Rolling Stone is an American magazine, established in 1967 and published monthly.note It primarily focuses on popular music, but also discusses other popular culture media such as film, TV and the New Media. In the 1970s famous author Hunter S. Thompson published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in pre-publication and also wrote a lot of "gonzo" journalistic articles about politics. From the 1980s on the magazine shifted her format to a more general "entertainment" magazine. Now, Rolling Stone has risen to become the leading magazine on Pop and Rock music, drawing their readers' attention to many artists of differing genres over the years. Perhaps inevitably, they've also been criticized for deriding or ignoring some musicians who were Vindicated by History decades later, primarily in the Heavy Metal genre such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, but also Progressive Rock bands such as Pink Floyd and Captain Beefheart. It also took a while for them to start devoting serious attention to Punk Rock and Hip-Hop.
Over the decades, like many other magazines, Rolling Stone has also been accused of Magazine Decay. It began in 1967 as a rock version of older genre-specific music magazines such as Down Beat and Sing Out, with some pretensions toward being a hippie version of TIME or Newsweek.note By the mid-to-late '70s it had became a corporate rock fanzine (they were notoriously slow to pick up on Punk Rock), and by the early '80s it was pretty much People magazine for pretentious folks. The mid-'80s success of Spin forced Rolling Stone back into a music-heavy format, which it then retained for the rest of the century.
The rise of the internet has given them strong competition in the music coverage arena, forcing them to look for another hook...which they found in left-wing political reporting. They have often exceeded "legitimate" news sources in scope, with Matt Taibbi and Michael Hastings in particular becoming significant names in journalism for them. For example, a 2010 article by journalist Michael Hastings uncovered comments made by General Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of the International Security Assistance Force and the US Forces in Afghanistan, criticizing US Vice President Joe Biden and other members of the Obama administration. McChrystal resigned shortly after these statements were made public. However, these reports also have been frequently derided and criticized, not least for a 2013 cover showing a Teen Idol-like photo of one of the Boston Marathon bombers (leading to accusations they were glorifying him), (a now-debunked article
concerning a purported rape at the University of Virginia, and Sean Penn's interview with drug kingpin "El Chapo" Guzmán, while the latter was still on the run from Mexican authorities.
For better or worse, Rolling Stone has become a largely divisive source of media. Some still view them as the definitive source of music coverage due to their Long Runner status, while others continue to see them as unreliable and biased.
This magazine provides examples of the following tropes:
- Face on the Cover: A regular feature are musicians or other celebrities shown in close-up or shown up until their torso or legs on the cover. The magazine hardly shows anything else on its cover.
- Fanservice Cover: Most people featured on the cover are shown in a cool, badass, sexy or otherwise glamorous pose. Two famous examples are Jim Morrison (The Doors) featured with his shirt off, which increased his reputation as a sex symbol and Janet Jackson nude, with her then-husband covering her breasts while standing behind her. This tradition got them in hot water when a flattering photo (a selfie, as it turned out) of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers, was used for their cover story about him.
- Gonzo Journalism: Hunter S. Thompson perfected this style in Rolling Stone, being one of the main reasons why the magazine lasted long enough to become an institution instead of folding early like many other such mags. Matt Taibbi's later pieces for the magazine were heavily influenced by Thompson.
- Long List: Their regularly returning 500 Best Albums Of All Time List.
- Meaningful Name: The name of the magazine alludes to The Rolling Stones (one time they were in the cover, the magazine name even had an extra "s"◊), Bob Dylan's song "Like A Rolling Stone" from Highway 61 Revisited and Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy", which has the line "I'm a rolling stone".
- Nostalgia Filter: The article: "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time." Written in 2004, it included only 3 songs from the 2000s and a truly massive number from the 1960s and early '70s, roughly coinciding with the rise of the magazine itself. Probably 400 or so of those songs (and their artists) were
regularly panned by the magazine when they were the Top 40 of the day. This is to say nothing of the fact that only a small fraction of the songs are from before the 60's.- Their album and song lists have been updated multiple times in later years, with newer releases being added.
- The Power of Rock: Rolling Stone mostly writes about rock music, but also devotes time to other kinds of popular music and actual media events. As the founder Jann Wenner put it:Rolling Stone is not just about the music, but about the things and attitudes that music embraces.
- Shout-Out:
- "The Cover of 'Rolling Stone'" by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show is a 1972 satire of the music industry in which the narrator laments that he's done everything necessary to be a real rock star—drugs, groupies, overcharging fans—but still can't get on the cover.note
- George Harrison's "This Guitar" (1975)Learned to get up when I fall
Can even climb Rolling Stone walls'' - Neil Young's "Crime in the City" (1989)And make sure that he's hungry, make sure he's alone,
And get me a cheeseburger, and a new Rolling Stone. - Bob Seger's recording of "Nutbush City Limits", from his 1975 Live Bullet album, includes the following spoken aside midway through the song, which understandably fired up his hometown crowd:As I told everybody last night, I was reading in Rolling Stone where they said Detroit audiences are the greatest rock and roll audiences in the world. I thought to myself, "Shit, I've known that for ten years!"
- Almost Famous by Cameron Crowe is a semi-autobiographical story about a 15 year old boy who aspires to become a rock journalist for Rolling Stone.
- Gen¹³ vol. #1 is Packaged as Other Medium. It shipped with 13 different covers; one of them a parody of Rolling Stone.
- Family Matters: During every episode's opening credits the grandmother was shown reading a copy of Rolling Stone, making her a Cool Old Lady.
- The poster art for School of Rock is done in the same style as a Rolling Stone cover.
