Shock value?

While browsing around Selectadisc yesterday for what felt like the first time in ages, I picked up a copy of Vice magazine, newly launched in the UK and with ex-NME scribe and Bizarre editor Andy Capper at the helm (they've also got NME's dance boffin Piers Martin onboard). On the surface (and there is a LOT of surface...) it's a blunt and brutal cross between style mags, Bizarre and 'Jackass'. Whereas Bizarre positions the reader as a "normal" person looking on voyeuristically from a distance at the freakish and perverse extremes of humanity, Vice presents all this as the norm - real people need to know how to fight those bigger than them, real people will relate to tales of wanking to homemade porn in aeroplane toilets etc etc.

Anyway, its status as a self-appointed provocatively controversial cat amongst the corporate pigeons is compromised somewhat by the glossy ads - OK so they help to keep the magazine free, but do we really need Ben Sherman and Sony filling up space? I for one would be prepared to pay if this meant no corporate bullshit - and if the content was worth reading. Aside from the entertaining and educational guide to "getting reamed up the cake" (that's Vicespeak which translates as "getting fucked up the arse" for you and me), there's precious little in the issue I've seen to merit any attention - too many sketchily trivial articles presumably included because they are about (hee hee) violence and female masturbation. What Vice lacks in wit, inspiration and intelligence it thinks it can make up for with pornography. 'Fraid not.

When all's said and done, the lack of any real substance means Vice buckles under the weight of its own amorality and is ultimately as vacuous as any of the publications against which it sets itself. Being "shocking" is fine, but it's got to lead somewhere, as in the work of Chris Morris. If it's an end in itself (as it seems to be in Vice), it quickly becomes tedious. OK, so Magazine World is currently a bland and safe place, but on this evidence Vice ain't the answer.