In the 1990s, though, no one’s nailed the decade yet. Think about it: the ’50s had Life, the ’60s had Esquire, the ’70s Rolling Stone - magazines that truly reflected the sensibility of their times. The ’80s - things were already getting more crowded - rates two: Vanity Fair and its evil twin, Spy. Today, we have . . . Men’s Health (not to mention its evil twin, Cigar Aficionado). It’s somewhat of a comedown.
What about Wired, you say? We’ll get to that. And it’s certainly true that this mythical magazine must embrace, or at least include, people under 35. But first, for our purposes, we’re not talking about the increasingly slivered ““niche’’ publications. So forget all the ““service’’ magazines that tell you how to play the market or decorate your patio. Also eliminate the journals of celebrity gossip - people always read this stuff. Omit the news magazines, too. News is still a different animal. And besides, I don’t need to complicate my life.
No, we’re talking about general-interest magazines. We read them like a book of mirrors. They tell us more about what we’re already interested in, but more important, what we should be interested in. They tell stories about all sorts of things that broaden our horizons, but with a voice that feels like our own secret Sanskrit. This is a parlor game, so go ahead and disagree, but here’s one scenario. In the 1950s, the magazine was Life, and because this was still more or less the pre- television era, everyone read it. With Big Pictures, Life provided the mainstream, on-the-fly history of the period.
In the 1960s, Esquire. By the end, it was a decade of tremendous upheaval, and no one could explain very well what was happening. It was a good time to leave it to the writers. And what writers - Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer. Esquire went out and discovered a slew of things about America that people hadn’t thought about before, and wrote about them with attitude and intimacy. Playboy might have had a larger circulation, and there was a supposed Playboy ““lifestyle,’’ something about sunken living rooms and smoking jackets. But that blew into smithereens about 1967. Esquire managed to bridge the decade.
In the 1970s, Clay Felker’s version of New York Magazine broadened Esquire’s new journalism into a whole sensibility rather than just a collection of literary articles. But Rolling Stone served an entire generation. In the ’80s, when Vanity Fair provided a glitzy celebration of Reagan-era power, wealth and celebrity, it gave rise to its antithesis, Spy magazine.
Spy deflated icons, and raised the bar of irreverent skepticism for everything that followed. ““People took Donald Trump seriously then,’’ says cofounder Kurt Andersen. ““We got part of that moment. It was a kind of “We’re grown up now, but we haven’t forgotten our ’60s yippiedom’.''
The ““we’’ he’s talking about is baby boomers, and these last few magazines, you may have noticed, were by, for and about them. The central riddle in the magazine business now is, what about the generations behind them? (They don’t read, the boomers whisper.) There are a few notable aspirants, like Details, aimed at hip twenty- and thirtysomethings. But these magazines need, first and foremost, to rebel against Mom and Dad. Details has two problems. Its owner is Conde Nast, a decidedly nonscruffy conglomerate. And it emphasizes high fashion. This attracts advertising, but as one former editor there says, ““It’s a little hard to seem revolutionary when the magazine’s full of guys running around in $1,200 suits.''
Spin magazine chose the Rolling Stone route, using music as a wedge, reacting against the corporate rock and MTV hair bands of the late 1980s. But rock music is splintered now, and doesn’t reverberate as it had a generation before.
Both Details and Spin have new editors, and Spin’s Michael Hirschorn, 33, maintains there is plenty to rebel against: ““We’re for people who don’t want to be Disney-fied. Our readers are tired of the blanket conformity of the consumer culture. They want something that feels honest.''
Editorial decisions are more and more ad-driven these days, and, at the same time, some theorize that the pool of magazine writers has shrunk because talented young people are being siphoned off by other options, like the Web or the entertainment business. It’s the old ““Eugene O’Neill would be writing sitcoms today’’ argument. And, of course, TV and the Internet are stealing readers, too.
On the surface the white-hot magazine for the decade might be Wired, with its hyperneon design, cultish but large (350,000) readership and revolutionary fervor about the digital future. It’s got a generational theme, and some good old-fashioned enemies (traditional media, Bill Gates). But Wired can seem a little hysterical about its world view. It is, after all, simply a magazine about a box with some buttons on it, but it is so anxious to convince us that digitalia will change Life As We Know It that it sometimes winds up looking like a cheerleader for the industry. Wired also has the added disadvantage of being considered by many to be practically unreadable, both graphically and in its insider-ness.
In fact, the one magazine this decade that shot from zero to cruising speed in no time is perhaps the magazine we deserve, Martha Stewart Living. It’s close to 2 million in circulation, and should only grow when her TV show begins airing daily in the fall. Martha Stewart Living may appear to be about choosing drapes, but observers like the New Republic’s Margaret Talbot have pointed out that it plays to the anxiety of working women who want to be professional and perfect at the home they fear they’re neglecting.
That’s all true, but Hirschorn is a grudging admirer. ““No focus group, no marketing survey, would have told you that readers wanted incredibly detailed information about Victorian trellises,’’ he says. ““For what it does, it’s very focused editorially.''
We’d just rather focus, by the end of the decade, on another Zeitgeist.
