Customer Rating: 
Summary: A mixed bag
Comment: For a long time
Rolling Stone has been one of the most popular magazines when it comes to music, politics, and popular culture in general. There's a lot of good things about it. For example, they often have some really great writers (I mean, this is the magazine that brought us Hunter S. Thompson). And then on the other hand, well, I don't know the most eloquent way to put this, but there's a lot of things about this magazine that kinda suck.
One of the things that's really weird about
Rolling Stone is that you can't really tell who it's written for. It seems like they're trying to write the magazine for everybody, but it just ends up seeming like it was written for nobody. They do cover stories on a lot of tween garbage like High School Musical and Fall Out Boy and then there will be stuff about these old dinosaur bands. It seems like it's very rare that there's a cover story about something that's both new and good.
And speaking of older bands, the magazine pretty much worships them. That's fine in some ways, but they really overpraise the work of older musicians who are no longer doing anything musically interesting while ignoring a lot of great new stuff. The most popular example is when they gave three stars to Nirvana's Nevermind when it came out. And then they hilariously made a couple of additional reviews later on where they backpedal and gave it a higher score. They do that with their end of the year music lists too. "Oh woops, we gave that Of Montreal album three stars, but it's pretty popular so let's put it in our Top 50 of the year list." And those aren't the only two examples of that. From what I've seen, if
Rolling Stone gives an album a three star rating, you should just assume that it's going to be awesome. And if they give an album a five star rating, you should just assume that it's by Bob Dylan.
Also, some of the praise given to really weak bands or bands that are really established makes me question the magazine. You have to wonder where the criticism stops and where the magazine just becomes a promotional tool.
Some of the political writing in here is pretty good. It skews heavily to the left and that might bother some people, but the writing is often very well done.
I've noticed that there's frequently these really kind of tabloid-y stories in here. That sounds bad, but the writers have a knack for keeping up with stories that read like they should be in the most awesome tabloid paper ever. For example, there was a story in here about an underage gay porn actor that was linked to the murder of his producer. There's often one story like this per issue and I really love that stuff.
Reviews for film and TV are usually a little more in touch with the present than their music reviews. They usually give praise to stuff that is actually good.
So yeah, there's a lot of problems with the magazine, but at the end of the day, you have a pretty decent amount of good reading material here for a very cheap price. On a scale of one to ten, I rate it "something to read on the toilet."
