This article posits that Rolling Stone may be the Voice of America. and the war in Iraq may well have galvanized its comeback.It was the bible of Sixties counterculture and radical thought. Now as it approaches its 1,000th issue this week, Rolling Stone magazine is once again leading the rallying cry against the political establishment, giving a new lease of life to its legendary editor and founder Jann Wenner.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1764350,00.htmlSunday April 30, 2006
The Observer
This week, Rolling Stone will give fans what it hopes will be their most enduring souvenir in almost 40 years. The cover of its 1,000th issue - a 3-D affair which will feature a Sgt Pepper-like assembly of its most feted stars - is expected to be the most expensive in magazine history, and has been making headlines since late last year.
Yet perhaps more surprising than the celebration of its status as a cultural institution is the magazine's regained fervour as an organ of political opposition. The current issue's cover story is a long article about George Bush entitled 'Is This The Worst President in History?' The piece - a hilarious premise followed by a frightening amount of corroboration - is by Sean Wilentz , who must surely be the only history professor to have won a prize for a book about American democracy and been nominated for a Grammy award (for his liner notes to one of Bob Dylan's Bootleg albums) in consecutive years. The magazine, whose legendary editor and publisher Jann Wenner is (or perhaps was) a friend of Tom Cruise, also took risks recently with a long report about Scientology; it published a profi le of corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff ; it weighs in on the costs and casualties of war, and routinely criticises its Commander-in-Chief.
Where did this come from? A magazine . . .now seems to have adopted a stance that makes it look something like the young music lover's version of the New York Review of Books.. . Wenner, who has personally interviewed Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Howard Dean for his magazine's pages, made Gore its cover star in time for the 2000 election, and has embraced his friend's green politics to the point of being labeled a 'Gorophiliac'. . . The esteemed music writer Nik Cohn has the sense that the magazine has become the semi-official organ of American liberalism. It's anti-Bush, anti-war - 'You always feel that, when one of the Bushes talks about the liberal media, what they're talking about is Rolling Stone magazine.'
No matter how liberal the magazine has been traditionally, it's probable that the Bush administration has allowed Rolling Stone to take up a cultural position far more similar to that of its origins than it has had in decades. A few years ago, in an article for salon.com entitled 'Rolling Stone Gathers No Marx', former Rolling Stone editor David Weir bemoaned its failure to live up to its radical promise. Weir pointed out that politics began to fall by the wayside at the magazine early, as the Vietnam War came to a close. If that's the case, then the war in Iraq may well have galvanised its comeback. Rolling Stone's circulation is up to 1.5 million now; before the war, it was 250,000 less than that.
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