Gary:

I subscribe to RS - and my kids are now picking it up. The current issue is only the most recent example of a long list of cover stories that have focused negatively on Bush, the Iraq War and Oil.

Though often pandering to fans of music that I find distasteful (Nick Lachey) and other areas of American pop culture (American Idol) that are best left to the weekly crap-rags, RS seems back on its old footings as an agency for (regime) change.

Dave

Dave,

Rolling Stone's old counter culture mix of music and politics was about cultural change through music in America as well as regime change.

In this article in The Observer Gaby Wood gives us an insight into the cultural change:

for many of us who've grown up since World War II, rock'n'roll provided the first revolutionary insight into who we are and where we are at in this country, our first discovery that behind the plasticised myth of what we had been told was the United States, behind that Eisenhower/Walt Disney/ Doris Day facade was (damn!) a real America: funky, violent, deeply divided, despairing, exultant, rooted in rich historical tradition and ethnic variety.'

It is argued that the change that has been effected through music and politics has been through music:

Sixties politics collapsed even as Sixties culture triumphed. It was preserving the life of that culture, not its politics, that, as Wilentz has it, 'the magazine in fact helped change America'. When I ask what he means, he goes on: 'It's astonishing to me that I can walk across campus now and hear the Grateful Dead coming through the windows. When I was a kid we didn't listen to Frank Sinatra. The music of my generation has become a national music, along with country and western, and the magazine had a huge part in that.'

Funny, I thought that Rolling Stone's music writers had little time for the Grateful Dead.

You are right to chart the decline of mainstream music journalism. It's a decline which parallels a declining interest in music as a force of social and political change. In England The NME followed a similar decline. In the 70s early 80s it was a champion of multi cultural music from the British Ska movement as well as the inconoclastic social and creative impact of punk. It also had excellent writers who were encouraged to be bold and intelligent.

Subsequently as Conservative politics won out during the Thatcher and post Thatcher era it declined into a fairly meaningless self-promoting magazine. Similar to the majority of mainstream music magazines these days it exists primarily as a shop window for product. Little more than an extension of the marketing departments of today's extremely Conservative music industry.

Of course the role of the internet and the increasing interest in pop culture as an academic subject means there are still interesting opinions to be found on music. We just have to look a bit harder for them these days.

Island Monkey,
you write:

the role of the internet and the increasing interest in pop culture as an academic subject means there still interesting opinions to be found on music.

Can you direct me to som of these interesting opinions? Are they online?

What about this

3am article..an interview with Jon Savage author of Englands Dreaming