For an media-hungry rock chick, leaving England for America is like leaving Sainsbury's for a butcher. You can still get a bloody good steak, but if you want a lychee, forget it.
While New York seethes with embryonic rock stars (and some of them are that young), the media is slow to notice and there is nothing like the comparative orgy of radio and print choices that there is back in the UK. Rolling Stone is the mast to which we cling in a sea of Dave Matthews, Faith Hill and Shakira.
Though to critique the magazine on the strength of its music coverage alone would be unfair, with its gonzo heritage and continuing inclusion of Hunter S Thompson on its flannel panel -- a one-time contributor of the wildly long, meandering articles for which Rolling Stone made its name.
There once was a time that you took your phone off the hook for Rolling Stone. Now, with its snappier features and bite-sized reviews (quadrupled in number), you can just put your caller on hold. It still looks pretty, of course (love that font), but new managing editor Needham has steered it into his familiar waters of two-page titters and four-page funnies, thus making it unlikely that we're going to get any more 10,000-word ponders by drug-addled wrinklies.
What we get here is a kind of Rolling Stone Redux, illustrated perfectly by the six-page (the longest in the book) 9/11 feature, which one year on quotes the same people it quoted in its original whole-magazine reportage in October 2001 -- only much more concisely.
And the music coverage is, well, predictable -- but then this is something that hasn't changed much in Needham's first flush. It's the old strokesvineswhitestripesmoldypeachescoldplayhives combo that has kept the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times, Blender and Spin happy for the past however long.
It's hard to remember what existed before, and I'm a little curious as to whether the letter from 16-year-old Stephanie Hamilton praising coverage of not only the young Turks but the old gits (Led Zep et al) might not be something of an obit.
It looks like gonzo's gone emo. The remaining product is still "good", and if the declining circulation rises again then Needham has won -- but he ought to make sure the archives section of the website is in good working order, just to make sure he doesn't lose from the bottom what he gains at the top.
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