And so, courtesy of a beatific cover illustration—complete with halo—Rolling Stone gets in the tank for Sen. Obama.

Keyboard Krybaby probably should have seen it coming, but he thought RS publisher/editor-in-chief Jann Wenner might have had a lingering loyalty to Sen. Clinton's husband. Clearly though, Mr. Wenner took note of Obama's Super Tuesday rout and concluded that this issue would hit stands last Wednesday, a day after his new "guy" was supposed to have taken the Ohio and Texas primaries and essentially the nomination.

Inconveniently, Sen. Clinton prevailed in those states and in Rhode Island. Thus the March 20 issue contains National Affairs Correspondent Matt Taibbi's essay "Hillary's Last Stand," which commences with the sentence "It's February 25th, T-Minus eight days until the end for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the most celebrated female martyr since Joan of Arc." Equally unfortunately, Taibbi describes her "Alamo campaigns in Texas and Ohio" before they had concluded. A few "if this is indeed the end" qualifiers fail to cloak the essay's now-silly looking intention.

While the piece more or less serves as a premature obituary, Taibbi makes a few good points. "The overall vibe of (Clinton's) campaign," he writes, "is now grounded in a kind of disbelieving outrage that a substanceless male charmer like Obama (or, one might add, her husband) could succeed in putting one over on so many people."

Taibbi is not without sympathy for Clinton—or at least he is respectful of the fact that "the first campaign of a serious female presidential contender is different simply because it is." He recognizes that many of Clinton's female supporters identify with the various humiliations visited upon her, but concludes that her status as an irretrievably compromised creature of Washington and as an enabler of the war should trump any considerations vis-à-vis her gender. Fine stuff from Taibbi, as usual, but KK wonders if he has similarly trenchant observations about Obama that he must suppress in his role as Wenner's hitman/ score-settler.

Rolling Stone presumably could not secure Sen. Obama for an interview, so the issue's big reportorial presentation is Contributing Editor Tim Dickinson's "The Machinery of Hope," in which we learn of the candidate's post-Howard Dean grass roots/social networking hybrid. But the issue's centerpiece is the Rolling Stone endorsement, titled "A New Hope."

Of course, the endorsement is written by Mr. Wenner. He says that he first learned of Sen. Obama from "a man who was at the highest level of George W. Bush's political organization through two presidential campaigns" and one who told Wenner "that he would not work for any Republican candidate in 2008 if Obama was nominated." It is very likely that the man to whom Wenner refers is Mark McKinnon, the chief media strategist for Bush's presidential campaigns and a current McCain adviser who has made identical statements all over the place (McKinnon says he will support McCain from "the sidelines" in the event of Obama's nomination). Wenner also says that Sen. Clinton "was" a bad manager and strategist, using the past sense and thus assuming her campaign would have expired by last week.

Wenner goes on to recount nearly every bromide common to Obama supporters: his guy "renounces the politics of fear," "the similarities between John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama come to mind," and that he's "Lincoln-esque." But RS' standard-bearer departs from the pack when he cites the most notorious passage in Obama's 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father: "he drifted through some druggy teenage years—no apologies!!—before emerging as a star at Harvard Law School." Obviously, Mr. Wenner, whose prodigious appetites in this regard are detailed in Robert Draper's Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History, clearly can get behind a guy who has said that getting high was "the point."

Finally, "...in electing an African-American," Wenner writes, "we also profoundly renounce an ugliness and violence in our national character that have been further stoked by our president in these last eight years." Wenner returned to this meme as late as Monday night in his opening remarks at the induction ceremony of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, of which he is the chairman. After spectacularly clumsy, needless and patronizing references to blues music, its African-American practitioners and the debt all rock and rollers have to both, Wenner made an equally graceless and petty reference to how Sen. Clinton might have a problem with African-Americans getting their due.

Why? Because, even on a night that finds him and his cronies saluting the likes of Little Walter and Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Wenner has to make it about him and his bully pulpit.

An aside in the cover story in the March 2008 Spin makes a lofty claim for the band profiled therein. "Vampire Weekend are," writes Andy Greenwald with subtle portent, " the first band ever to be shot for a Spin cover before they'd released an album."

Huh! So it's a big deal that VW was photographed for a Spin cover before its debut was "officially" released, despite the fact that the issue is on sale a few weeks after said debut appeared? Wouldn't such portent be appropriate if a Vampire Weekend cover story in Spin came out before the album was not only not released, but hadn't been finished? Keyboard Krybaby thinks it would be, but a cover story in a big-league entertainment publication still must promote an "official" release: Vampire Weekend's minders would doubtless not stand for the cover story appearing sooner than the album's release. One exponent of old media must still scratch the back of another.

Still, it's clear what Spin's role is to be now. Rolling Stone will grant covers to artists that appeal to teens, tweens, their parents and in some cases grandparents. Until further notice, Blender will proffer images of artists likely to inspire many men to start a'strokin'. But Spin is now the crucible into which blawg-rawkahs enter the big leagues. For instance, the mag put Franz Ferdinand front and center three years ago, when its aforementioned rivals likely decided that the band's appeal was limited to the twentysomethings who even then had largely deserted print media. Heedless of this basic fact, the powers that be at Spin seems to have concluded that the mag will be the premiere print media whistle-stop for indie-rock bands once the blog diaspora is done with them. And that's an honorable purpose.

As for the story itself: Greenwald, a former staffer who wrote Nothing Feels Good, the definitive study of twerps crying like little bitches, spends a bit of time exploring the current calculus for discovering indie rock bands that has benefited Vampire Weekend. He interviews New Yorker 'fro-sporter and Tipping Point pundit Malcolm Gladwell (who believes that "we're in danger of discovering people before they are worthy of being discovered") and Matador honcho Gerard Cosloy ("one favorable notice on Stereogum can be instantly undermined by one or two sarcastic, pseudonymous commentators") among others, and in doing so does a nice job explaining this paradigm for readers who may be unaware of it—KK supposes that there must be, y'know, ten such readers.

W/R/T the band, its genesis and how it appropriates Afropop: Greenwald seems to have found frontman Ezra Koenig somewhat entitled and smug. Apparently, Koenig counts among his past musical projects a Columbia University-based rap duo called L'Homme Run, from which the tunes "Interracial Dating" and "Pizza Party" emanated (full disclosure: for one evening, an 18-year-old KK was the DJ for a rap group consisting of his fellow white teenagers; the resulting songs were very likely even more banal than Koenig's). Greenwald also reports that Koenig's semi-apocryphal VW manifesto specified that no t-shirts would be part of the band's presentation and that Johnny Marr's townshippy guitar tone via "This Charming Man" would be venerated. He also notes Koenig's diffident manner throughout—although Koenig might have been on his guard around a member of "the big bad media" that his band mistrusted enough to largely avoid until the past six months.

"...having wrestled with issues of authenticity and cultural appropriation as a deracinated fourth-generation Ivy Leaguer," writes Greenwald perceptively, "(Koenig's) concluded that he's allowed to do whatever the hell he wants. It's charming, but it's also indicative of the sort of confidence that only exists in the very young, the very successful, or both. Because he cannot imagine any resistance or skepticism to what he's doing, none seem to exist." Koenig seems to believe that his band is immune to any challenges of colonialism: "that debate has already happened. We're in a context that's coming after instances of people stealing from each other."

KK will step in here to say that, barring college boys' "amusing" takes on hip-hop, he's a big fan of most examples of musical miscegenation in the history of humankind. But he regrets that Koenig is mistaken if he thinks he is free of all considerations regarding his band's context and how it may relate to cultural colonialism. That particular debate is not over, whether Koenig thinks it should be or not. KK will also add that he likes a few of the band's songs and thus will suspend his ironclad rule that any performer who considers cable-knit sweaters and boat shoes appropriate onstage attire should be thrown out of show business forever.

And now, KK'll just touch on the following, none of which require extended verbiage...

• In an otherwise not-precisely-needed Front of Book trend piece on dirty rock videos you can see on the Device You Are Currently Gazing At, we learn that Gene Simmons is an investor in ngtv.com, which provides a lot of said videos. As of 4:16pm, on Feb. 21, 2008, the clip in which Simmons soporifically mates with a large-breasted woman was not available therein, but it is here.

• There used to be a fanzine called FatGregDulli. Now, in a quick interview with the former Afghan Whig and his Gutter Twins partner Mark Lanegan, we can see that, despite what may have been the best efforts of photographer Tom Fowlks to blend Dulli's black suit into shadow, the zine's title is more apt than ever.

• In a "local scene/fashion roundup" titled "Chicago Ill" (nice job, headline writer!), we learn of Flosstradamus, the Cool Kids, Dude N' Nem and Kid Sister, who each, according to the piece's subhed, have "a sense of fun not seen since rap's golden age." Someone in Spin's braintrust seems to think that hip-hop has been nothing but a nihilistic trudge through the morgue, which KK thinks is a bit much. The piece is penned by Jessica Hopper, the Chicago-boosting publicist-turned-provocateur-turned-(evidently)-writer/not-journalist.

• KK has not heard REM's new album, Accelerate. But he does think that Josh Modell's assessment of the album, which takes the marquee spot in this issue's reviews section, hits so many "they've returned to their roots and thank gawd for that" beats that it almost reads like a David Fricke hosanna for Rolling Stone.

The first thing Your Correspondent noticed about the March 2008 issue of Vibe? Simply that it's clearly modeled on the hallmark cover design of one of its competitors: Marc Ecko's "urban" culture-oriented vanity magalog Complex, which always features two covers on its "front" and "back." This month's Vibe features images of 50 Cent and Robert DeNiro on its front and back covers.

The front cover heralds 139 pages consisting of a Hollywood-centric feature well (on which more below), the ReVolutions review section, front-of-book sections like VNext, a well-intentioned package devoted to raising awareness of global warming titled "VGreen," etc., etc. Flip it the mag over, and the other shot of the pair leads an additional 29 pages devoted to "And the Winner Is...," wherein Tracy Morgan, Jill Scott, and a bunch of actors, singers-and-rappers-turned-actors, and Tyler Perry are mooted to have a big 2008.

We'll start with this month's FOB marquee package, "Music Videos: Made You Look," compiled by Keith Murphy, Shanel Odum and Chris Yuscavage. Its intro posits that the migration of music videos from television to the likes of YouTube and Blastro.com necessitates a look back to hip-hop's glory days at MTV and BET and with director Hype Williams. A series of questions is posed—"What was the first music video ever? (A: A brief Bessie Smith performance in 1929's St. Louis Blues, apparently); "What makes Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' clip the best ever? (A: various)—and thus a bunch of factoids w/r/t videos are presented.

If YC had a hand in a survey of music video history for Vibe, he would think it worth noting that MTV, which was essentially run like an AOR radio station at its inception, refused to show videos by black artists in its first year and a half on the air. It took the threat of embargo of all videos from CBS/Epic Records—for which not only Jackson but Journey recorded—for MTV to relent and program "Billie Jean."

Any mention would have fit right in the package's "Who started MTV?" segment, which notes that Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment VP John Lack uttered the words first "broadcast" on MTV in 1981: "Ladies and Gentlemen, rock and roll..." There's your goddamn cue to observe that "rock and roll" in MTV's initial conception meant corporate rock, various Englishmen and Pat Benatar, Vibe! YC would think this a germane point of interest in any history of music video—particularly for a magazine devoted to African-American culture. But perhaps Vibe has opted for a Obama-esque "post-grievance" tone here...

And! Perhaps this winter is light on major new hip hop and R&B albums. Perhaps Vibe has said the hell with trying to haggle with labels over getting high profile hip-hop/R&B records to reviewers well before deadline. Or perhaps Vibe is taking all the talk regarding the meltdown of hip-hop album sales directly correlating with a steep artistic decline seriously. Whatever it be, its ReVolution section runneth over with blawg-rock.

To wit: Vampire Weekend; Cat Power's Jukebox; and Hot Chip's Made in the Dark are each assessed alongside mild rebukes of Lenny Kravitz's It's Again Time for Me to Reference Various Signifiers Common To The 1960s and Del the Funkee Homosapien's 11th Hour. And, as a sidebar to Greg Tate's review of the "expanded edition" of Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear, Sean Fennessey notes that Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out The Lights is "the other divorce album." This may be the first time either Thompson has ever been mentioned in Vibe. Being that he believes that man should not live by two closely entwined and similarly marketed kinds of music alone, this is fine with YC. But since Vibe gives no consideration to non-R&B and hip-hop artists anywhere else in its pages, it's more than a little dissonant.

YC should also mention that the author of the Hot Chip review is Nick Sylvester, the clownish former Village Voice staffer who ventured haplessly and disastrously into "real" journalism two years ago, taking a VV editor down with him and providing an abject lesson in what can happen when bloggers get in over their heads.

Editor-in-Chief Danyel Smith pens the puffish cover feature, thus creating anticipation for the summer crime film Righteous Kill, in which her interviewees star. We learn that the young DeNiro was referred to as "Bobby Milk" by his "crew"; DeNiro thinks 50's acting instincts are good; and, in an indication that his notions of parenting may be slightly deluded, 50 thinks "it's impossible" for his son, who apparently spends more time with his mom these days, to miss him, since if he "went through his regular day, there'd be references to me around... his school knows 50 Cent is his dad."

Continuing with the issue's Hollywood motif, The Wire is described beatifically in a three-page retrospective, followed by "media assassin" Harry Allen's report on the ongoing production of the decidedly-not-Hollywood documentary SlingShot Hip Hop, which portrays the burgeoning Palestinian rap scene. Understandably, the rappers here don't think much of Israel's presence in the Middle East in the past 50 years and its subsequent attitudes towards Palestine, and Allen pretty much sympathizes. This guarantees that Vibe either will or may already be deluged with missives from folks that otherwise would never be moved to learn of the mag's existence.

Your Boy's best guess is that the issue of Blender under consideration this week was about to be sent to the printer when it was announced that Joe Levy was going to leave his post as Rolling Stone's executive editor for Blender's editor-in-chief job.

YB's analysis of the dual legacies of Levy and departing Blender EIC Craig Marks was written the next day, so he did not see this interview with Levy in Adweek until it was too late. Therein, he says that you can expect Blender to be more respectful of artists than it has been previously.

This is not, frankly, good news. It's not unreasonable to suggest that Blender would often rather musical acts prance and caper monkey-style in their pages for the amusement of their readers than be treated as humans with, y'know, dignity. But it was the readers to which Blender answered, whereas "respect for artists" is really code for Rolling Stone's frequently cozy relationship with major labels and owner Jann Wenner's pals. You'd think that Levy might want to be freed of such considerations, but the above does not augur well how Blender is to be distinguished from RS going forward. We'll see...

The March 2008 edition of Blender stands as the final issue helmed by Marks. The former Spin editor and former muckety-muck of the before-its-time Inside.com launched the mag in 2001 as the savvy consigliere to Andy Pemberton, an Englishman who was not particularly attuned to American culture. After Pemberton was fired in 2004, Marks took the EIC seat. (A commenter in the above-linked Levy/Marks analysis speculated that Marks would make a move towards TV or new media projects, which would make sense, given his involvement with Inside.)

He goes out with a bang with his final issue, despite the fact that it's possible that RS put together a competing cover piece very quickly for its Feb. 21 issue in order to specifically fuck with Blender's newsstand sales. YB may be hunting for poltergeists here, seeing as Britney Spears-related content has recently been estimated to generate $120 million for the American economy every year. But Mr. Wenner is known to play hardball when his aides-de-camp dare defect to a competitor.

Both magazines bear the image of Ms. Spears, a woman who is pretty much the embodiment of Blender's raison d'etre and known to have a mutually advantageous relationship with RS when her career was functional. On Blender's cover, her face is Photoshopped onto a model's body, a crushed Red Bull can and a Mouseketeer cap full of cig butts visible below. RS's cover features a heartbreaking close-up of her face, cropped from an old file photo.

YB should disclose his agenda: He does not visit TMZ.com and perezhilton.com and is otherwise not compelled to cogitate on the daily-unfolding events of Ms. Spears' life. He does pretty much like every song he's ever heard released under her name—and he loves more than a few—and is reasonably confident that, if said life had taken another path, she could have easily been one of many southern girls who drops her flimsy garment on a nearby chair then proceeds to gyrate and bend over in front of YB's face for $20 a dance. YB will leave the psychological spelunking to the authors of the articles discussed below, and wish Ms. Spears well.

Blender's cover story on Ms. Spears, "The Road to Ruin," is very very good. Apparently, the mag had tried to do a conventional Spears piece late last fall, but given the events of the past two months, that wasn't to be. Instead, contributing writer Michael Joseph Gross pens an engrossing, deeply reported story that attempts to determine why Ms. Spears's life has immolated, compared to innumerable reports that settle for the "what" of said immolation.

Gross diligently recounts the events that have transfixed people other than YB, but he goes into great detail regarding the paparazzi that hound Spears. These "paps" (call 'em "mopes" or "thugs" if you like) are also something like her friends and confidants, often paying for her gas and fast food when she's indisposed. While Adnan Ghalib is now well known as the "pap" who has bedded Spears, Gross also goes into the shady history of Ghalib's rival, Sam Lutfi, the latest in a series of Hollywood hustlers/quasi-suitcase pimps who has appeared to be running her life and who has two restraining orders against him.

One of the "experts" swanning in to expound on the meaning of it all is Michael Hirschorn, the ex-VH1 exec behind the network's "Celebreality" programming and Marks' former boss at Inside (which probably should have been disclosed). "She got chewed up and spat out by this new celebrity culture," he says, "so it's hard not to feel some sympathy for her. She really was turned into a lab rat." Given his recent doings, Hirschorn might have mentioned something regarding his own culpability in the "new celebrity culture."

RS's piece, "The Tragedy of Britney Spears," is written by Vanessa Grigoriadis, who last fall penned a chin-stroker as to the greater meaning of the enterprise of which Idolator.com is a part. Her story is thus lighter on reportorial rigor and heavier on pop psychology than Gross'. "[Spears] is not book smart," Grigoriadis writes. "But she is intelligent enough to understand what the world wanted of her: that she was created as a virgin to be deflowered before us for our amusement and titillation. She is not ashamed of her new persona—she wants us to know what we did to her... she is enjoying the chaos she's creating."

An editor's note states that Grigoriadis spent six weeks running after Ms. Spears around L.A., so it could be that her article was conceived independent of Levy's egress. She also is granted a brief interview with Ghalib and interacts with many of the shifty hustlers who buzzard about Spears. Due to RS's later deadline, Grigoriadis covers Spears' two hospitalizations, the power struggle between Lufti and Adnan's over access to her, and her family's attempt to wrest control from the above two. Said deadline did not permit Spears' recently concluded two-week stint in UCLA Medical Center's psych ward and probably some other shit that happened while YB was writing this goddamn sentence.

Here are three factoids intended as exclusive info but present in both articles:

1. Spears had breast augmentation when she was seventeen.

2. Kevin Federline is known amongst his bros as "Meat Pole" (Gross reports that Federline called his brother after his first night with his bride-to-be, remarking "you're not going to believe whose back I broke").

3. Paris Hilton refers to Spears as "The Animal."

Ultimately, YB has to call the Battle of the Competing Definitive Britney Narratives a draw. He also wonders how many sources talked to both writers after promising "exclusivity" to each.

Otherwise, YB'll make some quick comments on the March Blender, since he thought he'd be assessing only that mag before the Feb. 21 RS showed up on the newsstand.

• Robert Smith, photographed for an "In the Studio" front-of-book piece regarding The Cure's in-progress album, looks like a portly beggar sans makeup.

• YB, no huge fan of R.E.M., is astounded that Senior Critic Jon Dolan reckons in the "Every Album Reviewed and Rated" back-catalogue feature that the band's naked ploy for grunge bucks, 1995's Monster, deserves five stars and is thus better than 1984's Reckoning and 1991's Out of Time.

• In an otherwise half-baked "the edit staff like these things" package titled "The Best List 2008," contributor Aaron Burgess crafts a March Madness-styled tournament chart to determine "the best heavy metal drummer." Beginning with post-NWoBHM beatsmen and extending to the current extreme metal movement (no Ian Paice and Tommy Lee, sadly), Meshuggah's Tomas Haake prevails over Slayer's Dave Lombardo. Burgess is allowed to use musicianly jargon therein, nominally a Blender no-no.

• Finally, Robert Christgau, the author of a recent RS review that YB noted seemed edited into tortured blandness, now appears in Blender's masthead as Dolan's co-Senior Critic. It seems that the Dean has already followed his onetime apprentice Levy over to Blender, possibly leaving RS's hypothetical copyeditor with no editorial mandate along the lines of "we know this guy indignantly refuses to turn in clear, readable copy, but he's the dean of rock criticism, so you, me and the rest of the staff have to grant him deference available to no one else."

Six months ago, your very own Keyboard Krybaby assessed the issue of Vibe in which the magazine's staff more or less endorsed a Democratic candidate for POTUS. Pageviews for that column were anemic in the days after it was posted, and they have received no boost since that time.

It doesn't strain credulity to infer from this that frequent visitors to this particular aggregate were then not invested in the presidential race. But Google or Technorati drive-bys in search of Obama-related content didn't seem to help either.

So, since KK will be analyzing one aspect of Rolling Stone's Presidential-race reportage this week, he's happy that the cover of the mag's Feb. 7 issue bears the image of a man whose visage, music, and musings are music blog chum.

RS runs with Radiohead this month in order to give the physical incarnation of In Rainbows a push: contributing editor Mark Binelli's piece, "The Future According to Radiohead," depicts the band members as family men ensconced in Cambridge, England. Associate editor Brian Hiatt's "Soul Kitten" notes that Chan Marshall is no longer a godawful mess; Alan Light's three-star review of Jack Johnson's Sleep Through The Static reads as if it deserved two stars; and Christian Hoard seems a lot less enthusiastic regarding Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut than his three-and-a-half star rating would warrant. Notably, Robert Christgau's review of the Whigs' Mission Control reads as if a copyeditor tried to clean up the Dean's phrasing but rendered it equivalent to the work of an ambitious ninth grader.

So since that's out of the way: Rolling Stone has employed contributing editor Matt Taibbi as a National Affairs correspondent since 2005. He's the son of NBC correspondent Mike Taibbi and in the '90s co-edited The eXile, an alternative paper oriented toward Americans living in Moscow. His co-editor, Jeff Koyen, went on to run the New York Press, an alt-paper started by churlish libertarian/right wing ass-kisser Russ Smith to function as a thorn in the side of the Village Voice. Koyen succeeded in turning the Press into an engaging publication, and Taibbi was its star scribe.

As the paper's star, it's fitting that Taibbi penned the item that will be the best-remembered exponent of Koyen's tenure at the paper: "The 52 Funniest Things About The Upcoming Death of the Pope." Immediately, various elected officials called for Koyen and Taibbi's heads.

While Koyen was forced to quit his job as editor, Taibbi strolled straight over to Rolling Stone, smelling like a goddamn rose. His National Affairs columns have been bracing from the get-go: he is most emphatically not a member of the clubby Washington press corps. He is from time to time referred to as the new Hunter Thompson, although that has more to do with his disinclination to peddle Beltway tropes than to do gonzo-ish shit on the trail. His preferred sport is with Republicans, though he'll often fuck with the Democratic establishment.

Such is the case with his column in the current issue, "The New Nixon," in which Rolling Stone's original nemesis is conflated with the junior senator from New York. Accompanied by a Ralph Steadman-lite illustration of a conflated Hillary/Tricky Dick (alongside, presciently given Monday's anointment from the senior senator from Massachusetts, a JFK-ized likeness of Sen. Obama), Taibbi heaps scorn on the Clinton machine.

After an implicit tip of the hat to now-departed, consistently-ignored-by-Beltway-journos-but-beloved-by-lefties candidate Dennis Kucinich, Taibbi compares Clinton pollster Mark Penn (often referred to as the Democrats' Karl Rove) to Jabba the Hutt, recounts Penn's frequent quasi-slurs regarding Obama's youthful indiscretions ("everyone familiar with the Clintons and how they operate," he writes, "could have set their watches by the Hillary camp's inevitable decision to start reminding America of the dangers of electing a black teenager on coke"), suggests that Sen. Clinton never really quit being a Republican, compares her obsession with vast conspiracies arrayed against her and courtship of "invisible Americans" with those of Nixon's, and opines that Obama is a pussy for not telling Clinton, Penn, and their surrogates to go fuck themselves.

This column, like every other written by Taibbi for RS, is candid, insightful and fearless. You're not going to read anything of its sort in other mass market publications, staffed as they are by editors and reporters who temper their output with eye to future access: don't want to burn bridges with any pol who may grant favors later, right?

But here's the rub. In another month or two, either Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama will have prevailed as the Democratic candidate. And RS's owner/editor/publisher Jann Wenner (who, somewhat inconveniently, became an early Howard Dean adopter a few months before John Kerry secured his party's nomination) will then get in line and marshal his magazine's resources to whichever has won. Incidentally, KK would have thought, given Wenner's long-standing Clinton advocacy, that RS would have gone for Sen. Clinton by now. But maybe he's annoyed that the Clintons didn't do more for his BFF Al Gore and is now charmed by Obama.

This is all to say that once a nominee is selected, Taibbi probably will be instructed quite firmly that he is to stop criticizing Democrats now, and to focus on the perfidy of the eventual Republican victor. What will Taibbi, a journalist who seems possessed of much integrity, do then?

Whither, asks Your Correspondent this week, anglophilia among the American alt-rock electorate? Spin will know the answer—or at least have a workable metric—when the numbers are in for its February issue.

For the cover image is of one Pete Doherty, captured presumably mid-tweaky twitch, his scaly fingers crackishly scratching an itch below his chin.

In the United Kingdom, hunger for anecdotes regarding this unfortunate creature is insatiable. Not only does British society have a much longer history of fascination with famous fuckups than the US (YC thinks VH1 wouldn't have had nearly as much success with Celebrity Rehab and Celebrity Fit Club a decade or two ago), Doherty is an ineffably English character. Take a look at that mug: that's a kind of face you don't often see on white Americans. His music is almost entirely premised on 30 years of English rock and roll (the Jam, Buzzcocks, the Clash, Manic Street Preachers) that didn't translate Stateside—beyond anglophiles, that is. He's a major figure in the UK (in his editor's letter, Doug Brod calls him a "folk hero" there) and thus can be counted on to sell music magazines.

But here? The New York Post's interest in Doherty is purely due to the fact that he probably snorted coke out of Kate Moss's cooch a time or two. Otherwise, your mom doesn't know who he is—although she might be aware of Amy Winehouse, since her songs are premised on the kind of music played by the band at your cousin's wedding.

So YC doubts that this issue will do very well on the newsstand. Brod says in his letter that he and his staff wearied of reading about Doherty's exploits, liked Babyshambles' new album Shotter's Nation and that the issue's cover story, "Man Out of Time," was expanded into a longer form once it was determined that Doherty's health was improving (YC wouldn't rule out the possibility that a preferred cover feature fell through).

So much for that! Nick Duerden, a prolific British writer for the likes of Q and Blender, first encounters a lucid, seemingly drug-free Doherty. Mid-interview, Doherty's informed by his manager that a photograph of him injecting heroin three days prior would be hitting the papers the next morning. And so it goes: Duerden recounts the vicissitudes of dealing with a junkie with all the portent English rock writers expend towards their pet dysfunctional geniuses. (Incidentally, Duerden's Q colleague Dorian Lynskey pens a Hot Chip story in this issue: YC wonders if Blender, for whom both wrote, became less sympathetic to favored British scribes last fall in anticipation of budget cuts?)

Twenty-five pages later comes a piece regarding Lenny Kravitz, a man who—while sharing with Doherty the knowledge of what it's like to be balls-deep in a supermodel, how to play the guitar and write songs, and exactly nothing else—is likely beneath the contempt of most of the magazine's past and present readers. (This would also hold for surfin' troubadour Jack Johnson, who is interviewed in this issue as well.) Thus some substantial horse-trading between Spin and Virgin Records might have taken place, since it's very likely that Spin's immediate competitors and other mass-market publications declined the privilege of chronicling an interaction with the famously vapid Kravitz at feature length.

YC also thinks it likely Spin's edit staff believes Kravitz to be kinda dim, so they let Jonathan Ames—memoirist, boxer and author of last year's Marilyn Manson cover story—loose for "Lenny Kravitz is A Virgin." Therein, Ames goes to a club with Kravitz, casting himself as a tweedy Brooklyn iteration of Entourage's "Turtle," hoping for some pussy shrapnel. The trouble is that Ames isn't very funny. He swings at the easiest "I am uglier, shorter and poorer than the interviewee" conceits, and doesn't turn an amusing phrase once. It doesn't say much for the post-McSweeney's literati that this guy is considered a laff riot. Anyway, Kravitz tells him that he's been celibate for three years, doesn't worry about money and is inspired by 'the masters," etc., etc.

Elsewhere, Deputy Editor Steve Kandell has a sit down with Bob Mould, who, as the contrast between two archival photos and those taken for the mag recently attest, has fully shed the doughy baby fat of his closeted '80s and has now emerged as, frankly, a very fit bear. A shame, then, that the interview is marred with two howlingly ill-informed queries: "Hüsker Dü are considered the first punk band to have signed to a major label," which Kandell states before asking about Joan Rivers interviewing the band, and "[the band] may have had the most contentious breakup of any band in recent history." The usage of the words "considered" and "may" in those two passages does not mask a poor grasp of history, nor does it excuse any editor who allowed those questions to be published as such.

Taking up the rear in the reviews is "Do What Thou Wilt," Music Editor Charles Aaron's review of last month's Led Zeppelin show in London. Aaron expended much acreage in the 1990s Spin writing almost exclusively—not to mention ponderously and crit-littishly—about hip-hop and dance music, to the point where YC was under the impression that he would regard enthusiasm for any and all "classic rock" artists with an upturned nose. So it's a bit shocking to see him turn into Rolling Stone's perpetually purplish David Fricke here. To wit : "Ramble On" concludes with a "jackknife jolt"; "'Black Dog' was a thick riff barrage"; "Nobody's Fault But Mine" is "Page's mine shaft of haunted metallic grind."

Clearly, Aaron thinks that the show was fucking awesome, and concludes, as he often does these days, with a keen observation: "At a time when we all want everything our way now, the iPod has become the commodity fetish the way the album was in the '70s. But what mysteries does it hold? Where is Steve Jobs' ZoSo?" (Maybe Jobs regards the iPhone as his ZoSo, which would render the Air his Houses of the Holy, right?) "We now can control music, cast and personalize it. But for one night, we were reminded of how it feels the other way around. How it feels to be engulfed by a volatile, outrageous presence... That command once made Zeppelin seem oppressive, almost demonic. Now it makes them ineffable."

This is key: Many insurgent music fans hated Jimmy Page for his imperial arrogance in the 1970s, and their 1980s kin wanted nothing more than for major labels to suffer a tortuous demise. Now, as the latter comes to pass, it's easy to be nostalgic for the divine right of kings with which Led Zeppelin conducted itself three decades ago.

Finally, in "Who's Next," Spin prognosticates as to hot acts for 2008—as music magazines must! YC will add that a.) out of the eight cited, he's only familiar with Santogold and Jay Reatard; and b.) Margot & the Nuclear So and So's is a shitty name for a band.

Coachella Promoters Launching NYC-Area Fest [Billboard]
Earlier: Is 2008 The Year The Bottom Falls Out Of The U.S. Festival Market?

According the insiders Bernstein interviewed, the superstar producers driving the urban market at the moment are also likely to be its downfall. Artists like Rihanna are seen as interchangeable, but the payments made to those producers are astounding in an era of rampant music business belt-tightening: they're often paid $50,000 or more up front, and then receive radio and ringtone residuals, as well as chunks of the money garnered by selling songs to television or film. In contrast to the standard label practice of paying money up front for a song, then owning nearly all of its backend, producers like The-Dream and his partner retain the publishing rights, withholding what can often be the most lucrative long-term source of revenue. Bernstein details the benefits of that arrangement for The-Dream, which include a nearly endless stream of $100,000+-priced vehicles that he paid for in cash. ("I'm going to have, like, 10 cars by the time I'm done," he tells Bernstein, "and I'll pay for all of them up front. Credit just gets you f—-ed up.")

Of course, when the music industry perceives that someone's getting rich before they are, there's likely to be grumbling.

While hit-makers have been cashing massive checks since the Motown era and earlier, it's hard to think of a time when the music business has been this strapped for cash. In the most recent fiscal quarter, both Sony/BMG and Warner Music reported losses, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And the economics of "urban" music are frequently cited by industry players as being the worst in the business today, with leading rappers and producers demanding far more money than they can guarantee delivering.

"Because of these producers and the massive fees for guest appearances by rappers, the risk-reward ratio in urban music is upside-down," says Tommy Silverman, the head of Tommy Boy Records, which launched the careers of De La Soul and Queen Latifah. "The cost no longer justifies the investment."

Another former label head, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says, "All of these labels are spending a fortune, hoping to sell like it's 1995. It just doesn't happen. How do you spend $250,000 on one song? It's crazy."
And being hot one minute doesn't guarantee success the next. In 2005, producer [Scott] Storch seemed to be on fire, with massive hits for 50 Cent, Chris Brown and Lil' Kim. In 2006, the labels paid him millions of dollars to produce records for more than 30 artists, among them Jessica Simpson, Nas, The Game and Paris Hilton. Not one of his songs even reached the top 10....

Recently, there's been some evidence that a correction is coming. Going forward, some are predicting that the labels will begin to move away from the high stakes poker game of manufacturing big stars and invest more resources in developing artists who write and produce their own music. This would likely leave fewer blockbuster acts, but would lead to more constant returns and lower overhead, they say. Even Nash says his own attempt to go solo is partially a way to generate another revenue stream without introducing the high costs associated with building pop stars. "With my projects, it's not really about me," he says. "It's us saying we can deliver this type of product at a lower cost. We're going to write 300 f—-ing songs a year anyway. So don't give me front end. I don't need any money. But give me ownership, and I can make money from record one, when it sells the first copy."

It's probably wise for The-Dream to develop as many revenue streams as possible, because the story told there should be a wake-up call for any producer looking for a six-digit payday. While having Timbaland on a track can even turn what sounds like a third-rate Fray song into a hit, Storch's recent dry run and the (for now) fading Neptunes have to put some fear into executives who are desperate for the immediate financial gratification of digital sales and ringtone purchases. With Soulja Boy and the like creating hits on their own that can be picked up by labels without the development costs normally associated with the cultivation of hits, why bother paying up front—and through the nose—for a hit when someone might just make one in their bedroom that can be had for half the price?

Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough [WWD]

Hey kids! Roll on up for Keyboard Krybaby's Kremlinology Korner!

KK certainly did not see yesterday's news regarding Rolling Stone executive editor Joe Levy's egress to Blender coming. But watch as he flails about, trying to make the scenario of a former Rolling Stone bigwig poaching the mag's main music dude kompelling!

Much is often made of the mercurial managerial tendencies of Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone's editor and founder. But for the past decade or so, the magazine's braintrust w/r/t music coverage has been remarkably stable. Levy replaced Mark Kemp as executive editor in 1996, and since then he has served as RS's frontman: whenever major/old media came calling for a quote or two regarding Napster/OiNK, a recently deceased musical figure, Britney Spears' vagina, etc., etc., Levy was there. He's familiar to a vast majority of viewers of VH1 talking-head programs as a reliably smug commentator. Then there are the few—the proud!—who knew him as the "Tim Gunn" of MTV's I'm From Rolling Stone.

Before all that, Levy worked at Details, and he was the music editor for the Village Voice in the early '90s. The latter position at the time amounted to being Robin to Robert Christgau's Batman. KK recalls (somewhat dimly) that Levy was capable of some good, non-shill-y scribing, and it's on the strength of his VV gig that he's held in high regard by the rock critic intelligentsia—or at least the pre-Pitchfork, pre-bloggy-woggy iteration.

At the same time, Levy often affects a somewhat preening posture, which stands him in good stead when dealing with the bigwigs of the music industry—or what remains of it. Part of this can be explained by the simple fact that he's been RS's chief liaison to the biz for so long, but the other part is that, as far as certain kinds of bizzers go, game recognizes game.

As cushy as Levy's job may have seemed, 12 years of supervising RS's music content might have become old: KK would guess that the stress of closing every two weeks would lose against Blender's more leisurely production schedule. (KK has absolutely no idea what sort of $$$ is entailed.) In any case, Levy must have had a good working relationship with Kent Brownridge, who spent 31 years as the Dick Cheney-style general manager for Wenner Media and is now, as the CEO of Alpha Media Group, the overlord of Blender and Maxim.

KK wonders, though, whether two of Levy's guys—Roberts Sheffield and Christgau—will follow. Both are very likely contract writers for Rolling Stone: if said contracts exist but are concluding, Sheffield would obviously be an easier fit for Blender than Christgau, whose stylings have been defiantly challenging in both Blender and RS respectively.

And now a few words regarding Craig Marks, the fellow whom Levy is replacing. KK has mentioned Marks' background before: While he's a much more discreet and more calculating character than Levy, he's well-known for his friendships with alt-rock elders like Courtney Love and Eddie Vedder, and is similarly respected by bizzers and the rock-crit front rank.

But while Levy has held the fort down at the dominant music magazine for more then a decade, Marks' achievement at Blender is singular. You may like Blender, or you may not. But in 2001, when the mag launched, the publishing landscape seemed hostile to a new general-interest music magazine, even one proffered by the then-ascendant Dennis Publishing; anyone could see that the meltdown now enveloping both the mainstream music business and the publishing business would proceed apace. But Blender succeeded, and it did so by embracing music culture as it exists in the present, and not something that suffers in comparison to its 1967 equivalent. Being that Blender is Maxim's sister publication, it uses humor and the suggestion of boobies to finance that conceit. This, in KK's estimation, is an honorable pursuit, and one that is wholly due to the canny machinations of the supremely talented Marks.

To put it another way: Perhaps Levy tired of Wenner's boomer-centric meddling and wanted to run a successful magazine that unambiguously celebrated the present moment. Now he will, and he has Marks to thank for that. It's almost certain that Marks will be up for Levy's old job.

[Photo: WireImage]

New York, NY (January 9, 2008) — Alpha Media Group Inc. CEO Kent Brownridge today announced the appointment of Joe Levy to Editor-in-Chief of Blender, the award-winning music magazine. Levy will oversee the editorial strategy and direction of Blender. He joins Ben Madden who was named Publisher in December.

Levy joins Blender from Rolling Stone where he most recently served as Executive Editor. For the past ten years, Levy helped define the editorial direction of Rolling Stone, steered the magazine's music coverage, edited features and cover stories, and supervised special issues such as Rolling Stone's 1000th issue and the RS 500, the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Prior to Rolling Stone, Levy was a senior editor at Details and an editor at the Village Voice and Spin. He taught at NYU's Clive Davis School of Recorded Music as an adjunct professor and is the co-editor of The Rolling Stone Interviews (Back Bay Books).

Kent Brownridge, CEO of Alpha Media Group Inc. said, "Joe is the Dean of today's music magazine editors—he is well known among his peers in the music industry, and beyond, for his passion and professionalism and I am thrilled to welcome him."

Levy graduated from Yale University with distinction. He and his wife reside in New York City.

Blender [Official site]
[Photo: MTV]

EW had 49 covers this year, and seven could claim to be music-related. The breakdown:
• American Idol preview (Jan. 12)
• Justin Timberlake (Feb. 9)
• American Idol top 8 (April 20)
• Kelly Clarkson (May 25)
• Britney Spears (Sept. 21)
• Carrie Underwood (Oct. 26)
• Alicia Keys (Nov. 23)

So, seven covers—four of which were American Idol-related, and two of which were focused on the show itself, and not any of the singers it spawned. To put things in perspective, that's as many covers as EW devoted to Heroes (3) and Harry Potter (4) combined over 2007. Maybe Stolley's rule needs to be tweaked a bit: "Television is better than music. Music on television is better than music. And music is better than sports... unless those sports involve a blonde cheerleader trying to save the world, in which case you're pretty much screwed."

Magazine Archive [EW]
Cosmo Editor: "My Sense Of A Good Cover Is If I Want To Lick It" [Jezebel]

So! The new year a-borning finds Your Correspondent having assessed the year-end issues of Blender, Rolling Stone, Spin, and Vibe in the past half-month. So his pickings look to be pretty slim for the next couple of weeks, huh?

YC'll begin this year with a crack at the February 2008 edition of a music mag produced outside the confines of New York City: specifically, Cleveland. He's mentioned more than once before that he wished more music publications based outside the centrifuge of major media had a spring in their step indicating a rugged independence, and he thinks that Alternative Press fits the bill.

AP was started in 1985, and rather like hundreds of other fanzines at the time it covered the SST/Homestead diaspora. But president/founder Mike Shea eventually forged a viable business in the very early '90s, emphasizing the likes of Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails at a time when Spin and Rolling Stone simply wouldn't bother.

As "alternative music" went in the 1990s, so went AP: Everclear, Veruca Salt, and the Toadies were covered with gusto. While the late '90s/ early aughts found the pub covering butt-rock (which evidently caused the editorial staff substantial heartburn), AP has for the past five years focused on commercially viable derivations of punk along the lines of AFI and Dashboard Confessional. Which is to say, if a band could possibly score a spot on the Warped Tour in the past five years, then it could reasonably expect AP to come calling.

Which is also to say that, much more than the pubs mentioned above, Alternative Press is currently premised on rock and roll music as it experienced by lotsa suburban teenagers. If anyone reading these words is older than 19, it stands a good chance that that someone is scornful of such signifiers as Hot Topic, asymmetrical haircuts, jeans-designed-for-but-not-worn-by-chicks, and alternately heart-on-sleeve/bratty songs recorded with a intimidating amounts of compression. YC will only suggest that that someone recall the signifiers they enjoyed at an equivalent time in their lives and the scorn that greeted them from older folks.

Alternative Press does not condescend to teenagers. In the article linked above, the staff credits talking to kids at the Warped Tour a few years ago as key to the abovementioned refocusing. It's de rigeur for music magazines nowadays to ape multifarious online communities based around music—but the current incarnation of AP succeeds at community-building better than most, simply because readers' voices are featured very prominently. There's a sense that the mag takes kids by the hand, embracing their interests and aesthetics while gently nudging them towards what lies past Saves the Day and its discontents. It's a starter kit for rock and roll.

Let YC get something out of the way posthaste: whether in the current or in past incarnations, AP's art direction has been gawdawful. Nearly every page in the issue under consideration includes colors clashing in the manner of a crazy quilt, irretrievably compromising already very busy page layouts. YC should say that his preferences are likely to mean a lot less to AP's design braintrust than those of the teenagers to which AP is devoted and who are known to clutter their MySpace pages with every available distraction.

The scribbling? Ain't much happening there. Contributing writer Jonah Bayer's cover profile of Paramore hits all the beats that are meaningful to their fans: Hayley Willams is a small-c christian, she isn't dating guitarist Josh Farro, message board goons want to "nail" her. No mention is made of how the band is the harbinger of the 360 deal, seeing as a typical AP reader probably has no investment in emerging business practices.

This being the mag's year-end wrap-up, Paramore is trumpeted on the cover as AP's "Band of the Year," having been voted as such by its readers. Where the big boys tend to descend from Olympus to emphasize their august choices for "best this or that" and render reader choices as an afterthought in their annual wrap-ups, AP emphasizes the opposite: Chiodos (whose Bone Palace Ballet is voted album of the year) and Paramore ride high via reader opinion, whereas Fall Out Boy are rebuked for dalliances with Ashlee Simpson and Jay-Z ("I'm almost ashamed to say they were my favorite band three years ago," writes San Lorenzo, Calif.'s no doubt wizened, battle-hardened Monica Vastaneda). Readers also swarmed the mag's Web site to vote for MySpace-enabled, unsigned Hometown Heroes; I was charmed by a photo of Clifton Park, N.Y.'s largely symmetrically coifed, seemingly-unconcerned-with-looking-cool band of 13-15 year olds Enigmatic Heart therein.

The editors' 2007 lists are deferential and are introduced thusly: "Please move quickly and calmly towards your nearest exit as our crack-critical AP edit team takes aim at all that was more lovely and than lame in our 2007." Editor-in-chief Jason Pettigrew reps for non-Hot Topic faves Holy Fuck and Grinderman (as well as, for no particular reason and deep in the reviews section, a survey of YC's beloved Mountain), while copy editor Rachel Lux acknowledges that AP's readers would not much care for Wilco's Sky Blue Sky.

There's more of a sense in AP that playing music is something you and your peers can do than with the big boys. At a time when Rolling Stone/Spin/Blender leave content regarding musical instruments to the downmarket likes of Guitar World and Modern Drummer, AP includes "Gig Bag"—in which Crate's Profiler 5 Guitar Combo Amp and a Rhythmsource Metronome are assessed—in its service well and asks musicians like Between the Buried and Me drummer Blake Richardson about the act of playing drums. Clearly, the presence of ads from musical instrument manufacturers influences this, but surely encouraging kids to learn about playing instruments is a fine thing (YC guesses that Guitar Hero and Rock Band will speed the process) so it's nice to see the tools of music making included in service round-ups alongside Triple Five Soul's winter jackets and Conair's Infiniti Hair Designer.

AP's approach could seem rather craven, nakedly catering to teenagers with a somewhat narrow frame of reference that involves believing that mall-punk and the emo disapora retain much of a countercultural charge. But YC doesn't think there's much sense in auntishly berating kids for not knowing their history. (Many will figure it out for themselves elsewhere.) He does think it's just fine to focus on a particular variety of guitar music with which tons and tons of teenagers identify with viscerally—no other music magazine does so. It may be all for naught, in the sense that the online communities that AP evokes will only become more evolved while print media withers.

In any case, YC will add that, given what was probably an early December deadline, he salutes the mag for a nimble response by including the first major magazine reference he's read as to 2girls1cup.com (page 89).

So, y'all tell KK: what is it with year-end wrap ups? Not just with respect to music magazines, but to top-ten lists compiled by rock critics, blog denizens, and possibly your human resources coordinator and mailman? What, precisely, accounts for the human tendency to quantify music, films and TV shows based upon their appearance during a calendar year? Unlike many folks of his acquaintance, KK lacks the compulsion to prioritize cultural artifacts along such clearly demarcated lines.

While you chew on that (and feel free to leave comments below to that end), your very own Keyboard Krybaby assesses the catch-all 2007 issues of the three magazines regularly considered in this space—the January Spin, the January/February Blender, and the Dec. 27-Jan. 10 Rolling Stone—all of which hit newsstands in the past week and a half. KK can say that the reason these publications, and many many other mags and computah destinations, concoct "best of 2007" lists and make sport with the celebrity mishaps occurring in the space of year are twofold: 1. To do so is easy; 2. People who ain't KK enjoy reading such things.

Given lead time constraints, Spin and Blender were certainly cooking up these issues more than a month and half ago. The Blender under consideration reviews an Oct. 30 Van Halen show and a Oct. 14 Kelly Clarkson concert; Spin includes a shot of Eddie Van Halen in midair leap from Sept. 27 and a review of the Sex Pistols' performance at the Guitar Hero III release party on Oct. 25. Which is to say that editorial judgments as to what was important in 2007 had to have been made when there were more than two months left in 2007. This RS issue, on the other hand, closed two weeks ago, having acknowledged both the widespread layoffs at a couple of major labels and Grammy nominations around that time.

But whatever the lead time issues might be, certain memes arise. KK withholds comment on each mag's "best of 2007" lists, not only due's to KK's own disinclination, but also since Idolator's curators have covered "the top this or that" beat with the same fervor that The Wall Street Journal has been devoting to the subprime mortgage crisis. To wit:

"The cover represents what we're all about, man.": Blender's cover features a pop singer removing her shirt; RS' year-end cover is, as always, a composite of many of its 2007 covers—which is to say, the magazine itself and imprimatur it bestows; and Spin has a rare instance of a African-American cover subject thereupon, one who this year scored covers for all four publications regularly discussed here and who looks to have been Photoshopped in with the men whose recording he mined for his calling-card single (Daft Punk appear to have interacted very little with interviewer Andrew Vontz in an "Entertainers of the Year" story, but it's all very high concept).

"Time to turn into Best Week Ever": Each mag tackles 2007's signal watercooler topics relevant to its demographic in a section devoted to charticles and quippy items regarding the misdeeds of Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears, among others (one wonders if Blender's rumored upcoming Britney cover is risked due to the sport it makes with Spears herein). But as of Wednesday, it's very likely that the staffers involved with each package are contemplating the limits of the lead time constraints mentioned above—doubtless l'affaire Jamie Lynn is the One That Got Away.

"B-b-b-but her publicist said we had the exclusive": Spin anoints Feist as "Breakout of the Year"; Blender dubs her "Breakthrough of the Year." While both Spin research editor Phoebe Reilly and Blender senior editor Josh Eells note that Paul Simon is aware that Leslie Feist exists, Reilly's piece reveals that Fran Drescher does as well, leaving Eells to disclose that she was handpicked to perform on Saturday Night Live by Brian Williams.

"Sorry, Mr. Ford ad rep, the whole fold-out ad supplement thing hasn't been working out so hot for us... wait, how much?": The Ford Motor Company sponsors a foldout presenting Rolling Stone's 100 Best Songs of the Year; the accompanying ad pimps the auto leviathan's Sync doohickey, which provides voice activation for MP3 players in cars. Similarly, Ford/Sync also presents Blender's 2008 Rock and Roll User's Guide, in which upcoming album releases are cited via artist categories: Weezer and Metallica are "Rock Studs," Big Boi and Usher are "Big Macks," and, to Blender's considerable credit, Madonna and Janet Jackson are "Cougars," KK's favorite recent appellation and one he does not recall reading in a mass-market publication until now.

"We are brought unto this world with nothing, and with nothing we depart": Blender and Spin do not bother with them what passed this year. RS does, and gives pride of placement to a Michelle Phillips-penned reminiscence of Denny Doherty, the least notable member of the pretty much suck-ass Mamas and the Papas. Jazz drummer Max Roach gets the half-page encomium from ?uestlove he deserves, while country music patriarch Porter Waggoner gets an insufficient 11-word passing mention. The issue's deadline, however, did not permit the mag to note the death of Ike Turner.

"Mustn't have anyone think we're going through the motions": Each mag includes a couple of pieces that emphasize their respective strengths:

• RS' front-of-book Rock and Roll section includes a story on the scourge of compression, in which the dynamics of most major label pop and rock recordings of the past 15 years were rendered undynamic in order to appeal to MP3-trained ears. While "The Death of High Fidelity" plays into RS' "everything wuz better years ago" meme, writer Robert Levine does a fine job shining a light on an underreported phenomenon, while noting the related issue of how Pro Tools tends to camouflage shitty musicianship. Oddly, contributing editor Rob Sheffield's "Still Hair Metal After All These Years," a report on July's Rocklahoma festival, probably should have been published in August. Perhaps it was sitting around until someone noticed that the death of Quiet Riot singer Kevin DuBrow last month made the piece timely. In any case, Sheffield is a lot easier to take when he has several thousand words in which to make some points: one could conclude that "compression" has a deleterious effect on his prose.

• KK was irritated by a question Blender music editor Rob Tannenbaum posed to Miranda Lambert some months ago, but KK believes that, as a music journalism all-rounder, Tannenbaum bows to no one. His cover profile of Stacy Ferguson, Blender's "Woman of the Year," manages to make the interviewee, a woman that previously interested KK not one scintilla, seem like good company. He not only coaxes her into admitting that she did indeed piss herself onstage last year (which KK believes is a quasi-scoop), but turns phrase after phrase after phrase. This is how it's done, budding ink-stained wretches! Additionally, frequent contributor Jody Rosen examines the genesis of the mag's reader-elected song of the year, Rihanna's "Umbrella." Rosen details the creative process for a magazine that most often concludes that its readers are less interested in the "creative process" than they are in engaging in a pursuit that tends to make Blender's pages stick together.

• As for Spin, "The October Surprise" finds contributor David Peisner analysing the ongoing self-immolation of the "recording arts" components of various multinationals, and how Radiohead, Madonna and Trent Reznor are jumping ship and thus demonstrating how artists can now take control of heir livelihoods. KK will only add that 20 years ago many folks inveighed against the business practices of major labels, and said self-immolation is precisely what those folks desired.

Retailers are expected to pay as much as $750 to $1,000 a square foot for 27,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space at 52 E. 41st [sic! see below] St., the home of Virgin Records. Virgin will be vacating the space in the mixed-use residential tower, which also houses a UA Regal Cinema, on February 1, 2009.

OK, first of all, a note for people who (like me) hadn't had your coffee yet and thought that the 41st St. address meant the Times Square store was on the chopping block too: The Sun means 52 E. 14th St^*, which is the address of the Union Square outpost. So all of you who (also like me) had "Christmas 2007" as that store's last, sale-filled gasp in your office pool are going to lose out, but at least the $85 Gwen Stefani hoodies and cute Japanese sweaters that the store's putting on its main floor in a last-ditch effort to make up for the general lack of demand for recorded music in general will be at least half-price for next year's holiday season, right?

Virgin To Exit Manhattan's Union Square? [Billboard]
A 'Very Exciting Time' For Retail In New York [NY Sun]
Earlier: Virgin Megastores In New York City May Be Closing Sooner Than We Thought

^* Funnily enough, though, there is a music-related tie-in at the address he quoted: 52 E. 41st St. is actually the address for the Dylan Hotel, which some of you may remember as the home of Britney Spears' foray into the restaurant world. Maybe he really liked their portobello burger?

And so, Vibe is the first of the four magazines assessed regularly in this space to hit the stands with its year-end roundup. Your Correspondent finds himself particularly grateful to the magazine's editorial staff and their colleagues in the ad department for the simple fact that it took him less than an hour to read the entire January 2008 issue.

Which is to say that, at 96 pages, it is not a taxing read. Perhaps ad sales have declined; two prior issues topped out at 144 pages. It's possible that it was determined that lemons be turned to lemonade, and thus for its year-end "Tabloid Issue," Vibe would imitate a class of magazines that still exudes boundless energy—despite chronically anemic ad quotients in a flagging marketplace.

YC speaks of Wenner Media's Us Weekly, American Media's Star, and Bauer Publications' Life and Style Weekly. It is very seldom that a few days go by without YC seeing a gal or or three reading Us Weekly on the subway, or during the summer, on the beach. A female friend of YC's once described the appeal of the genre: "They're like going to a huge party. 'Hey, what's up? How have you been? Oh, wait a second, I have to go say hello to someone... My gawd, I haven't seen you in such a long time, but hold on, I have to get a drink,' etc., etc."

What she described is the hectic design, clashing color schemes and nanite-proportioned attention span of Us Weekly and its ilk. One page features photographs of actresses in casually assembled street clothes at a Starbucks, the next depicts actresses in gowns that an assortment of bitchy "experts" find alternately scrumptious or wanting, the next after that encompasses a breathlessly reported story regarding the suspicious bump in another actress' midsection... you know the drill.

So, two months after Halloween, Vibe dresses up as Us Weekly. The dominant cover image is a candid shot of Kanye West, and it's abutted on the spine by candids of Jay-Z and Beyoncé, Rihanna, and T.I. Just like Us!

In the front-of-book V-Mix section, Rihanna's sartorial progress in '07 is lauded, while in "Dope or Nope," Ashanti and Beyoncé's frocks for the MTV Video Music Awards are lamented. "So You Think You Can Dance" is notable more for the Perez Hilton-style toddler-scrawl adorning its photos than for the photos themselves, which include a shot of Akon's ill-fated onstage encounter with a 14-year-old preacher's daughter and the "MC Rove" incident. Based on the design of these pages, it could be construed that several of Vibe's designers are making a naked ploy for jobs at the publishers mentioned above: Each looks just like Us!

What passes for the feature well is dubbed "Flashing Lights." Kanye West, Jay-Z, and 50 Cent are each allotted two pages in which the conventional narratives of their doings in 2007 are recounted: West's Graduation prevailed over 50's Curtis and he said arrogant things; Jay's American Gangster recaptured artistic capital lost with last year's Kingdom Come; 50 hasn't yet retired despite his promise to do so if West outsold him, but he is still rich as Croesus. Then the rivalry between Beyoncé and Rihanna (both deny it exists) is recounted; the musical and extralegal activities of T.I. and Lil Wayne are reprised; a recap of l'affaire Imus, the congressional hip-hop hearings, and the Jena 6 protests comprises a rundown of how hip-hop played out in the larger culture; and a kaleidoscopic photo assemblage matches celebrity and street couture trends with each letter of the alphabet. Just like Us! Also, none of the above articles are bylined.

The review section is the only one in the issue not to be Us-ified: music editor Jon Caramanica's essay "The Changing of the Guard" reveals to some of the magazine's less attentive readers that "hey, albums ain't the be all/end all of the music industry," which may go some distance in explaining why Vibe declines to present a list of the year's best albums; Soulja Boy's "Crank That" is picked as the best dance of the year; Hoffa of OnSmash.com picks UGK and Outkast's "Int'l Player's Anthem" as 2007's best viral video; and a bunch of writers pick the best records from artists who passed this year. (Your Idolator curators have already noted Vibe's top singles of 2007.)

What to make of this? YC kinda likes that Vibe foregoes the often windy "what did it all mean" tack common to other music mags this time of year and seems to be having fun with this conceit. Indeed, for a staff used to a leisurely monthly schedule, taking the events of a year and summing them up Us-style is probably a cakewalk—certainly more so for them than for the staffs of Us and Star, who evidently must sweat over how to address each week's celebrity minutiae and employ a microbiologist's focus to the presentation of photos and captions 52 times a year.

At the same time, it seems like it would be best for a year-end issue to emphasize what a given magazine, y'know, is: maybe the summer or Halloween would have been better for a frothy little exercise such as this. What does it say for the staff's confidence in its brand that Vibe concludes the year by becoming just like Us?

Yes, those are Norah Jones-branded booty shorts complete with dangling ass cheeks, only $16 and part of the Post's rundown of the hottest music-related junk to waste your gift money on this holiday season. (You can also get Sean Kingston panties, but sadly they don't say "You'll Have Me Suicidal" across the butt. The Bon Jovi thong does say "Slippery When Wet," however, because that's how we do in Jersey.) We're already wearing a pair of Ashlee Simpson's "fingerless gloves with the anarchy 'A' symbol," but we know a few more things we'll be picking up thanks to the witty urgings of the Post's Billy Heller, who should really be moonlighting as an advertising copywriter. Fer instance:

Hopefully, Dave Matthews wasn't thinking about his 1996 double-platinum album "Crash," when he decided to sell die-cast DMB NASCAR models for $64.99.

Or maybe:

Drive into a swimming pool with the Keith Moon drumsticks from thewho.com

Wow, Bill. Just...wow.

Musically Gifted [NY Post]

"Well then," YB thought once he noticed that recent issues of both Vanity Fair and GQ included a standalone supplement titled Movies Rock, "so much for those 'Music Issues' Vanity Fair put out every year!"

This year has seen VF publishing a "Green" issue and a Darfur-themed issue, but the annual issue devoted to musical figures that interest editor Graydon Carter—inevitably featuring a lavish group cover portrait by Annie Leibovitz—was absent in 2007. Perhaps, since the "recording arts" component of the mainstream culture industry is quadruple fucked, Mr. Carter has little incentive to lend his imprimatur to it any longer. If Vanity Fair is going to go to any trouble emphasizing music, it must be now tethered to Hollywood, Mr. Carter's favored constituency. Apparently, publisher Conde Nast intends put out Movies Rock annually, and it will round out what would be Vanity Fair's 13-issue year.

So, then! Apparently, "Movies Rock"! And, according to a cover line, "Hollywood Turns Up the Volume." And evidently because movie people "rock" and because Bill Murray will be in the upcoming film City of Ember, a cover image captured by Mark Seliger presents Murray portraying the Vegas Elvis, mid-karate chop. Movie stars "rock" so much that it's better that an actor who has lately served as muse to YB's least favorite filmmaker ever—rather than a musical artist—should appear on MR's cover.

Similarly, "Double Threats," one of two "photo portfolios" that VF typically includes in themed issues, includes images of musicians acting in recent movies, like Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chris Brown, Corinne Bailey Rae, and in one shot seemingly every rapper who has been in a major film in the past four years. Otherwise, you have portraits of musically inclined actors like John C. Reilly, Billy Bob Thornton, and celebrated songstress Minnie Driver.

Carter's point-man for MR is Mitch Glazer, a producer/screenwriter (he produced Lost in Translation but, more importantly, he also wrote Scrooged, starring... Bill Murray!!!) who's married to Kelly Lynch (the hawt, non-Heather Graham junkie from Drugstore Cowboy), was a Crawdaddy stringer in the '70s, and is now one of Carter's Hollywood cronies. Probably not coincidentally, Glazer and Lynch were picked as one of VF's "best-dressed couples" earlier this year. Glazer labors mightily in his editor's letter to reinforce the idea that 2007 is a big year for musical cinema, citing La Vie en Rose, Sweeney Todd, and I'm Not There ("hey," he half-jokes, "maybe this isn't crass ad scam after all") before teasing many of the articles in the mag. One of which is "Soul Survivors," his own gee-whiz essay recounting his role in the creation of Martin Scorcese's Shine A Light, which captured two Rolling Stones shows at NYC's Beacon Theatre, a 2,800-capacity space Glazer describes as a "small, sweaty venue." Glazer never describes what his specific contribution to the film was, busy as he is with hosannas to Scorcese and the Stones.

So off we go! In a front-of-book featurette titled "LA Rock City" we learn which Hollywood clubs actors and actresses have been known to frequent. In "When Stars Record," David Cross and Demitri Martin critique the music of Bruce Willis, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Dogstar, thus shooting fish in a barrel; Cross, as ever, is smug in the manner common to many fortysomethings secure in the belief that culture has been on a downward spiral ever since the demise of Hüsker Dü. We also revisit 1992's signal stoner parlor trick in "Dark Side of Oz": VF staff writer Jim Windolf proposes new film/music mash-ups, including Gone With the Wind/James Brown's Revolution of the Mind and Idiocracy/ Britney's Oops!... I Did It Again. Leaving aside Windolf's cutesy conceit, YB always wondered why folks did flips over the Floyd/Oz synchronization, since the film is an hour longer than the record: are you supposed to put on Animals or Wish You Were Here for the remainder?

Then we come to "The 50 Greatest (Mostly) Rock Soundtracks of All Time." YB has to disclose a conflict of non-interest, due to the fact that he's never had any affection for the "my mix-tapes are representative of my superlative taste" aesthetic of the Pulp Fiction (No. 4), Rushmore (No. 11) and Garden State (No. 43) soundtracks. So he'll just say that nothing therein will give Conde Nast readers pause—although, in a soon-to-be post album era, it may have made more sense to come up with a list of top music moments in film, or something similar.

Finally, we get to the feature well, which, given that deeply reported longform journalism and think pieces are VF's bread and butter, seems half-baked. James Wolcott, a trusted VF contributor and a gifted critic, takes on Ken Russell's 1975 film Tommy in "Tommy Dearest"; he admits that he hadn't seen the film until this year, discloses his Who fandom, notes Russell's aesthetic inclinations, mentions that the idea of a revolutionary "rock messiah" didn't seem far-fetched in 1969, concludes that Ann-Margret is the true star of the film, and otherwise carries on as if the piece needed to be written very quickly.

Seeing as YB believes that the film isn't very good at all (he doesn't think much of the entire Tommy franchise anyhow), he thinks a better subject for Wolcott would have been the entire subgenre of phantasmagorical "rock" films that probably involved rather a lot of cocaine use on set: not just Tommy, but Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth, Alan Parker's The Wall, Sidney Lumet's The Wiz, Brian DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise... fuck, throw Michael Schultz's infamously shitty Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in there!

That said, YB very much digs two deeply reported features: Sam Kashner's "Fever Pitch" explores the creation, production, and aftermath of Saturday Night Fever, and James Kaplan's "The King of Ring-A-Ding-Ding" tells the story of Jimmy Van Heusen, the co-songwriter of "Love and Marriage," "Come Fly With Me," "High Hopes," and "All The Way," as well as Frank Sinatra's lieutenant in all things involving booze and broads. Both are excellent: Given that each is concerned with Hollywood lore, is packed with insider-y dirt and are otherwise rigorously detailed, it seems likely that both were commissioned for Vanity Fair itself and not a fly-by-night supplement designed to attract additional ad revenue. Read 'em!

Easily the most useless piece herein comes from the pen of a woman who has Frankenstein-stitched P.R. tidbits for Vanity Fair for years, resulting in a column that makes Larry King's legendarily static USA Today commentary read like fookin' Hendrik Hertzberg. Yes, dahlings, it's Lisa Robinson, the Liz Smith/Cindy Adams of rock!

Many moons ago, this woman palled around with Mick Jagger on the New York Post's dime, and she has since proffered her artless assemblages in VF. In "Rock and Reel," she notes that a bunch of rock biopics are in production and also that pop artists are involved in upcoming films; each citation gets generally one sentence each, and to call her ability to craft a prose transition "rudimentary" would be far too generous. She also mentions that Bono appears in Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, which came out three months ago. YB wonders if Robinson or a proxy has registered the domain name "2girls5donkeys1VFeditor1cup.com," anticipating a time when Mr. Carter ever decides to call time on her far-beyond-phoned-in claptrap.

As it happens, several hours after this review's publication, CBS will broadcast Movies Rock, which was held in Los Angeles last Sunday and features Beyonce, Fergie, Usher, will.I.am, Carrie Underwood, and Mary J. Blige all singing movie songs. None of these artists appeared in the issue. If a representative of Conde Nast Media Group doesn't much care for YB's musings, that rep should take solace in the fact that he notified many readers of a televised event that seems very underpublicized.

Your very own Keyboard Krybaby, upon spotting the December Spin on the newsstand a few days ago, immediately chuckled, thinking of the ex-staffers he knew in the '90s/early aughts and how each would have likely blanched at the prospect of the Big Daddy of Baby Boomer Rock on the mag's cover.

Yet there Bruce Springsteen is, smiling gamely for Ben Watts' lens while his covermate Win Butler merely offers the dead-eyed gaze common to his suspicious-of-the-mass-media ilk.

In contrast to the Spin of years gone by, this cover doesn't represent much of a risk for the magazine in 2007. Because of the advocacy of Butler and the Hold Steady's Craig Finn, Springsteen is more than the torchbearer of a mass-culture consensus that folks weaned upon college radio used to mistrust, if not openly despise. Now, as many of those college-radio partisans fret over mortgages and which district has the best public school, Springsteen's brand of responsible center-leftism seems not at all offensive. (Doug Brod's editor's letter hints at this.) And it certainly doesn't hurt Spin that a good portion of this demographic probably has more of an attachment to print than its younger counterparts.

As for the story, entitled "The Feeling's Mutual," deputy editor Steve Kandell accompanied Butler to New Jersey's Continental Airlines Arena for what seems to be an extremely protracted joint interview; Herr Boss would be regaling thousands of folks on his home turf shortly afterwards. Butler and Springsteen discuss Springsteen-y topics like the sense of community shared between audience and band, Robert DeNiro and Motown, DUH SCREEN DOOR SLAMZZ, MEH-REEZZ DUH-RESS WAY-EEEVES, that kind of thing. Not much to see here, although Springsteen seems like much better company than the sullen Butler.

Two of the piece's three sidebars involve Finn and the National's Matt Berninger attesting to Herr Boss' incandescence. A third, entitled "Little Steven's Wicked Cool Ways," is written by contributor David Browne, and as such is the latest installment in his "rock and roll was much better when I was a lad" series. He finds the most willing conspirator possible in the E Street Band's resident pedant, Steven Van Zandt. There's no evidence that Browne questioned any of Van Zandt's premises or deviated otherwise from stenography, likely because he thinks Little Stevie is right. Here are some quotations from Chairman Steve:

• "Today, you can trace the mainstream stuff all the way back to Eddie Vedder. Or, with the indie stuff, it goes all the way back to...U2."
• "We grew up with 30 years where rock'n'roll was the main thing...we'd been hearing for years that rock and roll is dead. But rock'n 'roll was dead."
• "You have to go back to greatness to achieve greatness."
• "Fun is gone from the culture. Where's fun?"

Has it possibly occurred to Van Zandt that it is not for him to decide what constitutes "fun" for those several decades younger than he?

Two decades ago, the man who speaks these words spent what he calls his "celebrity capital" pressuring musicians to not perform in a resort town in South Africa, thus explicitly rebuking the country's system of apartheid. Nowadays, the best use of that selfsame cultural capital is apparently to complain that current rock music does not suit him. So he has resolved to write a rock-history curriculum for high schools.

It's possible that KK is even more old-fashioned than Van Zandt, since he believes that learning how to play any iteration of rock and roll is a discipline best refined outside of school, far away from teachers or any individuals (such as Van Zandt) who are bent on enforcing a "right" way of making music, and it has been ever thus. The results may not please Van Zandt, but maybe a 57-year-old man isn't supposed to like the music teenagers like. KK wonders if the teenaged Van Zandt would have bristled if an older gentleman suggested the music he enjoyed was not enough like Glenn Miller or Mantovani. Christ, take it from Van Zandt's benefactor: "We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever did in school." ("No Surrender," 1984.)

Now, watch KK as he switches gears from "old dude trying TOO hard to be down with the 'kids'" to "old dude bemoaning that 'HARRUMPH the kids sing like pussies HARRUMPH.' " In this issue's "big picture" feature—a slot that typically ends up as the best article in a given Spin—contributor David Peisner examines the singing style that persists in emo. "Whine of the Times" concludes that the majority of the genre's singers observe strict stylistic templates defined by former blink-182/current Angels and Airwaves dude Tom DeLonge, Saves the Day's Chris Conley, and Jimmy Eat World's Jim Atkins, and as such are largely ignorant of or suspicious of older singers who sound as if their balls have not just dropped, but have been emptied at least once while inside of a woman or man.

Peisner has done a fine job here, interviewing the likes of DeLonge and producer Tim O'Heir, who sounds as if he's awfully tired of the bands he's worked with—"Saves the Day: here's an adult who sings like he's a sixth grader," he sneers. He goes on to mention a band he's worked with recently: "their music history starts with the Chili Peppers. They will not go back and listen to a great singer like Bowie, because it sounds old and weird to them." If this is at all true, KK finds it odd that, after a little less than a decade of downloading culture, post-teen emo musicians have so little interest in incorporating music outside of their immediate frame of reference. He'll also add that this article could easily have encompassed many if not most indie rock singers, who seem equally afraid of experimenting with their chest voice.

Now, some notes that do not warrant excessive verbiage:

1. Spin clearly needed to address the arrival of In Rainbows. But a month and a half after it nearly rent the NetWeb asunder, a front-of-the-book think piece as to What It Means For Radiohead And The Rest Of Us can't help but feel irretrievably late.

2. Said album receives the lead review spot: four stars, ho hum. Its author, the cutesily-inclined Mikael Wood, pens two other featured reviews: Angels and Airwaves' I-Empire and Say Anything's In Defense of The Genre. Wood's a slick, if slangy, scribe, but one fears that by assigning him so many prominent reviews Spin's reviews section is cultivating its own Rob Sheffield.

3. Thank you, whichever Spin staffer oversees the short artist profiles in "Noise," for including a piece on the wonderful, on-her-way-back Robyn, instead of yet another indie-rock band that no one will care about three months from now.

Here's a little exercise: For a moment, try to focus only on the image of the fella on the cover of the magazine under consideration this week. Ignore the magazine's name and cover lines.

The guy has unkempt facial follicles, but is tight up top. He looks like he doesn't spend much time outside, though this could be a consequence of the lighting favored by the photographer. The cover looks less like one designed to appeal to casual readers, and more like one intended to appeal to bears. Maybe it would be canny for the publicists attending to Jim James and his band My Morning Jacket to do business with 100% Beef, the Bear Culture bible.

This is all to say that the 14-year-old Philadelphia-based publication Magnet almost certainly has a smaller rate base than Spin—which, of the publications normally written about in this space, is clearly the mag it competes with most directly. Since Spin presumably must appeal to readers other than Johnny and Joanie Indie Rocker, it must put relatively photogenic artists on its cover. But Magnet only has go with artists that its concentrated core of readers deems credible. And that core currently includes more dudes with unruly beards than any other subset of the American diaspora—save, of course, bears.

Like Paste, Magnet doesn't want to give off the scent of a commercial enterprise; its motto, "Real Music Alternatives," is pitched at readers eager to feel as if the music they listen to and read about is uncontaminated by the dictates of mass culture. But the publication that it resembles most would be Option, which before it ceased publication in 1998 more or less made Spin look like U.S. World News and Report. For example, the Magnet issue under consideration includes "21st-Century Primitive Guitar," a very Option-y survey of post-John Fahey guitarists.

But a lot has changed in the nine years since Option went under, chiefly the fact that being a fan of indie rock and otherwise "underground" musical idioms is a common lifestyle choice made much easier by The Device You Are Currently Gazing At, which also provides access to destinations that would seem to render Magnet invalid.

The best thing to be said about Magnet is that, like Option, it looks nice: Its design is elegant and uncluttered. Its graphic stock-in-trade is photographs of bearded and/or be-horn-rimmed guys standing around looking moody, and as such they are pleasant to look at, if utilitarian.

But the scribbling? From time to time, Your Boy has mentioned how he hoped that a music publication produced outside of New York City might be refreshing. But for all the brobdignagian self-regard of New York media types, many of those folks got where they are today because they were, y'know, talented. Sadly, YB cannot say the same of the scribes contributing to Magnet's Fall 2007 issue.

Exhibit A is one Phil Sheridan, who is evidently a sports writer; he contributes a back page essay entitled "Almost Heinous" wherein, after a lot of dithering regarding how consciously commercial artists like Toby Keith and John Mayer strike him as crass, he casts himself as a noble heir to the "beautiful loser" ethos of the Replacements and the Kinks. "Wow," he more or less concludes, "I'm so much more geniune and real than those pundits who appear on ESPN. Kinda like Paul Westerberg!" His Replacements fetish reappears in a profile of the now-defunct band the Mendoza Line, who just had too much integrity, in his telling. Or something.

Exhbit B comes in deep into the review section, in a column called Guilty Pleasures. One Corey duBrowa finds it necessary to classify Abba's Gold, Duran Duran's Rio, Def Leppard's Pyromania and TLC's CrazySexyCool as such, then expounds witlessly as to how each "is so bad they're good" or some similar claptrap.

YB has no idea whether the PTB at Magnet will read the following, but this is for them and any other like-minded editorial gatekeepers: Stop with the goddamn "Guilty Pleasure" conceit. It's appropriate to feel guilt regarding something that harms one's own health or the well-being of others. It is not appropriate to feel guilt over enjoying a song. An individual likes a song or doesn't, so please, M