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Revolver is a music magazine for men. I don't know if that's
their official line, but even a quick scan of the cover tells you all
you need to know: a big photo of Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst sporting
boxing gloves, tag lines for articles on Radiohead, Phish and The
Grateful Dead, Orgy, Hendrix, Big Star, P.O.D., Pearl Jam, Pete
Townshend, The Allman Brothers...do you sense a trend here? This is
manly (Frat-manly? - Ed) stuff. All the feature articles, by the way, are written by men.
And it's not just the articles that are manly -- nearly every woman
(there aren't many) that appears in the magazine (in ads or in article
photos) is partially naked or wearing a bikini! How did they pull that
off? Did they do it on purpose? Does the fact that their logo includes
the phrase "100% Nookie" have anything to do with it? I don't know. What
I do know is that this is one boy-centric magazine, and that, despite
what their publicity department might want to believe, there's nothing
daring or edgy about a magazine full of men talking about themselves and
pictures of women in bikinis.
That said, there are some interesting things in Revolver,
although it's pretty hard to get excited about articles on The Who!
Pearl Jam! Limp Bizkit! Jimi Hendrix! Radiohead! You hardly ever hear
about those folks! The interesting stuff is buried under the mainstream
pap. There's a nice piece about musicians' gravestones, including some
non-hard-rockers like Patsy Cline, Miles Davis, Selena and Karen
Carpenter. Some good long form reviews of De la Soul, Guided by Voices
and Cubanismo. There's even a short "Women in Rock" article, in which
Anne Powers, a pop-music critic for the New York Times, says that
"It sometimes feels like I've been asked to write the same 'women in
rock' piece every six months for the past decade."
So I'm not really sure what the point of Revolver is. They seem
to want to position themselves as an "alternative" music magazine, but
it's been a long time since Limp Bizkit and Phish qualified as
underground music. And there's nothing wrong with an Eddie Vedder
interview, but gosh, aren't there like twelve million other tortured
geniuses out there that haven't already been interviewed a
gazillion times? Revolver wants to be an alternative to
"compromised" music magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone. But simply
putting the same tired old stuff (minus the Britney Spears articles) in
a different package doesn't make you an alternative to anything. It just
makes you boring. Someone is clearly pumping a lot of cash into this
magazine; it's a big, good looking, full color glossy with lots of
photos and ads. I wish they would take some of that cash and actually
try to do something progressive and interesting with it for a change.
-- Irving Bellemead
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