Blender Magazine sucks
Woimsah
1,734 Posts
I never read it to begin with - but I was at the news stand today and saw an article about the 40 worst lyricists of all time. Wow.....the people who wrote this bad boy are A-class rectum heads. I mean I agree with a few....but Bernie Taupin? Common? Paul McCartney? Robert Plant? You can't really front on Sting either in the Police era....http://www.blender.com/guide/articles.aspx?ID=2882and jesus lord am I sick of these douched out magazines doing lists. ever since Maxim and frat boy magazines like it have blown up - that seems to be the new main format. shit sucks.
Comments
They're confusing people who've written the odd duff song (or even couplet) with the kind of mediocrities who've built entire careers on peddling cliches. It happens a lot nowadays. I mean, I know that, as a lyricist, McCartney can be trite and cloying more than occasionally, but when you're singling out "Ebony and Ivory" as a representative sample of a body of work spanning almost half a century, you're officially reaching.
There's a lot about Blender that clearly borrows from their parent company (Maxim) but frankly, I'd rather read it than Rolling Stone. Their actual features really aren't bad and they edit better than most music mags I know.
While I agree with many of their choices, having K-Fed and Timbaland reeks horribly of smug 'hipness'.
Also, I really like their chosen lyrics from You're So Vain.
Now I'm not saying they're the second coming of Creem magazine or anything, but even though I could barely give a damn about 95% of the artists they cover, the humor factor is what keeps me paying money for it every month.
I like "You're So Vain", too.
But on the real, they're granting K-Fed a dignity he really doesn't deserve by placing him in the company of a bunch of people, some of whom, for all their occasional shortcomings in the lyric department, have at least attempted to add something to the sum of human knowledge, wisdom and understanding. And let's be honest, selecting the lyrics of any artist whose music could broadly be described as "prog rock" for a list like this is like shooting fish in a barrel.
i heart creem, i went on a collecting binge a few years back. i have never picked up a blender issue so i have no idea what's going on there.
what do you think about HARP? someone suggested i'd be into it and i know jon wurster, one of my favorite funny people, is a regular contributor
Yeah this is the thing. I'd much rather read an article ripping apart the lyrics of people who consider themselves master songwriters than an article pointing out the shortcomings of Timbaland's guest spots.
Frickin' Parade!
Hey, whaddya mean, "you guys"? I like "California Dreamin'". And I love "Windmills of Your Mind" too - I got plenty of love for a little well-crafted 60's pop melancholy.
Hmmm, it's okay. Their main focus seems to be folky alt-country types like Wilco. That gets boring too, but a magazine like Harp can be really refreshing on the flip side of trendier mags like Blender and Spin.
In my mind, I keep confusing Harp with Paste (which has one of my fave writers, Ed Ward, who in the '70s used to write for all the rock mags, including Creem). Anyway, both mags seem to have that same adult-alternative, Wilco/Lucinda Williams/Josh Ritter focus (although Kanye West was a recent Paste cover).
Retracted. Aimed at the Soulstrut maasive, not a fellow lover of honey-sweet sixties song-writing. Excuse me.
That damn Marilyn Vos Savant...she thinks she's so smart. Well if you're such a genius, how came you can't get a better job than writing a column for Parade? Huh?!?!?
How can you see that cover and not say to yourself "I need this."??
Parade still exists???
(old-person-magazine-I-associate-with-the-seventies related)
Later for "You're So Vain" - "Wooly Bully" and "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow" say more with far less.
Parade has the largest magazine circulation in America.
What about TV Guide?
Co-sign. Those writers probably get paid like you cannot believe. It's not exactly Pulitzer-level journalism but its reach is scary.
Is that a real magazine?
Parade is included in hundreds of Sunday papers throughout the US, and is far and away the circulation leader. For paid magazines, AARP The Magazine is #1, with TV Guide coming in a distant #13 with a circulation approximately 1/7 that of AARP. Their circulation was down over 50% in the second half of 2006, probably due to the rise of digital cable guide menus.
And of course the key factor with both of the top two is that
they are essentially FREE - Parade with most major Sunday newspapers,
and AARP sent to any card-carrying member of the organization. I mean,
I "buy" Parade all the time, simply by buying the Boston Sunday Globe -
but that doesn't mean that I ever actually read it.
So after you get the "freebies" out of the way, THEN what is the biggest seller? That people actually buy intentionally?
...though I can't lie, the lists that the Onion and (online only?) Cracked do are pretty funny.
I need that.
If I had to guess, I'd say Reader's Digest.
edit - good point