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     Theoretical Tailspins: Reading "Alternative"
     Performance in Spin Magazine

     Jim Finnegan
     University of Illinois
     at Urbana-Champaign
     finnegan@uiuc.edu

     © 1999 Jim Finnegan.
     All rights reserved.
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          Media and commerce do not just cover but help
          construct music subcultures.... Subcultural
          capital is itself, in no small sense, a
          phenomenon of the media.
                 --Sarah Thornton, "Moral Panic, the
                   Media and British Rave"

          If you only talk to people who already agree
          with you, you are not a political
          organization. You're a support group.
                 --Elizabeth Gilbert (Spin April 1995)

  1. In the June 1995 issue of Details, Generation X was declared
     dead-on-arrival by the very author who had himself risen to
     instant fame only a few short years earlier with his first novel,
     Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. And indeed in the
     years since Douglas Coupland's Details pronouncement perhaps
     nothing has been assumed to be so thoroughly incorporated, so
     cliché, as the term Generation X. The common-sense consensus in
     both academic popular culture studies and subculture theory, as
     well as in the "alternative" youth culture industries themselves,
     is that Generation X is so passé, so universally un-hip, that
     even by remarking its passing one risks marking oneself as square
     beyond repair, like foolish white tourists who go to Harlem and
     speak nostalgically about the lost authenticity of the original
     1920s Cotton Club. The word Generation X is deader than dead. Yet
     media images invoking the iconography of Generation X continue to
     proliferate in the youth culture industries, particularly in the
     pop music, television, fashion, and junk-food markets. With the
     now familiar mix of manic-paced MTV jump-cuts, a multicultural
     brew of post-punk haircuts, piercings and retro-seventies grunge
     styles, neon-streak color bursts, roller-blade grrrl-power
     "attitude," and the requisite "cheese" of self-mocking irony,
     Pepsi's 1997 "Generation Next" campaign typifies the current
     alternative youth marketing scene, except perhaps insofar as its
     slogan came dangerously too near speaking the signifier that dare
     not speak its name.

  2. It is in this cultural climate of "alternative" simulacra, or a
     simulacra of alternativeness, that I want to take up theoretical
     issues surfaced by Spin magazine from the mid-1980s to the
     mid-1990s, as it sought to take avant-garde pop undergrounds and
     transform them, and itself, into post-avant-garde, alternative
     "overgrounds." My theoretical goal is to make a first pass at
     "reading" Spin magazine in a Cultural Studies context, and in the
     process map the boundaries of Andreas Huyssen's construction of
     the "post-avant-garde" as the hope of a political postmodernism.
     "Some hope!" you may be thinking. For many people with personal
     investments in youth subculture scenes Spin represents at best a
     laughable example of counterfeit "alternative" culture and at
     worst the very enemy of genuine subcultural resistance, the thing
     that threatens to rob a subculture scene of its essence of
     oppositionality.[1] While I agree with much of this line of
     argument, I am equally suspicious of the knee-jerk refusal of
     any-and-everything "commercial" expressed by so many subculture
     members and theorists who seem to have forgotten that, as Stuart
     Hall reminds us, opposition to the current state of capitalist
     society and culture does not necessarily mean a blanket refusal
     of the reproductive power of the commodity and commodification
     ("Meaning"). Opposition to postmodern capitalism, Hall points
     out, does not mean refusing a priori the productive and cultural
     forces of mass society and mass culture. Oppositional culture, or
     revolutionary ideology, means critiquing current hegemonic
     discourses of modernity/postmodernity; it also means rethinking
     and reconfiguring the cultural-material forces of
     modernity/postmodernity at multiple local, national, and
     trans-national levels.

  3. Perhaps what offends most about Spin is its brashness, its
     haughty prior claim to cosmopolitan cultural hippness. Spin
     magazine, like Andy Warhol's Pop Art interventions a generation
     earlier, presumes to have already obliterated and transcended
     those traditional boundaries between mass-cult and high art, pop
     culture and progressive oppositional politics. And it does so
     despite the fact that the contradictions of capitalist production
     and distribution, which fuel the worlds of Pop and mass-cult,
     have only become more pronounced--despite, that is, Spin's
     unlikely insistence that one can have a genuine cultural
     revolution and maintain a brand-name consumer lifestyle too.

  4. Realizing the unlikeliness of my own thesis, I nevertheless
     contend that Spin is a step in the right direction, and that Spin
     magazine may function as a popular progressive model--a structure
     of pop culture resistance. The Spin model offers a form that
     combines (sub)cultural opposition and mainstream fun, and it's a
     form that proved itself capable of keeping pace with the shifting
     forces of cultural Reaganism and the New Right in the late '80s
     and early '90s. The Spin model might, therefore, function as a
     counter-balance to the infinite adaptability presumed to be the
     defining characteristic of so-called "late capitalism": its
     apparently endless capacity to appropriate any-and-all forms of
     subcultural resistance, oppositional meanings, or semiotic
     critique.

  5. As such, Spin magazine also offers itself as an excellent case
     study to explore the practical implications of Michael Bérubé's
     claim that perhaps the single most important and difficult
     challenge for Cultural Studies critics is to think through the
     problematics that arise when academics theorize popular audiences
     and subcultures who are already theorizing themselves. This is an
     important challenge because, as Bérubé argues, the very
     "existence and autonomy of the academic professions," which have
     been under relentless (and frequently successful) attack by
     misinformation and de-funding campaigns from the cultural and
     political right, depends in no small part on mobilizing popular
     support from the very "ordinary people" which Cultural Studies
     frequently writes about and for, but not to; it depends, in other
     words, on our ability to popularize academic theory and
     criticism, which means "struggling for the various popular and
     populist grounds on which the cultural right has been trying to
     make criticism unpopular" (176). This is a difficult challenge,
     however, because academics must carry on this struggle in a world
     in which, as Bérubé notes, "there isn't a chance that academic
     criticism will ever be popular [and yet at the same time] the
     kind of criticism known as critical theory already is popular"
     (161). In such a context, academics must not only struggle for
     cultural ground that the Right explicitly targets; we must
     continue to build and strengthen coalitions with otherwise
     left-leaning mass-media culture industries, where much of the
     fall-out from the more explicit PC wars ultimately lands--that
     is, we must reach out to consumer subculture media like Spin, a
     magazine which in many ways is already popularizing academic
     criticism, but which frequently does so by rhetorically
     positioning itself against academic discourses portrayed as being
     either too "serious," too "obscure," or too "PC."

  6. Such academic work is of course already being done. Indeed, for
     many it's what Cultural Studies is all about in the first place.
     The most notable, sustained example of this kind of
     academic-popular criticism can perhaps be found in the pages of
     Social Text, which regularly brings together people from a wide
     range of cultural positions (people who work in various culture
     industries, mass media, and academic disciplines) in an attempt
     to forge alliances and cross the great theory/practice divide. In
     the Fall 1995 issue of Social Text, for example, Andrew Ross
     hosts a symposium on "The Cult of the DJ" in which Ross, two mass
     media music critics and two prominent dance music DJs discuss,
     among other things, the "changing role of DJs in the history of
     popular music" (67) and reasons for the general neglect of dance
     music in the mainstream music press. Though later on I will take
     issue with the way the term "mainstream music press" gets
     deployed in Cultural Studies subculture criticism, the discussion
     in this Social Text symposium, as well as in the more fully
     developed book-length symposium on alternative youth culture
     edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (Microphone Fiends: Youth
     Music and Youth Culture ), suggests that the relationship between
     academic discourses, "alternative" artistic practices or
     "underground" scenes, and commercial subculture/Gen X magazines
     like Spin is more complex, more symbiotic and, as I hope to
     demonstrate here, not so problematic as many academics might be
     conditioned to assume. It demonstrates, for one, that one doesn't
     have to dig too deep to find so-called "academic" cultural
     criticism lurking just below the surface of nearly everything in
     the Gen X scene, despite the fact that anti-academic rhetoric
     (bordering sometimes on outright neo-conservative
     anti-intellectualism) is standard Gen X fare.[2] It is within
     this more general context of symbiosis between critical theory,
     Madison Avenue, and oppositional subcultures that I want to apply
     a few Cultural Studies subcultural models to one specific
     "mass-cult" medium which explicitly markets itself as
     "oppositional." By working through the magazine's structure and
     then taking a close look at Spin's coverage of Riot Grrrl in 1992
     and a 1995 Diesel Jeans advertisement depicting two sailors
     kissing (which is an appropriation of an ACT UP/Gran Fury
     poster), I want to see what might happen if we try to take Spin
     magazine at "face-value." What happens if I accept their unlikely
     marketing claims that, in the acts of consuming/reading Spin, I
     too can identify with, and participate in, an on-going
     youth-music cultural "revolution" [see Figure 1]--what if I
     accept their claim that, with Spin's help, I too can be a Riot
     Grrrl [see Figure 2]?

      [Image]

      Figure 1. "The Voice of a
      Generation: Yours." Junk mail
      subscription renewal notice.
      Reprinted by permission of Spin.


      [Image]

      Figure 2. "For Girls about to
      Rock." "Flash" section article in
      Spin April 1992: 26. Reprinted by
      permission of Spin.

  7. Though Spin is frequently scorned (alike by academics, its own
     readers, and various self-identified subculture members) as being
     nothing more than a slick Gen X fashion magazine pimping
     corporate rock and Madison Avenue to the masses of middle-class
     (mostly male) suburban youth, the writers and editors of Spin
     repeatedly defend themselves against such criticism, both
     directly in their writing and indirectly in their editing and
     design choices, insisting that Spin is a genuine organ of an
     on-going youth revolution even if it is brought to you by the
     corporate world's latest-and-greatest, newest-and-coolest, mass
     marketing gimmicks. Spin's tenth anniversary issue, "Ten Years
     That Rocked the World," for example, is framed by two essays that
     specifically position Spin at the forefront of an on-going Gen X
     youth "Revolution"--a theme that is foregrounded in the title of
     this special issue, which, in its echo of John Reed's Ten Days
     That Shook the World, locates Spin within a longer historical
     tradition of radical journalism and a generationally-identified
     revolutionary temperament centered on images of "youth." Both
     publisher Guccione, Jr., in his editorial column ("TopSpin"), and
     Senior Contributing Writer Jim Greer, on the back page (what used
     to be called "SpinOut"), tell a retrospective narrative that
     links the evolution of Spin magazine with the emergence of a
     "cultural and generational wave at the beginning of its
     ascension" (Guccione, Jr., April 1995, 24); both define the
     mission of the magazine (Guccione refers to it as the magazine's
     "higher calling") as one that has evolved from an unselfconscious
     rock and roll naiveté into a self-conscious mission to give voice
     to "Gen X or whatever we're calling it this week" (Greer 224):

          [I]t was precisely our complete inappropriateness to the
          prevailing zeitgiest [of mid-'80s cynicism] that gave us our
          power and value and readership, all of which, eventually,
          became our conscious mission. We wrote about and for a
          then-disempowered generation, to which we belonged not (by
          now) by the citizenship of similar age, but by the universal
          solidarity of purpose. Our readership's culture and causes
          and self-defining discoveries were ours too, and so were
          their enemies. (Guccione, Jr. 24)

     Responding to those readers who repeatedly attack the magazine in
     "Point Blank" (the letters page) for merely exploiting the Gen X
     scene for commercial gain, Greer not only defends the mission of
     the magazine as a "rock magazine," he also defends the magazine's
     Madison Avenue commercialism as well, insisting that Spin is
     "more independent, both in terms of corporate structure and
     mindset, than most so-called independent record labels."[3]

  8. These are no small claims--claims, I suspect, at which most
     academics and subculture members would raise a skeptical
     eyebrow.[4] Nevertheless, I contend that, sometimes by design and
     sometimes in spite of itself, Spin does in fact manage to
     articulate what constitutes a popularized form of Cultural
     Studies criticism--a kind of Social Text for a particular mass
     youth audience as it were--in which the cultural-political
     meanings of youth music (not always rock) and "alternative"
     subculture scenes are explicitly addressed and in which issues of
     representation are repeatedly brought to the surface, even if
     academic discourses are specifically avoided. More specifically,
     I take issue with the kind of disgust that Dick Hebdige vents in
     Hiding in the Light towards the Face, the 1980s British
     subculture consumer magazine which likely inspired, or at least
     certainly influenced, the original conception and design of Spin.
     The first sections of this essay read Spin's Riot Grrrl coverage
     to address both Hebdige's critique of the kind of facile
     "flat-earth" postmodernism produced by the Face and Sarah
     Thornton's critique of the tendency of subculture theory to
     ignore the role mass media plays in the formation of youth
     subculture identities. The final sections engage the Diesel Jeans
     advertisement to question the larger tendency within Cultural
     Studies to read subcultural practices as models for more
     traditional forms of political organization.

     I. Generation X: A Generation By No Other Name?

  9. To say that Cultural Studies academics must get beyond their
     aversion towards Gen X posturing does not mean, however, that we
     must silence our criticisms of those who speak in the name of
     Generation X (including Spin), particularly since, as Andrew Ross
     has noted, the Generation X moment is one in which American youth
     are being scrutinized by a glut of journalistic and sociological
     hacks in the most "frankly exploitative way" since the late
     fifties (Microphone Fiends 4). Ross's own take on Gen X seems to
     be guardedly sympathetic at best, suggesting that the crucial
     questions for academics writing about Gen X at this juncture are:
     1) whether or not Gen X discourses can free themselves from the
     journalistic and sociological voices speaking from above on
     behalf of Generation X (even the more sympathetic ones such as
     Howe and Strauss's 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?) and 2)
     whether or not the "subject" of Gen X can be expanded beyond the
     narrow voice of white, middle-class heterosexual males--what Ross
     refers to as "those postadolescents who were temporarily confused
     but [are] more likely to succeed in the long run, and thus fill
     the target consumer demographic with high-end disposable incomes"
     (3), what one of my students has referred to as "all those
     Reality Bites kids, the MTV Real World kids or those people on
     NBC's Friends." Whether or not some construct of "alternative"
     culture (call it "Generation X" or whatever) can become a
     touchstone for a wider and more inclusive range of youth culture
     formations is by no means certain. And it will take more than
     academics analyzing grunge, rave, gansta rap, or riot grrrls in
     papers with Gen X in the title and delivering those papers in
     conventional academic venues to forge any such multicultural
     alliances. If "Gen X" fails to become common-coin to a broader
     range of youth subjects, then academics rushing to speak about or
     in the name of Gen X risk merely duplicating and sanctioning
     journalistic exploitative discourses.

 10. It is perhaps fittingly ironic then that at the very moment a
     1995 MLA Convention special session and a collection of academic
     essays was being prepared under the title "Generation X Culture,"
     Douglas Coupland had declared "Gen X" dead-on-arrival in an
     article published in Details, the preferred "cross-over" magazine
     for many Cultural Studies academics. According to Coupland, Gen X
     has been eaten alive by the marketing "trendmeisters," who have
     taken what he believes was a genuine "way of looking at the
     world"--an implicitly "authentic" and "original" aesthetic
     perspective--and they've turned it into just so much more white
     noise (72). That the term Gen X, along with the terms "slacker"
     and "grunge," has become one of the "most abused buzz words of
     the early '90s" is hardly debatable, nor is the fact that Gen X
     has been appropriated by Madison Avenue style industries to a
     degree that exceeds all previous generational signifiers, such as
     those of the 1920s and 1960s, which have also been reductively
     associated with avant-garde and counter-cultural movements. What
     is debatable, however, is Coupland's specious attempt to maintain
     his status as "author" of the concept "Generation X" based on the
     fact that he has penned a decent, but hardly exceptional,
     first-novel by the same name--a novel which I personally see as
     the epitome of the Gen X cliché, in which Coupland's
     aestheticized middle-class male suburban angst and self-indulgent
     narrative posturing cancels out whatever 1990s social realism may
     be at work in the novel. Generation X is a novel that may
     arguably mark, not the beginning of the Gen X moment, but rather
     the beginning of the very corporate marketing appropriations he
     now only half-heartedly bemoans (Coupland's own
     characteristically camp-ironic phrasing here is to say that it
     "was harsh").

 11. By expressing my personal distaste for Coupland's novel, I do not
     mean to deny the important role that the mass popularity of his
     novel has played in generating the cultural currency that Gen X
     signifiers now possess, however appropriated or narrow that
     currency may be. Nor do I mean to deny the very real economic,
     political, and cultural changes (everything that makes up the
     historical "reality" of the postmodern, late capitalist moment of
     our "accelerated culture") that inform and shape the generational
     angst of Coupland's novelistic world, however privileged and
     aestheticized the expression of that angst may be. Certainly I do
     not mean to align myself in any way with the openly hostile mass
     media cranks, such as David Martin in his infamous Newsweek
     piece, who dismissively attack self-identified Gen X
     twentysomethings as whiners who should just shut up and live with
     it.[5] My objection to Coupland's representation of Gen X is less
     an aesthetic judgment as it is an ideological judgement about the
     kinds of narrow subject positions and the historical narratives
     that his novel articulates.

 12. The way Coupland summarizes his novel and bemoans its mass-media
     appropriations in this Details article is itself enough to see
     the narrow focalization and ahistorical aestheticizing tendencies
     that make up Coupland's Gen X world. Though his three characters
     presumably live on "the fringe" and work at "dreary jobs at the
     bottom of the food chain," they do so because they, like
     Coupland, "decided to pull back from society and move there."
     Though they find themselves struggling to patch together
     individual identities in a dramatically reshaped environment,
     this environment is ultimately one that is, in Coupland's own
     words, a "psychic" reality more than a social or historically
     specific one. Coupland's claim that the worldview his characters
     manage to cultivate ("simultaneously ironic and sentimental")
     constituted "a new way of thinking I had never before seen
     documented" is merely another self-promoting throw-away comment
     which seeks to affirm the originality of Gen X as his baby at the
     same time that it attests to the representational "authenticity"
     of his characters as part of some larger Gen X whole--an
     authenticity that only gets asserted again as Coupland claims
     authorship in the very act of his "Gen-X-cide," as if it were his
     to kill or to declare null-and-void because something called
     "boomer angst-transference" has reduced his characters and ideas
     to Madison Avenue stereotypes and media clichés:

          The problems started when trendmeisters everywhere began
          isolating small elements of my characters' lives... and blew
          them up to represent an entire generation. Part of this
          misrepresentation emanated from baby boomers, who, feeling
          pummeled by the recession and embarrassed by their own
          compromised '60s values, began transferring their collective
          darkness onto the group threatening to take their spotlight.
          (72)

     The problem with such reductive narratives, staked out in neatly
     packaged us/them terms, is that they have in turn become the
     standard line of post-Coupland mass media Gen X historical
     clichés. (See, for example, the "valedictorian speech" delivered
     by Winonna Ryder's character in the opening scene of Reality
     Bites, as well as Douglas Rushkoff's self-aggrandizing,
     pseudo-intellectual, misinformed, and homophobic manifesto and
     introductory blurbs in The GenX Reader.[6])

 13. Whether or not one believes Coupland when he attempts to set the
     record straight and locate the "origins" of the title of his book
     in the final chapter of Paul Fussell's book Class rather than the
     name of Billy Idol's punk band is really beside the point.
     Historically, long before there was Douglas Coupland's Generation
     X, Generation X was there--both as a signifier and a signified,
     an attitude, a pose, an aesthetic, a sensibility, a way of
     looking at the world, but also the economic and cultural
     political realities of post-Fordist capitalism and cultural
     Reaganism. Whenever it can be said to have arrived, Gen X was
     certainly as much a punk sensibility as it was the kind of
     neo-beat Bohemianism Coupland now (re)locates in Fussell's X
     class. Fourteen years before Coupland's novel caught the wave of
     media interest in Richard Linklater's independent film Slacker,
     Billy Idol's Generation X opened at the Roxy Club, and a month
     prior to that the Vibrators released their single "Blank
     Generation." This on-going punk theme would be taken up again in
     1985, the first year of Spin, by the Replacements in "Bastards of
     Young":

          God, what a mess
          On the ladder of success
          Where you take one step
          And miss the whole first rung.
          Dreams unfulfilled
          You graduate unskilled
          But it beats picking cotton
          And waiting to be forgotten.

          CHORUS:
          We are the sons of no one
          Bastards of young
          We are the sons of no one
          Bastards of young
          The daughters and the sons...

          Clean your baby room
          Trash their baby boom
          Elvis's in the ground
          There'll be no beer tonight.
          Income tax deduction
          One hell of a function!
          It beats picking cotton
          And waiting to be forgotten.

          CHORUS:
          Now the daughters and the sons....
          A willingness to claim us
          You got no word to name us.

     If there is in fact an "X sensibility" that describes "a way of
     looking at the world" rather than "a chronological age," it is
     nonetheless a historically specific sensibility, one that is
     popular now because of the more general and on-going cultural and
     political backlash against youth, one that is not so new after
     all and one that's much more complex than Coupland's reductive
     Boomer v. Buster narrative suggests. One that should not
     therefore be limited to the privileged romanticisms of
     new-Bohemian aesthetes.

 14. I invoke this brief sound-bite from punk history (a kind of
     "roots-of-GenX" narrative) here, not to try to distinguish
     between "authentic" and co-opted strains of Gen X, but rather as
     a check to the tendency in many self-identified media and
     academic Gen X discourses to define Gen X as an uniquely late
     80's/early '90s scene or aesthetic. Regarding punk, I agree with
     David Laing, who argues that to talk about the history of "punk
     rock" is really to talk about a discourse--a loose, fluid
     (frequently contradictory) consensus of users between 1976 and
     1978 that can be found circulating in punk artifacts (records,
     zines), punk events (concerts, interviews, staged media hoaxes,
     and interventions), and punk institutions (underground,
     scene-specific record labels, clubs, and shops, as well as
     established record companies, radio stations, and the music
     press) (viii). If in the early 1990s a similar kind of new
     consensus or discourse formation emerged under the sign
     Generation X (even if there can be no such directly stated
     signifier), then one thing that seems to separate it from its
     punk predecessors is the lack of any clearly identifiable
     artifacts, events, and institutions. If there are no artifacts of
     Generation X but only a handful of novels and films about the
     lack of generational artifacts now taken up as artifacts in
     themselves, if with Generation X what we have is an emerging
     consensus that positions itself as a subculture but lacks any
     clearly identifiable subaltern scene, then what happens when we
     try to apply our tried-and-true academic questions about the
     mainstream's appropriation of subcultural resistant practices
     only to transform their original oppositional cultural politics
     into trite morality clichés for middle class fashion consumers?
     Does it make any sense to even ask whether or not GenX-identified
     symbols of disaffection and dissent have been appropriated as
     fashion symbols? Or should we be asking instead what happens when
     fashion symbols of images of disaffection and dissent are taken
     up and disseminated by people (like Coupland) who may or may not
     be disaffected but who nonetheless identify themselves as part of
     a newly disaffected generation emerging on the scene of their
     imagined post-Boomer wasteland?

 15. How then, in other words, do I deal with the fact that everything
     I have just described and critiqued as the narrow privileged
     range of Coupland's Gen X world frequently gets articulated in
     the pages of Spin as it presents itself as "the voice of a
     generation"? How do I explain the fact that, when I discussed
     Spin magazine and Generation X with my undergraduate rhetoric
     students in the spring of 1996, we ended up switching roles and I
     was the one defending Spin against their teacherly-intoned,
     ironic, and theoretically informed critiques? This essay has, in
     fact, largely grown out of that 1996 course, where I found myself
     in the unlikely position of defending Spin against my students,
     half of them senior English and Rhetoric majors ten years younger
     than myself. As part of this on-going debate, one of my students
     wrote an essay arguing that this whole Gen X thing is all just
     one big (M)TV media scam in the first place. He only
     half-ironically, and rather convincingly, argued that Gen X is
     something that was invented by the MTV-Spin-Geffen music
     industrial complex, that the whole thing is just so much more
     white noise--the projection of pop industry workers and academics
     in their lower thirties (he meant me) waxing nostalgic for a punk
     past that they never really lived in the first place: "The whole
     thing makes me want to barf," he wrote. "The fact is that there
     is/has been an ongoing and Real punk movement since the mid
     seventies and it lives and thrives in the streets and in the
     underground--where it belongs--and this Gen X crap is just yet
     another attempt to appropriate and somehow control the anarchy of
     real punk culture." And of course I think he's partly right on
     that. The thing that interests me, however, is that Spin magazine
     frequently says basically the same thing, and I think my student
     was getting some of his arguments against Spin for exploiting and
     appropriating the punk scene in their cover story "Greenday: The
     Year Punk Broke" (Nov. 1995) from that very article. And if
     that's the case, then what the heck does that mean!? What it
     means is you end up trying to "read" Spin by reading someone else
     reading Spin reading itself. Then you get thrown into theoretical
     tailspins--brought to you by the "Tailspinners," which is Spin's
     name for their list of this month's feature writers, editors, and
     contributors, who, not unlike the contributors in a typical issue
     of Social Text, are drawn from a wide range of cultural
     positions, including established music critics, new journalists,
     fiction writers, musicians, and artists, as well as pop culture
     academics and other public intellectuals.

 16. There is in fact another, perhaps even more significant,
     reciprocal chain of signification going on here alongside the
     example I just cited of my student's reading of Spin reading
     itself: take this sound-bite from Bob Guccione, Jr.'s January
     1994 "TopSpin" column specifically addressing the Gen X
     phenomenon, which is also where my student was getting some of
     his rhetorical ammunition against Spin and which pre-dates
     Coupland's Details "eulogy" of Gen X by six months:

          This year belonged to something that doesn't exist:
          Generation X.

          Generation X is a phantom, an hysterical hallucination of
          baby boomers, suddenly realizing they are no longer the life
          of the party.... With a speed befitting long-honed instincts
          of self-interest, they created the mythology of a blank
          generation that has inadvertently wandered onto the stage,
          awkward and whining, clueless as to what to do. (12)

     Unlike Coupland, however, Guccione isn't just haggling over Gen X
     property rights under the guise of narratives about "corporate
     marketing appropriations" (though that may be a factor too and a
     legitimate critique of Spin); rather, his complaint against
     Boomer-sponsored Gen X narratives is aimed at the insidious
     side-effects they are producing: deflecting attention away from
     the social and economic devastation wrought by 1980s
     Boomer-complicit Reaganism and, most importantly for Guccione,
     further deflating the politically energized atmosphere of youth
     cultures which had galvanized around the 1992 Rock the Vote
     campaign. Guccione concludes his year-end editorial on a hopeful
     note, predicting that 1994 would be "a watershed year. Because,
     like it did in 1968 and 1969, America is ready to burst again."
     The prediction itself turned out to be woefully off the mark.
     1994 of course brought instead Newt Gingrich's other,
     all-too-familiar kind of Republican revolution and ushered in the
     era of the Clinton compromise, and if anything, the usual
     academic suspects tell us, youth political apathy seems to be on
     the rise. Yet, Guccione's allusion to the barricades of 1968
     ironically locates Gen X once again back in the discourses of
     punk rock--not punk rock as my student would construct it (and as
     Coupland would re-construct Gen X), as an aesthetic "way of
     looking at the world" forever living in the wishful imaginary
     space of some "authentic" media-free underground streets, but
     rather punk rock as The Clash attempted to define it in
     explicitly extra-generational political terms on the back sleeve
     of their first single release "White Riot"/"1977":

          there is, perhaps, some tension in society, when
          overwhelming pressure brings industry to a standstill or
          barricades to the streets years after the liberals had
          dismissed the notion as "dated romanticism"... the
          journalist invents the theory that this constitutes a clash
          of generations. Youth, after all, is not a permanent
          condition, and a clash of generations is not so
          fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be
          a clash between rulers and ruled. (qtd. in Marcus Lipstick
          Traces 11-12)

 17. That Guccione, Jr. and Spin will repeatedly critique the concept
     of Generation X as a Boomer-Media-Madison Avenue phantom while at
     the same time marketing the magazine as the voice of a (Gen X)
     generation, and frequently do so in explicitly political terms,
     is, to say the least, a contradiction, one that's not easy to
     work through. But it's a contradiction that we will have to get
     used to if academics are going to, in Huyssen's terms, "catch on"
     and work in the same postmodern, post-avant-garde world that has
     been "home" to Spin and the youth cultures and subcultures it has
     been reporting and disseminating since the mid 1980s.

     II. "Bone-Crunching Contradictions" and Theoretical Tailspins:
     Spin is Not Just a Magazine

 18. To live in the postmodern moment of contemporary youth cultures,
     according to Andrew Ross, is to live in a world in which
     confronting "bone-crunching contradictions" is the norm, a "daily
     item" (1). The particular "contradiction" that Ross uses to frame
     the academic/pop-cult dialogue taking place in Microphone Fiends
     (co-edited by Tricia Rose) is the fact that, in the opening
     feature page of Vibe's preview issue, Greg Tate launched the
     first major commercial magazine devoted to hip hop by hosting a
     "swinging assault on hip hop commercialism consciously spoken
     from within the belly of the Madison Avenue beast" (1). This is
     precisely the kind of contradiction that is both found on the
     pages of Spin and that constitutes the underlying logic of the
     magazine's mission, design, and style--a logic that may or may
     not be merely another face of the logic of consumerism as we have
     no doubt been conditioned to assume.

 19. As a way of framing Spin's specific coverage of Riot Grrrl in
     1992, let's skim the surface of a few brief, relatively random
     samples of Spin's own spin on its relationship to the postmodern:

     Spins

 20. Everything in Spin spins off the metaphors of the word spin.
     There was a good deal of media flap back in April of 1985, the
     date of Spin's first issue, as to just what it meant to have
     another mass-circulation rock magazine enter the market. Was Spin
     Rolling Stone revitalized for a new emergent youth culture
     formation (a rock re-formation)? Is it Rolling Stone for an
     accelerated culture? If so, how so--as in merely having
     "advanced" one generation or as in having "progressed" (as in
     accelerating the revolution)? Or is the title of Spin merely a
     self-reflexive wink at a consumer culture gone mad, spinning out
     of control--spinning directionlessly in a world where there is no
     more up or down? Is "spin" a self-conscious, self-implicating
     metaphor for postmodern vertigo? Or, does it refer to political
     spin? A particular political spin or more generally the politics
     of spin at work in a media society, a testimony to the power of
     media in shaping the spin of the world? Or, is it something even
     larger in its philosophical implications: an entrance sign into a
     poststructuralist world where all meaning is relational and
     contingent? A world where Guccione's editorial column is titled
     "TopSpin" because that's how he both is positioned and positions
     himself--how he is positioned within the management hierarchy of
     the magazine itself, but also how he is socially positioned in
     terms of class, race, and gender more generally? Or, is the
     answer the obvious one: all of the above?

 21. "Spins" is also the title of the album review section in the
     magazine, which (until recently) came framed by the following
     "Handy Omniscient Rating System" and which is typical of Spin's
     logic of the "bone-crunching contradiction":

          Green  = Go directly to your local record
                   store.  Buy this album.
                   Immediately.  Kill if you must.

          Yellow = Whoa! Slow down pal! This album is
                   pretty good, but you can't buy
                   everything in the store.  Can you?

          Red    = Stop it.  Put that down.  Go buy
                   something to eat instead.  You have
                   to eat, too, you know.

     But what kinds of critical space does Spin open up with such a
     gesture when the reviewers then go on to make serious critical
     distinctions about specific albums up for review? And exactly
     what irony survives when those reviews are framed by columns of
     advertising for these same newest CD releases? What picture is
     being drawn here of the reciprocal relationship between music
     industry advertising goals and those of Spin (an alternative
     music media industry) as it implicates itself in this process by
     drawing attention to the fact that a good review means you should
     go out and buy the merchandise? What does it mean, however, when
     each and every month anywhere from six to ten albums get the
     green light and another half dozen or so get the yellow? What
     narratives of youth poverty and affluence are being invoked here
     by this ironic ratings guide? How does it map out consumer
     categories? Here's one possible reading of the implied ironic
     critique:

          Green  = poverty/the poverty of desire. Urban
                   kids (implicitly of color?) killing
                   for a pair of sneakers or a cd,
                   killing for the (false) "image"
                   behind some mass-produced band or
                   album.

          Yellow = affluence/the boredom of getting what
                   you want. You suburban white kids who
                   can buy everything, plus the guilt of
                   knowing that your satiated poverty of
                   (false) desire is got by someone
                   else's (real) poverty.

          Red    = junkie/consumerism itself as a
                   cultural psychosis. The shop-aholic
                   and the alternative music aficionado
                   collapsing into one with Spin
                   magazine as simultaneously the
                   ultimate aficionado and the
                   compulsive consumerist ideologue.

 22. In the movement from "green" to "yellow" to "red," Spin not only
     offers a critique of advanced capitalism's multiple forms of
     false consciousness (affecting both the haves and the have-nots),
     they also ground these "individual" or internalized moments of
     false consciousness in a deeper, cultural logic of consumer
     society, which, like the shop-aholic/aficionado, is driven
     towards a commodification of desire to the exclusion of basic
     social needs ("you have to eat, too, you know"). Yet, there's
     still the question of gauging the end effect of Spin's ironic
     posturing and whether such irony facilitates or nullifies the
     possibility of any "cultural critique" taking place at all. Has
     Spin so thoroughly implicated itself in the advertising function
     of album reviews that it frees a space for critical narratives to
     speak themselves and, in that way, paradoxically lays bare an
     otherwise hidden logic of consumer capitalism? Or is the irony
     here (and throughout Spin more generally) merely another
     superficial postmodern wink at the reader that reasserts a
     consensus ideological space for business-as-usual in a world
     where "there is nowhere else to go but the shops" (Hebdige 168)?

 23. Similar sets of ironic questions can be generated by just about
     everything in the pages of Spin.

     AIDS: Words From the Front

 24. This is serious spin by Spin dropping its standard line of
     parodic Thompson-esque outlaw journalism. The fact that from
     January 1988 Spin maintained a sustained monthly discussion of
     AIDS under the subheading "Words From the Front" and gave it a
     central place in the magazine is itself somewhat remarkable and
     commendable. However, it may also, as does everything else in
     Spin, raise more questions than it answers--which, regarding AIDS
     discourses, sometimes is and sometimes isn't necessarily a good
     thing. How, for instance, should one read Spin's long-running
     series of stories on whether or not HIV is the cause of AIDS,
     particularly as they take a pro-sex stance and popularize certain
     Cultural Studies analyses of AIDS discourses (e.g., Crimps's
     AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism)? On the one hand,
     these articles appear to popularize the Cultural Studies
     assumption that "AIDS does not exist apart from the practices
     that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it" (Crimp,
     "AIDS" 3). As such they may successfully deploy the discourses of
     pop culture journalism to deconstruct medical/scientific
     discourses and their authoritative claims to objective knowledge,
     demonstrating that, when it comes to AIDS, "no clear line can be
     drawn between the facticity of scientific and nonscientific
     (mis)conceptions" (Treichler 37). Celia Farber's "Words From the
     Front" articles in particular seem to give popular voice to what
     Crimp describes as "the genuine concern by informed people that a
     full acceptance of HIV as the cause of AIDS limits research
     options, especially regarding possible cofactors" ("How to Have
     Promiscuity" 238). They certainly seem to "perform a political
     analysis of the ideology of science" and in doing so also take a
     pro-sex stance. On the other hand, one might also argue that
     Farber's articles do so in a regressive tabloid fashion by
     celebrating Duesberg as a "maverick hero" without critiquing
     Deusberg's views on the causes of AIDS, or without adequately
     reporting the controversy surrounding those views (as The Village
     Voice did when Ann Fettner characterized Deusberg's views as a
     "regression to 1982" when the medical community viewed AIDS as a
     collection of diseases related to "the gay life style" [see Crimp
     238]). Other AIDS articles written for Spin are even more
     suspect, suggesting that Spin's preoccupation with the HIV
     controversy may be motivated more by a need to confirm a
     political-medical "establishment" conspiracy against "sex" than
     by a genuine desire to engage in AIDS cultural analysis-activism.
     If this is the case (and I'm not concluding here that in fact it
     is), what then separates Spin's reporting from the kinds of
     exploitative reporting that Crimp finds in the pages of the New
     York Native, which, according to Crimp, merely trots out "the
     crackpot theory of the week" and exploits "the conflation of sex,
     fear, disease, and death in order to sell millions of newspapers"
     (Crimp 237-238)? Certainly the fact that Spin would run an
     article rehashing the "poppers theory" (Nov. 1994) in a totally
     unselfconscious article that makes no mention of the homophobic
     medical-politics surrounding this theory is cause for some
     concern if not outright alarm. If silence equals death, and it
     does, Spin is at least not silent. But the fact that silence
     equals death does not, of course, mean that the inverse is always
     true: sound does not always equal life. Sometimes sound isn't
     voice, it's just more noise, and, as ACT UP Cultural Studies
     analyses of AIDS discourses have all too frequently demonstrated,
     some kinds of noise can be deadlier than viruses. By positioning
     itself on the "front lines" of the AIDS War, has Spin succeeded
     in articulating and popularizing an ACT UP frame of reference on
     AIDS, as well as, in the process, popularizing Cultural Studies
     notions of hegemony as a "war of position," not least perhaps in
     Spin's 1989 infamous ad-stunt/political intervention of including
     a free condom with one of its special issues?[7] Or, has Spin
     merely appropriated ACT UP rhetoric as a kind of cutting-edge
     neo-punk style, exploiting the AIDS epidemic and PWAs as a way of
     furthering its own self-promoting image of Spin as front-line pop
     (i.e., Spin as shades of Michael Stipe)?

 25. In fact, Spin's relationship with the tabloid-style New York
     Native may be even more complex and problematic, as is made clear
     in Celia Farber's outrageously off-the-mark "TopSpin" editorial
     on ACT UP published in May 1992. Most outrageous (it would be
     funny if it weren't so dangerously misinformed) is Farber's
     completely unselfconscious presumption to lecture ACT UP on the
     dangers of being "absorbed" by the mainstream media. ACT UP and
     other activists need to realize, she concludes in her lecture
     about the dangers of being too "entertaining," that the
     mainstream media always gets the last word: "We don't use the
     media: the media uses us. And the government uses the media. If
     AIDS activism did not exist, as a vent system for AIDS fury, the
     government would have reason to worry. As it is they're grinning
     from ear to ear" (12, my emphasis). Talk about a bone-crunching
     contradiction! Who's the "we" here? If Spin ain't "the media"
     then who is? Again, if it weren't so dangerously inane, it might
     be funny. I won't bother to detail the contradictions here,
     except to note that it's hard to imagine how it is that Farber,
     who has led the charge of Spin's own brand of mass media
     appropriations of ACT UP activism, can be so blind as to turn
     around and try to blame successful ACT UP media interventions for
     derailing some imaginary "AIDS fury" that would otherwise unleash
     itself, when of course those ACT UP and Gran Fury successes are
     themselves the only reason Farber can conjure up the signifier of
     "AIDS fury" in the first place.[8]

     Sex in the '90s

 26. After ACT UP AIDS activism had lost much of its radical,
     alternative cachet, Spin shifted gears in 1995 and ran a series
     of self-identified, third-generation, sex-positive "feminist"
     articles under the heading "Sex in the 90s"--which again raises
     questions about the commodification of oppositional culture. How,
     for example, should one read Elizabeth Gilbert's feature article
     on "feminist porn" titled "Pussy Galore" (April 1995)? Here is an
     article that has clearly been informed by Cultural Studies
     positions on the anti-porn/"pro-sex" debate within
     feminism--positions such as those articulated in Ross's chapter
     on "The Popularity of Pornography" in No Respect, or in the
     Social Text special issue "Sex Workers and Sex Work." Again,
     however, one might ask whether this article, or similar Spin
     discussions under the heading "Sex in the '90s," survives the
     seemingly masculinist framing devices that accompany it? Take,
     for instance, the way this article gets framed on the contents
     page: "Pussy Galore. Sick of the same old sleaze, feminist
     pornographers are getting off their backs and behind the cameras.
     Meet the revolutionaries in the flicks-for-chicks business. By
     Elizabeth Gilbert." This blurb, along with the rest of the
     contents blurbs, is printed over a black-and-white still photo
     from an S/M film covered in the article depicting a topless woman
     gazing down at her outstretched feet which are being suckled by a
     blond submissive dressed in a teddy and collar. In small print
     off to the side is the following photo caption: "Toe-lickin'
     good: A scene from An Elegant Spanking. See Elizabeth Gilbert's
     article on feminist porn." Of course, the first academic question
     is likely to be (and with emphasis), who is being invited to gaze
     into such a "revolutionary" porn world? Or rather, whose gaze is
     being invited to gaze? Do such phrases as "pussy galore,"
     "toe-lickin' good," or "flicks-for-chicks" appropriate
     masculinist porn-speak and rearticulate it in a sex-positive
     feminist-porn voice? Or are we seeing instead the limits of such
     acts of appropriation which have become increasingly commonplace
     in Gen X underground scenes and discourses? Is such a world,
     framed as it is here, revolutionary or merely exoticized for the
     titillation of male readers looking to rationalize their
     heterosexist porn appetites? Or, are we freed from struggling
     with these questions because Elizabeth Gilbert raises most of
     them herself in the article, as when she puts down her pen and
     picks up the camera to shoot some footage for a director while on
     the set of an S/M film, remarking in retrospect that she felt
     more like a tourist than a pornographer?

     "The A to Z of Alternative Culture"

 27. Let's take as one final example the issues raised when one
     attempts to analyze Craig Marks's multiply-ironic introduction to
     Spin's April 1993 "A to Z of Alternative Culture," a highly
     eclectic, kitsch "dictionary" of what it means to be Gen X in
     1993 that lists, in mock encyclopedia style, items ranging from
     consumer products like Snapple to "in" bands like Nirvana and TV
     shows like The Simpsons, as well as underground subculture scenes
     like rave and Riot Grrrl. Marks's introduction to this feature
     offers itself up as a perfect example of Spin's trademark ironic
     style (marked by MTVish Gen X posturing):

          The outpouring of scribblings recently about the generation
          born in the '60s and '70s reads like a misguided conclusion
          to that psych experiment where twins are separated at birth
          to answer the nurture versus nature debate. Could it be that
          these profiles of you and yours are nothing but covert
          attempts to reduce a complex, confounded generation to its
          lowest common denominator, thereby making it easier to blame
          you for all that's wrong with the world, and easier to
          exploit you when there's a new soft drink on the market?
          Does the word "duh" mean anything to you?

          What your birthdate does provide you is common ground, a
          shared vocabulary. The items we've selected, when added
          together, do not equal your thoughts, feelings, fears, and
          aspirations. That's for you and your confidants to sort out.
          There is, though, a lexicon that develops among the members
          of a generation, a secret language that's so pervasive it's
          taken for granted. Asking a 40-year-old to comprehend a
          conversation between two 24-years-olds is as fruitless an
          exercise in code-breaking as reading the Daily Racing Form.
          What you'll find on the following pages is more the result
          of sifting through the contents of your pants pockets than
          of unlocking the door to your soul. We'll save that for next
          year's anniversary issue. (38)

     What does it mean when Spin, which already ironically sells
     itself as THE monthly tour-guide to "Alternative" scenes,
     publishes an A to Z tour-guide to Alternative Culture? What does
     it mean when the music editor then writes an introduction to this
     pastiche cultural dictionary by announcing that these profiles
     you are about to read are reductive and commercially exploitative
     and that such a list could never really be compiled except as a
     set of already appropriated mass media stereotypes of a
     self-identified generational youth culture that could never
     really exist? What does it mean when Craig Marks goes on to
     suggest, in a seeming reversal, that a generational lexicon is
     "so pervasive it's taken for granted," and cites as proof of its
     existence the fact that it lies in the shared consumer goods
     found in the contents of our pockets?

 28. Two months later, the editors throw into the mix, as Spin always
     does, that one last twirl: a reader's response to the A-Z
     tour-guide to the
     always-already-thoroughly-appropriated-GenX-scene--a letter
     published by Spin further implicating Spin as it simultaneously
     represents, constructs, and exploits the scene that never quite
     yet was:

          Just when I thought SPIN had a clue, we get "The A to Z of
          Alternative Culture." Why can't people realize that the
          basis of an alternative culture is that it can't be
          alphabetized? A better title for the piece would have been
          "26 Steps to Becoming Trendy"--or better yet "What's out for
          '93."

     Insofar as the article at issue is a simulacra of Spin, each of
     these substitute titles may be read as already popularized
     meta-commentaries on what it means to read Spin magazine itself.
     Staked out here between these two alternative titles to Spin's
     alternative tour-guide, lies a wonderfully complex and
     illustrative debate about the relationship between popularized
     postmodernism and essentializing patterns in Cultural Studies
     subculture criticism.

     "26 Steps to Becoming Trendy": Spin as Just a Magazine

 29. Of course, Spin magazine is only one of a growing number of
     mass-circulation pop-cult magazines which have learned, in a
     sense, to talk the talk of academic theory and cultural
     criticism. And even though I've invested more time than I'd care
     to admit in this paper and I consider myself a "fan" of Spin
     (whatever that might actually be), I, too, am sometimes inclined
     to dismiss it wholesale as so many of Spin's own readers do. I
     too am tempted to read Spin as merely a tour guide to what's
     trendy--to interpret Spin according to the logic of Hebdige's
     reading of the Face as a magazine that articulates nothing more
     than a facile, flat earth postmodernism in which everything is
     always already commercially appropriated, where the line between
     the ads and the articles isn't just blurred, it collapses
     altogether, and for Hebdige it always collapses into the ad.

 30. Borrowing Jean-Luc Godard's famous maxim "This is not a just
     image. This is just an image," Hebdige reads the Face as a way of
     marking the differences between what he sees as "a just magazine"
     (Ten.8) and "just a magazine" (the Face). Comparing these two
     British youth culture magazines on points of design, content, and
     style, Hebdige maps a cultural terrain between, on the one hand,
     the last remnants of an avant-garde world (a three dimensional
     world of words capable of historical perspective and motion over
     time) and, on the other hand, the emergent dominance of a
     postmodern, post-avant-garde world (a flat depthless world of
     images happily fixated on its own eternally changing
     kaleidoscopic present). According to Hebdige, Ten.8, with its
     more traditional magazine style and print-dominated three-column
     layout, is a magazine capable of offering up "knowledge of
     debates on the history, theory, politics and practice of
     photography," where as the Face, with its oversized "continental
     format," its emphasis on photo images and a design that blurs the
     boundaries between article and ad, ends up offering nothing but
     flat surfaces: "'street credibility,' 'nous,' image and style
     tips for those operating within the highly competitive milieux of
     fashion, music and design" (158):

          The Face is a magazine which goes out of its way every month
          to blur the line between politics and parody and pastiche;
          the street, the stage, the screen; between purity and
          danger; the mainstream and the "margins." (161)

          [...]

          All statements made inside the Face, though necessarily
          brief are never straightforward. Irony and ambiguity
          predominate. They frame all reported utterances whether
          those utterances are reported photographically or in prose.
          A language is thus constructed without anybody in it (to
          question, converse or argue with). Where opinions are
          expressed they occur in hyperbole so that a question is
          raised about how seriously they're meant to be taken. Thus
          the impression you gain as you glance through the magazine
          is that this is less an "organ of opinion" than a wardrobe
          full of clothes (garments, ideas, values, arbitrary
          preferences: i.e., signifiers)....

          As the procession of subcultures, taste groups, fashions,
          anti-fashions, winds its way across the flat plateaux, new
          terms are coined to describe them.... The process is
          invariable: caption/capture/disappearance (i.e.,
          naturalisation). [...] Once named, each group moves from the
          sublime (absolute now) to the ridiculous (the quaint, the
          obvious, the familiar). It becomes a special kind of joke.
          Every photograph an epitaph, every article an obituary. On
          both sides of the camera and the typewriter, irony and
          ambiguity act as an armour to protect the wearer
          (writer/photographer; person/people written
          about/photographed) against the corrosive effects of the
          will to nomination. Being named (identified; categorised) is
          naff; on Planet Two it is a form of living death. (170)

     Hmmmmm. Smells like team Spin. What's in Spin is out because
     being in Spin marks one as having already been "sold out" long
     enough to be included in Spin. Regardless of how frequently Spin
     may implicate itself in the ironic world of its own making, such
     acts of self-implication are themselves, however, only part of
     the language of simulacra... every month the world of youth
     cultures and pop is made anew in the pages of Spin only to be
     declared dead already, only in turn to be made new and declared
     already dead again next month. Or is it?

     "What's Out For '93": Spin as Not Just a Magazine

 31. The Spin reader who wants to dismiss the magazine as a
     consumerist tour guide to what's trendy also, unwittingly,
     acknowledges in his letter that one might read Spin as a way of
     gauging what's not authentic alternative culture--as a guide to
     "What's out." The logic underlying such a critique reflects Sarah
     Thornton's argument that (as well as perhaps Spin's
     self-conscious realization of the fact that) mass subculture
     consumer magazines such as the Face, however ironically scorned
     by people who identify themselves with underground scenes,
     nevertheless play a crucial, constitutive mediating role in the
     formation of subculture scenes and identities. In "Moral Panic,
     the Media and British Rave Culture," Thornton challenges the way
     Cultural Studies subculture theories "tend to position the media
     and its associated processes in opposition to and after the fact
     of subculture" (189):

          Their segregation of subcultures from the media derives, in
          part, from an intellectual project in which popular culture
          was excavated out from under mass culture (that is,
          authentic people's culture was sequestered from mediated,
          corporate culture). In this way, the popular was defended
          against the disparagement of "mass society" and other
          theorists; youth could be seen as unambiguously active
          rather than passive, creative rather than manipulated. In
          practice, however, music subcultures and the media--popular
          and mass culture--are inextricable. In consumer societies,
          where sundry media work simultaneously and global industries
          are local businesses, the analytical division eclipses as
          much as it explains. (188)

     We see this kind of interpretive "eclipse" at work in Hebdige's
     account of the "invariable" process he maps out regarding the
     relationship between the Face and the subculture scenes it
     covers: "caption/capture/disappearance." In her reading of
     British rave scenes, however, Thornton finds that, in the
     mainstream as well as in niche/zine media (and everything in
     between), one can chart a relationship that looks more like
     caption/formation/caption/re-formation--a reciprocal relationship
     in which subcultures are not "subversive until the very moment
     they are represented by the mass media," but rather "become
     politically relevant only when they are framed as such,"
     frequently by disparaging mass media/tabloid coverage which
     becomes "not the verdict but the vehicle of their resistance"
     (184). Moreover, Thornton argues that subculture theorists need
     to acknowledge the existence of mass media that cater
     specifically to counter-cultural desires of young people, what
     she refers to as "subcultural consumer magazines."

     III. (White) Riot Grrrl: who really wants a riot right now?

 32. Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald take up a similar post-Hebdige
     position in "Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution and
     Women in Independent Rock," where they conclude that the limits
     of Riot Grrrl "revolutionary" rock are to be found in the
     movement's self-imposed media black-out, some of which has
     remained in effect since 1992. Though they concede that Riot
     Grrrls have legitimate reasons to fear and loathe masculinist
     "mainstream" media and the gaze of academia, both of which
     threaten (in different ways of course) to exploit and trivialize
     the movement and incorporate it into various forms of cultural
     tourism, Gottlieb and Wald conclude that such a stance against
     academia and the "popular" is ultimately politically regressive
     and elitist:

          In pinning its resistance to the undifferentiated
          "mainstream," Riot Grrrl risks setting itself up in
          opposition to the culturally "popular," as well as to the
          political status quo; in this they echo the collegiate
          erudition and elitism of independent music generally.
          Moreover, in rejecting the popular, Riot Grrrl may preclude
          the possibility of having a broad cultural or political
          impact.... If Riot Grrrl wants to raise feminist
          consciousness on a large scale, then it will have to
          negotiate a relation to the mainstream that does not merely
          reify the opposition between mainstream and subculture.
          (271)

     This criticism is perhaps especially poignant when one considers
     that many Riot Grrrls are themselves current or former graduate
     students and that much of Riot Grrrl's neo-punk "revolution"
     resides in the translation of academic feminist critical theory
     into everyday subcultural practice. For the purposes of my
     argument here, however, what's most relevant about Gottlieb and
     Wald's essay is not only the fact that their conclusions about
     the limits Riot Grrrl counter-hegemonic practices echo Thornton's
     analysis of the symbiotic, constitutive relationship between
     media and subculture identity but also the performative criticism
     that their essay enacts by violating, in the acts of composition,
     presentation, and publication, Riot Grrrl resolve to resist
     incorporation in/by the gaze of both "mainstream" media and
     academia. This is made all the more clear when one considers the
     ways Gottlieb and Wald undermine their own analysis by
     constructing Riot Grrrl as an "original" underground that
     "emerges as a bona fide subculture" and then gets "discovered" by
     mainstream journalism and subsequently popularized (262-263).

 33. This is precisely the kind of violation for which Spin magazine
     is routinely vilified, again by academics, subculture members,
     and so-called "mainstream" readers alike. Moreover, Gottlieb and
     Wald's implicit rationale for committing such a violation is
     identical to that which is frequently asserted in the pages of
     Spin as it reports and disseminates "alternative" underground
     scenes to "mainstream" readers--namely, "politics," or in the
     words of Gottlieb and Wald, the "possibility of [Riot Grrrl]
     having a broad cultural or political impact." Compare this
     statement to Spin's own coverage of Riot Grrrl just prior to the
     movement's semi-official 1992 media blackout in the magazine's
     "Flash" section (a series of short articles in the front of the
     magazine devoted to, among other things, alerting readers to new
     and emerging underground scenes):

          When asked about their inspiration, many of the women
          involved cite Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of Bikini Kill.
          Hanna, however, doesn't exactly have mass-media savvy--she
          declined to speak to Spin and, with that, gave up the
          opportunity to reach thousands with her motivating voice.
          (Furth 26)

     To punctuate their certainly self-serving critique further, and
     to give Riot Grrrl the benefit of the mass media advertising plug
     that Hanna expressly tried to refuse, Furth concludes her brief
     Spin article by listing Riot Grrrl Washington D.C. contact
     addresses for "girl bands" and "girls interested in Riot Grrrl"
     (a rhetorical gesture that echoes Spin's monthly Amnesty
     International updates, which appeared on donated ad-space for 12
     months in 1991-92, including an entire special issue guest-edited
     by Amnesty International Executive Director Jack Healey in
     November 1991).

 34. The bottom line from both Gottlieb and Wald and Spin's
     perspective seems to be the same: if you really want to have a
     progressive riot (or a cultural revolution), first you have to
     assemble a crowd. And you can only do that by reaching out to
     Others, even to those (or perhaps especially to those), who
     threaten to incorporate your slogans, your "look," and your
     politics into their own agendas and their own practices and
     pleasures of everyday life; and you can only do that if you're
     willing to work in the mediums of the popular. Spin sound-bite:

          Sinéad O'Connor: I don't believe that rock'n'roll is only
          about entertainment.

          SPIN [Bob Guccione, Jr.]: I don't either, but it's certainly
          an entertainment medium. ("Special Child" 48)

     Or, as Elizabeth Gilbert would write in her article on feminist
     porn after being snubbed by a NOW spokesperson who refused to
     distinguish between Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, Sr. and his
     son who publishes and edits Spin: "If you only talk to people who
     already agree with you, you are not a political organization.
     You're a support group." Spin writers and editors frequently echo
     academic critiques of the traditional divisions between the
     margins and the mainstream--as they do, for instance, in an
     article on Stone Temple Pilots (August 1995): "As mainstream rock
     bands continue to emulate indie ways, they become lightening rods
     for ridicule. 'Poseurs!' cry the righteous arbiters of indie. But
     shouldn't we encourage the mainstreaming of indie values?"
     (Azerrad 57). This is the core of Spin's theory of its own
     relationship to mass culture--this is at once its angle into the
     market of subculture consumer magazines and its moral mission,
     what Guccione, Jr. calls its "higher calling."

 35. The arguments against Spin successfully articulating or
     performing any such cultural criticism should by now be familiar.
     Regarding Spin's Riot Grrrl coverage specifically, one might
     argue that Spin doesn't perform an act of criticism by publishing
     a "Flash" article on Riot Grrrl and that it performs, instead, a
     double act of Madison Avenue mainstream incorporation. On the one
     hand, it appropriates Riot Grrrl interventions to serve a
     masculinist spectacle of rock ideology, the kind of thing that
     Ross defines as "some homosocial version of young, straight males
     out on the town, partying, and so on." On the other hand, it
     appropriates an academic critique of the relationship between
     popular culture and mass media to serve its own
     self-congratulatory, self-promoting, moralistic editorial voice.
     One might argue that Riot Grrrl revolution is, to return to
     Hebdige's phrasing, merely the latest commodity to appear in
     Spin's endless parade of revolutionary youth cultures as fashion
     that it deploys to better market its own self-styled image of
     "street credibility." In this regard, one might note that the
     word "Grrrl"--which in Riot Grrrl usage performs a multi-valent
     intervention into, and recuperation of, the language of
     patriarchy, as well as a critique of the woman-centered
     discourses of mainstream feminism--appears on the pages of Spin
     as "girl." Spin articles do give a certain voice to Riot Grrrl
     concerns about masculine-media appropriations: "At a recent CBGB
     Bikini Kill show, many guys panted at the prospect of seeing
     Hanna topless (she had doffed her shirt at a previous gig),
     turning a potential act of defiance into an oglefest." But those
     same Spin articles also tend themselves to "ogle" at and invite
     male readers to be titillated by Riot Grrrl displays of women's
     rage: "Some of the older females present saw the show as just a
     Poly Styrene/X-Ray Spex retread. But to the younger, less jaded
     Goo-girls, Hanna is the Angriest Girl. They understand. They see
     this scary, sexy girl, who pogos while singing about sexual
     abuse, as the future of punk rock--where girls can have fun for a
     change." With the final sentence of the article collapsing Riot
     Grrrl anger into Cindy Lauper's "girls just wanna have fun," one
     might conclude that, indeed, "violation" is the appropriate word
     to use regarding Spin's Riot Grrrl reporting and its diluted
     critical performances--that Spin's refusal to respect Riot
     Grrrl's "no" in response to its media advances constitutes a form
     of sexual violence.

 36. Though there is no doubt some validity to each of these claims,
     the problem with such arguments is that: 1) they all depend upon
     a return to an interpretive paradigm that constructs Riot Grrrl
     subculture as existing apart from and outside of the multiple
     levels of media (mass media, tabloid media, niche or zine media,
     as well as subculture consumer media, and, I would add, academic
     media), which are in fact the materials out of which subcultures
     and undergrounds are made; and 2) they presuppose that a valid,
     qualitative (if not quantitative) distinction can be drawn
     between Spin's violation of Riot Grrrl media black-outs and the
     violation performed by Gottlieb and Wald's academic essay, which
     is of course only the tip of a whole wave of Riot Grrrl seminar
     papers that began hitting the beaches of traditional academic
     venues. Gottlieb and Wald tend themselves to reify the opposition
     between mainstream and subculture, and in the process exaggerate
     the anti-hegemonic resistance of the subculture, by turning to
     Riot Grrrl performances in order to validate academic
     gender-as-performance criticism while at the same time holding
     those performances up as a model for future feminist political
     strategies: "Using performance as a political forum to
     interrogate issues of gender, sexuality and patriarchal violence,
     Riot Grrrl performance creates a feminist praxis based on the
     transformation of the private into the public, consumption into
     production--or, rather than privileging the traditionally male
     side of these binaries, they create a new synthesis of both"
     (268). Making such an intellectual and political investment in a
     "popular" scene that refuses to engage the popular almost as a
     matter of policy, however, makes me wonder exactly what kind of
     praxis we're really talking about here, bringing to mind Steven
     Tyler's joke about rock critics: "Why do rock critics like Elvis
     Costello? Because they all look like him" ("Cult of the DJ" 75).
     But even assuming that Riot Grrrl has indeed managed (in spite of
     itself) to mobilize a popularized form of feminist cultural
     criticism centered on a Hebdigian post-modernist "problematics of
     affect" (and I think the subsequent mass popularity of Courtney
     Love and other popularized "angry womyn" Grrrl-styled
     "alternative" rock bands indicates that is has), I would argue
     that it could only do so, as Gottlieb and Wald themselves
     hesitantly acknowledge, in its popularized forms in the mass
     media:

          Possibly, the riot grrrl movement would have been
          significantly diminished had it not been for its careful
          coverage [in Sassy], which gave a mass audience of teenage
          girls access to a largely inaccessible phenomenon in the
          rock underground. This suggests a variation on Dick
          Hebdige's model of ideological incorporation in that--in
          this case--the media, beyond its function to control and
          contain this phenomenon, may also have helped to perpetuate
          it. Sassy's role in publicizing and perpetuating the riot
          grrrl phenomenon may arise from a gendered division in the
          experience of youth culture, with girls' participation
          gravitating towards the forms, often mass-market visual
          materials, that lend themselves towards consumption in the
          home. While it appropriates riot grrrl subculture as a
          marketing strategy, the magazine also enables riot grrrl
          culture to infiltrate the domestic space to which
          grrrls--particularly young teenagers--are typically
          confined. (265-266)

     All of which tends to circle without directly facing the more
     fundamental questions of exactly where Riot Grrrl performances
     might be said to perform and who in fact might be said to perform
     them, which ultimately leads to a question of who qualifies to
     identify themselves as part of the Riot Grrrl revolution:
     underground rock bands and underground zines, certainly; readers,
     writers, and editors of Sassy, maybe; but presumably not readers
     (let alone writers and editors) of the likes of The Village
     Voice, Rolling Stone, and Spin.

 37. Of course, there are important differences to note between
     underground scenes and mass media disseminations of underground
     messages and styles, between the reading spaces and reading
     practices of contemporary teenage girls and boys (though Hanna
     herself allows that boys too, like Bikini Kill's guitarist, can
     be "girly boys"); however, Gottlieb and Wald's compulsion to
     police the boundaries between Sassy's "careful," "respectful,"
     and ideologically "committed" mass media disseminations on the
     one hand, and an otherwise undifferentiated mass of "mainstream"
     media dilutions on the other, seems to me to overplay all of
     these differences, especially given the collegiate nature of
     "alternative" youth cultures more generally. The overall effect
     of this is to exaggerate Riot Grrrl underground agency in
     "infiltrating" the mainstream with presumably more "authentic"
     Riot Grrrl articulations and to discount any empowering potential
     in the readerly consumption of mass media marketing
     appropriations of those articulations.

 38. Thornton claims that, because mass media is the stuff out of
     which subcultural identity is formed, we must concede that
     subcultures are themselves likely to be more passive than we have
     been conditioned to believe. The converse of this may be,
     however, that subculture consumer magazines (their articles and
     ads) are more actively subversive than we have been conditioned
     to assume. From this perspective, one could argue that Riot Grrrl
     as Gottlieb and Wald construct it not only risks "echoing the
     collegiate erudition and elitism of independent music generally"
     by positioning itself against the "mainstream," but rather it was
     from the start already collegiate, erudite and elitist, and that
     it remained so in part because Riot Grrrl subculture identity
     grounded itself in limiting rather than expanding the stage upon
     which it would perform popularized articulations of academic
     feminism, which, as Gottlieb and Wald acknowledge, remains itself
     a largely collegiate white middle class woman's (as opposed to
     "girl's") tradition/culture/movement. Spin writer Charles Aaron
     was perhaps (ironically) correct, then, when he prematurely
     concluded in his Village Voice article on the movement that Riot
     Grrrl circa 1992 would turn out to be only a white college
     women's riot after all (though he might have emphasized that
     that's significant in and of itself!). Aaron missed the mark,
     however, when he failed to see Riot Grrrl media coverage itself
     as a constitutive part of that subcultural resistance movement--a
     movement of cultural critique which (even more ironically) may
     have only appeared to evaporate in news photographer's "flash" to
     later re-emerge (in spite of everyone) in other, more popular
     popularized forms.

     IV. Conclusion: Post-Scripts (Again): Cultural Work in the
     "Always Forever Now"

          Part of our point is that nobody owns these
          images. They belong to a movement that is
          constantly growing--in numbers, in militancy,
          in political awareness.
                    --Douglas Crimp, AIDS demo graphics

 39. I want to conclude by way of a brief turn back to Hebdige's
     "Post-Scripts" which make up the conclusion of Hiding in the
     Light--where Hebdige seems to grudgingly accept that, like it or
     not (and he clearly doesn't), postmodernism is "here" to stay, so
     we might as well "get used to it." Meaning, it's time to stop
     complaining about the postmodern (or waxing nostalgic for those
     more knowable "modernist" times that never quite were anyway) and
     figure out how to work within it--how to "work it."

     Diesel[TM]: Jeans and (ACT UP) Cultural Work

 40. So let's begin again by taking Hebdige at face value. Let's allow
     that Spin, like the Face and Vibe and other consumer subculture
     magazines, not only blurs the line between article and ad, it
     collapses it all together. And let's allow that it all collapses
     into the ad. Following Thornton's line of thinking, ads like
     Diesel Jeans' "Victory" [see Figure 3], which was published as a
     full two-page spread in the opening pages
     of Spin in 1995, can be read as a             [Image]
     post-avant-garde counter-cultural
     intervention (commercial to be sure) that     Figure 3. Diesel
     does not merely appropriate "original" ACT    Jeans and Workwear,
     UP signs of subcultural opposition, but in    "Victory!"
     fact resemanticizes and disseminates          Rpt. from Spin
     (popularizes) those oppositional values on    August 1995: 3-4.
     a scale that no subcultural articulation      Reprinted by
     ever could. There are indeed multiple         permission.
     moments of commercial appropriation taking
     place here, appropriations of what traditional subcultural
     theories would either explicitly or implicitly define as
     "original" or "authentic" ACT UP oppositional signs. The
     ad-series slogan and logo, which appears at the bottom corner of
     all the Diesel Jeans shock ads, borrows directly from ACT UP
     subcultural styles and rhetoric. The logo features a profile face
     of a punk/new wave rebel whose image calls to mind ACT UP's
     initial appropriation of earlier punk-rock looks; surrounding
     that profile, arranged like the print surrounding an activist
     logo, is the series slogan printed in the fashion of ACT UP
     protest slogans: "Number 80 in a Series of Diesel 'How to...'
     Guides to SUCCESSFUL LIVING for PEOPLE interested in general
     HEALTH and mental POWER." The central image of the two sailors
     kissing on the dock of a World War II home-coming Victory
     celebration is specifically an appropriation of a 1988 ACT UP
     poster titled "Read My Lips" [see Figure 4] featuring two World
     War II era sailors in a similar pose of loving embrace and
     full-mouthed kiss that gets rearticulated as an
     in-your-(heterosexist)-face assertion of gay pride and
     resistance, the visual equivalent of "we're here, we're queer,
     get used it."

        [Image]                       [Image]

                                      Figure 5. "VD DAY!"
                                      Illustration accompanying Phil
        Figure 4. Gran Fury, "Read    Ochs's "Have You Heard? The
        My Lips (boys)" (1988).       War Is Over!" The Village
        Rpt. in Crimp and Rolston     Voice 23 Nov. 1967. Rpt. in
        56. Reprinted by permission   Phil Ochs, The War Is Over
        of ACT UP.                    (New York: Collier Books,
                                      1971) 93. Reprinted by
                                      permission.

     However, this "original" ACT UP poster, which was produced by
     Gran Fury to promote a "kiss in" protest rally, itself borrows
     from similar tactics of appropriation deployed by 1960s anti-war
     protests. In fact, this Diesel ad bears an even more direct
     resemblance to Eisenstaedt's famously staged World War II V-J Day
     photograph, which was itself incorporated into a 1968 Vietnam War
     Protest poster promoting the parodic celebration of "VD Day: The
     End of the War!" [see Figure 5].

 41. The Diesel Jeans "Victory" ad therefore ends up being not merely
     a commercial appropriation of ACT UP signs of subcultural
     resistance, but rather an appropriation of what was itself an ACT
     UP appropriation. The questions facing us, then, in light of
     Thornton's critique of Cultural Studies' tendency to romanticize
     and essentialize subcultural resistance are: What, if any, kinds
     of oppositional cultural work (including but not limited to queer
     cultural critique) may survive the commodification process? What
     other kinds of oppositional images might be for sale? Does this
     image of commodified queerness mark or elide the
     cultural-historical systems of power and social struggle that lie
     behind the multiple appropriations taking place? The expected
     "disclaimer" is clearly present in the lower left corner where a
     man is wearing a placard in which a sampling of the song "God
     Bless America" ("America, God shed his grace") reads as a
     moral/religious invective against homosexuality. But it's
     difficult for me to imagine that virtually all of the
     in-your-(heterosexist)-face activism of the "original" Gran Fury
     "Read My Lips" poster gets lost in the popular commercial
     appropriations here. In fact, when one considers that the timing
     of the ad proclaiming "victory" comes right on the heels of
     newly-elected President Clinton's soon-to-be doomed attempt to
     lift the ban on gays in the military, this appropriation might be
     interpreted as reflecting a fuller image of the important role
     World War II played in the historical development of gay and
     lesbian identity and community in America because the photograph
     evokes a wider contextual image of the role World War II and
     post-war cultural environment in the development of contemporary
     gay subcultural identity and resistance. The realpolitik optimism
     of this ad may have been misplaced; however, the larger political
     successes of ads such as this and of commodified queerness more
     generally is not to be located in any direct influence they may
     have on public policy, but rather in their ability to win popular
     consent for the free and open expression of "outlaw" sexuality.
     As one reader of an earlier version said in response to someone
     else's dismissal of the queer politics in this ad as merely
     appropriating ACT UP rhetoric as the latest image of suburban
     "alternative" hippness: "Yes, but that may be precisely the
     point. We want and need for young people to be able to look at
     images like this, or video images of Madonna kissing a woman, and
     see them as 'cool.'"

 42. The potentially successful populist politics of this ad and
     similar consumer culture appropriations reveals the limitations
     of Crimps's claim that ACT UP subcultural pop art interventions
     succeed in breaking down the barriers of mass culture and high
     art which earlier generations of Pop artists sought but failed to
     achieve. In AIDS demo graphics, Crimp credits ACT UP's Gran Fury
     with having successfully circumvented "the fate of most critical
     art" in the twentieth century, which is to be "co-opted and
     neutralized" by the overriding commodity constraints of the art
     world:

          Postmodernist art advanced a political critique of art
          institutions--and art itself as an institution--for the ways
          they constructed social relations through specific modes of
          address, representations of history, and obfuscations of
          power. The limits of this aesthetic critique, however, have
          been apparent in its own institutionalization: critical
          postmodernism has become a sanctioned, if still highly
          contested, art world product, the subject of standard
          exhibitions, catalogues, and reviews. The implicit promise
          of breaking out of the museum and marketplace to take on new
          issues and find new audiences has gone largely unfulfilled.
          (19)

     Crimp claims that ACT UP's Gran Fury delivers on postmodernist
     art's failed promise to break out of the twin confines of "the
     museum and the marketplace" because they target their
     art-politics at the "streets" of AIDS activism. Though Crimp is
     justified in his critique of Pop as museum-bound cultural
     critique, in his celebration of Gran Fury he tends to fall into
     the reverse trap of exaggerating and romanticizing the
     authenticity and independence of queer subculture, much in the
     same way as George Chauncey does in his analysis of gay
     subcultures in the 1920s and 1930s, and as Hebdige does regarding
     punk in the late 1970s and as Gottlieb and Wald do with Riot
     Grrrl in the late 1980s.

 43. Cultural Studies subcultural theories, as important as they are
     in mapping the complexities of power relationships operating
     according to the "spectacle" logics of consumer capitalism,
     frequently fail to take full account of the constitutive role
     that mass media technologies play in the long history of
     dissatisfied people locating ruptures in the hegemonies of
     cultural dominants and rearticulating resistant cultural
     practices within those ruptures. What Spin magazine offers us,
     then, is a demonstration of the limits of relying on subcultures
     as a paradigm for political action and activism against a global
     system of multinational consumer capitalism. That's the bad news.
     The good news is that rethinking the post-avant-garde politics of
     Spin may lead to new, more successful strategies of Left
     coalition-building between intellectuals, counter-cultural
     celebrities, consumer-subcultural media industries and "the
     people" which Stuart Hall called for in the conclusion of The
     Hard Road to Renewal.

 44. When one more fully acknowledges the interdependent, symbiotic
     relationship between the media and subculture identity
     formations, the Face becomes more than "just a magazine," even if
     one doesn't yet want to call it "a just magazine." And so too
     does Spin, which has from the late '80s on increasingly
     positioned itself in more explicit political cultural terms and
     which had always been more explicitly "political" than the Face
     from the very beginning. But Spin may arguably be "a just
     magazine" as well, not because it offers up the kind of
     academic-friendly, rational argument and criticism that Hebdige
     locates in Ten.8, but rather precisely because it is able to use
     irony and hyperbole to mobilize an effective form of "sound-bite"
     criticism--because Spin manages to reach, with its Gen X
     posturing and hyperbolic irony, the kinds of readers that neither
     Hebdige nor media-phobic undergrounds ever will: those
     center-leaning, educated-but-decidedly-not-academic,
     generally-conservative-but-still-reachable mass cult readers
     against whom both subculture theorists and undergrounds scenes
     ritualistically define themselves, but upon whom they must also
     depend if their alternative cultural politics are going to be
     effective.

     Jeans II: Celebrating Whose Specialness?

 45. In arguing that contemporary Left pop culture academics need to
     rethink their relationship to commodified media technologies that
     shape the shapeless mass of the known world through which
     progressive cultural politics work, I do not mean to suggest that
     Spin magazine has arrived at the promised land of
     post-avant-garde political postmodernist practice. Rather, I'm
     suggesting that its appropriations of Riot Grrrl and ACT UP
     counter-culture have functioned progressively and that the Spin
     model of commodified resistance represents a viable strategy. In
     many ways, of course, Spin's appropriations do function
     conservatively, particularly regarding issues of race and race
     representations. Since the advent of Vibe (which now owns Spin),
     Spin appears to have abandoned its 1989 to 1993 political vision
     of an alliance between alternative rock and hip-hop manifesting
     itself under the banner of some vaguely defined multi-cultural
     Gen X signifier. The magazine continues to market itself as Gen X
     radical chic, but regarding race, Spin in 1996 and 1997 resorted
     to merely paying lip service to hip-hop as an imaginary
     post-racist ally to the (now more than ever) implicitly-coded
     white world of Gen X iconography.

 46. In the post-Gen X, post-punk, post-Vibe world of the late 1990s,
     "Gen X" ironically remains a potent signified for both Spin and
     its fashion-music advertisers, even though any and all explicit
     signifiers of Gen X have long since past being passé. Moreover,
     the percentage of multi-ethnic imagery associated with Gen X
     iconography continues to grow in inverse proportion to the rise
     of de facto ethnic segregation and racial conflict over the last
     two decades. Similar to Spin's Riot Grrrl coverage, the current
     proliferation of multi-ethnic Gen X signs again raises complex
     questions about commodified images of progressive political
     ideals and the resistant practices of subordinate peoples. In the
     construction of an explicitly multi-racial Gen X hippness, are we
     seeing a progressive proliferation of racial integration imagery
     in a neo-racist age that seems to have forgotten the brief
     respite of 1960s integration idealism, or are we seeing instead
     merely another set of "post-racist," feel-good images that only
     fuel current, so-called voluntary segregationist trends by white
     consumers who deny the existence of racial difference and racism
     even as they run out to buy stylized images of urban,
     racially-coded hippness?

 47. The narrative logic of Spin's racial positioning can be seen in a
     Levi's Silver Tab advertisement featured in the October 1997
     issue of Swing: A Magazine About Life in Your Twenties, itself a
     spin-off of the Spin phenomenon. In this ad, which is typical of
     the Silver Tab campaign, a kitsch late '70s family portrait that
     screams white-bread suburbia gets intruded upon by a moment of
     inter-racial "contact" [see Figure 6]. The authenticity of the
                            1970s suburban dress, the stiff poses and
       [Image]              the sterile smiles of the family stand in
                            stark juxtaposition to the relaxed
       Figure 6. Levi's     posture, the gently mocking smile and the
       SilverTab,           "alternative" street style of this urban
       "Celebrate Your      female hipster whose punked-out afro
       Specialness."        touches the white house-wife's
       Rpt. from Swing: A   do-it-yourself-perm cut. Of course, the
       Magazine             "in joke" of the ad is that white people
       About Life In Your   aren't hip. But the deeper irony, the
       Twenties             implied commercial message of the ad,
       November 1997:       seems to be that white people, these
       14-15.               twenty-something college students who read
       Reprinted by         Swing and Spin, can in fact purchase a
       permission of        kind of second-degree hippness through
       Levi's.              Levi's SilverTab products. White people
                            can't be hip, but they can achieve a level
     of hippness by ironically acknowledging the fact of their
     unhippness. This is the appeal of urban hip-hop styles for
     suburban whites more generally, made all the more ironic here
     since the product is not really hip-hop attire at all but instead
     pretty run-of-the-mill suburban causal wear, which is perhaps
     also designed to sell images of economic and social uplift to a
     secondary market of black middle-class twentysomethings. (Note,
     for example, in the photograph of the black woman relaxing alone
     in the elegant chair that she has now lost much of her former
     punk/hip-hop signifiers in favor of a decidedly more assimilated,
     middle-class posture.) For the white twentysomething, the
     emotional appeal is partially located in the way that wearing an
     image of inter-racial integration offers the consumer a feel-good
     sentiment of racial harmony in the midst of racial segregation,
     racial tensions, and perhaps even their own race prejudices.

 48. The images of multi-racial, multi-cultural harmony are now common
     ad stock. But in our increasingly segregated society, it remains
     to be seen whether any of the progressive taboo-shattering
     meanings of ads like the popular Benneton's United Colors series
     [see Figure 7] will survive the neo-colonialist race or race
     essentialist meanings implied by
     these kinds of shock "idea" ads         [Image]
     which are so crucial to Spin
     magazine's own street-wise and          Figure 7. United Colors
     "alternative" hip currency.             of Benneton,
     Benneton's United Colors ad series      rpt. from Spin October
     has become for many skeptics of         1996: 9-10.
     political postmodernism the epitome     Concept: O. Toscani.
     of commercial appropriations            Courtesy of United Colors
     masquerading as social protest          of Benetton.
     imagery. Appignanesi and Garratt
     contend, for example, that
     Benneton's appropriation of photojournalism and the stylized
     imagery of social protest "art" merely appropriates the
     "hyperreality" cachet of those original forms, gleaning that
     reality onto the unreal construct of the magazine ad page and
     condensing it down to the image of the Benneton product name and
     logo--a purely commodified image (and for Appignansesi and
     Garratt it is also only an image) of global identity and "social
     conscience" (138-39). In this particular ad, the scene is
     obviously staged and, similar to the camped-up homosexual
     overtones in the Diesel jeans ad, the visual racial marking is
     really over-the-top. The straight blond mane of the female horse
     and kinked and curled mane of the "black" horse is as camped-up
     as the applauding, beef-cake sailors or the phallic shape of the
     submarine with "sea-men" descending from the tip in the Diesel
     ad. But there is still the vexing question of whether this image
     of interracial contact deconstructs race as a binary black-white
     discourse or whether it reconstructs race essentialist myths by
     reifying race as a set of natural attributes? Does this image
     force readers, particularly young white readers, to confront
     their internalization of deeply entrenched racial taboos? Does it
     make the braking of taboos "cool" in the same way that the Diesel
     Jeans "Victory!" ad makes the image of homosexuality a cool
     transgression, or does it merely allow the consumer to trick
     themselves into feeling multi-cultural, "third-world hip," or
     radical-chic, through their fashion purchases? The questions are
     easy to form. The answers, of course, are the hard part. It
     should be clear, however, that it is too easy and
     counter-productive to dismiss as appropriation the constitutive
     role that commercialism and commodification play in the
     historical, material construction of progressive cultural studies
     ideals: internationalism, economic justice, racial harmony,
     gender parity, and sexual liberation [see Figure 8].

      [Image]

      Figure 8. Ben
      Thornberry,
      photograph from
      ACT UP "Stop The
      Church" March on
      St. Patrick's
      Cathedral, New
      York City,
      December 10,
      1989. Reprinted
      by permission of
      ACT UP.

     Always Already the Spin Doctors

 49. Subcultural capital is, as Thornton points out, "in no small
     sense" constructed out of and by media and commerce--by the likes
     of Spin, which includes its photo spreads and fashion ads as well
     as its articles, editorials, and album reviews. It is equally
     important, however, to keep reminding ourselves that subcultural
     capital is at once a form of academic cultural capital as well.
     The cultural dollar signs may take different forms, but Gottlieb
     and Wald, Ross and Rose, and Social Text are all cashing in on
     the Riot Grrrl phenomenon, too. Though academics do so in the
     higher registers of subculture theoretical discourses, and only
     after first expressing the appropriate academic sensitivity about
     "who will speak for whom, and when, and under what conditions or
     circumstances" (Bérubé 271), we all unavoidably traffic in the
     spectacle of "street credibility." As am I in this very essay. As
     are so many other graduate students who are trying to scramble
     for Cultural Studies vita credits to compete in a job market
     which, professors tell us with simultaneously sinister and
     apologetic jocularity, probably isn't going to materialize after
     all. As were the hundreds of graduate students who paid $95 to
     deliver papers at an open-invitation Cultural Studies conference
     at the University of Oklahoma in 1990, which, according to Cary
     Nelson, only "testifies to the sense that putting a 'Cultural
     Studies in the 1990s' label on your vita is worth an investment
     in exploitation and alienation" (26). But Cultural Studies
     capital circulates beyond the traditional academic systems of
     credentials and rewards as well. As Clint Burnham notes in the
     conclusion to The Jamesonian Unconscious, Cultural Studies theory
     and criticism is itself being consumed by graduate students and
     other "alternative," self-identified Gen X readers as mass
     culture:

          I would argue that many intellectuals of my generation read
          the work of Jameson, and theory in general (Jameson means
          something else) as mass culture; by my generation I suppose
          I mean those born in the late fifties or in the sixties,
          Generation X as my fellow Canadian put it.... [I]n this
          milieu, Jameson and Butler and Spivak and Barthes are on the
          same plane as Shabba Ranks and PJ Harvey and Deep Space Nine
          and John Woo: cultural signifiers of which one is as much a
          "fan" as a "critic," driven as much by the need to own or
          see or read the "latest" (or the "classic" or the
          "original") as by the need to debate it on the Internet and
          in the seminar room. You think Rid of Me is good? Check out
          4-Track Demos. True Romance is more of a John Woo film than
          Hard Target. If you like Gender Trouble, check out Bodies
          That Matter. Jameson's piece on Chandler in Shades of Noir
          is a remix of his older essay and samples some of the
          comments on modernism at the end of Signatures of the
          Visible. (244)

     And this comes to us in a Duke University trade paperback that is
     self-consciously designed to be a simulacra of Jameson's own
     Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which is
     itself now (in)"famous" amongst critics and reviewers for its
     self-consciously styled presence as "a gorgeously produced
     400-page document" (Bérubé 127). By the time I finished Burnham's
     text, I could no longer be certain why I had originally plunked
     down my VISA card and paid $17.95 for this aesthetically pleasing
     book (no longer merely a "text") whose marketing blurb, appearing
     both in the Duke University Press mail-order catalogue and on the
     back of the book, sounds a lot like a heady academic version of
     that subscription junk mail I keep getting from Spin: "Imagine
     Fredric Jameson--the world's foremost Marxist critic--kidnapped
     and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera,
     generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our
     post-post-contemporary landscape. In The Jamesonian Unconscious,
     a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham
     devises unexpected encounters between Jameson and alternative
     rock groups, new movies, and subcultures.... In an unusual
     biographical move, Burnham negotiates Jameson's major works... by
     way of his own working-class, queer-ish, Gen-X background and
     sensibility. Thus Burnham's study draws upon an immense range of
     references familiar to the MTV generation, including Reservoir
     Dogs, theorists Slavoj Zizek and Pierre Bourdieu, The Satanic
     Verses, Language poetry, the collapse of state communism in
     Eastern Europe, and the indie band Killdozer."

 50. I don't know about you, but I definitely hear the sound of some
     bones crunching now--but can anyone tell me with any degree of
     certainty anymore who's doing the crunching and who's being
     crunched?

                                                Department of English
                            University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
                                                    finnegan@uiuc.edu

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                                   Notes

     1. My position in relation to Spin and the contemporary music and
     subculture scenes it covers is primarily as a fan of so-called
     popular "alternative music," what Robert Christgau insists should
     more accurately be called "college rock," and even here I am more
     of a tourist and fan than a fellow traveler in any specific indie
     scene. I have, however, been reading Spin (or perhaps as Hebdige
     would have it, I've been "cruising" Spin) since 1986, when I was
     introduced to the magazine while attending a small midwestern
     state college by a friend from Decatur, Illinois, who read Spin
     with, what seemed to me then, an odd intensity to determine his
     position in relation to the "mainstream" and some notion of a
     true punk "underground."

     2. In a May 1994 Spin cover story on Courtney Love, for example,
     Dennis Cooper will point out that Love grew up in a liberal
     intellectual environment and "remains an avid reader of feminist
     theorists like Susan Faludi, Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, and
     Naomi Woolf" (42), but neither he nor she will articulate
     anything that even remotely smacks of academic criticism--even
     though there is clearly a long, rich history of academic feminist
     cultural critique and avant-garde artistic intervention
     associated with the name of Love's band alone. It is perhaps true
     that one doesn't need to be an academic feminist to interpret the
     band's name, Hole, as a cultural critique of the hegemonic sexual
     ideologies of phallic domination, nor does one need to be a
     professor of pop culture to link the band Hole to its many punk
     predecessors, such as the Slits--the first all-woman punk band
     whose members, like so many other early punk rock musicians and
     contemporary "alternative" musicians, walked straight out of
     their university studies and into the punk "streets." There is,
     however, something troubling about the way contemporary popular
     artists deny their academic backgrounds and intellectual
     influences, just as many academics, whose cultural writings may
     be influenced by the postmodernism they (we) encounter in pop
     culture, are equally reluctant to acknowledge the knowledges that
     they derive from their own practices as fans and consumers,
     though they are increasingly eager to acknowledge their
     pleasures. And this is true, despite the fact that both popular
     music artists and academics luxuriate in the art of surreptitious
     quotation of one another.

     3. Though I don't take it up here, Spin's relationship to the PC
     Wars is particularly interesting and, as with everything else in
     Spin, contradictory. Both Spin and Guccione, Jr. have been very
     vocal concerning the censorship of pop music. In fact, in the mid
     '80s when Tipper Gore and the PMRC were waging their war against
     youth, Guccione, Jr. propelled himself to the status of
     celebrity/public intellectual, regularly debating William F.
     Buckley and the usual cast of right-wing pundits on CNN's
     Crossfire and similar news talk shows. Yet, when it comes to
     academics and their battles with many of these same pundits, Spin
     has remained uninterested at best, too often picking up anti-PC
     catch-phrases from the New Right along the way.

     4. I say my "suspicion" because I don't personally know many
     academics who read Spin. If one can judge academic readership by
     the availability of library resources, then I would suspect that
     indeed very few do. Trying to research the early years of Spin
     proved to be a bit of an unexpected challenge. The Chicago Public
     Library was the only library in the state of Illinois that I
     could find holding Spin since its first issue in April 1985,
     including the University of Illinois, which is the only college
     or university out of the 42 state and private schools on the
     state-wide library computer search system that carries the
     magazine at all (and the U. of I. only started carrying it from
     1994 on). Moreover, Spin is not indexed in The Reader's Guide to
     Periodicals or any bibliographic indexes or databases that I'm
     aware of (with the exception of The Music Index, which started
     indexing Spin in 1989, but only very selectively music-specific
     articles). If you research Spin, you may feel like you're in some
     warped version of a VISA card commercial--you're walking around
     with Spin and everywhere you turn they only accept Rolling Stone.

     5. "The Whiny Generation," from David Martin's "My Turn" column
     in Newsweek (Nov. 1, 1993), rpt. in Rushkoff 235-37.

     6. On Rushkoff: 1) Self-Aggrandizing: "Exposed to consumerism and
     public relations strategies since we could open our eyes, we
     GenXers see through the clunky attempts to manipulate our
     opinions and assets, however shrinking" (5); 2)
     Pseudo-Intellectual: "Our writers are our cultural playmakers and
     demonstrate an almost Beckettian ability to find humor in the
     darkest despair, a Brechtian objectivity to bracket painful drama
     with ironic distance, and a Chekhovian instinct to find the human
     soul still lurking beneath its outmoded cultural façade" (8); 3)
     Misinformed: "To most of us, concepts like racial equality,
     women's rights, sexual freedom, and respect for basic humanity
     are givens. We realize that we are the first generation to enter
     a society where, at least on paper and in the classroom, the
     ideas that Boomers fought for are recognized as indisputable
     facts" (6); 4) Homophobic: "We watched a sexual revolution evolve
     into forced celibacy as the many excesses of the 1970s and 1980s
     rotted into the sexually transmitted diseases of our 1990s" (5).

     This is not to say, however, that academics and public
     intellectuals aren't guilty of similar kinds of lazy thinking.
     Take for example, this throw-away comment made by Frank Owen in
     "The Cult of the DJ" symposium concerning the mainstream music
     press and its refusal to cover dance music: "What I can't
     understand, though, is how the current rock scene is portrayed by
     some rock critics as radical. I listen to a band like Pearl Jam,
     and I guess they're critical favorites, but to me they sound like
     Bad Company. I mean, am I wrong or are they Bad Company? Why is
     grunge radical? What is so radical about it?" (78). Owen, who was
     a music editor at Spin for two years and who received an MA from
     the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of
     Birmingham in England, ought to know better--making his sweeping
     dismissal of any and all politics of grunge in the context of
     this symposium on dance music DJs appear suspect, perhaps even
     patronizing. Certainly, he should realize that Pearl Jam isn't
     just a sound but also a look, an attitude, a stance; he should
     realize, as Ross has noted elsewhere, that, among other things,
     grunge asserts "a politics of dirt... as a scourge upon the
     impossibly sanitized, aerobicized world of 90210" (Microphone
     Fiends 5). However white and middle-class the grunge phenomenon
     is (Ross also characterizes it as white suburban kids "style
     slumming with a vengeance"), there is something "radical," or at
     least oppositional, about it, not least the fact that at the very
     moment Owen is making these comments Pearl Jam was waging its
     legal battle and media campaign against the monopolistic
     price-fixing practices of Ticketmaster.

     7. Though even here, when one considers the practical uses of
     this condom, Spin might once again be accused of promoting its
     own radical image rather than any substantive subcultural
     resistance, in this case putting hype before health; for, as a
     reader of an earlier version of this paper pointed out to me, one
     would really have to question whether or not this condom, after
     going through the rigors of mass circulation magazine
     distribution, would even be safe. (My thanks to Elizabeth Majerus
     for this comment, as well as for her responses to the essay as a
     whole.)

     8. Most of this nonsense seems to be just a case of journalistic
     sour grapes resulting from Farber having been publicly spanked by
     ACT UP and The Advocate which, I think correctly, denounced
     Farber's 1989 Spin article on AZT as dangerously overstating her
     case about evidence of the drug's risks and how that should
     impact the medical decisions made by people living with AIDS.

                                Works Cited

     Azerrad, Michael. "Peace, Love and Understanding." Spin August
     1995: 56-58.

     Bérubé, Michael. Public Access: Literary Theory and American
     Cultural Politics. London: Verso, 1994.

     Burnham, Clint. The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of
     Marxist Theory. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

     Cooper, Dennis. "Love Conquers All." Spin May 1994: 38+.

     Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated
     Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.

     ---. "Eulogy: Death of Gen X." Details June 1995: 72.

     Crimp, Douglas, ed. AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. An
     October Book. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1988.

     ---. "AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism." Crimp, AIDS:
     Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism 3-16.

     ---. "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic." Crimp, AIDS:
     Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism 237-271.

     Crimp, Douglas, with Adam Rolston. AIDS demo graphics. Seattle:
     Bay Press, 1990.

     "The Cult of the DJ: A Symposium." Social Text 43 (Fall 1995):
     67-88.

     Farber, Celia. "TopSpin." Spin May 1992: 12.

     Furth, Daisy. "For Girls About To Rock." Spin April 1992: 26.

     Gilbert, Elizabeth. "Pussy Galore." Spin April 1995: 150+.

     Gottlieb, Joanne, and Gayle Wald. "Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot
     Grrrls, Revolution and Women in Independent Rock." Rose and Ross
     250-274.

     Guccione, Bob, Jr. "Special Child" (An Interview with Sinéad
     O'Connor). Spin November 1991: 42+

     ---. "TopSpin." Spin April 1995: 24.

     ---. "TopSpin" Spin Jan. 1994: 12.

     Greer, Jim. "Letter From Dayton, Ohio, Bureau." Spin April 1995:
     224.

     Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the
     Crisis of the Left. New York: Verso, 1988.

     ---. "The Meaning of New Times." in Stuart Hall: Critical
     Dialogues in Cultural Studies. David Morely and Kuan-Hsing Chen,
     Eds. London: Routledge, 1996: 223-37.

     Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London:
     Routledge, 1988.

     Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass
     Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.

     Kipnis, Laura. "(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading
     Hustler." Cultural Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson
     and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 373-391.

     Laing, Dave. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock.
     Milton Keynes, England: Open UP, 1985.

     Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: a Secret History of the Twentieth
     Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.

     Marks, Craig. "A to Z of Alternative Culture." Spin April 1993:
     38-52.

     Nelson, Cary. "Always Already Cultural Studies: Two Conferences
     and a Manifesto." Journal of the Midwest Modern Language
     Association. 24.1 (1991): 24-38.

     Rose, Tricia and Andrew Ross, eds. Microphone Fiends: Youth Music
     and Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.

     Ross, Andrew. "Introduction." Rose and Ross 1-13.

     Rushkoff, Douglas. "Introduction: Us, by Us." The GenX Reader.
     New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. 3-8.

     Thornton, Sarah. "Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave
     Culture." Rose and Ross 176-192.

     Treichler, Paula A. "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse:
     An Epidemic of Signification." Crimp, AIDS: Cultural
     Analysis/Cultural Activism 31-70.