My brother, bless his generous soul, sent me Rolling Stone Cover to Cover. For a music obsessive like me, it's a great gift, although it's like drinking out of a fire hose. I used to subscribe to Rolling Stone when I was younger but hadn't bothered with it much in the past 10 years or so. Partly it was because of the dim, self-congratulatory leftist politics that Jann Wenner has always championed (with the notable and honorable exception of P. J. O'Rourke), but mostly it was because staying current in rock becomes less urgent as you get older.
Having said that, if you want to understand a certain cohort of the Baby Boom, Rolling Stone is probably the best pathway out there for doing so. The package comes with four DVD discs that contain every issue of Rolling Stone from 1967 through the end of 2006. It's all there, even the advertisements. You can study the changing obsessions of certain Boomers by looking at the ads. Back in the 1970s, many of the ads in RS were for stereo equipment; by the end of the 1980s, it was all about fancy cars, booze and luxury items. It's great source material for this blog, no doubt about it.
1 comment:
Cool gift. I'd love to see the older issues. It's been a loooong time since RS was worth bothering with though. I really couldn't care less what old bald guys with pony tails think about today's music scene. This quote from Gawker pretty much sums it up (re Jann Wenner sell US Weekly):
"But just how clueless is the 62-year-old former hippie, who founded Rolling Stone at the age of 21 after dropping out of Berkeley? His minions joke that Wenner's musical evolution ground to a halt some two decades ago. He's never quite figured out that Us Weekly staple Beyoncé has one of those accents at the end of her name. Wenner refers to her as be-yons, much to colleagues' amusement."
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