Chainsaw Magazine

How Vice Magazine Failed A Generation

By 

Ellis Jones

Once, a long time ago, there was an antenna called MTV that was crude, jagged, and smelled like burning plastic and stale teenage sweat. It taught a generation about Sonic Youth, about the beautiful, screeching junk-pile noise of the underground, before the boardrooms smelled money in the water and executed a slow-motion pivot into the slick, airbrushed pop-punk and boy-band shitstorm of the late 90s. They replaced the howling feedback with bleached teeth and lip-sync tracks, setting the stage for the unmitigated reality TV hell of the 2000s, a permanent loop of spray-tanned vanity and cultural lobotomies. That was the blueprint, the script that Vice Magazine read line by line and memorized for its own final act.

Vice started as a jagged little piece of scrap metal—a MAD Magazine for the junkies, the free-thinkers, the skaters, and the culturally unhinged. It was a beautiful, salacious, no-holds-barred bastion of free speech that would print things just to see if the page would catch fire, the only place on the wire where you could find a field guide on how to navigate the absolute fringes of human behavior next to raw war reportage from places the major networks couldn’t find on a map. 

Then the decay set in as the rowdies got desk jobs and the street-level instinct was replaced by the cold, dead hand of the institution. They transformed into an overly written, overly academic, nose-in-the-air publication of unbearable pretension where every article began to read like a master’s thesis written by someone who had never actually smelled street asphalt or broken a bone. They traded the bleeding meat of reality for the sterile language of the faculty lounge, curating an aesthetic of high-minded scolding.

After the billion-dollar valuations evaporated like cheap smoke and the Chapter 11 bankruptcy papers were signed in cold blood, the carcass was picked clean by corporate vultures and investment consortiums, the grand illusion having been fueled for years by massive infusions of cash from the big entertainment empires, including that multi-headed corporate entity out of Anaheim, the cartoon mouse itself, sanitizing the edge until nothing remained but a hollow brand name. 

Step into the modern editorial office and you see a bullpen populated by a staff of lazy, boring, uninteresting Gen-Z and millennial overly sensitive babies who act as the new bureaucrats of the spirit. They don’t look for truth; they look for safe harbor, and they don’t want to shock the system so much as file an HR complaint against the universe. 

Vice used to publish visceral, unvarnished dispatches on the rawest mechanics of human desire and subculture, but today the edgiest thing they cover with any regular frequency is the melodramatic, scripted soap opera of professional wrestling. They sit behind their glowing screens, typing out low-stakes grievance copy, terrified of their own shadows and completely detached from the wild, free-love chaos that birthed the very masthead they draw a paycheck from, because the edge didn’t just get dull—it was confiscated by the management.

Look out the window at the digital landscape—a flat, gray parking lot where a carnival used to bleed. They failed us, selling the whole psychotropic circus for a mess of pottage and a seat at the adult table.