Rolling Stone Cover to Cover

[highwaywomen]

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to share with everyone an article I was just reading today. I recently purchased Rolling Stone Cover to Cover from Amazon.com. Rolling Stone magazine released every single issue (over 1,000) of their magazine on four DVD-ROMs. The DVD's span from 1967-2007 and include every photograph, article, and advertisement from Rolling Stone.

At the moment it's overwhelming me, because there is so much I want to read. I stumbled across this album review written by Lester Bangs in 1972. He was reviewing Janis Joplin's recent live album "Janis In Concert." In regards to the recent deaths of Brad Renfro and Heath Ledger, the first few paragraphs, which I will post here, really struck a nerve with me. It's scary how things haven't really changed, but in fact, have gotten much worse. Remember, this was written in 1972. Click on the link to read the entire review.

Janis In Concert Article

Janis Joplin is gone, by now just one more we've seen succumb in the public arena of the pop marketplace. It's not just that this kind of early death has become a fact of life that is disturbing, but that it's been accepted as a given so quickly. We're getting to the point where we merely anticipate between exits, idly wondering which will be the next among our "heroes" to go. And caring less all the time.

I don't know which is worse, the cannibalistic impulse of the public and the pop music industry which mutually encourage artists in disintegration because that's the flash and we really do think that someone else can live our lives and deaths for us, or the sickly, not to say sickening, spate of "Eulogies" and "Memorials" and "Remembrances" which sweep the pop press as soon as another star done gone. But perhaps they are the same thing.

Because as soon as another Name's dead, the slick magazines and tabloids alike get out their plumes and their crying towels and indulge in all sorts of disgusting bathetic paeans to the deceased. But unfortunately, they almost invariably pay tribute not to the actual person but to the self-consuming myth, the larger-than-life persona which had no more than a marginal existence in the first place and ballooned so that eventually it dwarfed the person carrying it around: The composers of the Memorials make sure that we will keep on worshiping exactly that lie which contributed so heavily in almost every case to the desperate, self-consumption which killed the Name. They almost never write, on the other hand, and the public almost never comes to understand, anything about the real, different, scared individual behind the flash and its bluff. Maybe it just doesn't make good copy.