dfinkels's Full Review: Spin Magazine Subscription
When I decided to give my opinion on Spin (more on this in a minute) I consulted the already existing negative reviews. I have to say that I was disappointed. Critics of the magazine seem to find fault with the manner in which it fails to achieve critical distance from youth alternative culture. As I said, I'm not particularly moved by this criticism. It strikes me that Spin _does_ aim to not just sell, but also delve into the significance of that which it covers. Of course, the magazine is peppered with ads for the designer life style gear that indicate one's aspiration to belong to youth alternative culture. But this in itself, I would argue, no more compromises Spin's editorial ambitions than the advertisements for rare book search services compromise those of the New York Times Book Review.
Nevertheless, I think that there is room to be critical of the manner in which Spin covers its subject. I have to admit, though, that I was prompted to write this opinion, not by a Spin magazine article with which I found fault, but by an article in the Sunday Times Magazine ("Among the Mooks") by RJ Smith, a Spin magazine staff writer. It struck me that the journalistic conventions employed in that article, however, were precisely what I have come to expect from the magazine itself. You can take the journalist out of Spin, it seems, but you can't take Spin out of the journalist. Consequently, I don't think it's unfair to cite examples from Smith's article in the Times Magazine in a review of Spin magazine itself insofar as the former manifests all that I find worthy of aspersion in the latter.
My complaint about Spin, in a nutshell, is that it is so interested in telling clever stories about youth culture that its coverage is shaped more by literary than factual exigencies. Put simply, Spin magazine articles concern youth culture only superficially -- what they're really about is playing a formal game one learns in lit classes in college, and using youth culture as raw material for that game. Allow me to cite an example. In his/her (I couldn't tell) article on what he/she calls "Mook Culture" -- the culture of mosh pit denizens and affecionados of Kid Rock and the like -- Smith is led to analyze the current state of professional wrestling. (Smith, rightly I think, claims that the music and the sports entertainment manifest the same cultural currents.) He or she takes WWF wrestler the Rock as his/her example. He/She makes much of a "revealing story told by the Rock" (Smith's words) in the Rock's autobiography. According to Smith, the Rock got his start as a good-guy wrestler (or "face"), but was eventually called on to be a bad-guy (or "heel"). Smith has the story of the Rocks transformation as follows: "To facilitate the experiment, his trainer had [the Rock] fight his father [a former pro-wrestler]." Smith then quotes the Rock as saying, "The character of the Rock first came to life that day ... I remember feeling rather intensely ... this is more fun that being the good guy." Smith doesn't connect the dots him/herself, but the implication is clear: the rage the Rock manifests (and Mooks consume) has its source in his/our collective desire to kill the father. Evidence for Freud's theories is all around us!
The problem with this is, this story just isn't true. (Or at least, the basis for this story is not, as Smith claims, to be found in the Rock's autobiography.) The Rock, a former pro-football player, was taught to wrestle by his father. His audition for the WWF was arranged through his father. Then he debuted in the WWF minor leagues. Then he was brought up to the WWF as a face. Then he was turned heel. As far as we know from his autobiography, the Rock's father had nothing to do with his heel turn. There was no experiment. There was no trainer suggesting the experiment. There wasn't even a trainer at that point! In fact, the Rock gives his account of training with his father several chapters before his discussion of his heel turn. Smith quotes from the two discussions as if they occur on the same page, taking the quotations out of context in order to make it seem that the two events had something to do with one another in the Rock's mind, when in fact the connection exists only for Smith.
I mention this example because I take it that it is irresponsible, and not just sloppy journalism. I take it that Smith knew what he/she was doing, that he/she made a self-conscious decision to finesse the Rock's account in order to make it cohere with the story he/she was looking to tell. (There really is no confusing the two events -- the Rock's training and his heel turn -- as they occur pages and pages apart.) The Oedipal story in this case was more important to Smith than that which it putatively explains. Moreover, the manner in which Smith subordinates his coverage of the Rock's story to his/her theory about the deep significance of the Rock's story is symptomatic of the values of Spin magazine (and of the dominant trend in literary criticism classes in which Spin's current crop of editors and journalists honed their craft more generally). Put simply, Smith and Spin (and Barthes and Derrida) _don't care_ about the demonstrable facts concerning their subject matters. Instead, they want to tell clever stories. If they can be clever without falsifying the factual record, great. If not, oh well.
I think it's a shame that this mode of writing dominates art and literary criticism. (It's not that I think that it has no place. It's that if it's the only thing that's on the menu in lit departments, then what makes people want to study literature in the first place -- the impact that works of art can have on us -- risks going missing.) But these writerly conventions are downright insidious when they infect what presents itself as journalism, even when the journalism has a self-conscious editorial bent. This, I think, is the real moral failure of Spin magazine -- not that it aims to glamorize a certain lifestyle, but that it perverts its craft.
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