Maybe it's because I've been watching how the Jonases' ascent has been meticulously plotted by Disney over the past year, and how—despite being successful, and having a bunch of songs that I enjoy—one could argue that they've sort of fallen short in a relative sense. Having their Disney vehicle Camp Rock and its attendant soundtrack debut during the great Coldplay/Lil Wayne sales race probably didn't help my perception of their potential for mass teen appeal; through last week, it had sold a good-for-2008 562,000 copies. And even though the teenpop crowd is supposed to be more immune from illegal downloading thanks to technological innovations like filtering software, sales of the JoBros' forthcoming album's lead single "Burning Up" softened in their third week, taking a 12% hit and just brushing the 400,000-sold mark. Meanwhile, their tour grosses this year have been decent, and their big headlining tour this summer is bringing out the StubHub profiteers once again, although the highest prices haven't reached Miley levels yet.

(Speaking of Miley, one would think that if RS were really going for the teen-girl-squad demographic, they'd have put her on the cover long ago. Perhaps Jann still has lingering Billy Ray issues from the early '90s, which, frankly, I couldn't possibly blame him for.)

Perhaps what's odd about the rush to embrace the Jonas Brothers—particularly on the part of the staid Stone—is that it seems like yet another naked attempt to champion The Way Things Were, i.e. when teenage girls all swooned for the same dreamy boys in unison, and the monoculture kept entities like RS and MTV in close proximity to the forefront of popular consensus. Even though the numbers haven't really borne out that sort of mass appeal yet. Perhaps ticket sales for the tour and the scans for A Little Bit Longer will completely prove me wrong, and I'll have egg on my face. That's fine! I just get wary when the mainstream media seems sort of, well, desperate to get eyeballs at any cost.

Anyway, I'm sure this post will be swarmed by Jonas Brothers fans telling me that I'm wrong, that I'm a "hater," etc. So let's just post another picture!

Aww.

The Jonas Brothers to perform at this year's VMAs [AP]
The Jonas Brothers: Go Behind The Cover Story [RS]
[Photo: AP]

At the conclusion of his assessment of the July Vibe last month, Keyboard Krybaby asked whether something was distracting the magazine's EIC, Danyel Smith, and her staff. Based on the August issue, which in current parlance could charitably be described as a "hot mess," his question still stands.

Before he jumps into the specifics regarding the exceptionally poor packaging extant, he should mention that this particular issue, "The Real Rap Issue," is the first in the mag's history in which hip-hop is featured exclusively. Smith says in her editor's letter that "many think of Vibe as a hip-hop—all rap, all the time—magazine," and that this is not correct. But she feels that the various obituaries for the genre offered recently warrant this issue.

Smith also mentions that next month's issue will celebrate the magazine's 15th anniversary. Over the past year, each issue of Vibe has included photo compilations focusing on images of hip-hop and R&B personalities from then and now, as well as countdowns of the best or greatest this or that. This issue, in the V-Mix front-of-book section starting on page 57, vintage photographs of the likes of Salt & Pepa and Remy Ma are contrasted with images from the past year or so.

But 16 pages beforehand, as this issue's V15 Rewind, comes "Dropping Gems," in which verses from Nas, Scarface and Lauryn Hill are hailed as the best that have been spit in the magazine's lifetime. In between comes an article listing 19 reasons hip-hop isn't dead at the moment; "Because the King of the South (T.I.) isn't getting dethroned yet" is No. 1, while "Because Nicki Minaj" (a Lil Kim-esque MC) "raps...and loves to play dress up" is the list's final rationale.

What KK is getting at is that it's self-evident that Vibe's staff should place content regarding the present together, and the stuff concerning the past as such. He would have thought it only logical to abut the two aforesaid retrospectives, then follow 'em with "Diggin' in the Crates: 24 Lost Rap Classics." KK learned quite a bit about records he never heard of, but he also thinks that, notwithstanding Ms. Smith's keen desire to emphasize the genre's health, it doesn't say much for Vibe's estimation of hip-hop in the here and now when this throwback piece appears as the sum total of VRevolutions, which is nominally devoted to reviews of new music. It may be that Vibe just can't get their hands on upcoming hip-hop and R&B records, which in any case seem to be produced and manufactured without much regard to the needs of entertainment magazines.

He also would have placed "Bringing '88 Back," a survey of records and movements that rendered 1988 "the greatest year in hip-hop history," next to those pieces. KK thinks that the article's assessment of that year's importance to hip-hop is about right, and is pleased that 2 Live Crew's Move Somethin' and Too Short's Life is...Too Short are placed alongside Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back. (He's somewhat embarrassed to admit that he doesn't like the latter very much.) But he's also confused as to why Geto Boys' album from that year, Making Trouble, makes the cut. As he's a fan of music with lots and lots of cursing (Blowfly, G.G. Allin), KK loves him some Geto Boys, but Andrew Nosnitsky's piece "Most Known Unknowns" fails to describe why anyone should have cared about the then-Scarface and Bushwick-free crew, other than the dubious claim that sampling Tony Montana's dialogue from Scarface was a "major innovation."

It seems like all of these retrospectives not only could have benefited from a greater unity in packaging, but perhaps should have been saved for the big 15th-anniversary blowbang next month. Did Smith conclude that there were not enough ads being sold for the August issue, and dump the longer pieces here?

The cover subject of The Real Rap Issue is reputed Keyshia Cole suitor Young Jeezy. KK has to salute writer Benjamin Meadows-Ingram, for his feature Q&A "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" manages to evolve from a customary exercise in braggadocio ("you can go to any club, anywhere in the United States, and probably motherfucking Pakistan, you gonna hear a Jeezy record") to a very candid interview with a guy who would rather labor mightily to keep the focus on his upcoming album, The Recession. Jeezy admits that he did not (and still does not) have insurance and paid cash for an operation on his damaged vocal cords; that Ms. Cole did not deny strenuously enough in public that she was pregnant by him, and that she asked him to marry her and bought him a ring; and that he is mindful of the absence of his father during his childhood when he reflects upon how his profession keeps him away from his son. Good stuff.

KK was also interested in A sidebar to the Jeezy story, Linda Hobbs' "Southern Hospitality," wherein we learn that Antonio "L.A." Reid's move from Arista in Atlanta to Def Jam in New York was viewed with suspicion; the subtext is that there's a lingering resentment among the New York hip-hop cognoscenti that Southern artists and execs have success that is perpetually and rightfully due them. And Chris Yuscavage's "I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T" explores the online strategies that rappers like Soulja Boy and Flo Rida, as well as comers like Crooked I, Mickey Factz, Blu, and Jay Electronica, rely on in place of altogether fucked major labels.

Vibe hasn't been sucking all over the place, but the way this issue was produced indicates distraction and sloppiness on the part of the staff. KK certainly wouldn't blame anyone in the print business for feeling a little insecure, but he does think that as long as one has a job therein, one should evince greater care than is evinced in this issue.

Five weeks ago, Anono-Prick suggested that, after featuring chicks consecutively on the previous three covers, it was time for Joe Levy's Blender to feature a dude on its cover.

Right on time, here's the August 2008 edition, which is fronted not by a comely young woman, but by a guy who shares a physique with a goodly part of the readership Levy and his colleagues desperately want to not to lose to World of Warcraft, Twitter, and a komputah-based distraction that emerged while AP was writing this sentence. Jack Black is thereupon styled in combat gear, as per his role in the upcoming Tropic Thunder: he has enough credibility as a rock figure via his beloved D. that no one should look askance that he's on this particular magazine's cover.

Many months ago, AP alluded to a few words of wisdom offered by a publishing potentate. AP should disclose that said pearls—"in the late spring and summertime, they can see all the tits and ass they want on the street; In the fall and winter, they can't, and that's when you put nearly nekkid chicks on the cover"—were courtesy of Felix Dennis, Blender's former owner. At the time, Mr. Dennis was keen to impress upon the staff that a music magazine risked losing credibility if it went the "pendulous dugs" route too often; that this directive came from a man whose persona and publishing philosophy rebuked American notions of "credibility" amused AP and a few of his colleagues.

And so, in July comes no sweater meat. (Black's pair doesn't count.) It does seem, though, that Blender is overcompensating w/r/t the dude quotient in this issue. The issue contains exactly one piece of significance—by which AP means features, front-of-book items involving the subject's participation, and lead and secondary "down page lead" music reviews—involving a female artist. This would be the four-point "Useful Tips" front-of-book featurette regarding Katy Perry, the Christian music refugee responsible for the most strident song regarding one young woman's aborning interest in another to never appear under the "womyn's music" rubric.

Otherwise, the pieces emphasized in the August Blender go like this: AP's beloved T-Pain will have a new album, THR333 Ringz, ready for the fall; Chris Martin answers what are very likely not real queries from Blender readers; the four members of Motley Crue phone editor-at-large Elizabeth Goodman over the course of a week and disclose their mundane tour preparations; contributing editor Rob Sheffield rhapsodizes over the Hold Steady; Michael Joseph Gross talks with the cover dude; a piece details how games like Guitar Hero and SingStar are proving to be adept at selling downloads; contributing editor Jon Dolan visits the American Museum of Natural History with Conor Oberst...

Alright, let's take a breather here.

Okay.

...senior editor Jonah Weiner awards four and a half stars to Tha Carter III after spending half a year as the mag's Lil' Wayne correspondent; Beck's Modern Guilt, Black Kids' Partie Traumatic, Seun Kuti & Fela's Egypt 80's self-titled album, and the Cool Kids' The Bake Sale are judged to be very good indeed; contributing editor Robert Christgau uses a five-star review of a 2007 compilation to eulogize Bo Diddley and then devotes an "Every Original Album Reviewed" to Funkadelic (but not Parliament) and spends a lot of ink extolling funk, which is kind of funny if you've ever seen the guy move in a most arrhythmic fashion to live music in the NYC area; and finally, senior editor Josh Eells solicits in a "Who Do You Think You Are" interview with G-Unit that 50 Cent fancies Phylicia Rashad rotten.

The next prominent placement of a female "artist" pops up in the review section's "point of entry" item "I Love This CD." Tila Tequila, Blender's June cover girl, has this to say about Madonna's Hard Candy: "...how great does she look for her age? I'd date her." AP suspects that, if queried on merits of of the past five prime ministers of the UK, the ever reliable Ms. Tequila would exclaim, "Margaret Thatcher? I'd hit that!"

Gross' "G.I. Jack" comprises a fairly innocuous conversation: most often, that's all you can expect from a conversation with what appears to be a well-adjusted, talented guy who pretty much everybody likes. But AP is fairly confident that Black's likeability will not amount to a big newsstand gallop. AP wouldn't be surprised if Blender lobbied for a Coldplay cover a few months ago, lost to Spin and Rolling Stone, and had to settle for Black pimping a movie that has produced little anticipation.

As it is, Blender does not have a very wide latitude w/r/t to male cover subjects. Rolling Stone can put Obama and iconic musicians familiar to its aging longtime readership on its cover for a newsstand boost. Spin is now the whistlestop for bands transitioning from the blawg/Pitchfork diaspora to the wider world. But which huge-selling male musical figure or band can a happily commercial, generalist music publication that has historically declined to put baby-boomer faves on its cover rely on these days?

When AP worked at Blender, the answer was always thus: Eminem. Now? Coldplay, sure. AP would think that the mag's staff might have predicted Tha Carter III's first-week sales of a million, so why not him? Might be the old saw that images of black individuals tend to not do well for publications aimed at white people. Why not Nickelback? Might be that New York publishing types still cannot countenance butt-rock. Radiohead? Might be that too many of their fans proudly eschew print. Blender is in a pretty daunting bind here.

But it seems past time for Levy to come up with some new editorial gimmicks. He seems to have thus far abandoned Blender's longstanding reliance on lists, which is perhaps too redolent of the tenure of his predecessor, Craig Marks. His single formal addition has been giving over three pages an issue to crony Sheffield's aforesaid Station to Station column, which this month finds Sheffield chewing over the Hold Steady's new album Stay Positive. He likes it a whole lot, and in saying so, Sheffield grapples with an artist in the here and now instead of crafting hosannas to his '80s faves, which has been his column's tack thus far.

Levy had better get cracking: Blender's August 2007 issue topped out at 136 pages. The page counts of the subsequent seven issues, which concluded Marks' run as editor-in-cheif, would never go under 120. Three of Levy's first four issues topped out at 96 pages; the current mag hits 108.

And so, Rolling Stone devotes its July 10/17 issue to an interview with the all-but-presumptive Democratic candidate for the President of the United States of America, just four months after the mag's endorsement. The MSM pricked up their ears when the mag hit the stands last week: "Ooh, no cover lines for this issue, just like the 1980 Annie Leibovitz-shot image of John Lennon suckling Yoko Ono." We learn, from answers elicited by editor and publisher Jann Wenner's first two questions, that Obama is pleased by the endorsements of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, that Blood on the Tracks graces his iPod, and not much else.

(BTW: This week, a sale of Wenner's Us Magazine to Condé Nast was mooted; the consensus opinion seems to be that he's mystified by that mag's game-changing success and doesn't have much interest in the celebrity culture upon which it feeds. But it's clear that Wenner'd sooner a bear gnaw off one of his feet than part with Rolling Stone, what with it being the instrument with which he administers tongue baths to his longtime heroes and new crushes.)

Mention was also made of another article therein, which concerns another persistent meme of the past two years: Amy Winehouse leads her life in a heedless manner.

But no one in a position to trumpet the contents of any entertainment magazine noted the truly big news. So, with full knowledge that he has been much easier on Mr. Wenner's mag since he revealed his identity and his prior associations with RS, it is Your Correspondent's pleasure to laud the fact that Rolling Stone has published a feature on the Canadian progressive rock trio Rush in this very issue.

YC reckons he's on pretty firm footing when he suggests that Rolling Stone's past and present staffers regard the band the same way as every American woman and non-nerd male: as an abomination. Writer Chris Norris enumerates the qualities that damned Rush in RS' purview, although he describes them as commonplace complaints: "Their hypertrophic musicianship is mocked by critics, " he writes, "their lyrical pedantry spoofed by hipsters, their singer's voice a subject of churlish speculation..." As such, RS has been a bete noire to the trio's fans not only due to the mag ignoring the band for three decades, but also because Jann Wenner's other plaything, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has steadily declined to nominate Rush for induction. Since the 1980s, Rush coverage has been left to the likes of Guitar World, Bass Player, and Modern Drummer.

So YC wonders how this piece came to pass. Did the departure of Joe Levy and the ascension of Eric Bates and Jason Fine as co-executive editors clear the way? Is one of those two a fan of the band? Is Mr. Wenner so cuckoo for Obama that he didn't pay much attention to what else was in the issue? Or did he turn in his interview from wherever it is that he summers, allowing his employees to sneak the Rush piece in? Was the piece intended as an acknowledgment of Canada Day? Or does Norris have mystical ability to pitch the unpitchable? Whatever it may be, drummer Neil Peart generally consents only to speak to the drum press, so it's refreshing to read him interviewed by a journalist who's not invested in the sycophancy of the snare set.

Norris was a staff writer at Spin in the 1990s and early 2000s, and "Rush Never Sleeps" is his first piece for Rolling Stone. His conceit is that the band has created a world with as much immersive detail as the Grand Theft Auto diaspora, the Marvel Comics universe, or J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. Which is to say that a certain kind of nerd digs the fuck out of the band. So, between the MSM's recent interest in geek culture and Rolling Stone's agenda to laud any band that has stood the test of time, Rush can now receive the mag's imprimatur.

And when that imprimatur doesn't involve supplicating to many tropes beloved to Mr. Wenner, this can be a very fine thing indeed. A Rolling Stone writer obviously tends to get a lot of access to interviewees, and indeed Norris gets loads of color: he goes to a Toronto Blue Jays home game with bassist-singer Geddy Lee; he attends a rehearsal for the current tour; and he goes to dinner with the three. We learn that guitarist Alex Lifeson is an oyster enthusiast and that Lee is an oenophile. (YC must confess that he knew that factoid previously.) It is at this time Norris and the band discuss the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's persistent snubbing, a passage YC is frankly stunned was allowed to see print.

But Norris particularly excels at describing common knowledge in engaging language and thus avoiding cliche. To wit: "the very phrase 'Neil Peart' is shorthand for the kind of Olympian accomplishment rarely seen outside genres like classical music." "Lee entered the history books as one of (hard rock's) truly sui generis frontmen: gimlet eyes, ectomorph noted proboscis. Robert Plant may have sung about Mordor: Lee looked like he'd been there." YC believes that what you write about is not nearly as key as how you write, and he would bet that Norris agrees.

As a veteran of five Rush shows, experienced in each New York area venue that can accommodate the band (Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, Jones Beach, Garden State Arts Center), YC can say that Norris' contention that most attendees sing along with every word to every song from every album, even from last year's Snakes and Arrows, is true: Rush fans are the Trekkies trekkers of rock. Since the issue came out last week, there has been much debate on fora dedicated to the band, wherein fans have tended to be defensive w/r/t Norris' characterization along these lines. And yet, YC is surprised that Norris does not make the point that the Rush model—a band that does everything its own ruggedly, individualist way— has found recent adherents in the band's Canadian countrymen like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Wolf Parade and the Arcade Fire.

A few notes:

1. Norris notes only one of the nicknames the Rush dudes have given one another: Lifeson is "Lerxst." YC can reveal that Peart is the "Professor," and Lee is known as "Dirk."

2. Norris also does not mention Lifeson's New Year's Eve 2004 arrest for assaulting two sheriff's deputies, which is the one of the very few "rawk" occurrences to have involved a Rush dude.

3. He alludes briefly to Peart's interest in weirdo philosopher/ponderous prose stylist/right-wing nerd icon Ayn Rand, which manifested itself in many of his lyrics from the 1970s and prompted the band to be tarred as "fascists." YC believes that Peart's worldview has evolved since then, but he would have liked for Norris to get Peart to address this specifically.

4. But Peart's annus horribilis, which found his daughter and wife dying within ten months of each other a decade ago, is accounted for. He went on a motorcycle and biking odyssey, which is recounted in Peart's book Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, which YC read a bit of and found it quite moving.

In any case, Norris has done a superb job, and YC—who, it should be sufficiently clear by now, really really digs Rush, and has watched Peart's instructional videos—is jealous of the quality time he got with the band. His somewhat arch tone, typical of everything YC has read of his work, can occasionally read as if he's condescending to the band and their fans on behalf of RS. But more often, his take on what makes the band unique seems genuine and admiring.

Let's have some more like this, RS! And to you what don't like Rush: reading Norris' article will begin the process by which you will acknowledge how very very wrong you are.

It has been a long-running meme at this column that mainstream entertainment magazines don't like it much when their competitors run a cover story featuring the same famous people at the same time as they. And so it comes to pass that the July 2008 Spin hits newsstands two weeks after the most recent issue of Rolling Stone. The former comprises an image of the entire lineup of Coldplay, whereas the latter features only the band's front-sissy Chris Martin. RS is clearly observing prevailing publishing wisdom that an image of a single individual will produce better newsstand sales than that of several; Spin goes with the noble concept that "Coldplay is a band."

But Your Boy wonders if the respective muckety-mucks of Spin and Rolling Stone can muster any righteous indignation as to which has the exclusive right to feature the most self-effacing rock band in the history of the world around the release date of Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends. It seems like all concerned would keep their heads down, play ball with one of the few bands to debut in the past decade that can command a consensus among people around the world that have no "oh they're just the Home Depot version of Radiohead" bona fides to prove, and hope that these issues do well in a crumbling marketplace and not worry that the dudes across the street had the same access they did. But Spin's braintrust must be pleased that their issue came out two days before Coldplay's record debuted at No. 1.

In any case, the issue under consideration this week is a Bizarro World version of Spin's June 2007 issue, which perhaps unintentionally featured a three-part examination of what the term "rock star" used to connote: namely, a imperially arrogant, debauched, and extravagantly wealthy individual. This month, again perhaps unintentionally, the mag presents a trisected meditation on how residents of the indie-rock diaspora are often seized by notions of humility.

Spin begins, of course, with Michael Joseph Gross' "Shine On," in which he spends some time in London with Coldplay. Gross presents a woman who works next to the band's rehearsal space: she knows little of the band other than that they are unassuming and that they are probably "crap at what they do." He recounts the standard litany of Koldplay Komplaints—their music is dull, the 40-Year-Old Virgin "gay" comment—then notes that the band's new album is produced by Brian Eno and Arcade Fire knobsman Markus Dravs, and is thus spikier and more challenging than its previous music.

For the remainder of the piece, Gross portrays the dudes being self-deprecating. They are self-deprecating while planning the band's marketing; they are self-deprecating in that they foolishly ceded too much decision making to others and erred in dismissing their now-reinstated manager, Dave Holmes; Martin frets over the possibility that someone might think the name of the album and the video for "Violet Hill" are pretentious, as well as the celebrity culture that makes his family's life trying; and so on.

YB should mention here that he was interested to learn that Martin's grandmother is Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe's next-door neighbor. But otherwise, YB is mostly struck that with Coldplay, the now 15-year-old expectation that musical artists should not behave in a manner associated with Louis XIV dovetails with an ancient and very English notion that one should not draw undue attention to or seem altogether pleased with oneself.

Similarly, Deputy Editor Steve Kandell's "Animal Collective of Montreal" (BTW: no matter the knowledge and predilections of Spin's readership, that's one unwieldy mufuggin' headline) concerns the Canadian quartet Wolf Parade. The men of this band are also laconic and concerned/unconcerned with seeming too prepossessing: like Coldplay, they each profess a lack of interest in cellphones and the innuhnet, and are bemused that anyone cares much for their music. Unlike Gross, Kandell ascribes these traits to the band's nationality; he also delightfully describes singer/guitarist Dan Boeckner as being "one blue knit cap away from being Jimbo from The Simpsons."

Finally we come to "Fjord Escorts," which concerns how the Swedish government takes an active interest in and indeed subsidizes native musicians as key exports abroad. The piece is written by Adam Sachs, a fellow YB has known since he was 14 years old and with whom he spent a long weekend prior to this writing, so he must recuse himself from any qualitative assessment. He'll just leave you with the fact that Swedes—part of the Scandinavian continuum populated by folks widely considered to be exceedingly reserved—seem to regard music and musicians as humble artisans producing exquisitely designed and serviceable craft, and not powerfully self-involved "art."

YB should say here that he tends to desire humility in his personal acquaintances, in elected servants, and in other players in public life. And it may be that most self-conscious, middle-class music fans were taught by Nirvana 15 years ago and by the domestic and foreign policies of the current administration that swaggering around with your big dick is bad. "Those folks are not like the Motley Crue, most rappers, or the tweakers on all those realty shows," they might say. "They're like me: responsible and humble. They look like they go to the same bar as me." And perhaps some of the people interviewed in these three articles are in fact preening jerks, but are adept at concealing this from journalists.

But YB more or less believes that some artists should be arrogant. Swaggering around with your big dick when you have a titanic, compelling gift that enriches the human race is okey-dokey in YB's book, and he'd like the regular-guy paradigm to go away for a while.

You'd have knocked over the teenager I used to be by saying so, but goddamn have I gotten sick of listicles. I buy the better-looking ones and spy in on those more obvious, the ones in the big music magazines. I've written and/or contributed to a number of them myself, not counting this column; my life was more or less changed by them. So feeling like I'm over them does not come lightly. But it seems more and more as if they've hit critical mass. Even Blender isn't doing them much anymore (as our outed Anonodude has mentioned), which is sort of like Madonna not releasing singles. Maybe the listicle is finally finished.

Or maybe the formula just needs to be put to rest. At this point, listicles—most of them, anyway—have become numbingly predictable. Take Blender's 100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums Ever list from a while back. The only surprising thing about that was that people were actually surprised by it. Of course No. 1 was Pavement's Slanted & Enchanted—let's see, it placed 16th in the Spin Alternative Record Guide's Top 100 back in 1995, after it had only been out three years. Then it was fifth in Spin's Top 90 Albums of the '90s, and fourth in its Top 100 Albums 1985-2005. (I contributed to the latter, though not the Pavement entry.) What were the chances that it wasn't going to place highly on the Blender list? The listicle has become much the same as the pop charts themselves: mostly the same old shit, over and over again, without any real divergences, and lacking any real individual viewpoint.

That's the major reason I like the cover package of Signal to Noise's 50th issue so much. I don't always read this magazine closely: most of it is about improv and jazz, not styles I know much about, and its out-rock and electronica coverage tends to pass me by, though I'll note the new issue has an interesting profile of East Orange, N.J., freeform radio station WFMU. (I'll also note I've written one piece for STN, a jukebox feature with Jace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ /rupture, in 2002—the last time they ran one, as I recall. Too bad—I enjoy jukebox features wherever they run. I even like the Seattle Weekly's recent twist on it, in which artists respond to chunks of reviews of their own albums.) But publisher/editor Pete Gershon is an exceptionally warm guy in my limited email experience with him, and his commitment and enthusiasm are obvious and inspiring. And the Summer 2008 issue has a great premise: "Our Favorite Things: Signal to Noise writers and extended family throw open their closet doors and share 50 of their most-cherished musical possessions." The Things are not presented in any special order, as far as I can tell, but they're numbered, so here are the first 10 items chosen (writers in parentheses):

1. Duke Ellington Orchestra autographed photo (John Chacona)
2. Two free jazz posters (Martin Davidson, Emanem Records)
3. Muscle Shoals Sound tee-shirt (Kandia Crazy Horse)
4. Jimmy Giuffre interview cassettes (Alain Drouot)
5. 78 RPM record by unknown artist (Adam Lore, 50 Miles of Elbow Room)
6. Lead pipe left behind at Faust concert (Andrew Choate)
7. Misha Mengelberg's piano stool leg (Dan Warburton)
8. "Graydog" (Kurt Gottschalk)
9. The Azusa Plane's "For Claudia Cardinale" 7-inch (Ian Nagosk)
10. Tibetan thighbone trumpet (David Cotner)

You can see where this is going. A lot of the writing rambles—and it should. That's that this kind of thing is made for. It's favorites, not "greatest of all time," and it's stuff that means to these writers what it could to no one else. So they try to explain why, and in the process, they explain themselves.

This resonates, because much of what and why we love what we do as listeners depends on serendipity—of being in the right place at the right time, ready to have our expectations met or to be blindsided, however it happened. How it happens is the real story much of the time, especially if you're dealing with stuff that isn't poised for crossover. And STN's contributors write as if that's the starting point, even if they were heading in this stuff's direction before they knew how the rules were supposed to work. Take No. 38, Erik Davis' "vintage copy of John Fahey's The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party LP." It belonged to his father, a Berkeley folkie whose Kingston Trio titles the eight-year-old Erik never cared for. But he flipped for Dad's Faheys: "They seemed magisterial and lovely and strange, and the lack of wards let my mind 'a wander." Davis's choice, though, stands in for a missing object, and he puts it in words that are funny, cutting, and jump off the page: "[T]he heirloom I would much rather be writing about here [is] Pop's old banjo, jettisoned somewhere along the way because my step-mom said it smelled like a goat."

Such regret is rare here, though. Much of it is unabashedly nostalgic: The Big Takeover editor/publisher Jack Rabid's salute to his cherished issue of the punk 'zine Search & Destroy (No. 13) is precisely what you'd expect ("Search & Destroy taught readers how liberating and fun it is to take part in culture, rather than absorbing it passively through endless electronic devices. I hope my own mag does, today"), and nice to read for precisely that reason. Then there's Susan Archie's 12-inch by Patti Smith: "I came in contact with Lenny Kaye ... I sent him the Goodbye, Babylon box i designed for Dust-to-Digital and he asked what I would like in return. I asked, 'By any chance, do you have any copies of "Hey Joe"?'"

—-

In the spirit of election season, I'm going to give equal time here. The new Blender isn't unusual, though I enjoyed more of it than usual, particularly Rob Sheffield's Erasure column. What caught my eye was something written (without byline, as is increasingly the case throughout the magazine's front of book) about No. 10 in the mag's monthly 33 Most Wanted Songs in America:

1. Lil Wayne, "Lollipop" (Cash Money)
2. Danity Kane, "Damaged" (Bad Boy)
3. Mariah Carey, "Bye Bye" (Island Def Jam)
4. Clay Aiken, "On My Way Here" (RCA)
5. Vanessa Hudgens, "Sneakernight" (Hollywood)
6. Madonna, "4 Minutes" (Warner Bros.)
7. Three 6 Mafia, "Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body)" (Columbia/Hypotize Minds)
8. Motley Crue, "Saints of Los Angeles" (Motley)
9. Chris Brown, "Take You Down" (Jive)
10. Taylor Swift, "Picture to Burn" (Big Machine)

Over a picture of Swift at a vintage mike clutching a rhinestone-studded acoustic, it says, "Dudes: Let Taylor Swift drive your truck, OK? If you don't, she'll write one of her signature breakup songs (like this one) about how she's going to exact her revenge."

Here's what struck me: this is precisely the kind of thing you say about someone who's been releasing singles from the same album for a year and a half. Which is to say, it's an explication of how her persona has evolved, as much as on what we think of as its basic premise. You don't get to write a "signature breakup song" unless you're on your third one, at least; you don't get a "signature" anything, usually, until your second album. That's the difference between paying attention to singles versus paying attention to albums. With albums, you're absorbing the work as a whole, thus precluding the need to see how its components play out in the public sphere.

This sort of happened to me last year. I bought Rihanna's Good Girl Gone Bad, played it a number of times, and picked "Don't Stop the Music" as my favorite long before it had any traction outside of Billboard's Dance Club Play chart in terms of public recognition. By the time the song hit on the radio, etc., I was unmoved: What took everyone else so long?, I wondered. That wouldn't be the case with Taylor Swift, were I of the same apparent mind and interests as the Blender blurb.

I'm not sure I am: I haven't cared much for the little Taylor Swift I've heard. But the ongoing drama of pop as public discussion is a lot of its appeal. And I'd argue that a lot of people have gone back to being interested in it because, in part, of the way the diffused listening we've been hearing (and arguing) so much about lately. Certainly American Idol's popularity has helped as well. And it's obviously in Blender's interest, as the magazine that most aggressively sells itself to the average pop fan, to discuss it in those terms. Which is fine with me, especially now that they've finally gotten rid of that stupid "Your music buddy" tag.

Last month, Keyboard Krybaby scolded Vibe editor Danyel Smith for evidently allowing a story about June cover subject Mariah Carey to be printed despite the lack of anything resembling an interview.

For the July "Swagger" issue, the mag secured the participation of Usher Raymond for both a photo shoot and a sit-down chat. In "Caught Up," penned by Mitzi Miller, Usher addresses the issue that has enveloped his public profile in the past year: the dismissal of his "mom-ager" of 30/15 years, Johnetta Patton, and his marriage to longtime confidant Tameka Foster.

The two were to wed at the Hamptons estate of Antonio "L.A." Reid last summer, but it was called off, which prompts producer Jermaine Dupri to provide this reminiscence, which amused KK: "Usher had all of us pay for private planes to go to Reid's house, and on my way to the plane, he cancels, and I blow a couple hundred thousand dollars for not going up in the air." The rich are very different than you and me, etc., etc....

The common supposition is that Foster has supplanted Patton in Usher's organization, and that his marriage has rendered him a player no more. (In KK's municipality, this is called "being pussy-whipped.") So Miller sets 'em up for her interloctutee to knock down. In his telling, he did not fire his mother, but she was by mutual consent to be retired so she could be "a full-time grandmother." Miller contacted Patton, who, after an hour of off-the-record conversation, contradicts her son's account and enumerates her continuing managerial duties for other artists. Usher goes on to say that he gets his swagger from his wife, which if true would be the first time in history that such a thing has ever occurred.

So this month, Vibe's cover story did what it was supposed to: It got a famous person to address a controversy or otherwise surrender personal information, as consumers of popular culture have come to expect. Fine.

But it's at times like this that KK sympathizes with a complaint common to artists: "Why don't you ask about my work?" It might be true that said consumers are not interested the creative process, but KK would like to know how his personal life impacted Usher's (pretty good) new album, and to what degree his music reflects his choices and preferences or those of his co-conspirators. (Miller only references "Love In This Club" in her piece, so it may be that no one at Vibe got to hear the record before press time.) Clearly, though, KK's interests are prioritized by neither Vibe nor any magazine aimed at the present consumer, so perhaps he doth protest too much.

The other substantive article in the July Vibe comes from the pen of Online Content Producer Linda Hobbs. "Stoked" concerns the alleged misdeeds of Chris Stokes, the "king of black boy bands" and former manager of B2K and Immature, a pre-teen R&B trio that recorded some tunes that KK dug the fuck out of in the '90s.

It seems that the three less-emphasized members of B2K (lead singer Omarion transitioned into a successful solo career) are now disgruntled and have accused Stokes of sexual misconduct and not allowing his charges to eat chicken, since the hormones therein would make them grow too fast. Horrors! Hobbs has done her due diligence with this deeply reported story; every underappreciated online drone who watches with irritation as his/her lazy editorial "betters" do little other than pick belly-button lint should salute her.

And it does seem, based on this particular issue, that there's some indifference or sloppiness in the editorial department at Vibe. To wit:

1. The first page of the Usher story is on the right-hand side of the magazine, facing an ad for the Nature Conservancy. The reader sees a freestanding picture of Usher and has to turn the page to see that it's part of the package: the placement of the photo seems disjointed and is likely a hugely embarrassing error.

2. 2008 marks Vibe's 15th anniversary, so the front-of-book of recent issues has dedicated space to counting down the "top this or that" of the past 15 years. This month recounts the most notorious sex scandals since 1993, which on its face is a tremendously lazy exercise. But the fact that the page design defies notions of easy navigation on the part of the reader compounds the problem: each numbered entry proceeds to the next in a willy-nilly, illogical, and almost amateurish manner around the page.

3. Similarly, the results of a sex survey conducted on vibe.com take up nine pages; not only are the findings presented by the edit staff—as it must—as very exciting and revealing, but like the charticle described above, the pages are designed using a worrying clash of colors.

4. Smith states in her editor's letter that the July issue is not the "Sex" issue traditionally presented this time of year; it is instead the "Swagger" issue. Yet there is not much in the way of what KK understands as "swagger" represented in the issue. You've got the Usher profile, and two pages in the VMix front-of-book replete with photos of Jay Z, Snoop and Flo Rida swaggering around. And that's it.

Typically, this kind of indifference is evidenced in magazines published in July and August, when editorial staffers can't wait to get to the share house on the Jersey Shore or Fire Island. Is something distracting Smith and her staff?

No, really: Over the course of one night, the awards given away included the "Icon Award," which went to the Sex Pistols; the "Hero Award," which went to Motorhead"; the Inspiration Award," which went to Genesis; the "Outstanding Contribution To Music Award," which went to John Fogerty; and the "Maverick Award," which went to Mark E. Smith. What do you think would have happened if they'd switched, say, the Maverick Award and the Hero Award? Probably not much, I'd reckon. Full list of awards (hey, it also includes the "Legend Award," the "special Award," and the "Vision Award"!) below.

Song of the Year Award: "Mercy," Duffy
Best Breakthrough Act: The Last Shadow Puppets
Best Album Award: Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Hero Award: Motorhead
Icon Award: Sex Pistols
Best Live Act Award: Led Zeppelin
Classic Songwriter Award: Neil Diamond
Hall of Fame: The Specials
Lifetime Achievement Award: Genesis
Special Award: Judy Collins
Legend Award: Irma Thomas
Classic Album Award: Loveless, My Bloody Valentine
Inspiration Award: John Fogerty
Outstanding Contribution to Music Award: Paul Weller
Roots Award: Toots Hibbert
Les Paul Award: John Martyn
Maverick Award: Mark E. Smith
Vision Award: Julien Temple for The Future is Unwritten
Compilation of the Year Award: Juno soundtrack
Catalogue Release of the Year: Pillows & Prayers: Cherry Red Records 1981-1984

(I guess Phil Collins tried something bad at the buffet?)

Duffy wins big with Mercy at Mojo Awards [Telegraph via ONTD]

Some years ago, Anono-Prick was walking around one day with a copy of the magazine he assesses this week. He ran into an acquaintance, who noticed the issue. "My boyfriend can't live without Mojo," she snorted. "It's porn for rock nerds."

Indeed it is. AP had been a longtime Q reader in 1994 when he noticed its new sister publication, which was emblazoned with the visage of Frank Zappa. A few feet away from where AP writes is a closet containing about 100 issues of Mojo that, despite taking up space better used for irreplaceable family heirlooms, he cannot bear parting with.

It would seem likely that Emap, the former mag's publisher, noticed that issues of Q bearing images of classic rock acts (or however artists are thus described in the UK) on their covers sold well. So, one year before Q would get in the tank for Oasis and Blur, came Mojo, ready to go to the well for Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin multiple times. (Mojo is now owned by the massive German publisher Bauer.)

But Mojo wasn't just an enterprise based on challenging Rolling Stone for the title of "magazine that puts the Beatles on the cover for the most cynical, flimsiest of reasons whenever it needs a circulation boost or is otherwise short on ideas" (9 times since 1993, tied with Pink Floyd and not counting issues devoted to post-Fab careers). AP certainly had no problem whatsoever slapping down eight bucks a month for a magazine that, for no apparent reason other than it would probably be interesting to rock nerds, put out a Krautrock issue in 1997, the same year that brought a pre-Volkswagen campaign Nick Drake cover feature. Or would publish career retrospectives of AP's beloved Todd Rundgren and Roxy Music. AP could forgive the mag's fascination with Gomez, an English band that wished desperately to turn into Ry Cooder circa 1969.

Alone among British music publications, Mojo didn't indulge as in nearly as much quasi-nativist Britpop cheerleading (although Oasis has appeared on six covers since 1994). If rock nerds on both sides of the pond were rediscovering Lee Hazlewood or Scott Walker, then Mojo was there with a 30-page retrospective. Mojo has to sell pretty well stateside, since a common practice is for a particular issue to have one cover for the UK and another for the U.S. (Last month, Paul Weller and Slash split the difference.)

And it must be said that, like an issue of Vanity Fair or Wallpaper, there's a significant heft to Mojo; you can walk around with an issue, or leave one conspicuously around your home, and it'll signify to others that your taste in music is superlative. A given issue will BE assembled with great care: in particular, AP has long been impressed with its design and art direction.

But roundabout 2002, AP had had it with Mojo (and with Q, too). He wasn't sure this was because Mojo had run out of popular music history to mine, or because of his irrational disaffection for British people at the time. So he was interested to revisit the mag.

The July 2008 Mojo runs with interviews with each of the four Sex Pistols, a band with a new DVD and a series of British shows this summer to promote that signifies for English people the Britain of 1977 as vividly as the Beatles did a decade prior, and thus probably can be relied upon to sell magazines in the UK. Two of these men, John Lydon and Paul Cook, look like AP's great aunt and grandmother, respectively, and all four do not say anything of much interest to Sylvie Simmons, a writer who's been reliably and gushingly more fannish than her '70s pop scribe peers.

You can count on Mojo to dutifully note the current, major label-financed doings of pop legends. So, in the front-of-book featurette "Yes Minister," Gabe Soria (with whom AP worked at Blender) checks in with Al Green at JazzFest and discusses Lay It Down, his new, ?uestlove-produced record that will be referred to as his best since The Belle Album for the next couple of months. And Simmons speaks with Neil Diamond about his Rick Rubin-helmed Home Before Dark for the "Mojo Interview." AP is listening to the latter as he writes, and it's the kind of solemn, ponderous record that bears Rubin's recent imprimatur and thus which Mojo can duly laud as a late-period masterpiece. But there are no drums on record, so AP, who has never cared for the author of the one karaoke staple ("Sweeeet... Care-Oh-Lahn, BAM BAM BAM") that never fails in boiling his blood, don't dig it.

But the reason AP picked this issue for consideration was the inclusion of two longform pieces that, again, have no particular product peg of the sort commonly regarded as necessary in entertainment journalism. "Jungle Boogie" details the rise of August Darnell, the Bronx English teacher who left the employ of his brother Stony's Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band to found Kid Creole and the Coconuts. AP is familiar with Darnell's "Endicott," and only a few of his other tunes, so Mojo has succeeded in making him want to examine Darnell's catalog in grater detail.

"Double Trouble" concerns the often fractious relationship between former schoolfriends Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, which has long fascinated AP. He thinks that, after 1970, Zappa's work in the rock music arena was pitched to chops-a-holics and devotees of excretory humor, and may have financed the "serious" music that truly interested him but which also cast him as a cynical, heartless misanthrope in the eyes of many rock critics. Beefheart, on the other hand, was all heart, all the time: his shit was "outsider music" before the term existed, and it inevitably appealed to critics sympathetic to neo-primitive authenticity or somesuch claptrap. According to Dave DiMartino's reporting in this piece, the Captain resented what he considered Zappa's marketing of him as a "freak," and disliked being thrown a bone vis-a-vis a guest spot on Zappa's Bongo Fury and 1975's subsequent tour. Highly recommended for them interested in either artist.

Mojo, to be sure, has its easily identified and mocked traits. Of course Fleet Foxes' debut album is going to praised to the skies in this issue's marquee review in the Filter section, penned by Simmons: the band's 22-year old frontman Robin Pecknold believes that "Van Dyke Parks is rad" and thus fulfills every requirement of what a Mojo staffer wants a young musician to be. And of course the reissue section's marquee review of Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue (which AP really really digs), written by London's Dreaming scribe Jon Savage, cites Gene Clark's No Other and Neil Young's On The Beach as "dark night of the soul"-style precedents. And of course the recent doings of hippie standbys like Gong and Hawkwind are bestowed with great import.

So yeah, Mojo has an Apollonian ideal: music of the late '60s and the '70s can't be topped, only emulated. AP's irritation with this kind of thinking is well known to regular readers of this column, but, perhaps since he's not often confronted with the English iteration of that kind of thinking, the mag doesn't vex him. Besides, the level of trainspottery detail common to Mojo is pitched to the obsessive and the omnivorous more than it is towards the self-satisfied survivors of the '60s and the '70s.

He's not gonna start buying it again all the time. Too goddamn much $$$.

Sure, $35 is a lot to spend on a t-shirt, but what about a t-shirt that has this picture on it?

Think of what your less cool friends will say when they see Dirty Vegas on the left sidebar. As long as they don't know where the local Macy's is, you'll have a monopoly on hip.

We haven't even taken into account "today's cross-channel lifestyle" (whatever that means):

"Rolling Stone magazine is an iconic and revolutionary brand, and its covers are among some of the country's most memorable and culturally-charged images," said Jerry Balest, Macy's vice president of Men's Fashion. "The new collection of Rolling Stone tees appeals to today's cross-channel lifestyle, bringing together the influences of fashion, music, celebrity and entertainment. Macy's is honored to be exclusively bringing back these covers in a new, wearable way."

However, when focusing on music stars that have graced the magazine's cover like the Beatles and Jerry Garcia, Macy's and Rolling Stone might be missing a golden opportunity. Which of these iconic covers would you rock casually under a suit jacket?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Macy's Partners with Rolling Stone to Offer Magazine's Iconic Covers for Collectors' Edition Tees [Trading Markets]

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.

This week, Your Boy breaks one of his informal rules: He shalt not assess two consecutive issues of Rolling Stone in a row. But the June 12 RS leads with a package titled "The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs Of All Time," and if both music mag publishing trends and protocols of innuhnet bitching tell us anything, it's that people luv lists—or at least luv disagreeing with them.

Being that the mag represents what it does, Rolling Stone is awfully invested in the totemic centrality of the guitar to "rock and roll" music. This issue is the third in five years to emphasize the guitar: in 2003 came "The Greatest Guitarists of All Time," followed in 2007 by "The New Guitar Gods." Typically, this sort of exercise involves a lot of grandiose verbiage regarding how the instrument is rock and roll's "essential liberating voice," as per this feature's introduction.

It goes unmentioned that Guitar Hero and various YouTube shred clips have created greater general interest in the guitar in the past two years—saying so might render this list a bit more timely, and then wouldn't have to rely purely on shopworn "these are the immortal moments of rock's six-string legacy" tropes. It's a point that RS never tires of making.

YB should mention that he contributed a few entries to the 2003 list: he was charged with making the case for the greatness of several players, including Soundgarden's Kim Thayil (which he, frankly, struggled with) and Randy Rhoads (which he most emphatically did not). That assemblage drew the ire of many respondents (among them Scandal's Patty Smyth) for the lowly status granted to Edward Van Halen (No. 70).

If Van Halen was slighted at the time, all is forgiven now, as he appears with a be-mulleted Jimmy Page, B.B. King, the Mars Volta's Omar Rodriguez, Kirk Hammett, Carlos Santana, Buddy Guy, and RS' current "pop dude we like cuz he's into playin' bloozy and bangin' famous gals" John Mayer on this issue's wraparound cover; all are interviewed therein. Typically, RS puts an image of Jimi Hendrix on the cover of any such big guitar extravaganza, but perhaps his visage is no longer the automatic sales tonic it was for so many years.

In an editor's note, senior editor David Fricke is described as possessing the requisite "encyclopedic knowledge of music," which more or less identifies him as the point man for this list. YB knows that Fricke is dependable for such prose as "barbed wire fusillades" and so on, but does not know if he actually, y'know, plays guitar. As for the package's remaining contributors, YB knows that Douglas Wolk plays guitar and that Austin Scaggs had and may still be in a band, but he does not know any such thing about Evan Serpick, Brian Hiatt and Gavin Edwards.

But clearly the "100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time" was shepherded by Fricke. It's unlikely that tunes from Moby Grape ("Omaha," No. 95) would make a list were he not running the show. Otherwise, this is exactly what you'd expect: Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze," and Cream's "Crossroads" take the top three spots, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit (No. 10) is the only song from the past 20 years to make the top 20, the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" appears at No. 21, and...

Aww fuck, just look at the list itself and then go be a good little innuhnet whiner and complain that the mag has no credibility because songs by Deep Purple, The Band, Black Flag, Arto Lindsay, the Isley Brothers, Allan Holdsworth, Maiden, Richard Thompson, Pantera, or the cover subjects of the previous issue aren't included. Run along now!

YB will pass, as he long has believed that these assemblages emphasize unnecessary divisions in music, which is an art form best appreciated in its vastness, and not in some stuffy (and, in this particular case, rather boring) canon-building exercise. But Rolling Stone's edit staff and many of their competitors know that some folks like to argue about the best this or that in bars and on their computers.

He's also very very tired of the adulation that the mag has thrown toward the act of playing the guitar and its notable practitioners. So he'll suggest that next time, why can't RS do a list of the greatest rhythm sections in rock and roll history? Or of singers? Or of Australian bands? Bands fronted by women but otherwise staffed by men? Best bands with sci-fi-, fantasy-, D&D-themed lyrics? These kind of pitches are part of what made YB the success he is today, so he doesn't expect RS to pay them much mind. But he does wish the mag's staff would throw a curve here and there.

Now, a few notes:

• In a sidebar interview with Eddie Van Halen conducted by Hiatt, EVH repeats a claim that YB remembers the guitarist making in the early '90s, namely, that he "doesn't really listen to anything nowadays. The last record I bought was Peter Gabriel's So." YB wishes to take nothing away from EVH's monumental talent when he suggests that a lack of musical stimulus may go some way toward explaining how his creative output has dwindled over the past decade.

• The No. 6-rated "Eruption" by EVH is a composition, a performance, and a recording. But it is not a song.

• In an entry for the No. 4-rated "You Really Got Me," the composer Ray Davies states "I said I'd never write another song like it. And I haven't." YB fails to see how the very next single the Kinks released, "All Day and All of the Night," is not a rewrite of the former song.

• YB wonders if, once the mag no longer feels the need to trumpet the way each carries on the rock tradition, My Morning Jacket, John Mayer, or the Mars Volta will make RS' next guitar-oriented list. He does think its funny that RS flies the flag for such unexceptional fare as the Strokes "Take It or Leave It" (No. 71) and Pearl Jam's club-footed clamfest "Even Flow" (No. 77).

• In a brief obituary notice in the issue's front of the book, RS mentions that the original drummer of Rush, John Rutsey, died earlier this month, which makes YB want to go back on his above pledge to not complain about this or any other list. So: RS! Please get over your tiresome institutional bias and pay the noted Canadian progressive rock/objectivist power trio the respect it is due in future iterations of your dreadfully dull rockist lists.

This week, Keyboard Krybaby comes not to bury the May 29 Rolling Stone, but to praise it. The issue features a cover story on the Eagles—a story that may seem a bit late, as their first album in 30 years was released five months ago. But based on the comment traffic to last week's post regarding this cover image, y'all seem to be interested in this most smug of rock bands.

He'll waste no time and say that his praise is tinged with bias. The writer of this issue's cover story is a guy who KK has had dinner with a number of times and has otherwise been friendly with since the early '90s, when said writer was an editor and KK was an intern at Musician. He's also pretty much KK's favorite writer to have ever practiced music journalism, one who deserves as much recognition as Lester Bangs.

Now some backstory: when Charles M. Young came to work at Rolling Stone in the mid-'70s, the Nixon/Hunter S. Thompson era that most consider its apex was coming to a close. The mag's music coverage had long been in the doldrums; even then, it seems the the staff were dismissive of disco, Kiss, and all manner of musical developments past James Taylor. Young came along, was noticeably unafflicted by baby boomer exceptionalism, and proceeded to have an open mind towards artists that RS kept at arm's length.

Young covered the CBGB diaspora, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Ted Nugent, and Parliament/Funkadelic with gusto, trenchant wit, and, above all, curiosity. He didn't have to like the artist's music in order for him to recognize a good quote, observe funny shit, or explore what made one human or another tick, and he was Rolling Stone's first music beat writer in a long time to offer anything in the way of penetrating insight (Cameron Crowe, an RS music writer a good five years younger than Young, was regarded as a bit too fannish, which should be clear to anyone who's seen the remarkably shitty Almost Famous).

Young was also apparently the only RS staffer who understood punk rock in 1977: he insisted that he go over to London to profile the Sex Pistols that year when everyone else he worked with probably wondered why he wasn't more interested in an audience with, say, Linda Ronstadt. But he got his story, "Rock is Alive and Sick in London": while the issue took a notorious dive on the newsstand, it's looked at as a highwater mark in RS' history. He got it right, and for a few years afterwards, he was the mag's star music scribe, often referred to therein as the Reverend Charles M. Young.

At the same time, the magazine and the Eagles sustained a mutually antagonistic relationship. Henley and Co. represented a nakedly careerist, hedonistic, and misogynistic version of RS's beloved Jackson Browne. KK wouldn't be surprised if the persistent rivalry between Los Angelenos and San Franciscans comes into play, as Rolling Stone was based in SF until 1977; the disaffection continued when RS moved to New York City, which the Eagles also did not like. These days, the Eagles are simply an enormous, totemic rock band that represents the way shit used to be, and so naturally Rolling Stone comes calling, two weeks after running with a cover story on the chicks from The Hills, a more recent exponent of Hollywood decadence. But 30 years ago, Rolling Stone and the Eagles no likey.

Roundabout 1978, the Eagles were the biggest band in America, but Rolling Stone was constantly dismissive of the band and its manager, Irving Azoff. After a charity softball game in which the Eagles' team beat RS's team 15-8, Don Henley befriended Young, who followed the band around for a year during the recording of The Long Run, argued with them over the merits of punk rock, and did a shitload of drugs with them. Young fell afoul of Henley, who was not pleased about reportage of his "stress related indigestion": it was but one of many instances of Henley complaining about about being profiled in a frank manner. (Many in the biz have apparently received long, invective-ridden missives from Henley regarding this slight or that.)

That cover story was also Young's swan song with RS: he left the magazine's employ the next year and has penned pieces for it regarding Beavis and Butt-Head, Noam Chomsky, and (most recently) Ray Davies since.

And so, 29 years later, he has reconvened with the Eagles again. According to the "editors' notes," Young ran into Henley at a Jerry Lee Lewis concert last year, which apparently paved the way for this piece. Under normal circumstances, a Rolling Stone article that proceeds with Don Henley's cooperation would bear the byline of Anthony DeCurtis, a Baby Boomer Boswell who can be counted on for grade-A genuflection.

That's not the kind of piece Young has written. He may not be able to go deep with these men the way he did 30 years ago, but his story, "Peaceful Uneasy Feeling," is nonetheless a rare piece in Rolling Stone for its candid insight. Essentially it regards how everyone in the Eagles organization has to negotiate the vicissitudes of Henley's ego. Glenn Frey, who's never seemed like an unpleasant person to KK, emerges here as a guy who surrendered the band he started and fronted to his drummer, and who now defers to Henley. "Without Don," he says, "...we'd be Air Supply."

As for the remaining current Eagles: Timothy B. Schmidt continues his policy of not "creat(-ing) waves" in interviews, while Joe Walsh posits that the advent of ProTools gave Henley new methods with which to be obsessive in making a record. Young also contacts Don Felder, the guitarist who left the band and then immediately sued Henley and Frey: Felder was said in the '70s to be Henley's dude, while Frey favored Walsh. (A screaming match between Frey and Felder after a 1980 benefit show for Alan Cranston directly preceded the initial break-up of the band.) He tells Young, "I admire a band like U2 who share a brotherhood and, despite the money, still care about the music. That was never the case and never will be with the Eagles."

Felder describes Henley and Frey therein as "the Gods," and Walsh describes the band as "a democracy with two dictators," but it feels like both (and possibly Young) are trying to obscure the fact that it is Henley alone who is the micromanaging asshole. "No one can suck the fun out of a room faster than Don Henley," Young quotes Frey remarking to someone other than he many years ago.

KK, who is fascinated by the Eagles and loves a lot of their music, but thinks that most of their "rock" tunes are lousy due to Henley's weak-ass beatsmanship, now offers a few stray comments on Young's story.

a.) He says that The Long Run is "the least of their six original albums." KK thinks that it's their best: a curdled, often nasty piece of work containing "King of Hollywood," a song where Henley points his finger at film dudes who were probably just as predatory towards young women as the Eagles themselves, the equally creepy "Those Shoes," two really fucking weird tunes ("Teenage Jail," "Disco Strangler"), and four awesome AOR hits.

b.) The finished article does not mention an event in Henley's past that forever precludes him from running for higher office and is echoed by the alleged deeds of another famous entertainer whose trial began this week.

c.) The finished article also does not explore the deal the Eagles struck with Wal-Mart to sell their new album exclusively, despite Wal-Mart being a massive corporation whose business practices are in direct opposition to Henley's often laudable but nonetheless limousine liberal principles.

d.) Young states that the Eagles are selling "$175 tickets to hordes of or Middle Americans who would never pay that kind of moola in the age of foreclosure to hear rhythmic declamation over a drum machine, orgasmic melisma, morbid snarling or other forms of contemporary vocalization." Notwithstanding the creeping hostility of Young's descriptors, many of those same Middle Americans pay more than the amount he cites so that their children may thrill to the concerts of Miley Cyrus, whose music is a close cousin to his second example.

None of which obscures the fact that this article is a significant achievement. Don Henley doesn't seem to trust anybody, but it seems like age has mellowed him to the point that he can vaguely let go of at least one ancient grudge. And so, Rolling Stone can publish a story that touches on the rivalry between two warring pop culture institutions in the 1970s by one of its all-time great stylists. It may be clichéd to suggest that they don't make 'em like Young no more, but sometimes cliches are true. Notwithstanding a considerable conflict of interest, KK urges you to read this story.

Marty P. | 5/14/2008, 4:17 pm EST

R.S., How about a Van Halen cover next? That would be very cool. It's good not to have anything to do with rap on the cover.

Because clearly, that's been such a problem this year. (Dude does know who Barack Obama is, right?)

The New Issue Of Rolling Stone: The Eagles [RS]
"Rolling Stone" To Readers: Buy This Magazine Or We'll Have To Figure Out More Ways To Pander To Non-Music Fans While Subtly Making Fun Of Our Cover Subjects

Anono-Prick passed on assessing the March and April issues of Vibe. He recalls glancing at the former and thinking that it didn't look very interesting; as for the latter, he thought that it was kinda lame that the mag went with a Lil Wayne cover story less than six months after the guy led their November issue. AP wanted to be generous to Vibe this time around.

So the June 2008 Vibe, which is intended to herald the summer, appears with none other than the patron saint of all outerborough broads on the cover. Mariah Carey, make no mistake, still sells records—at a time in which expectations for sales of tangible recorded product dwindle down further and further, she commands something like a consensus. Fortyish hausfraus remember "Vision of Love" fondly, their younger, cougar-ish sisters and cousins still dance to "Fantasy" at the club, and their daughters either prize her influence on American Idol contestants or contemplate twisting around the pole to the strains of "Touch My Body." And all manner of dudes would not, shall we say, turn that shit down. (AP digs most of her singles a ton; "One Sweet Day" with Boyz II Men is his fave.)

Vibe can't go wrong, right? You'd think that the mag would send a scribe to follow Carey around for a bit and perhaps extract some clues that she was very serious about Nick Cannon, the actor/rapper described in the story as a "recent acquaintance" and whom she married a month after the events described in this issue took place?

No dice. There is no evidence in "Body Language," the piece accompanying the cover, that Ms. Carey consented to anything vaguely resembling an interview with the piece's writer, associate editor Shanel Odum. In her editor's letter, EIC Danyel Smith describes a delegation including herself, Odum, fashion editor Memsor Kamarake, and photo editor Robyn Forest traipsing off to Antigua, where Carey celebrated her birthday and where the reporting and the photo shoot for this story transpired.

Odum employs mucho purple prose in depicting the firestorm that ensues amongst Carey's handlers in the run-up to a photo shoot, how Carey comports herself during the shoot itself, and how much she, her nephew, Cannon and bunch of other folks enjoyed themselves during her lavish birthday celebration that evening. Odum records one solitary quote from Carey, during the shoot, in which she requests different lighting.

And that's it: the mag's readers are supposed to be satisfied with a few words regarding Odum's five hours in Carey's general, but very fabulous, vicinity.

It's hard to understand how Smith, an editor whose first time at the rodeo was many years ago (she alludes to her own audience with a more forthcoming Carey for a Vibe story a decade ago in her editor's letter), could possibly stand for her writer being denied significant access to the subject of her magazine's cover story. She had to have known this would be a dog of a story, notwithstanding what might have been a pleasant trip for her and her staffers.

If a celebrity is awarded the cover of a entertainment magazine, then that celebrity will consent to at least fifteen minutes of innocuous conversation with a reporter for the magazine. Perhaps the reporter will try to solicit an interesting quote, which a celebrity of Carey's caliber will do their level best to bat away. At least that's been the prevailing modus operandi for entertainment journalism for the past twenty years, but maybe Smith and her peers are adjusting to the following, emerging facts:

1. superstars will grant the access they feel like at a particular time;
2. vague access is better than no access;
3. superstars are not afraid of alienating particular music magazines, a double-fucked species of cultural commerce; and
4. editorial muckety-mucks can go jump in the lake if they don't like any of the above.

Indeed, it could be that Carey's surrogates dicked Smith and her retinue around, or it could be that Smith agreed to the Carey camp's contention that she would not speak directly to a Vibe writer—although this seems inconceivable to AP. It could also be that Smith knows that her group left Antigua with something much, much more important than a record of Carey's current state of mind. Namely, they left with photographs of Carey arching her back and frolicking in three expensive swimsuits while on the beach. This, more than evidence of a fleeting conversation, was Smith's primary quarry in Antigua, and the consequences would have been far more grave should she have returned without it.

Otherwise, the June issue includes a list of the top "summer bangers" (and runners-ups) of the past decade, of which AP can only say that from May to September 2006 he heard Chamillionaire's "Ridin' Dirty" a helluva lot more than he heard T.I.'s "What You Know" on the radio. And "It's Murder," an oral history regarding Irv Gotti's Murder Inc., the gangsta pop idiom Gotti proffered in the early '00s, and feuds with both federal government and with 50 Cent, is mildly interesting, if premised on the shaky notion that Gotti's hitmaking acumen is undimmed.

In Ms. Smith's editor's letter, she paraphrases ODB's fabled verse on Carey's "Fantasy": "Vibe and Mariah do go back like babies and pacifiers." AP supposes that's not far back enough to ensure that the writer of the cover story for her magazine was granted at least a brief conversation upon which a semi-credible profile could be constructed. Smith's editor's letters have alluded to at best the opacity and at worst the uncooperative attitudes of the people on her magazine's covers. Perhaps it would have been impolitic to candidly discuss what seems like a gratuitous insult from Camp Carey, but AP would have appreciated a bit of transparency from Smith on this matter.

But, like AP said above, Smith got the most important things she needed in Antigua: several photographs of Mariah Carey in a number of bathing suits.

This past Monday, Idolator posted the cover image of the June 2008 Blender, which Your Correspondent assesses this week. What follows is the first comment, from Dead Air ummm Dead Air, that followed the post...

"There's not one word or image on that cover that would entice me to buy that."

The post asked Blender's new editor, "why?" Although YC is certain Idolator's writers know the answer, he'll suggest that the reason Joe Levy rolled out the red carpet for Tila Tequila is the same as why YC suspects that the page views for this post are going to be greater than if, say, the accompanying image was that of the gentleman who fronts Fucked Up. The latter is fat, while the former fits all manner of requirements for the masturbatory fodder of many young men.

The promise of images and words regarding music figures of estimable worth are hardly a guarantor of newsstand sales, and the type of reader that Blender would have been able to depend on a few years ago now fills comment boxes with invective along the lines of "OMFG, I can't believe that they're putting this creature on the cover" and "whatever happened to talent?" So why, precisely, should the big music mags do what pleases Idolator- and Pitchfork-niks? Why shouldn't Blender, like MTV, appeal to people who like to watch strippers, cocktail waitresses, and goofball dudes debase themselves?

Were YC in Joe Levy's shoes, he'd probably put Tila Tequila on Blender's cover. This is simply because doing so helps subsidize some content that would interest Idolator- and Pitchfork-niks—this was the way that Blender operated when YC worked there, and given the first two issues of Levy's tenure as the mag's editor, he doesn't see any evidence that the "respect for artists" that Levy once promised to foster in Blender's pages is resulting in an infusion of Rolling Stone fustiness. The Hippocratic Oath's first rule is "Do No Harm," and Levy hasn't harmed Blender... yet.

Indeed, Ms. Tequila—or rather, Ms Nguyen, as scribe Chris Norris refers to her— has but the most slender rivulet of a burgeoning music career upon which Blender hangs "Everybody Loves Tila": a Lil' Jon and will.i.am-assisted ep entitled Sex. Otherwise, Norris attempts to unravel this Singapore-born Sphinx, but she remains as inscrutable and unforthcoming as any woman who must promote another season of a program in which her affections are the prize. She tells Norris that she thinks that "every girl is born bisexual," which both she and Blender's editors (who dutifully place her quote in display type in the issue's table of contents) know is a good thing to say when appealing to readers once referred to by a Blender critic as "walking boners."

Norris calls upon Dr. Drew for an explanation of the kind of participant common to Shot of Love, Rock of Love, and Flavor of Love. He says they tend to be "narcissist/borderline sociopath(s)," and that "producers actually do psychological testing to find people who (bespeak) this kind of makeup...they put them in an isolation tank away from their usual anchors, in this very intense environment with someone they're attracted to and encourage them to have intense feeling for them." YC has watched very little of this kind of programming, but he wouldn't be surprised if the producers have also inculcated or reintroduced some of these unfortunate people to the joys and pains of methamphetamine.

This issue sees the debut of Rob Sheffield's first "Station to Station" column. Sheffield's prominence at Rolling Stone was mostly due to Levy's beneficence, so YC fully expected "Nonstop Erotic Cabaret," a paean to Madonna, to ricochet from non sequitur to incongruous song lyric to 21 Jump Street reference even more recklessly than his RS columns. But it's nice to see that he keeps his eye on the ball for the most part: Sheffield loves Madonna (and her new album Hard Candy) and says why in less caffeinated prose than he used at his old gig. He does often betray the sense that he listens to music and watches television by himself in such worryingly massive doses that his ability to contend with ideas other than his own is either compromised or nonexistent (a hallmark he shares fellow Blender contributing editor/Levy crony/"my opinions are so precious that I needn't ever commit to real reporting"-adherent Robert Christgau), but he seems much, much closer to the ground here than usual.

A few paragraphs ago, YC mentioned that Blender uses cover images of the likes of Tila Tequila to finance content that might enlighten blog readers, should they be able to tear themselves away from their Yeasayer-centric playlists. This issue's contender as such is "The Eyeliner Wars" by senior editor Josh Eells, a guy who consistently gets out there and ruins his shoe leather real good. He goes to Mexico City to report on the mass hysteria and frequent beatings that Mexican emo fans often endure. (Note to Dead Air Umm Dead Air: YC believes that Chuck Klosterman wrote about Mexican-American devotees of Morrissey a few years ago, so Blender's article herein cannot be tarred with the brush you suggest.)

Eells reports that sensitive boys wearing eyeliner and identifying with darkly dramatic rock music flourish in a culture that favors drama (telenovelas, masked wrestlers); but that same culture contains deeply ingrained, intertwined-with-Catholicism notions of machismo, which results in "cholos" and punks often assaulting these "faggots." Something similar happened, by the way, in England last year: a young goth girl from Lancashire named Sophie Lancaster was beaten to death by a bunch of "chavs," the cholos of their country. Since YC does not frequent emo-culture hotbeds on his computer and was thus unaware of these events, he thinks Eells has done a commendable job.

Now a few quick notes...

• YC should mention his amusement at seeing that the some of the stock questions asked to nine music figures in this year's "Summer Music Blowout" are the same he posed to a bunch of musicians in the same roundup in 2002 and 2003: in fact, he thinks he came up with some of them.

• YC was also amused by the front-of-book featurette "Armadrinkin' It," in which three oenophiles from Def Leppard opine upon the merits of various wines proffered by six musicians. Guitarist Vivian Campbell asks whether Vince Neil's Vince Petite Sirah 2006 is called "duuuuuude"; singer Joe Elliott asks of the proprietor of Little Jonathan Winery Cabernet Sauvignon 2006, "Who's Lil Jon? He named for the Robin Hood guy?"; and bassist Rick "Sav" Savage, based on the accompanying shot of the three, looks like he goes to the same hairdresser and plastic surgeon as your great aunt.

• Finally,YC thinks that, in pop music journalism, it is unwise to publish more than one major feature on the same artist inside of six months, since it bespeaks a certain "appearance of impropriety," i.e. it makes a mag look like it's in the tank for said artist. Lil Wayne is one entertaining mufugger in this issue's "Dear Superstar" feature, in which he answers—ahem—"reader questions." But since he was already profiled in a feature in Blender's March issue by the same writer behind the piece in this new issue, senior editor Jonah Weiner, the mag should probably cool it with Lil Wayne, review his record whenever it comes out, and leave it at that.

Not much else to say about the June '08 issue of Blender, except that this issue is already available on eBay.

What's interesting is that in the "sneak peak" (sigh) of the article given by Vibe editor-in-chief Danyel Smith, there isn't one mention of weight loss, unless the reference to Einstein's 1905 paper "Does The Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?" is a sly way of mentioning the incisive look at Mimi's daily caloric intake-to-activity ratio that this story will supply. Ah, talk about missed opportunities! I for one would love to watch as yet another music magazine gets swallowed up by the public's lack of interest in music and increasing trainwrecky fascination with the celebrity-industrial complex in real time.

Me And Mariah [Vibe]