As goes GM, so goes shitty rap magazines

It would be too bad if the rest of these rap magazines went out of business. Or would it? Sometimes I wonder if anyone even gives a shit.

I've been watching cable news this week, and I've been seeing a buncha old cracka-ass crackas reminisce about the days when GM was the shit - back when your parents would get a new Chevy or whatever, and everyone on the block would get jealous. Then, like a year later, the bumper would fall off and you'd have to go get a new one. And so on and so forth, until people got sense enough to buy a Toyota.

Why in the world anyone would be nostalgic for a time like that is beyond me. I guess that's the kind of shit you had to concern yourself with in the days before the Internets. But the point remains. People used to love GM. Now that it's officially bankrupt, they talk about it as if one of their relatives died, and it didn't even really go out of business. It just got a shedload of free money from the government. My own grandpa should have been so lucky.

Something tells me people aren't gonna be nearly as sad if, say, Giant magazine goes out of business. I did a post on my own site the other day about how Giant might be going under, and I probably wouldn't even have bothered, except I read about it on Gawker, and I came up with what I thought was a rather amusing quip about ghetto hair care products. Ever since I heard that Vibe had to take up a collection to put out its next issue, because the only ad they sold that month was for some sort of afro sheen, I've been obsessed with the idea that a lot of these magazines only really exist to deliver ads for shit like hair gel, big booty pr0n DVDs, the US Army, etc. I wonder if the uber cynical business people in charge maintain any illusions about their target audience, or if they really do sit around and discuss the hopes and desires of kids named Tiallondra, D'Brickashaw and what have you.

Anyway, no one really seemed to give a shit whether Giant lives or dies. Maybe the kind of people who read Giant don't read my site, but I stumble upon a number of blogs during the course of a day, and I didn't see where anyone gave a shit anyone else. The next day, I read somewhere that Giant's editor in chief, who I believe may have been one of the teh ghey guys at Vibe discussed in Russell Simmons' silly as told to autobiography, left to work at Essence, which, as far as I know, is a woman's magazine. But you know what they say - any port in a storm. If this was two weeks ago, maybe he could have become the editor in chief of Global Grind. Ha! Oh that's right, Russell Simmons knows better than to have a teh ghey guy run a hip-hop publication, and even had the balls to as much, albeit probably over 10 years ago at this point.

But that's just Giant. And who gives a shit about Giant anyway? I've heard it's been around since forever, and it used to be a magazine for white people, but I'd never heard of it until it was bought by the black radio conglomerate Radio One. I remember I started hearing ads for it on the radio, and I thought to myself, "This magazine Giant seems to be displaying some ambition. I'll have to remember to flip through it the next time I'm in a Borders." I'll admit, it took me a while to realize that Giant didn't have to pay for those ads, because it was owned by the same company as the radio station, and the fact that the station would even take time out to run a free ad for Giant means it probably wasn't doing very well either. You don't hear ads for, say, Us Weekly, on the local adult alternative station? Admit it, sometimes you listen adult alternative radio, especially now that southern rap's become so popular. It's just so... I don't know, pleasant?

Vibe magazine might be on its last leg, too, and I doubt anyone would give a shit about it either. In fact, if you hear anything about Vibe magazine at all these days, it's in the context of people talking about how much they hate Vibe magazine. They really seem to have pissed people off with all of these asinine lists in their new "real rap" issue. Yeah, they've succeeded in getting people to talk about something that's in Vibe, but no one seems to have anything good to say about it. Granted, I realize that all people ever do is complain about lists - I'm more concerned with the fact that Vibe doesn't seem to have a single defender in the blogosphere, other than people who work there and their various spouses. Where are the people who actually like Vibe magazine? Is there a such thing as a Vibe magazine stan? There probably used to be, back in the '90s, but then they grew up, and/or died of AIDS.