Punk planet

A decade ago I acquired a discarded Punk Planet and Maximum Rock and Roll. I expected moralising and poorly written interviews and reviews of bands I'd never heard of. Instead I found myself in a Europe that I kept questioning the reality of. The article seemed real- the accounts were detailed, the style consistently earnest. If it was a fake it would have taken incredible dedication and been of a kind I hadn't encountered. Yet here in, a continent by all accounts more civilized than the U.S., were these neo-Nazis and skin heads which were anti-Nazis and they were getting in pitched battles. Wouldn't the newspapers and magazines jump on this juicy stuff- youth out of control, fighting, good and evil. But I'd never heard of any of this.

Today I was reading Vice which had an over-heated article about a neo-Nazi/ anti-Nazi altercation. I've gained small bits knowledge over the years. Never anything close like the original report which told of the encounters, the life, what it was doing to the universities but brief bits about the neos desecrating graves.
The article was over-heated and illogical but I was struck once again that is what magazines needed to be doing. I soon began to beat myself for not having subscribed to one of the punk magazines and wondering what I was doing with this one. This was Vice's Hate issue which had also had celebrities on hate, cute white power bands, and a hate fashion spread. Next month would be back to rock or drugs, nerds or porn. Vice was merely the midmarket between MR&R and Spin- a way to combine punk and panty ads.
A few moments later I realized that I was being drastically unfair. Vice is teenage. Not at all in the way of Spin or Rolling Stone but honestly. It always seems like it is done the way you would have with some friends in high school. If it was funny you were going to do it, even if it was "stupid" or no one would get it. If you wanted to do an issue where you cut-out everyone's face in the magazine and replaced it with one of your friend's, and put him on the cover, and had everyone you interviewed say something about him then you did it, and laughed with your friends all month. If you liked an artist and wanted to mention it every other issue, you did.
What's more you knew what you were doing was stupid which made it even funnier.
There are flaws with this but it's also freedom. This is the magazine you would have wanted to have as a teenager, Vice is the cool kid who could hang out with all the groups.