Let's talk about Vice Magazine

Racist jokes are not satire, Mike. It seems clear to me that Vice and Nathan Barley inhabit the same world, a world of irony and meta-commentary. Very few people think that Vice is actually racist; they simply feel greater or lesser degrees of discomfort with its racially-themed language. Vice plays on all the same ambiguities as Nathan Barley did, in terms of whether it celebrates or condemns the culture it portrays. Sure, Nathan Barley is one step more meta than Vice -- it contains a portrait of Vice (in the Sugarape Vice issue episode-- but Vice is already meta. (And this thread is more meta than both. Any racists here, or just people using the word "nigga" protected by layers and layers of meta-quotation?)

this is kinda true, actually. reading about music is like reading about architecture. boring for the most part unless there are nice pictures to look at.

I'm with Dan on the archival value of this thread. The Cher quote maybe not so much.

Now, I suspect that the same people who have problems with Vice's post-PC version of racial politics will be having problems with American Apparel's post-PC version of sexual politics, and will think of AA's adverts as "sexist". Am I right? Do we need a separate thread for condemnation of AA's "sexism"? Or do people not get as worked up about sexism as they do about racism?

american apparel-C/d?

I want to bone American Apparel.

I've never heard of this company!
-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), January 8th, 2005.

Ha ha ha, you guys are so funny! How does it go?

Oblivious
Annoyed
Still annoyed, but less so
Finally accepting

Why not just give in now? Save yourself all the angst? Because your initial resistance is a crucial part of your later acceptance? You don't want all that emotional investment to have been wasted...

Other than this being completely fucking wrong; I bet 90% of kids I went to college with don't even know what Vice is.

Scott OTM about whether all this was already done, better, in the early nineties - people who think Vice is on the cutting edge are like people who show up to the burned-out room where the party happened last week and announce that they're ready to get funky now

i had a dream the other night that i was watching mtv with someone and there was this old hole video on (it was "miss world" i think, but that doesnt't really matter since the song was completely different.) so c. love was gyrating around and she had these huge breasts and kept flashing her vagina (it was shaved), to which i exclaimed "my god!" repeatedly, more shocked/horrified than excited. i said to my viewing companion: "it's hard to wonder now how anyone ever fell for this as some sort of feminist statement."

i don't know how this fits with maura's statement but i don't want the dream lost forever. (her coochie is still burned into my memory.)

-- jess

Jake on the floor is a pretty typical one. Naked or semi-naked hot young boy, informally snapped in a situation which might be spontaneous, photographer's friend or lover rather than standard issue model. It combines Araki's intimate relationship with his models with Nan Goldin's scummy settings. Both these influences, by the way, were not accessible to Americans in the early 90s. And they're very evident in the American Apparel look which, I say again, will be a big part of how we look back at the 00s, whether we know it comes via McGinley and Vice or not.

What's very interesting to me is that Dov Charney is now championing Mexico City (there's even a free paper in his stores called Mexico City) as a style leader, and Mexican kids as cooler than American ones. This extends down to things like how sexy it is not to tweezer your eyebrows or shave your armpit hair. I'll make a bold prediction and say that in ten years young American women won't do either.

AA actually asked me to write something about the company, but I declined.

Hustler in the 80's to thread! er, or so i've heard.

Styles that will later dominate the mainstream and contribute to how we perceive a particular decade begin in media enclaves like Pitchfork and Vice. Actually, that's not even true; they begin in the art world. No, that's not true either, they begin in widespread social trends which artists are often the first to pick up on (the mainstream is usually slow to change its representations of the world, even when the world changes and moves on). Once they get into art shows, these new images and styles are legitimated: they begin to be seen as acceptable for wider use. People in advertising, music, publishing etc pick up on them, and soon (if they resonate with wider trends, ie the whole post-PC thing, or the fact that demographic growth in the US is coming from Asians and Hispanics rather than either the black or white populations) they reach the mainstream.

A case in point would be how Corinne Day's photos in the 90s (influenced by Nan Goldin) led to a moral panic over "heroin chic" which spilled out of the fashion world and left a mark on the 90s via "Trainspotting" etc. Heroin use in itself doesn't make "heroin chic" a legitimate style; it needs to be picked up by artists, then percolate through to wider cultural resonance via films, records, magazines, photographs... One consequence of this is that we wake up one morning and find that a particular sensibility is literally paying our bills.

I am rather glad though that Vice was not ahead of the game in making it OK for white people to call blacks "nigger" and "chink," and that the attempted resurrection of the "reclaiming the word!" ("reclaiming" by people who don't have the moral right to say what gets reclaimed when) trope seems to have died a richly-deserved death in the racial sphere anyhow (I wish it were still considered more bogus to call women "bitches" but you can't win 'em all)

Momus OTM however about how sexism doesn't get nearly the rise of of ilx that racism does, but this is my ol' hobby-horse

I don't say it all starts with Vice, but Vice is an important node on the network. Out of thousands of dud magazines, magazines that went nowhere, Vice is one that "knew what time it was" and positioned itself ahead of the curve. We're now seeing that sensibility go mainstream, which of course is the beginning of the end for Vice. But it has its place in the history of this decade now... and its thread on ILE. Which other magazines do we have threads on? Pitchfork? Also an important node on the network.

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