Spitball Army

If Rolling Stone had said that along its masthead, would it have been more tasteful than pasting the three unclothed actors from True Blood, catsup-splattered and entwined, on the cover of the magazine that I pulled out of my mailbox yesterday?  Who can say…

(photo: Matthew Rolston)

Does this really sell copies?  Who gets turned on by this stuff?  Is it art?  Is True Blood really that good?  If it is, shouldn’t it deserve a magazine cover with a lower trash quotient?  Or is the trash quotient part of the show’s appeal?  (I don’t watch True Blood, obviously.)

This isn’t a new approach by Rolling Stone.  I have been an infrequent reader, but I recall the “hands on Janet Jackson” cover, and several other skin-baring shots featuring a number of celebrities whose names I couldn’t begin to recall for you.  Maybe it all started with that shocking Annie Leibovitz shot of a naked, fetal-positioned John Lennon nestled up to a clothed Yoko Ono, sprawled on the couple’s Dakota suite bed.

I had that magazine and saved it for a while.  The cover photograph seemed like a document of the times; Leibovitz had photographed it five hours before Lennon was assassinated, and it was a true historical artifact.  I placed it in a cheap frame briefly, and it shook me up slightly whenever I looked at it.

(photo: Annie Leibovitz)

So, holding the current True Blood issue in my hand, puzzling, I thought that there must be some redeeming content inside.  Surely.  Here are some of the headlines that I found inside:

“Avenged Sevenfold Thrash to the Top”

“Taylor Swift Rules Charts with New Single, Preps for Huge Fall”

“Kid Rock Guns for Greatness…”

“RS Launches ‘500 Greatest Songs’ iPad App”

Are you kidding me?  Surely this isn’t the music that is supposed to be engaging us.

It wasn’t all that bad, though.  There were several eye-catching ads.  And an interesting profile of Chuck Berry at 83 years old written by Neil Strauss.  And a few sidebars where I found out about a new film documentary about John Lennon (LENNONYC, debuting in November), a doc about the making Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town (plus news about a CD reissue of the album), an October release of the latest installment in the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, a few other trivialities.

This is certainly not my parents’ Rolling Stone.  Oh, who am I trying to kid, my parents hated having Rolling Stone in the house when I was a kid.  This rag doesn’t even resemble the Rolling Stone of MY youth.

(20 August 2010)