I was paging through a stack of Playboy magazines from the mid-to-late seventies, and I was kind of amazed at (among a million other things) much more classically cultured the magazine’s target readers seem to be. A year-end poll has readers nominating not just their favorite “TV Show” or “Band,” but their favorite play of the year, favorite book by genre, favorite jazz musician by instrument (down to favorite horn player, favorite jazz drummer, favorite bassist, favorite jazz pianist/keyboard player - herbie, of course), and so on. The general articles seem aimed at a much more cultured and higher-brow reader; you’ve got articles on politics by Norman Mailer, fiction by Raymond Carver, and all of the celebrity news items are a far cry from the modern hollywood-centric gossip stuff; it’s more “Miles Davis was seen here, while Truman Capote appeared here with Roman Polanski,” and so on. And we’re talking about Playboy, the boobie mag, not even something like Esquire.
Contrast with today’s common fratboy/asshole everyman, who follows very little art and culture other than what’s directly spoon-fed to him by TV and the media. 2007 everyguy has no idea who Norman Mailer and Roman Polanski are, much less their current counterparts like David Foster Wallace or, say, P.T. Anderson. He’d probably be hard-pressed to even name one member of his “favorite” band, which means that he really liked their single that he heard from Clearchannel and maybe even paid to download it (the one song, of course).
What went wrong? Is it as simple as media being much more bought and sold, therefore leading to a corporate money-driven convergence of what the gatekeepers out there allow through? Are people just stupider and less cultured these days, even though they actually have access to far more than people from 30 years ago did?
Assuming this isn’t a whoosh, the entire point of Playboy was pretending that you were, in fact, a playboy. Hence the name of the magazine. It sold the idea of a lifestyle of glamour and sophistication; part of its allure was pretending its readership were all rich guys who hung out with the Rat Pack. It’s all bullshit.
Totally not whooshing; I thought it was about boobs and being a dood. I mean, Playboy '07 isn’t about some sort of uppity lifestyle or posturing; it’s all interviews with Johnny Depp and new fiction by “the bro that wrote Fight Club.”
As much as I’d like to put on my old fart hat for this one, I’m going to agree. The typical Playboy reader of 30 years ago (and I was one of them) might read the essay by Norman Mailer, but only long after (like two weeks later) looking at all the naked chicks.
Right – Playboy WAS supposed to be the highbrow “boobie mag”. It was a lifestyle magazine as well as a girlie mag: Hefner’s lifestyle, once he got some money. You not only had all the fine fiction by Updike and the interviews by Haley, but also some seriously El Expensivo product placement (you had to have a serious Hi-Fi at your swingin’ pad…). And that way you justified all the fine nakedness. (I suppose the idea being, if you could make literate conversation, knew your wines, and had the right fine products, you are a hipster who can score with this class of gals…)
The OP contrasts it with Esquire… well, guess what magazine Hef left to start Playboy? His genius was taking the concept to the next level by adding outright nude pictorials while retaining enough mainstream respectability for text content. Oh, and BTW… back 40+ years ago it was not unheard of to have respectable writers publish in skin mags, which had taken over the men’s market from the old pulps.
Yeah, I found a couple at a flea market from the 70s as well, and you really could legitimately claim to read it for the articles. One had an intelligent discussion about sensible drug laws (hey, the 70s), for example. I also remember that the articles assumed that the reader had a much much higher grasp of vocabulary and political knowledge than most newspapers do today. Color me impressed. Those pot-smoking, sex-enjoying damned hippies really had things together, y’know?
I remember from reading my dad’s Playboys in the 70s that it always had a an ad (full-page maybe?) called What Kind of Man Reads Playboy that would *tell * you how sophisticated you were.
Poplar magazines often have a “pretend” audience that isn’t really who the magazine is aimed at, but that appeals to the actual audience: look at Cosmo, which, if you read it, seems to be aimed at hip, sophisticated professional women in NYC, Chicago, or LA who are in their late 20s and make in the healthy six figures. In reality, it seems like Cosmo is mostly read by 17-25 year old girls.
You may be right, Manda JO (and by “may be,” I mean “I think you are”) – but it’s still interesting that the “pretend” audience has changed that much in the last 30 years – or is it that the pretense has been dropped?
Playboy has been marginalized like most print media and they’re scrambling desperately to dumb down so they can capture more market share.
Just another symptom of the problem of media sources becoming more and diffuse while ownership becomes more and more concentrated. It’s a race for the crumbs outside the castle gates anymore.
I was looking at an old Playboy issue the other day and man, the choices they made in their Jazz selections sucked. Chuck Mangionie as the best Jazz trumpeter? Of course since Jazz is dead and at that time had been dead for 20 years, it’s kind of a moot point.
I think the point about class vs. cool is a good one.
Basically, Alphabet Soup, Playboy was going after a different reader 30 years ago. It was a gentleman’s magazine and it’s competing with what are being called “lads magazines” like Maxim and Blender, not to mention Penthouse, which I don’t think anybody ever pretended to read for the articles. Nobody’s reading those for the articles, so it’s pretty clear what kind of a shift Playboy would be expected to make in response. It’s not that everybody suddenly became stupid and stopped listening to jazz and going to plays, it’s that that set is no longer who Playboy is targeting because they need more readers. You think Everyman was a Playboy reading jazz lover 30 years ago? Not hardly.
I admit these changes aren’t always for the better. One of my favorite authors was a former Playboy editor, and in college I was taught by at least one former Playboy contributor (and there were others in the journalism department). I don’t know if today’s Playboy writers are going to be future professors.
I’m sorry, but someone is actually lamenting the demise of Hef’s Playboy Philosophy? I still read the magazine on a regular basis, but reading those old ones is a chore sometimes when half of the print in the damned thing is Hef rambling on and on about the meaning of life or whatever he was actually going on about.
I actually think it’s a much better magazine now than it used to be. It’s still a damned sight smarter than any of those Lad Mags or other boob oriented publication out there and it’s still done tastefully and has good articles.
Playboy had the best cartoons. It had very famous interviews with important and interesting people. It had very good articles and writers. Whats not to like. Movie reviews and record reviews were first rate.
“back in my day…” :rolleyes:
I would hypothesis that it only seems like people have more limited taste in culture now because there is so much more crap out there than there was 30 years ago.
Maybe in quantity of crap, but not necessarily in quality.
What’s the difference between, say, the Monkees, and Hannah Montana? Is the wanking that permeated the late-60’s Rolling Stone better or worse than the daily ejaculations from Pitchfork?
I can’t think of a single pop-cultural movement or aesthetic from the past sixty years that wasn’t at some point co-opted, commercialized, and watered down. I think the culture as a whole is probably more blatantly crass than it used to be, but that’s partially due to the efforts of folks like Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor who the cognoscenti now revere as geniuses.
I think that the cause of it is that there is a lot more competition. Back then, how many options did you have for naked pictures? I suspect most “readers” of the magazine weren’t buying it for the articles.
Now, Playboy is competing not only with dozens of other magazines but DVDs and the internet.
I glanced at one once and bogged down on about sentence 2. Who flippin’ well cares?-- I know why I was reading the mag. (Remember a MAD magazine article, “The world’s thinnest books”? One was “The Sum and Substance of the Playboy Philosophy”.)
But, back to the OP: we’ve always, it seems to me, drawn the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow art, literature, and so on. Shakespeare’s clowns included jokes to amuse the groundlings, so 'tis said, and medieval miracle plays included plenty of sex and gore to amuse the masses while the gentry sang of courtly love.
Although I do not watch television and know very little about modern music, is not a well-written television show fully as difficult to produce as a thought-provoking book, and isn’t it hard to learn and play good modern music? While a classic is not always recognized in its own time (e.g., Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring– which, I, personally, cannot stand!), we know that we, as a society, manudacturing enduring works.
My tastes have certainly grown more refined in over the last thirty years. I now enjoy a fine aged single malt scotch from time to time, but at age seven I was strictly a beer and bourbon man.