Like a lot of people who enjoy the ebbs and flows of popular music, I've read and subscribed to my share of music magazines, and learned to find them all more or less tedious. Rolling Stone mixes its unreflective leftism with equal parts pretension and onanism; Spin performs its namesake to its wheels not being as cool as it wants to be; Magnet bores; Maximum Rock n' Roll flails. Each one is ridiculous for its own reason.
That said, I still pay attention to them, because I live in the suburbs, and they closed my local Record & Tape Traders, and I need some way to keep my ears to the underground (whatever that means). So whatever excrable things I say about mags like Filter, I still use them to guide my purchases, as yesterday, when I ordered the Them Crooked Vultures album and the latest by Oh No. Or last week, when I snagged No Age's Nouns on iTunes. Or any of the buys I've made over the last year or so.
Which means that economically speaking, they've done their job on me as surely as any trendhumping teenybopper. And if pop culture class warfare was a goal of mine, I'd suppose I'd feel bad about that. But since I'm way more interested in finding good stuff to listen to and urinating on the hysteria that surrounds it, it actually works out nicely.
So thanks for the tip, Filter. Now stop being a bunch of hipster doofii.
No comments:
Post a Comment