The Lameness of Rolling Stone

A great take-down of Rolling Stone Magazine from Nick Gillespie of Reason.

His initial motivation is a very dumb/communist statement it published, but the overall idea is that the magazine, particularly on political matters, has become utterly doctrinaire, in contrast with its glory days in the 60s and 70s when the music mattered, and the RS reporting and writing was fresh and vital, and open to more than simply leftist points of view. But now-a-days:

. . . you get bullshit bits about what’s on Barack Obama’s iPod and a 2012 Douglas Brinkley Q&A with Obama that takes butt-kissing into a whole new dimension not yet mappable by science. And a sad-sack story about “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For” that even Raul Castro would have been embarrassed to publish.

Gillespie’s on a glorious roll there, but that last line is not merely a joke, given the utter idiocy the piece displays.  Castro really would know better.

Some of this is a feature of standard lefty-boomer rock-ist political dogmatism, which my Rock Songbook has most explicitly criticized here (on rock leftism) and here (on a the great Joe Pug song “I Do My Father’s Drugs”).

But some of this is unique to the utter lack of morals and concomitant surrender of standards that Rolling Stone evinced when it hired the in all-ways vicious Matt Taibbi to be their politics editor. Yeah, very punk-rock, that.

So they deserve this 100%.