Q Magazine

The Adult Orientated Mainstream -


Paul McCartney was on the first issue of Q and came back to celebrate its 50th issue: he’s typical of the magazine’s emphasis on older ‘classic’ artists.
KEY BRAND VALUES: MAINSTREAM ADULT ORIENTATED ROCKOWNER: EMAP (1986 TO 2007) BAUER (2007 to present)
MASTHEAD: Q
PUFF: THE GUIDE TO MODERN MUSIC AND MORE / THE ULTIMATE MUSIC GUIDE
PRICE: £3.90
HOUSE STYLE: RED AND WHITE, BLACK TEXT, CANDID COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHY
ADVERTISING PORTFOLIO: ALBUM ARTISTS, HI-FI EQUIPMENT, PREMIUM BRAND ALCOHOLIC DRINKS, EXPENSIVE CARS.

Q was launched in 1986 by EMAP. Its founding editors were Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, both of whom had worked on Smash Hits.
In many ways it was an extension of this in that it was colourful and A4. However, it also drew upon the sophisticated journalism of an earlier era: old school NME journalists like Charles Shaar Murray also wrote for the magazine. This reflected the older demographic of readers, who were still music fans in their thirties and forties.
Initially its success was based upon the proliferation of the CD, which generated high levels of advertising revenue. However, the magazine fast became the biggest selling music title in the UK. Though in some respects the magazine pioneered men’s lifestyle journalism, the success of FHM and Loaded threatened the magazine in the mid-1990s (interestingly Dave Hepworth was editor of FHM!). Likewise the decline of album sales in the digital age and what has been described as the ‘death of the bankable cover star’ saw the magazine resorting to lists of 100 greatest singers/ guitarists/ songwriter, etc. for lead feature articles.
Analysing Pop History: Q Magazine and the Mature Mainstream
The notion that what can be identified academically as a sub-culture is not always definitive of opposition or resistance and has been remarked upon by a number of theorists including Gary Clarke and David Laing. Laing in particular has suggested that what Hebdige identified as subculture in punk was simply a discrete genre within mainstream rock. It is with caution then that we must approach the nominal mainstream of the music press occupied by Q Magazine.
Since its launch in 1986 the success of Q has snowballed: by 1990 it had a readership of 170,000 and today it is still the most widely read music magazine. Roy Shukar categorises the magazine as a ‘new tabloid’ and it is easy to see why. It occupies a middle ground for middle of the road, middle aged and generally middle class listeners. Like the Daily Mail, Britain’s most popular newspaper, Q is conservative with a small c. However, with that it encodes a range of cultural prejudices. As Shukar suggests, the success of the magazine is predicted on what is characterised as its objectivity: ‘its non-partisan approach and avoidance of vehemence’, ‘its non-confrontational style of interviewing, and an avoidance of the critic as star form of self-indulgence’.
As Q matured it became more orientated towards male consumers – influenced by lads mags like FHM and Loaded.
At first glance Q appears to adhere to many of the conventions of women’s magazines outlined by Janice Winship in Inside Women’s Magazines. It is slightly smaller than A4 in size and is produced on high quality glossy paper. It places music within the wider culture of pop, however, it explicitly emphasizes the consumer lifestyle of its audience.
This is linked to the origins of the magazine, which are inextricable from the birth of the CD in the 1980s and transformations in male consumption outlined by Frank Mort and Sean Nixon. This appropriation of the tools of female consumption is perhaps connotative of the insidious backlash against feminism in the 1980s outlined by Susan Faludi. However, what is spectacular about Q is that it fails to take account for its own location within a range of variables that determine its own ability to make proclamations of cultural nobility. In its objectivity, Q is blind to issues of race, gender and age and therefore cannot recognise when its own impartiality transgresses these boundaries. It has an ambivalence that neutralises its own performance
Issue 200 is typical of the blithe manner with which Q has come to comport itself. In celebration of this milestone the magazine arrived shrink wrapped in gold foil with the intention, one supposes, of enticing the reader with the thrill of unwrapping a virgin Q.
This outer-layer is adorned with what the reader will assumes is the somewhat prosaic cover within: a photo montage of the star interviews making up this month’s edition including David Bowie, Marilyn Manson and Moby. However, in this protective jacket the magazine also quite intentionally resembles a top shelf pornographic magazine. Once the reader has torn off the jacket, in whichever state of feverish excitement it has managed to illicit, it is apparent that the cover depicted on the foil wrapper is quite different from the one within, and quite purposely so.
The real cover of Issue 200 is grunge star Courtney Love; naked and inebriated with strategically placed feathers. Certainly one could argue that the images are distasteful. Love is well known for courting this kind of publicity. Moreover Q is somewhat gratuitous in its use of them. What is disturbing, however, is not the display of flesh or even that the candid shots look very amateur. Rather it is the entirely non-partisan way in which the accompanying article tells the story that shocks:
Courtney Love went mad in London before Christmas. During a bizarre photo shoot with Q on 23rd December she poured Champagne over her head, stripped naked and spent the early hours of Christmas Eve streaking around the upmarket Park Lane area… Tired and emotional, having learned of former movie co-star Joe Strummer’s death earlier that day Love paraded around the room in just a pair of knee-length socks.
There is a real tension between written and visual narratives. On the one hand, textually it is locating a framework in which the debauched antics of a lewd and mentally unstable middle aged woman are an entirely neutral activity. On the other hand, the visual account is very clearly exploring the ideas that these pictures might be pornographic. I am not going to be so pedantic as to suggest that Love is some sort of victim or that the piece denigrates women. Love is denigrating women and there is no value judgement made about whether porn is a good or bad thing. However, it raises certain questions about the implicit agendas that are encoded in such implicit objectivity.
Another area in which the magazine’s ambivalent stance betrays its own agenda is in the presentation of different generations of musician. Historically the magazine has always championed established artists with lengthy back catalogues. Indeed, the success of Q can largely be attributed to change ageing demography of pop consumers in the 1980s looking to buy classic albums on CD. Thus Q’s first issue featured Paul McCartney, with Mick Jagger following not long after. Q 200 is no exception featuring as it does lead interviews with Keith Richards, David Bowie and Steven Tyler alongside contemporary artists like Justin Timberlake, Christine Aquilera and Craig David.
In the horizontal bizarre that is contemporary popular there is nothing unusual about this. While pop sensations come and go, it is very difficult for newcomers to achieve the legendary status of artists whose recording careers have spanned four decades. However, where Q’s objectivism is disquieting is its refusal to perceive a value difference between Keith Richard and Justin Timberlake. Issue 200 of Q features a series of question and answer interviews in which all interviewees are subject to a tabloid style investigation.
At no point is any reference made to the generational difference between the respondents. Now of course the notion that in 2003 anyone might still want to know what Keith Richard’s bedroom looks like is perhaps a fitting tribute to his enduring appeal.
Likewise, nobody under the age of 40 is going to be impressed that Mr Timberlake’s idea of Heaven is a big long golf course. However, there is real tension between the historical narratives this ambivalence encodes. On the one hand, the juxtapostion of an old trooper like Steven Tyler and the fresh-faced Christina Aguilera confers upon the latter a particular potency: his continuing relevence is secure because his airbrushed visage is appearing just pages away from her nubile physique.
On the other hand, that Aguilera can be found sandwiched between two greats like Tyler and Bowie lends her a particular credibility. Obviously one could argue that by failing to balance the trilogy of Bowie, Richards and Tyler with a female figure like Stevie Nicks or Marianne Faithfull Q is betraying a very specific prejudice. However, the point I want to make is that by refusing to be partisan in the presentation of generational difference this encodes a far from neutral idea of history.
Q mixes older ‘classic’ artists with the biggest stars of the contemporary music scene. Arguable the magazine is sexist for the disproportionate number of older male stars it carries!
For Roy Shukar the construction of history is the one of the foremost functions of rock criticism. He suggests that rock critics are the gate-keepers in the definition of what Shukar characterises as the ‘the reference points, for the highs and lows in development of rock’. This is explicit in Q 200 in an article which celebrates the ‘200 Most Amazing Moments in Q’s Lifetime’. The piece introduces itself with the wry aside: ‘What a strange sixteen years it’s been’. There is no explanation of the rationale or logic behind the compilation of this list.
However, this makes the message all the more resounding. It is implicit that whatever Q has deemed to be the most amazing moments in its lifetime will undoubtedly be based on reasoned objectivity. This is underlined by the empirical certainty of the figure 200. Nor does this imply that greatness can be quantified but it confers an authority on Q to do so because, conveniently, it has produced the same number of issues in that time. The moments that are chosen, however, are not private moments - the birth of its own television channel, for example, or the disappearance of Vox, Q’s closest competitor - but a list of collective moments in popular culture over the last sixteen years. These range from when the character ‘Dirty Den Watts’ from BBC television’s soap opera Eastenders ‘served his missus Angie with divorce papers on Christmas Day 1986’ to George W Bush’s recent demands of Saddam Hussein: ‘You disarm, or we will disarm you’.
On the surface the equivalence Q perceives in the magnitude and significance of these moments is suggestive of much that is wrong in our media dominated world. However, in doing so the magazine is simply delineating the clear and unspoken parameters of non-partisan concern, which establishes a disarming rapport. If Q’s history is our history then so too might our history be Q’s. Not only does this give the moments book-ended by these events a mutual legitimacy but it also raises questions as to how neutral and objective that history is.
The presentation of history is perhaps central to the understanding of the conflicting aesthetics that are at play in the presentation of pop in contemporary music magazines. Respective notions of minority and majority listeners, sub cultural and mainstream groups do not seem to apply to the accounts of pop they offer.
The location of history it would seem is central to understanding the aesthetics that are at play in the dissemination of the music. Andrew Goodwin has argued that in spite of transformations in the technological production of pop it still operates within very traditional notions of creativity and authorship. Likewise it is possible to index the aesthetics at play in contemporary music to the location of history within the same binary of majority and mainstream listeners outlined by Reisman. This is inextricable from the idea that the pop scene is a complex world in which the attitudes and values constitute a symbolic system.
However, it is also a simple function of pop being a lot older than it used to be. Thus within the genre of teen pop typified by Smash Hits one could just as easily be a minority listener excited by Danni Minogues’ appropriation of syncopated Moroder rhythms as a majority listener interested in her hair-do. However, this would be dependent upon a very specific knowledge of pop history. Likewise, as yesterday’s pop stars grow old, majority listeners curious to find out about the extra-curricular activities of their mainstream heroes frequently invade the avant-garde. This too is a function of specific histories. Nominally sub-cultural genres, like metal and indie, represented here by Terrorizer and NME, have majority and minority listeners too; for whom access to highly specialist vocabularies are indexed to specific cultural histories.







Discussion Points
WHO IS THE BIGGEST BAND IN THE WORLD TODAY?
WHY DON’T SOME PEOPLE LIKE THE IDEA OF BEING MAINSTREAM?
IS THERE AN AGE AT WHICH ROCK STARS SHOULD QUIT?
DO PEOPLE’S TASTES CHANGE AS THEY GET OLDER?

Bibilography
Faludi, S (1992). Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. London: Vintage.
Shuker, R (2001) Understanding Popular Music. London: Routledge.
Winship, Janice (1987) Inside Women’s Magazines. London: Pandora Press