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Whereupon we honor the publishers, editors, magazines and newspapers, producers, shows and web sites that we think have made a difference
By Gene Ely
Blender
Publishing company: Dennis Publishing
Publisher: Malcolm Campbell
Editor in chief: Andy Pemberton
If there's one thing music snobs love to do, it's complain about how bad American music magazines are.
Blender's not likely to put an end to that. It's far too egalitarian in its tastes to please the hipster set.
But for the rest of us, Dennis Publishing's two-year-old, 410,000-circulation music title offers a welcome alternative to the ossified conventions of Rolling Stone and Spin - above all, the fiction that if the music is interesting, the people who made it must be interesting, too.
Blender's premise is simplicity itself: A magazine that covers a vast amount of music, every type of music and nothing but music -- no sitcom stars, no campus politics, no special reports about the hidden dangers of this or that club drug. (Okay, there are a few pages of movie and video game reviews, but that's it.)
If it's popular, you will find it in Blender, regardless of whether it's death metal, alt-country or acid jazz. If it's not popular, you will still find it in Blender, albeit with less space devoted to it. If it's truly indie … well, there's always Pitchfork Media.
Blender's intelligence lies chiefly in two epiphanies. The first is that there's way more music out there than any one listener can hope to keep track of without some kind of cheat sheet. Blender's massive reviews guide is that cheat sheet. This month's issue contains 149 CD reviews, including a "Back Catalog" section with write-ups of every Joni Mitchell release. Note that Rolling Stone has already recognized the merit of this approach, upping the number of reviews it prints in response.
The second epiphany is that rock stars - and long profiles of rock stars -- usually aren't all that interesting, so a music magazine that wants to keep readers' attention must work extra hard to compensate.
Blender's hard work takes the form of regular features like "Dear Superstar," in which a rock god answers readers' inane and invasive questions, and "Spend Our Cash," in which a band is given $848 to blow in one day and instructed to photograph the mayhem that ensues. (For this month's installment, the Flaming Lips rented two strippers, put them in a kiddie pool and doused them with $242.07 worth of Pepto-Bismol.)
In fact, Blender probably tries a little too hard. In particular, the jokey, Maxim-style captions seem out of place here and are more often lame than funny.
Moreover, Blender's omnivorous appetite inevitably ensures that most of the magazine will be devoted to bands the typical reader couldn't care less about.
Then again, that's true of any mainstream music magazine. At least Blender, with its bounteous offerings and skim-friendly organization, seems willing to acknowledge that reality.
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