Not So Hot, Rolling Stone

“Tarnished” is the word being applied to Rolling Stone's reputation – to the Rolling Stone brand, I mean —- as its story about an alleged gang rape at a fraternity house at the University of Virginia is shown to have been based on thin and compromised reporting.

But reading the issue of the magazine in which the article appears – the Hot Issue – is itself enough to make you wonder about the magazine’s reputation.

I’ve read Rolling Stone regularly since issue 295, which featured Paul McCartney on the cover. That is, I’ve read it for thirty-five years and nearly a thousand issues. But I have to say that the campus rape story, eye-opening about the perils of college life as it is, also opened my eyes anew to just how thick the magazine is with references – gratuitous ones, if you ask me – to sex and drugs and alcohol and violence and the ways these things fit together. Here are some choice bits about performers in the Hot Issue:

AC/DC: We learn of Phil Rudd’s arrest in New Zealand and the accusation that he undertook “murder for hire,” and that although those charges were dropped, he is “still accused of threatening to kill, and possession of methamphetamine and cannabis.” His situation is a “blow” and a “challenge” to the band: they have to go on tour without him.

Wu-Tang Clan: They are “hip-hop’s wildest, most talented collective, a nine-man crew steeped in kung-fu movies, mystagogic symbolism, and Staten Island’s drug trade.” But lately the band members have been busy with children and side projects: “U-God is working on a memoir that proudly delves into his rap sheet – `I got the most fuckin’ criminal record of anyone in the Wu,’ he claims.”

Kid Rock: “Cheap wine is good and Coldplay is bad on Rock’s upcoming fifth album” is the boldface leader; the piece singles out the new song “`Good Times and Cheap Wine,’ a stomping boogie that blasts everything from Twitter to Coldplay in favor of getting drunk and listening to old-time rock & roll.”

Gigi Hadid: This “Hot It Girl,” a Palestinian American, is “call-girl beautiful” – and in case you doubt it, there’s a photograph of her topless and clutching herself, mouth wide open. Oh, and by the way, she’s nineteen years old, and she’s a college student, “studying criminal pschology at the New School in New York. `School is where I don’t have to think about work,’ she says.”

Harry Styles: The One Direction singer and “Hot Golden Boy” has “inspired a new book: Anna Todd’s After, a soft-porn novel that’s already been touted as this year’s Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Tina Belcher: The “Hot Awkward Teen” is a cartoon antiheroine (Belcher, geddit?) who “owns her proudly geeky horn-dog urges,” such as the urge to “write brilliant `erotic friend fiction.’”

Miles Teller: The “Hot Actor” plans to skip a dinner for his new movie, Whiplash, in favor of “lounging around his room in the Bowery Hotel, watching football and `laying on my girlfriend’s ass.’” In high school, he was homecoming king – and also “a talented beer thief and `the kid people always wanted to get high …’” His vividest memory of his time as a student at NYU is of dating a girl who had her own dorm bedroom – “`a big perk, obviously.’” His previous movie is called Two Night Stand.

Young Thug: The “Hot Rapper” is“a perma-stoned oddball from Atlanta …” whose “approach to rhyming is uniquely weird, blowing past meaning into a realm of pure nonsense and gleeful vulgarity.” As a teen, he spent some years in juvenile detention after breaking a teacher’s arm. In the piece we see him smoking blunts and “bouncing his toddler-age daughter on his knee” in the “studio’s smoke-filled control room.”

Dave Grohl: The Foo Fighters Leader and Nirvana alumnus “stopped doing drugs – acid, mushrooms, and weed – when he was 20,” and he says that he has never done cocaine and heroin. That’s saying something, given that his Nirvana bandmate was Kurt Cobain – who is shown lighting cigarettes for both of them in a vintage photograph. But “I like wine,” Grohl tells the magazine. You should see him in his home studio after “a day of daddy duty.” It’s like this: “`I’ve done three-quarters of a bottle of wine and I’m in my underwear, totally rockin’ these riffs all night.’”

Kambo: This, FYI, is the “Hot Bad Trip” of the moment. It’s “an exciting new way to get high: `kambo,’ a.k.a. frog venom,” which leads you to “vomit bile for about 30 minutes … `Your temperature spikes, heart pounds, you feel bloated.” Then “what follows is a super-detox which leaves you feeling clear-minded and tranquil.”

Awful stuff – awful enough to make the photograph of cover of RS 235 (shown at the back of the current issue) seem dignified by comparison. It’s the five members of Fleetwood Mac half-dressed and in bed all together.

8 December 2014
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