Uh…did I mention that Grandma’s Boy was funny?
I stare at a lot of magazine racks. What stares back? Countless mid-level publications with innocuous titles. It’s as if the internet never happened. WRONG!! The internet did happen, it just killed the zine world. What’s left is a glut of glossies with respective readerships comparable to any zine from the mid-90’s. One can count on boring graphics, boring interviews (interviews are always boring, trust me, I written plenty of boring ones) with boring bands, and boring record reviews. Just imagine if Pitchfork was exploded into a hundred print magazines.
Of course, I’m not referring to the magazines that I write for. They’re awesome. They’re also the only magazines that I actively read, because I get comp copies. My favorite music mag, though, is one that I no longer write for. I wrote for Decibel Magazine, issues 2 and 3, but after a few months of unreturned e-mails and rejected pitches (I still try every two months or so, just for shits and giggles), my name disappeared from the masthead (funny note: it remained by mistake in the masthead for issues 4 and 5). Still, I continue to get comp copies, and I read most of each issue. AND…..I enjoy 50% of that “most.â€Â That’s a pretty good hit rate for this relationship between myself and a mid-level music glossy, especially one that couldn’t find room for my sizeable talents. And I’m sure that’s what it was, an space issue. I mean, no one can write a crappy, marginal metalcore review quite like me (Eugene of Oxbow had some funny things to say about writing for Decibel…scroll down).
Overall, Decibel writers remain a more caustic, humorous lot than what’s usually available in this insular bubble (made even more insular by the fact that Decibel covers “extremeâ€Â music, or rather, metalcore, death metal, grindcore, flimsy “artâ€Â metal, and the thrash revival). It’s miles above Revolver, which maintains a average IQ of 71 from cover to cover and remains stuck in 1998. Decibel gives way too much space to over-intellectualizing “intenseâ€Â pretty-boy boneheadedness like The Red Chord, As I Lay Dying, A Life Once Lost (and any band that could share its name with the title of a made-for-Lifetime drama) plus other garbage that’s one dinner away from Hot Topic fodder. Outside of this, I manage to read enough entertaining writing to briefly expand my “to steal from Soul Seekâ€Â list.
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