DeRogatis Defects to Rolling Stone
Keith Moerer, the new music editor of Rolling Stone, has asked DeRogatis to join him in New York as senior editor. He’ll run “pretty much the meat of the magazine, except for the feature well.”
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DeRogatis is going to a shop where, as he puts it, you can “spend a week on the road with Pearl Jam and do the ultimate Ticketmaster story.” At least in theory you can. The problem is, such a story would be an example of the “extraordinary journalism” Rolling Stone isn’t committed to anymore. Moerer’s supposed to restore lost vigor, but soured readers wonder how much freedom editor-publisher Jann Wenner will actually give him.
“Robert Christgau at the Village Voice is now in his mid-50s,” DeRogatis said. “He slept on the ground at Woodstock for three days. He hasn’t slowed down a bit. I think if you’re a serious enough journalist there’s no reason the beat’s limited. The way I look at the rock-and-roll beat is the way I look at the religion beat. It went from covering bingo to being at the very center of our cultural life, with abortion, the fundamentalist movement, Farrakhan. I think that living at a time when a president has rock-and-roll bands, albeit awful ones, playing at his inauguration, the music beat is every bit as important as any other. If people were listening to what was coming out of Los Angeles, the riots after Rodney King wouldn’t have been such a surprise. That stuff was being written about in the music for years. I think the challenge for a writer my age in the music beat is to bridge the gap and explain the new to slightly older readers and give a sense of history to younger readers. Nine Inch Nails didn’t come from a vacuum.”
When chain gangs returned last month to Alabama, Brent Staples wrote last Sunday in the New York Times Magazine, “a tent was erected where reporters could sip cold lemonade in shaded comfort while the prisoners struggled under 10-pound sledgehammers in the blazing sun.” The rock breaking these prisoners do is useless; prison bosses don’t pretend otherwise. “The real reason for stretching legions of chained, white-suited men for a mile or so along the highway,” Staples observed, “is to let motorists gorge on a visible symbol of punishment and humiliation. Hanging, too, was once a public entertainment. No one should be surprised if some ambitious politician suggests making it so again.”
