Rolling Stone is the awfullest magazine ever. I say this knowing full well that there are many, many awful magazines out there, now more than ever, perhaps. But weeping Jesus on the Cross, Rolling Stone is just so awful, so very, very awful awful awful. Whether it’s the spectacle of a magazine run by an aging, Eagles-loving gay millionaire putting Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen on the cover and headlining it as “America’s Favorite Fantasy,” or putting Britney Spears on the cover–again!–in a pose so transparently and badly airbrushed that it makes even a Photoshop tyro like me want to put his head through his computer monitor, there seems to be no lengths to which this horrendous publication won’t go to pimp teenage girls in an effort to win over young readers that is likely to be about as successful as Dino De Laurentis’s remake of King Kong, but with less charm and more, you know, appallingly immoral teen-girl body-image mindfucks.
And for the love of David, they call their article on MTV’s annual calculated-“outrage” fest “MTV Awards Fail to Suck,” and lede it with the following: “When the annual MTV glitzfest of the Video Music Awards begins with Britney slipping Madonna some Louisana tongue, you can feel certain that your night in front of the TV is going to be quality time.” Can you, Rolling Stone? When a Rolling Stone article on the VMAs begins with the kind of embarassingly breathless dicksuckery normally reserved for Maureen Dowd columns about the Clinton administration, you can feel certain that the magazine, in actually acting (or worse, being) shocked and titilated by the grotesque, 100% prefab sexual assault against two pill-addled middle-aged-men-controlled developmentally-arrested girl-women by an aging self-obsessed insufferably boring harridan intent on reviving her interminable career as quote-unquote provocateur, is an enormous steaming dung-beetle-encrusted pile of elephant shit. Why I flipped through the magazine, and consequently stumbled across an article emblematic of the kind of hard-hitting political analysis that won Jann Wenner his many Pulitzers in which it is alleged that computerized voting systems are a big plot by the Bush puppet masters to steal (“more”) elections, is quite frankly as much a mystery to me as I’m sure it is to you, but I’ve entered therapy and I’m trying to work these things out. (Next session will be devoted to understanding why I looked at an article about how the U.S. military is poisioning, uh, the U.S. military with depleted uranium. There’s even some pictures of Iraqi kids with leukemia! It must be true! BUSH LIED!!!! Also, Mick Jagger’s solo album is a four-star tour-de-force.)
Please, Rolling Stone, I’m asking you now because I know how instrumental you were in advancing the career of Jackson Browne and that’s obviously really important, but please douse your collective selves in gasoline and light yourselves on fire. It’s really the only way for things to be made right again in this crazy world, RS. The only way.