Let's talk about Vice Magazine

The problem with this whole let's recontextualize old bigot terms in order to rid them of their previous offensive connoctations and thus provide a way for diferent people to come to terms with each other WITHOUT the intrusion of the Politically Correct Police is that it might feel very daring and liberating and laudable for the average white straight male; but if you've spent your entire life getting kicked around for being a "fag" or "nigger" or what have you, you'd be much less likely to see VICE's stuff as the highly subversive breaking down of the PC walls etc that its staff thinks it is, and much more likely to see it as a bunch of guys celebrating their bigotry under the guise of "irony", regardless of whether or not they employ members of the groups they're throwing cuss words at. And you'd probably be right.

Cf: "The White Noise Supremacists" by Lester Bangs

(in between writing and posting this, I see Momus's link, which I'll check now and see how it changes what I've just typed)

whenever i pick up a vice, the prevailing message i seem to get from it is one of "aw shit, dude, don't think about things so much! titties are fun, some music sucks ass, mainstream media is all bullshit, this is REAL. have some fun you uptight fuckwad."

but i think the thing that bothers me most about vice is their undeniable beavis factor; sometimes in their brazen stupidity and painful 'realness', they hit at the root of a subject with more effectiveness and insight than anyone else.

i'm sure some readers who secretly (or not so secretly) *want* that for themselves allow themselves to be bullied by vice's "what's one more?" con job. the (flawed) logic being: "i am a certain way, and this is my life. they are a certain way, and that is theirs. if i want elements of what they have, etc etc etc"

from where i stand, vice is a bunch of pretty and insanely charismatic (but ultimately vacuous) people using their assets to play against the desires of anyone else is who *not* definitively those things.

haha mark i think you've pretty much nailed momus' aesthetic right there.

(except maybe replace pretty with Clever.)

"I said "at least they're white" about Williamsburg because it was funny."

"We’ve always felt that PC attitudes always hurt the people they’re trying to help. We believe words like “African American” and “East Indian” are just excuses for white, middle class, academic, liberals to patronize the working classes (of all races) and tell them how to speak."

"At worst it incites an angry debate on the power of words and what prejudice is really about."

Gee, Momus. Have you been around the art schools, man? I've got a feeling you have. There's about a bazillion people doing the exact same thing Ryan's doing. Ryan is aggressively mediocre at it, no less. The whole Tillmans/Goldman thing is a fucking yawn. It's no-talent no-vision scenester snapshot crap. This shit's got to die, and Vice is just feeding it. That's enough of an argument against Vice as it is, before you get into their dubious politics.

Let's get to the heart of the matter with Ryan McGinley: he's a cute guy and he knows who to pal around with, and who to sleep with. He's a clever and ambitious guy, and a total hack of an artist.

What makes me cringe is the "some of my best friends are [oppressed minority], therefore it's OKAY for us to use the word [epithet]" card the Vice guys try to play. And of course the reportage about being on the scene with Actual Real Live blacks/gays/dwarves makes the magazine seem so very real and trenchant. < /sarcasm>

I have to wonder how their "best friends" feel when Mr. Badass Vice Editor uses these epithets to their faces at a party or something -- I mean, mileage varies, but I wonder if they're perfectly cool with it, or whether they just grin and bear it while secretly feeling offended. All I know is how I'd feel -- uncomfortable.

Magazine A decides to pass over your orientation in discreet silence, because 'it's about the music, man.' Mag A is read by some people for whom homosexuality is actually not an acceptable lifestyle option. And we don't want to put them off buying your records, do we? Because you might influence them towards your decadent metropolitan views if you don't push their faces in them. So shut up already and you might get somewhere, boy.

Magazine B is militantly liberal. It tries to feature as many 'minority' artists as it can, and push their 'agendas'. It wants to talk about you as a 'new gay voice' in music. All its questions seem to angle for anecdotes about how you've been discriminated against and beaten up. The article will be a form of cultural reparation. Hardcore queer activists will ask you to speak at rallies after reading this piece. Whoopee!

Magazine C -- written by people you see all the time around town, some of whom you may even have had casual sex with, you can't remember -- calls you an 'art fag'. Actually, that's what you call your boyfriend too.

Vice magazine is run by people who have set their watches to the correct time, in terms of what words have what meanings to what people. This is why people who make money from trends are buying into them, and have been for a while. They are not affectionately calling, say, Larry Clark, 'pedo' in their articles. But they are calling people, affectionately, 'faggot'. This should tell you something about the word 'faggot' in the year 2002.

Resistance to the 'decriminalisation' of words like 'faggot' can be conservatism disguised as 'sensitivity'. Vice magazine is not conservative. Some people on this thread are.

Well, it's free, so there ya go.

felicity, do you like goebbles?

felicity, you know i was joking (since i am talking to you about it right now ha ha.)

1. One of Vice's contributing editors, Amy Kellner, a lesbian, DJs at an event called Art Fag Mondays in the Meat Packing District. She even named it.

2. We (and by 'we' I mean fags, non-fags, art fags and Vice readers) are a lot quicker and more creative when it comes to messing with language than Bushites in pickup trucks. So let's put the word 'faggot' more and more in a friendly context, and hear hostile uses of the word sounding increasingly lame. Eventually the hostiles will be forced to come up with a new term. It'll take them about ten years. Partly because they're not too smart. And partly because they believe that words do not change their meanings, and that the word 'faggot' is -- and will always be -- intrinsically insulting. They're wrong.

a lot of young black men call themselves niggers. would you walk into a room and do the same? even 10-20-30-40 years after the initiation of civil rights?

First of all, and I don't know how apropos this is but I'll say it anyway, "contributing editor" is often just a vanity title given to famous writers and other "cool" people whose butts senior editors smooch in order to look hipper by association. Occasionally they'll write an article or something.

As Jess already stated -- just because a subculture has adopted an ironic usage of an otherwise loaded word DOESN'T MEAN that the word is inoffensive anymore. YES there are gonna be some "fags" here and there who don't give a shit how the word is used, but it's not really fair to use those people as proof that IT'S OKAY to go around using hot-button words like that.

In other words, Michael Daddino was absolutely right.

That Albini quote is so WRONG it's, I don't know, cute. "Anyone involved"? Like, did he ever go to a Bad Brains show? Were the gay and punk subcultures really intermingled anywhere outside of NY, London and LA, especially after the first couple of years?

Personally, I find the insistence on skate culture in Vice and Tokion and some other mags a little silly. But that may be a generational thing.

On the question of 'the revaluation of all values', nobody has made the smart objection to my argument, which is that recontextualising insults is a reactive stance, and allows the enemy to set the terms of the debate.

And the answer to that is... but I'm typing this in a computer store in Ginza. Must dash.

your argument readily positions vice as vanguards of libertarian language. in general, you seem more than willing to bestow a whole lot of credit on them ("...run by people who have set their watches to the correct time..."), all the while discounting a much more likely possibility: that they're a bunch of meatheads who use words like "fag" and "kike" and "nigger" because it instantly earmarks them as different from virtually every other magazine in their demographic. the tired "we're trying to disempower the rich kid academics" bullshit comes much, much later.

what are the dangers of re-selling latent bigotry as 'realness'?

"But although that might make you foolish, unthinking, and sadly all too typical these days, it doesn't make you bigots. No, what makes you bigots is under the Vice Guide to Evil where you listed "Israelis" as a runner-up. Not the Israeli government, not Israeli policy, just Israelis. Of course you wouldn't list all Muslims as evil because of Sept. 11, but it's somehow become politically correct and acceptable to consider all Israelis as "evil." Well, this is the exact same attitude as suicide bombers, who don't have any problems blowing up a family with little children, after all, they're Israelis, they're evil."

full response from gavin:

"Hey jewboy,
If you check the gang rape gavin thread you'll see a co-founder of the magazine defending Israel and the Jews."

Vice Sports shut down today, also Thump, possibly more?

Thump was hit or miss but I'm sad if it's shutting down

I was to understand the Vice empire was worth billions of dollars

Does anyone else have a problem with their pages loading?....maybe I'm better off..

Welp

https://www.thedailybeast.com/unsafe-and-just-plain-dirty-women-accuse-vice-of-toxic-sexual-harassment-culture

the least surprising of all

Nirvanna the band the show is in season 2 and curiously slept on. Mining the early 90s hard (especially 1990-93) for movie/pop culture references, it's a situational comedy like curb in spirit but the mockumentary out-in-the-streets moments make it a thing of its own. Highly recommended

I'm really interested in this show - Ross, should I watch the web series first or start with the first TV series?

fuck these people and their garbage programming

shakey, i understand that sentiment and agree for the most part, but this show is good and just marred by the vice name.

NI - start with the tv series, web series isn't as good or fleshed out, can always go backwards later :)

Something's up

http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/30/media/vice-media-firings-workplace-conduct/index.html

xp it's not just the name, when you watch it they get money

^ fair point sleeve

Vice now just seems like "Internet Content, But With A Sneer(TM)"

That wasn't intended to be related to sexual harassment allegations, which I also agree are not surprising.

xxxp, good job torrents exist then. Thanks Ross, will do that.

if you're not a ratings-reporting household, then watching on TV sends them no money

though if you do have the option of sending them a message that the specific content you approve of should be their focus, then watching it is a good way of doing that

or writing a letter to Spike Jonze I guess

if anyone at vice wants to anonymously send me the things they wish they could tweet right now i'll just fire 'em off for ya

— Robyn Kanner (@robynkanner) December 23, 2017

The NYT article apparently barely scratched the surface.

that thread is just... ugh. what a caravan of sleazers, operating in open view.

?

I mean the Vice higher-ups behaving so sleazily.

so much of this discussion reminds me of riot grrrl imagery -- where they attempted to establish a 'look' for themselves placing traditional female imagery and once-derogatory slogans into the context of punk rock clothing started off as sly commentary, but were soon co-opted by companies looking to make a buck off 'princess' and 'i stole your boyfriend' t-shirts for 11-year-olds. (see also: the wholesale erasure-of-SLUT-from-bare-midriff that made gwen stefani so initially successful.)

so wouldn't that sort of cycle be eventually repeated if the arguments momus espouses hold true -- and wouldn't the underlying message of these mass-marketed uses of these words, then, also mutate into an affirmation of already-existing prejuidices that are held by the majority of americans, for the simple purpose of making as many dollars as possible?

― maura (maura), Monday, October 14, 2002 12:26 PM (fifteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

damn

there it is

capital gonna capital

the rise of the alt right, explained

lol even the Viceland sex show (Slutever) had to have a weed episode

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EEWpvc1XoAEmiZl?format=png&name=small

whoops

i warned you about colorization bro. i told u dawg https://t.co/7N007t2zwV

— bunny yeager air combat (@3liza) April 10, 2021

Wtf did this dude think he was doing?!

Not terribly shocking, but...

Vice Media secretly organised $20m Saudi government festival

When social media influencers turned up at the Azimuth music festival in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert they were promised a festival of musical and gastronomic excess, all subsidised by an arm of the Saudi government.

What attendees did not know was that the pricey music festival was secretly organised by youth media company Vice, as part of the media company’s ongoing push to make money in the Middle Eastern state despite the country’s poor human rights record.

Just three years after Vice publicly announced that it was pausing all work in Saudi Arabia due to the fallout from the state-ordered murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, insiders at Vice told the Guardian the company was once again aggressively pursuing business opportunities in Saudi Arabia...

Hey they said they were 'pausing' work in the kingdom, so...

This article doesn't directly have to do with Vice, though it mentions it, but I didn't want to start a whole thread just for it: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/peter-thiel-anti-woke-film-festival-trevor-bazile

Posting it here because the whole vibe of this Thiel-funded film festival feels extremely early-Vice to me, the "post-Left" or "post-woke" thing is such a retread of anti-PC shtick of the late '90s/early '00s. Except arguably even more cynical. It's also a sad story about Trevor Bazile, who kind of floats through it like a ghost. And of course several of the organizers are guys with histories of sexual harassment. It's a rancid scene.

from the image in that piece i’d say peter thiel definitely subsists on the blood of innocent children

He is a spectacularly vampiric dude.

He's high on the list of dicks whose deaths I will loudly and gloriously celebrate.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/09/media/vice-end-news-shows-layoffs/index.html