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Well I have to admit to being a major magazine and newspaper junkie - I will read pretty much anything which I find interesting, but at the moment this doesn't count too many of the mens' magazines.
One of the things I really hate about these magazines is the tone of shared beliefs - the assumption that you must want to aspire to being a successful businessman, living in a studio loft in London's Trendy wherever and able to invest in the latest hip gadget. The sort of man who always orders Tanqueray, knows just how much olive brine goes into a dirty martini and keeps his cigars at the exact room temperature they need to be kept at.
Yet oddly, who needs to be told how to fuck, what to wear and what to listen to. Bollocks to that. (This rant covers the Esquire/ GQ/ Arena end of the market. FHM, ICE and Front are more or less blatant nowadays in saying they are aimed at teenage boys.)
Loaded is the sorriest case, because as a few posts had rightly noted, in its early days it was a bloody good magazine. There was some absolutely cracking pieces in the early years of Loaded, and people forget that it was one of the few mags in the boom which followed its birth to put people it found interesting, such as Vic and Bob, Harry Hill or Gary Oldman, on its covers, rather than just naked birds.
It was also, I'd argue, one of the major players in the boom of British culture in the mid-90s; on the Live Forever documentary, James Brown was talking about turning to Alan McGee at Knebworth and saying something along the lines of 'we were the outsiders; now we're the establishment.'
He meant it in a celebratory way, but of course, that was when everything started going wrong, the cheap buck was gone after, and the mens' magazine market sank under a sea of tits and ass.
Nowadays, I will usually not bother picking up Loaded at all; I don't buy FHM becasue I think the magazine is absolutely disgusting, both in its attitude to women and because of its arrogance; if I feel the need to buy Front, ICE or any of their ilk, I'll usually just be honest and buy porn instead; occasionally I'll pick up GQ or Esquire, sometimes if there's a bylined article on the front from a writer I like; and, on rare occasions, I might buy Bizarre, which is kind of like a lads mag/ Fortean Times genetic experiment gone horribly wrong.
With regard to dance music magazines; I have endured loads of stick in work for buying Jockey Slut, which is actually a pretty good, interesting and balanced dance mag with a decent free CD, but happens to sound like it is full of horse porn... |
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