Glassy eyed glossies
Desperate magazines’ last gaspg
MAGAZINES, RIP. Time of death: 9:02 pm, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017.
That’s the moment Paper magazine posted its latest cover, which stars rapper Nicki Minaj, half-naked and in triplicate, performing sex acts on herself. Just one hour before that, People magazine named Blake Shelton — a bland reality-TV show judge with all the heat of a used tea bag — 2017’s Sexiest Man Alive.
Both covers are a study in the abject desperation of print magazines: Paper admitted the Minaj cover was just another attempt to “break the Internet,” while People offended everyone by attempting to offend no one.
“Sexiest Man Alive,” after all, was a title that once meant something: JFK Jr., Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford, David Beckham. Now Blake Shelton? Joked one Twitter user: “Did everybody die?”
The Minaj and Shelton covers, along with GQ naming Colin Kaepernick “Citizen of the Year,” are just hyperbolic presentations meant to drive click-throughs and headlines, nothing more. They don’t titillate or challenge. They certainly don’t change the world.
And everyone knows it, including the intended readership.
Not since 1991, when a heavily pregnant Demi Moore posed naked for Vanity Fair, has a magazine cover shocked us. We’re post-Internet, post-porn, post-Weinstein, post-reality TV. A fe- male celebrity posing naked and pregnant is now a rite of passage — just ask Serena Williams, Beyoncé, Jessica Simpson, Kourtney Kardashian, et al.
Gone, too, is the celebrity editor-in-chief, the icon indivisible from the publication. After Graydon Carter announced his retirement from VF in September, Condé Nast reportedly considered, among others, star replacements Janice Min, Jim Nelson andd Adam Moss.
Instead, the company went with a relative unknown: Radhika Jones, editor of the New York Times book department, who was announced as VF’s new editor last Saturday. Min, who led Us Weekly in its heyday and masterfully overhauled The Hollywood Reporter, reportedly wanted $2 million to Jones’ $500,000 annual salary. (It also seems unlikely Min would happily submit to Anna Wintour, who now oversees all of the rapidly-shuttering Condé Nast titles).
The budget-conscious hiring of an editor who’s not an Anna, a Graydon, or a Tina Brown is a seismic shift. Magazines were once aspirational: On display were worlds where we’d never gain entrée, from Gstaad to Hollywood, from Anna’s Met Gala to Graydon’s Oscar party. They were selling us a fantasy. Even People magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive were once icons of old-Hollywood masculinity, completely beyond our reach.
In Blake Shelton, we’ve got the guy from “The Voice,” best known for heavy drinking, erratic tweeting and PDA sessions with Gwen Stefani. Execs and editors at People probably poll-tested that choice for relatability — but is that really what we want in a sex symbol?
Everything feels smaller now. It’s why Paper’s Minaj cover falls flat; you’ll see more shocking stuff on Reddit. GQ’s Kaepernick cover isn’t driving the zeitgeist, it’s reacting to it — and, by the way, a Change.org petition or an online activist is likely to have greater impact. (Just ask Rose McGowan, expelled from the Celebrity Industrial Complex — she outed Harvey Weinstein on Twitter.)
Magazines can’t sell us fantasies anymore because we don’t believe in them.
How ironic, then, to see Brown everywhere this week, hawking her just-published book “The Vanity Fair Diaries, 1983-1992,” reliving and relishing her years of power at the height of American excess.
Most everyone in Brown’s pages matters no more. What a timely, fitting metaphor.