I’ve read both Spin and Rolling Stone, and both seem to have interesting(interesting not neccesarily being good in a fair amount of cases) articles, Spin having good fashion(read: sexy women wearing the lastest $200 mini-bikini). Both aren’t really worth the $4.50 or so, but it totally puts any doubt of staying with the magazine with the pretioniousness of the reviews. I don’t have any direct quotes, but least just say that they manage to describe an incredible lot without giving you a fucking clue what the music is about or sounds like.
So, any suggestions for a music magazine with solid writing(humor), decent reviews, and not too indie that I’d be paying out the ear or wouldn’t be able to find in canada?
Mojo, the British music mag, is awesome and has a sense of humor. It clearly has a British bias, but I find that interesting. After all, we’re still part of the commonwealth, right?
Downsides? Slightly stuck in the past and it costs about $10 Canadian an issue.
Me? I grab a Chai Tea at Chapters and sit and read it for about an hour every month. Can’t beat that.
Blender, the Maxim spinoff, isn’t too bad. Seems to cosider Quantity over quality, however, and doesn’t have very good feature articles, IMHO.
I’ve heard good things about NME (New Music Express), but it seemed a little, er, busy for my tastes.
I’m a big fan of CMJ New Music Monthly. It has great reviews and interesting articles and features. The best part of it, though, is that each issue comes with a free CD. It’s more if you like indie stuff, though bands such as the White Stripes and Pearl Jam have been on recent covers. The downside is the price. Here, it’s $40 for 12 issues, but it’s $70 for Canadian subscribers, plus you have to pay in American dollars from an American bank.
Q is another British music magazine that I really like. Unfortunately it costs about $12 Canadian per issue, but the articles and reviews are generally great, and it occasionally comes with a CD.
The only music magazine I subscribe to is Q, and that’s mainly for my fond remembrance of it from the past. It is expensive, and if you don’t care for what’s hot in the UK there’s not much to read, but the reviews tend to cover a lot of ground and the captions to the photos are probably the best that have ever existed (a little story on the Raveonettes a few months past had the lady half of the duo looking damn fine, and the caption read something like: “The Raveonettes: How long before she goes solo?”). I grew displeased with Rolling Stone in the late 80’s when it seemed to me that they couldn’t get over the fact that Jane’s Addiction and the Pixies just weren’t the same as Country Joe & The Fish or Captain Beefheart. So I switched to Spin, which I liked fine for a year or so, but it seemed like it was veering into RS territory by becoming less a music mag than a culture one and it lost its appeal. Now I basically stick to the internet & Q for whatever music news I get, but I’m really finding it actually fun to be so uninformed.
I’ve never read Q, but I have come across Blender. It’s funny, but it only comes out every two months I think.
Like phreesh said, the magazine goes for quantity over quality. Each issue I’ve flipped through has something like “150+ CD Reviews!!!” blazing on the front cover. I don’t subscribe to it, but I have bought a few issues here and there if something catches my eye.
Rolling Stone has fallen off the cliff as far as quality is concerned. They were losing sales to Maxim, so a new editor was brought on board to turn RS in a new direction.
The result has been the extreme dumbing down of the magazine. Whereas before the letters section would contain some letters that were actually thoughtful, insightful and intelligent, now it’s all frat-boy, "I want to see chicks boobs!!! crap.
And the overall attitude has become extremely snarky and smarmy.
I read it at Borders, but I would never subscribe to it again.
SPIN tried and failed to be the magazine for the "alternative music crowd, until the publisher realized that driving the magazine in that direction was not only not gaining them any new sales, they were losing sales like no one’s business.
It’s pretty much a clone of RS, although, SPIN has an excellent and very funny writer in Chuck Klosterman.
