“Blender” Plays A Game Of Peek-A-Boo

Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who’s contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Blender:

The magazine that Your Correspondent assesses this week can currently be found on newsstands wrapped in a loose plastic wrapper. Typically, this packaging is enacted so that a mag can tease the potential reader with content that he/she cannot access while standing around and flipping through its pages in a store. Thus stymied, the reader is more likely to buy the issue.

This is a practice most often associated with publications catering to enthusiasts of the guitar and of pornography. Take, for instance, the latest issue of Anal Gourmand: the issue contains a pictorial featuring rising Japanese/Dutch adult star Takesa Hüügedikk, but since the issue is packaged in the manner described above, anyone curious must purchase the mag in order to see what she’s up to therein.

YC wonders if Alpha Media Group Chairman Kent Brownridge, publisher Ben Madden, and editor Joe Levy concluded that Blender‘s July cover gal, Leona Lewis, may be the kind of young lady your mom thinks “is so elegant” yet not, shall we say, the kind of gal representatives of Blender‘s primary readership would knock one out to. (“Bleeding Love” strikes YC as redolent of the pre-lotsa fun, “Vision of Love”-style material that Mariah Carey was compelled to record in her role as a suitable consort for Tommy Mottola.)

So, once the cover shoot, photography, and reporting were each complete and the three possibly realized that they didn’t have a home run on their hands, perhaps the idea was to boost sales by not only making in-store perusing difficult, but by promising free downloads! Yay! A card floating around the issue’s wrapper includes a URL leading to a page on Rhapsody.com that offers MP3s from the likes of Tokio Hotel (misspelled as “Tokyo”), Fleet Foxes, and No Age, among others, as well as enough legal language describing the limits on this promotion to choke a fucking goat.

As for that cover story: It was up to Music Editor Rob Tannenbaum to elicit a series of interesting quotes from Lewis. But based on “Leona Lewis Wants a Cuddle…But Not the Way You Want To,” the British singer either has nothing interesting to say or has been prepped by her handlers to a superhuman, Monica-Lewinsky-interviewed-by-Whitewater-prosecutors-in-1998 degree. Tannenbaum (with whom YC worked at Blender several years ago) is an uncommonly gifted interviewer, but he more or less concedes that he’s not getting blood out of this particular stone. YC hopes he had a good time in Tokyo, where he interacted with Lewis during promotion, got loads of reportorial color, and probably otherwise enjoyed himself.

Elsewhere, we come to the second installment of Rob Sheffield’s Station to Station, which, given that it ostensibly concerns the reunion of Yaz, seems to augur that the column will perpetually find Sheffield waxing rhapsodic over his favorite artists of the 1980s. While he breaks from type by interviewing Yaz/Depeche Mode/Erasure keyboard boffin Vince Clarke in his remote Maine village instead of relying purely on his often airless ruminations on this TV show or that gleefully plastic New Wave artist, it’d be nice to see Sheffield grappling with an artist or occurrence tethered to this moment, like… oh, YC doesn’t know, Miley Cyrus or the R. Kelly trial or something.

Apart from pointing out that YC feels like Dennis Wilson’s fascinating Pacific Ocean Blue should have been awarded The Guide’s marquee spot for reissues over Liz Phair’s slightly refigured Exile in Guyville, YC isn’t moved to comment further on the July Blender.

So he’ll note that this issue makes three consecutive “chick singer” covers under Levy’s stewardship. Perhaps he was Rolling Stone‘s cheesecake advocate, as his former mag has not featured a surfeit of such cover imagery since his departure (maybe this would be unseemly during the mag’s “go, go, Obama” phase). But it’s past time for a male musician or a band to front Levy’s Blender. And what about those lists that Blender excels at, which make similar efforts from Rolling Stone look fusty and get attention from Assholes in the AM with Schmucky and Fuckface, as well as the Topeka Pig Testicle? When is Mr. Levy going to unveil his iteration?

YC realizes that he previously voiced a concern that Levy might import too much Rolling Stone-style kiss-assery to Blender, and it doesn’t seem like anything of that sort has come to pass. But it seems like Levy has relied too much on his predecessor’s templates (notwithstanding the above point re: lists). It may be that, in a lousy-and-getting-lousier advertising climate, he and Mr. Brownridge are loath to tamper with proven editorial formulae. But YC thinks that, after 11 years of diligent obeisance to Jann Wenner’s preferences and allegiances, Levy is free and might want to cut loose and show how he’d run a fully engaged, revitalized music magazine without having to keep Wenner’s wishes at the front of his mind.