Blogcritics.org

Rolling Stone turns 1000!

(that's 38 in human years)

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Rolling Stone had a birthday last week--one freakin' thousand issues and still as fresh and relevant as it was on its first day on the planet, 9 November 1967. Yeah, she has a few wrinkles here and there, but she's remarkably well-preserved, and can still hold her own with any magazine that came before or after her birth.

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Sure, there were other music magazines before Rolling Stone--Crawdaddy for the hippie-oriented and the original Hit Parader with its chord charts and lyric sheets come to mind, but by and large, those magazines were beholden to the record labels and their content reflected that. Whatever else there was about rock & roll was pretty much teen fanzine fodder.

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Rolling Stone changed all that--and then some. From the first, her edict was rock & roll not only can change the world, but is changing the world, and you'd be well-advised to listen. That was a powerful message, a defiant proclamation, and one to which, through all the years and changes, the magazine has steadfastly adhered. And somewhere along the way, it went from being an almost underground newspaper to evolve into the cornerstone of modern journalism it is today.

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Nobody writing about pop culture today can deny they were influenced by Rolling Stone-- in fact, most of us would probably not have been inspired to write at all had it not been for Jann Wenner and his cadre of guerilla journalists. Guys like Hunter S. Thompson vindicated my belief that the way we were being taught journalism was just--well, boring. He and others writing for Rolling Stone demonstrated that not only was it okay to immerse oneself in reportage, to become a character in the story--it was essential. I've not used the phrase "in my opinion" since-- it seems a redundancy.

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From its inception, Rolling Stone recognized the power of the image--that publicity still of John Lennon in How I Won the War was the reason I, a scrawny fourteen year old kid with delusions of rock stardom, bought that first issue. Those cover images kept me-- and millions others--coming back again and again. Whether it was Annie Liebowitz reinventing the art of portraiture in her photos or Robert Grossman's brilliant caricatures, the covers have--almost all of them--been snapshots of that moment. More, they stand as testaments to history.

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It's only fitting that the 1000th issue of Rolling Stone should be not a mere retrospective of the past thirty-eight years, but a celebration of where we were then, where we are now and where we may be headed. This isn't merely a magazine issue--it's more akin to a coffeetable edition in content and feel--all it needs to be one is heavier paper stock and a hardcover-- oh, and a price tag of around forty dollars.

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At US$5.95, RS1000 is a steal. The 3D cover alone, inspired by the Sgt. Pepper album jacket, is worth the price of admission. A whimsical hologram of all figures pop, it's a coup de grace of technology melding with acid flashback. While some have derided it as a syptom of the magazine's midlife crisis, I find it a source of endless hours of enjoyment and eyestrain.

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Rolling Stone has always had great covers, though-- they've been immortalized in song--if one can count Dr. Hook as immortal-- praised as news photos, even adored in museums. But the proof is in the details, and RS1000 illustrates in word and picture why Rolling Stone didn't just report modern culture--in the process, she became pop culture.

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The writers, photographers and illustrators that have worked on the magazine through the years have done so with a passion that wasn't found in journalism before Rolling Stone--even the magazine's title was inspired by Bob Dylan. And like Dylan, they have never shied away from being controversial.

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Rolling Stone set the bar for pop journalism and no one has ever been able to raise it to the next level. Many have tried (myself included), but nobody thus far has been able to raise that bar to the next level. It's become trendy in some quarters (mostly young Republican quarters) to dismiss Rolling Stone as a hippie relic no longer relevant to today's world. The truth is RS1000

shows in no uncertain terms that not only is she relevant, she's kickin' it.

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