What happened to Rolling Stone and gonzo journalism?
As a teenager, I remember buying Rolling Stone when we would pick up Easy Rider magazines at the quickie mart like we lived 1994’s Clerks in 1994, which I didn’t see until 2004, so the joke was literally on me. Yes, they sold us Easy Rider’s when we were fifteen and sixteen years old, which definitely had topless women. I remember chewing 1988 Donruss gum well into the late 1990’s, and I think I had at least 2 complete sets of 1988 Donruss, which now I don’t even know if they exist. I spent my entire childhood hoarding massive card collections of individual and card sets worth tens of thousands of cards, which I regularly checked the value of in Beckett. And now, I have no clue where my card collection is. It’s been decades, because I lost them bouncing around the game of life.
If you think eating ten year old gum is gross, I played in sewage run off like it was mountain spring water instead of city cigarette butts, used condoms broken beer bottles, broken homes, and broken dreams. Hell, we made rafts that sank, and when the creek flooded, the rafts would end up two miles downstream in the Target retention pond. The creek water in Wheaton, Illinois wasn’t always that bad, but we joked about the three finned fish that swam in circles we would catch, and then keep alive in our ten gallon fish-tank full of clams, muscles, and snails.
Of course, I had ten year old mutant goldfish I bought from Walmart for a quarter that lived forever. I dropped a light in the tank and electrocuted them, and then they jumped out of the water where I found them stiff and dried out. I threw the goldfish in the tank and they must have been shocked back to life. The uselessness of pet fish is lost on the fact I kept twenty-five cent gold-fish alive the entire decade of the 1990’s, which is probably why my dog is so well behaved. These goldfish are probably twenty pound carp at the bottom of Herrick Lake, but who knows.
The kids these days will never know what it was like to memorize baseball stats from baseball cards and boxscores in the Chicago Tribune. Man, getting a pack of Topps or Donruss baseball cards, a Marvel comic, Slurpee, and Reese’s after playing Pacman or Lethal Enforcer were the days. In the late 80’s, I lived with my cousins, because my mother and father were lost in the 1960’s and 70’s in the 1980’s, but I remember walking with my brothers, sister, and cousins to 7-Eleven and being in heaven. Sure I remember the chaos of my childhood, but I remember loving what little time I had with my cousins. We had to wait years for new arcade games, and now everyone has an arcade in their hands.
The entire quickie mart magazine and comic sections have been replaced by iPhones. I remember reading every Rolling Stone from about 1994-2004-ish like I remember reading every one of my foster mother’s Victoria’s Secrets, and I wonder why I ended up at The Ohio State University. I remember all the bands. I remember all their songs. I bought all their albums. I had binders and binders of music, and it’s all been replaced with the iPhone. I remember reading Fear and Loathing Las Vegas. I remember seeing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 2001, and then my English professors made me reread the book in 2015. Now, I don’t remember the last time I read Rolling Stone. I don’t remember when I stopped reading Rolling Stone. I don’t remember when I stopped seeing Kurt Loder on MTV or VH1 or whatever show he was on. Remember MTV Spring Break? Remember Pauly Shore, buddy? Laugh out loud. #SqueezeTheJuice
Why does everything seem like Rolling Stone changed after the Christina Aguilera and Brittany Spears rivalry ended? I was their age, so it was cool to me, but looking back, it was pretty perverted what Disney and the music industry did to those poor girls. Kevin Federline was my hero every bit as Mike Sorrentino and Charlie Sheen. Okay, I’m kidding about Charlie Sheen, but seriously. Men grow out of boys, and when we do, we see girls and women differently. And I am not okay with what the industry did to women like Christina Aguilera and Brittany Spears and Beyoncé and Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. What kind of sick psychopaths get off from taking choir girls and turning them into witches and whores of Babylon, figuratively and quite literally?
I was a kid, and just because I didn’t have the power to stop it, doesn’t mean I won’t have the power to stop it. Just because I haven’t stopped it, doesn’t mean I won’t stop it. Just because we haven’t stopped it, doesn’t mean we won’t stop it. On June 19th, 1984, I was the naked kid at the pool party chasing dollar bills like Nirvana’s Nevermind, which is now obviously pedo propaganda programming young minds, and we wonder why Kurt Cobain blew his brains out. #Adrenochrome
When I listen to Blood Sugar Sex Magik or Dude Ranch now, I hear entirely different music than I heard as a kid. Why didn’t I see the swastika around the rose? Why didn’t I see the Satanism? Why didn’t I hear the Satanism? Why was I so Third Eye Blind? I don’t know, but I feel like a boomer calling bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Metallica, and The Rolling Stones devil music, but it is devil music. What happened to Rolling Stone? What happened to gonzo journalism? What happened to the American Dream? Did they die with Hunter S Thompson?