Music Magazines 2006

I'd still pick up a new music magazine and check it on the newstand.

I read about African, Caribbean, and Latino music in The Beat magazine, out of Los Angeles but with contributors worldwide. Perhaps I am not looking online in the right spots, but I hear about music there that I do not read about anywhere else, online or on paper. And yes, I then buy some of that music.

Although I did not buy it, a recent issue of the NYC based publication Fader that I looked at at Borders had a wonderful feature article on Jamaican dancehaller Baby Cham, and great photos by musician/writer Ned Sublette of Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans.

I just can't seem to find any of the threads...

I just let my subscription to the Vibe lapse (I had gotten it real cheap). An occasional interesting article on r'b'b hitmakers or producers and a nice but short Rob Kenner dancehall column were not enough to keep me interested. Plenty of ads and fluff.

Jazz Times ain't bad.

Neither can I. Is there a thread that addresses this (as in, "what was the last time etc etc")?

Are there any decent music magazines in the UK? That arn't OMM middle brow todge or indie-zine scenester-ing??

i don't have a subscription to the wire and i only read it at the newsstand--i always read sherburne's critical beats column, flip through the electronica, hip-hop, and outer limits columns, and then look at whatever features seem interesting. i agree with you about the dub column; i think freeman was on a one-man-crusade to convert that into the doom metal column or something, which i thought would have been interesting.

i've been liking arthur a lot lately, even though they jock that new-weird-america tip that i'm not into. i don't like devendra banhart and most of his crowd of psych-folk musick. please god, make it stop. but some of their features are really interesting. it helps that arthur is free in new york and the wire costs $10 at the current exchange rate.

Why does everyone always pick on the dub section?

The guy who did Sound Collector is one of the guys who does Arthur now, I think. Speaking of, Arthur is a great magazine. big xp.

-- mcd (srmcd...), March 28th, 2006.

It's just so retro (and yes I like it), plus it seems odd to ignore current Jamaican dancehall sounds.

Me too. dB knows its audience so unbelievably well, does some real reporting, and really hits on the geek aspect of metal, too. Plus, it's funny.

who is apathetic here?

what do you expect? print music journalism isn't in a golden era right now--it's going down the dumper, and fast. most of us who write about music can't afford to do it. i give myself another six months before i have to find another line of work. why do you think we've all retreated to music blogs and ILM to air out our thoughts and opinions on music? because we can't express them in print magazines and papers anymore, most of the time, at least not at a decent word rate. i agree that decibel is great, but only so many people can write for decibel. as far as i recall, arthur doesn't pay their writers--or if they do, it's a nominal sum. when the wire pays you it's more of an honorarium than anything constituting an actual paycheck. the entire spin editorial staff is at FOUR PEOPLE now--i know blogs that have a bigger staff than that! i've started writing for blender, but i can't say it's that fulfilling to write a 120-word record review. my blog gets as many hits per day as the average article in the voice music section. granted, i don't make any money off of it--i actually lose money doing it--but it's the only way i can keep sane in lean times like these. these are dark days, my friends. that's why some of the most talented music writers i know are getting the fuck out and doing other things, like law school.

Haha. I just thumbed through our office copies of Blender, Spin and Source and thought about how utterly boring they all were. Blender, weirdly, seems to get much better toward the back, like they figure that the Maxim set is only going to make it through 30 odd pages and then give up, so they can have some decent content in there. Spin just gave me too much about the clothes and not enough about the music. I don't give a fuck what Karen O wears, or the middling discontent she feels. I want to know if the album's interesting, if their live shows are interesting. I don't need to be sold on image.
But I dunno. I'm 26, I've been working for a small market monthly rag for five years, and freelancing in little bits aside from that. Most of what seems to pay has nothing to do with music, but I slog through. For Spin, one thing that seems to hurt it a lot is that a) I'm not terribly interested in a lot of the breathless gossip stuff, and b) even when I am, it's three months old. Why should I give a fuck about obits from February in your April issue? And I know that's a function of deadlines and print times, but the reason that mags are post-dated is to make them seem cutting edge. Now when I read it, I get the vague feeling of deja vu and cluelessness. Spin reads more and more like some sort of print version of Vh1, at least up front. As for the Wire, I find myself not caring about half of what they put in there anymore (at the very least) because past a certain point, all of the minimal "avant garde" all sounds about the same to me.
So I end up reading ILM and blogs, along with local papers that cover artists around here, since I've felt less and less pull to go to national acts as they seem to have all devolved into the same boring indie wanks.
And it's not that there aren't great articles on music being written, or that I'm not hearing great new music all the time. It's just that I can't trust music mags anymore unless I know the name of the reviewer (and even then not always), and their features seem to all be about everything but music.
Frankly, I read Dusted pretty regularly, have a couple of blogs on RSS, and count on endless PR spam in my inbox to entertain me.

Polyphonic - "Why don't the collective of music writers who can't express themselves at the mags and weeklies put together some sort of mega-zine and publish it?" -- That's what we've been doing with Arthur since 2002 (!)...

Scott - " i like [Arthur] even though i don't care about all the people they have on the cover and all that freeekfolke stuff that much." - Thanks for the kind words. Not sure why we (Arthur) get tagged so much in this thread with the 'folk' thing ... Our cover features for the last year have been .... let's see...

* Brian Eno interview by Kristine McKenna (the only one he gave to a US publication, btw; plus a wonderfully evocative appreciation of the great man by Alan Moore),
* an at-length M.I.A. profile by Piotr Orlov,
* Jon Hassell/Afrirampo/Sublime Frequencies/Alan Bishop concept issue cover,
* Animal Collective
* SUNNo))/Earth cover feature/dual interview by Brian Evenson,
* Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom cover feature/interview

so I dunno...

Yeah, I like Arthur. I wish there were more magazines like it to cover other points of view.

Art galleries are usually visually negative spaces that even try to hide light sources, never distracting the viewer from what's being displayed, there is no ambivalence, they are exercises in objective presentation. For the presentation of a portrait photograph in a magazine that's wonderful, you engage with the picture, there are no sidebars, pull quotes etc.
But the magazine's about music, and the treatment of text is alienating, it's presentation, like a gallery's, puts it in an objective role. It discourages scrutiny of the writing. The ads and the charts pages seem the most visually exciting things going on on the pages. The magazine isn't visually questioning, it presents. The album cover piece is a really nice idea, but the actual graphics are too small, especially compared with the sometimes oversized portraits. I'm looking at the July issue and alonside the cover photograph of David Tibet, there are 3 full page portraits 2 of which are David Tibet. How many times do you need to see him? They do it because they don't like placing photographs in the text and it's the only way they can break the text up due to to there adopted design rules. End result is just puzzling at the very least. Do people cut David Tibet out and stick him on their bedroom walls? I doubt it.
At least they tidied up their bitstream section, now it feels like the news bit in the Economist
I think I'm being over analytical about it but if one magazine invites analysis it's the Wire.

And Foggy Notions is nice for a multitude of reasons, they did well. Nice nice nice.

i guess theoretically i have a "music magazine" now, but i'm always kinda waiting for my boneheaded schemes to get me tossed.

Even a cursory examination of Arthur's contents over the last four years would show you that the mag covers a LOT more than "indie psych" (whatever that is).

I think perhaps it's simply a matter of taste re: the Wire. Where you say "UNDERdesigned" I read overly-formalised and graphically neutered. I don't disagree with the overdesign of most magazines, even the ones that have high ideas about themselves. I especially don't like the trend for density of detail and ornamentation, with vines and flock wallpaper styles, it's getting a bit stupid. That said I think the Wire design and layout is not without conceit or dogma, I would tend to think the opposite. The design is dogmatic in so far as there is an underlying idea as to how to present their words and it's formal and sober and shan't be distracted from. The images cannot free associate in any way, they are always purely for depicting the artist, the subjects of the portraits do not interact, they are static, and only the setting is used to manipulate the language of the image. Rarely there'll be an artist at work type picture. There's nothing in the least risk-taking about the magazine, I've been reading it on and off for a few years (since 2000/2001 I think) and it can really really feel like a chore. They've not attempted any substantial changes in that time. I have to mark records I'm interested in with a pen to remember where they are when I scan back through it. If this was Circa or something I wouldn't mind, if this was a journal I wouldn't mind but even the Journal of Music in Ireland is nearly better designed.
The magazine I always feel does it right is StopSmiling, the chicago monthly. I always really liked just the adjustments in alignments of the text boxes and the page number boxes etc. It isn't in any way over designed but it's recognisable and does graphic and photography really well on the page. I think one of my favourite magazines is Carlos magazine, the Virgin Upper Class in flight magazine. They were kind enough to send me some copies when I asked. It's done on unbleached paper in blue ink, with lovely sketched illustration and gold or silver embossed high lighting. Carlos Magazine

The portraits would be great collected together in book form.

i saw a very badly designed movie mag the other day. 'little white lies'?

Articles would suddenly disappear just as you went to read them.

I'm often tempted to start sampling magazines off amazon and other net retailers. Tower carry a bunch of american titles but I find it impossible to justify buying them because of reasons people have given upthread. Under the Radar is one of the titles I remember. Also Venus (is that female orientated only?). They're also usually sort of late, and of course US tour dates etc. don't mean much to me.

The only mag I have an actual subsciption to is National Geographic, had it for years and years. I love the photography. I do however inevitably buy Mojo. I haven't opened Uncut in years and years, NME either. Word, and Bang (are they still going?) never interested me. I cannot stand Hotpress at all, and I know some Hotpress staff have posted here before, I apologize. The Wire I buy on and off, more on that off, particularly if there's a cover disc.

I don't buy cinema magazines, I read the newspapers and to be honest their reviewers can be very good or good enough(I like Philip French and Mark Kermode in the Observer and Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian) I can usually triangulate a film from the Guardian/Observer/Irish Times/Sunday Times and the trailer as well as the net.

Oh and I can't abide Q.

They sell Colors in Tower? I hadn't checked but I had been under the impression that you coudn't get it in Ireland. It's only a quarterly and extremely expensive but the photographs are great.

National Geographic pisses me off. I can almost never get through a single article. I don't even find the photographs that interesting and the issue they did on Ireland made me very suspicious of what they say about other countries.

I have a supscription for The Wire (you get way more free CDs) and Colors since I thought you couln't get it here. I had always loved those Benetton ads and Colors has a similar vibe but doesn't have too strong an affiliation with the clothes label.

I like Mark Kermode too, but I also like Ciaran Carty, his opinions always seem to be his opinions, not for the sake of them. He doesn't agree or disagree with anyone else, just reacts to the film. Even when I don't agree with him, I get something out of his perspective which is my estimation of a good critic.

Re: Net Geo. The writing doesn't interest me in the least, I don't think the photography is interesting in terms of advancing the medium but what it captures, they have the money to send photographers to interesting places for long periods of time. That Irish article was an abomination, but it was written by an associate editor or something I think, basically he needs to use flickr and not the magazine he works on, spouting shite about "celts" along the way.

Never understood the Har Mar circus, didn't press my humour buttons or music buttons.

Everything you hate about The Wire is what I love about it – that clinical layout, the divide between words and pictures. I love that text and images are so often separate, that I can simply read reviews or interviews or whatever directly without a bunch of photoshop wankery cluttering everything up because the art designer wants to show off....I love that there’s just so damned much to read and that realistically it’ll take me a lot of time to actually check every piece out, months or maybe years, something may not interest me right away or might seem alienating but it’s likely that eventually the reverse will be true. Thus I’ve never thrown an issue away, and never will.

Thanks Raymond. I thought I was the only one who felt that way. But I have to confess to being the one who was praising Ray Gun. Which I've never really read. (too young, missed it) but tracked down a couple of issues to look at after being really impressed with a few covers I came across in design books. The dinosaur jr. one stick out in my mind.

I don't "hate" the Wire and appreciate that people love its design and find it a joy to read, but I'm just a bit tired of it. Perhaps because it seemed like a magazine that promised more visually than I ever got from it.

The enlarged text extract is called a "pullquote", it serves two purposes.
The first being to emphasise to a browsing reader the tone or angle of a story by concentrating on something that the story turns on. Pull quotes, intros, headlines and subheadlines and images serve to draw a reader and introduce them to an article, the don't have to commit themselves to say 3,000 words of text without being aware of what it contains.
The second purpose is to interrupt the text visually. I'm sure you're take on the Wire means you won't agree with this, but it's taken as layout law that if the flow of text isn't interupted by something other than the page break then a reader who isn't committed to reading it in the first place is less likely to want to read it. If you have things to snag your eyes on, you can break the text up and navigate it more easily. I have no problem what-so-ever with pullquotes and I don't miss dreadfully them when they're gone.
Everything about Wire is tilted against the casual reader, that's the effect they want. It always seemed a little to hostile to me. The absence of pullquotes ties with that.

I think this should be an ilm stock image...

-- Uncle Tom (to...), July 31st, 2006.

Remind me to get a list of their subscribers so that I can be sure to never invite them to parties.

Wire designer James Goggin take a bow!