MUSIC JOURNALISM 101 / JOHNNY MNEMONIC

Death Of An Indie Bible (or, Adventures with Option Magazine, Pt. 2)

By Johnny Mnemonic

In my last installment of Music Journalism 101 I outlined my misadventures in the land of grunge and honey circa 1991 and how a proposed story on Sub Pop lumberjacks Tad got deep-sixed, frustratingly, by Option. The magazine operated from 1985 to 1998, publishing 81 issues overall, and at its 1995 peak, according to Wikipedia, had amassed a circulation of 27,000. That's not quite at Spin level, and not even in the same universe as Rolling Stone, but still damned respectable for what was known in its time as the indie underground's bible.

People tend to remember Option rather fondly, and I'll be the first to admit that I was proud to write for it even though the pay, if adjusted for inflation, probably wasn't any better than writing for online publications nowadays - which is to say, negligible. Those of you reading this who also reviewed records for the magazine back in the day will recall that reviewers, in lieu of actually payment, got to keep the albums and cassettes sent to them by the editors. But the free music (plus free subscription, of course) combined with the ego-buzz of seeing one's byline in print was enough when it was a magazine whose mission you believed in.

Respect from the music community aside, editorially speaking, Option was pretty disorganized, and it was hard to get a handle on what, if any, editorial "stance" the publication took other than "if it's independent, we cover it," which meant one issue you'd see, say, Patti Smith on the cover, an African world-beat artist the next and an obscure British folk artist attempting to make a comeback the next. Cool, but in the long run, not the smartest strategy to employ when trying to make headway at the newsstand. Subscribers are one thing, and I suspect the magazine had a fairly loyal subscription base that re-upped each year. But the habits of newsstand browsers are different, and nowadays even the lowest-circulation fanzine knows to put a known quantity or semi-familiar face on the cover (along with names of main feature artists listed on the left-hand side of the cover, not the right, due to the way magazines are displayed); otherwise you risk nobody even picking the damned thing up in the first place, and you can't build a brand in a vacuum. Option, to its credit, wised up about this considerably during its 13-year run, but I still hear people make the occasional comment about it being "too eclectic for its own good."

As a writer, contending with Option could also be confusing, as one's story pitches seemed to be accepted or rejected on such a random basis that you imagined the editors taping ideas to a giant roulette wheel, spinning it, and making assignments based on where it stopped. Worse, it wasn't unusual to get an assignment, turn it in, and then wait for it to be published... and wait... and wait... or in the case of the Tad piece, call up the editor only to be told, "Oh, we didn't have room to run it, and now it's too old..."

Too, the head-in-sand quality I alluded to in the Tad story could sometimes be perplexing. For all Option's so-called championing of the music underground, Amerindie and otherwise, it "overlooked" (or conveniently ignored) anything that didn't quite measure up to the editors' rarified notions of what was hip. Ergo, the Seattle snub; grunge bands were kinda ratty-looking, presumably blue collar or worse (we now know that grunge's early white-trash image was a marketing ruse foisted upon the public by Sub Pop), and - shudder! - borderline heavy metal, therefore very uncool. Option played favorites; for example, you'd always see some avant-garde Independent Project Records band or shambling K Records artist being featured (one of this blog's comments, below after the Tad entry, makes a similar observation), but only occasional lip service would be given to the skronk/noise groups of Amphetamine Reptile, Treehouse and Touch & Go. (For some reason the gnarly, noisy, long-haired outfits on the SST label were mainstays of Option-land, but hey, SST was headquartered just down the road from the Option offices in L.A.) Additionally, a pervasive politically correct streak, editorially speaking, was impossible to miss; there's nothing wrong with covering females and persons of color, but that sort of lingering Great Society mindset sometimes trumped notions of actual musical worthiness at Option.

This myopia-bred snobbery extended to the Option choice of cover subjects. Certainly featuring the likes of Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets early on was admirable, and it wasn't unusual to see (as noted) Patti Smith or Frank Zappa staring out at you from the newsstand down at your local record store where Option was typically sold. (Good choices from a circulation point of view, by the way.) As that Option Wikipedia page points out, however, the frequent dialogue among staffers ran along lines of, "Is this artist too popular to be worthy of a cover?" (What do we do if Sonic Youth leaves SST and goes to DGC?) Such navel gazing further resulted in an almost formulaic rotation of non-rock cover subjects to ensure that Option was never perceived as "mainstream" or, heaven forbid, "rockist" (more p.c. groupthink there). The comment above about being too eclectic aside, part of Option's appeal, certainly, was how it wore its eclecticism on the sleeve, that between its covers nearly all genres were considered equals (again, see the Wikipedia entry for more details). But to many who discovered the magazine late during its tenure, it's likely that it did indeed have a somewhat schizophrenic reputation.

The fact that it often relied upon less-than-seasoned writers to provide the bulk of its content didn't help its case either. Nobody who picked up Option was necessarily expecting The New Yorker, but I distinctly recall getting my copy in the mail from time to time, reading an article, and wondering to myself, "Did anybody even fact-check this?" Plus, the magazine had a tendency to favor certain "pet writers" of dubious talent beyond that of extreme self-promotion. Without a doubt one of the most annoying music journalists the ‘80s and ‘90s ever produced was Gina Arnold, whose solipsistic wet kiss to alternative rock, 1993's Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana, remains a low literary point of the era; Arnold penned feature after feature for Option despite all extant evidence that her reporting skills were nil. Having edited publications in both L.A. and NYC myself, I understand how thousands of writers are out there clamoring for work, and how as a result one tends to rely on a small pool of trusted freelancers, folks who turn in clean copy, and on time. But they also have to write coherently and cogently, and they need to be mindful of the fact that their readers aren't interested in their personal diary scribblings (which is how Arnold's pieces invariably came off).

Option began life in ‘85 as an outgrowth of/successor to the late, great OP, which had enjoyed a healthy 26-issue run in the early ‘80s as the first indie music bible prior to founder/publisher John Foster imposing a built-in obsolescence rule. Two music publications sprung up in its wake: Sound Choice, a kind of anarchist/collective-minded mag published by the extraordinarily grumpy and no-business-sense-whatsoever David Ciaffardini; and Option, founded by Scott Becker (publisher) and Richie Unterberger (editor). I'd subscribed to OP (among scores of music fanzines) and faithfully sent in my money to Sound Choice and Option, too. It wouldn't be too long before I offered my services to Option, because while I'd already been reviewing records for Spin and Circus (for pay), I greatly liked the magazine's DIY spirit, and anyway, it was hard to place more than one review every few issues in the other two because the competition among freelancers was so fierce. Option seemed to be a welcoming group of peers.

That "DIY spirit" could be a double-edged sword, however. Publisher Becker reportedly had an iron-clad rule that his magazine would not accept pitch calls from record labels' publicists. A pitch call is exactly that: the p.r. agent rings up an editor in order to hype a client or follow up on a record that had previously been mailed to the magazine. In order to increase the chances of landing coverage in the magazine, sometimes the label would also provide what's known in the industry as "swag": free teeshirts, coffee mugs, shot glasses, promotional-only releases, and just plain bizarre gee-gaws with vague thematic tie-ins to the artist or the record. (Swag is far less abundant in 2009 as the labels have realized they're just giving editors and writers free eBay fodder.) I personally never saw Becker's rule being implemented during the times I visited the Option office, but I heard enough complaints from publicists who knew I wrote for Option and were begging me to pitch their artists to the magazine that I have no doubt it existed in some form or another.

So you can add a measure of hubris to the aforementioned snobbery when tallying up the Option score. Virtually no magazine in the history of entertainment coverage ever enforced such a strict mandate, for while a moderate separation between the editorial and advertising departments is generally considered good for a publication's ethical health, we're not exactly talking about someone ringing Option up and offering, payola-style, to purchase the back cover ad space in exchange for a ten-page feature. In all fairness to record labels, their viewpoint tends to be that they advertise in music magazines where their products will get the most visibility, and there's an expectation that at least from time to time those products will be covered. They don't necessarily expect a positive review (some do, actually), but they still want a fair shot at coverage. That's just the way it works. Imagine someone calling up Option: "Did you get our check and the artwork for the Johnny Mnemonic Blues Band ad?" "Yes we did, and thanks. It will run next issue." "What are the chances of the Mnemonic album getting reviewed?" "CLICK!"

For a magazine in the early ‘90s to play the gatekeeper card to the extreme that Option did, trying to remake the rules in an industry where back-scratching and favor-rendering is not only business as usual but, when done properly, an efficient and mutually beneficial process, was ludicrously out of sync with reality. That, an inability to see the music magazine milieu through the eyes of the aforementioned newsstand browser (it's no coincidence that Mojo came on the scene around this time and, with its regular rotation of Beatles, Dylan, Neil Young, Stones, Springsteen, etc. for its covers, was wildly successful due to its sheer predictability), and a series of unfortunate business decisions (notably the launching, in 1995, of sister publication UHF, a glossy "alternative fashion" magazine that was a massive, money-sucking flop and embarrassed everyone associated with it), all conspired to doom Option.

In mid-'98, we writers received a letter from Becker indicating that Option was temporarily suspending publication. At the time it was suggested that Option would eventually reincarnate itself as some sort of combined digital-print entity, although Becker's plans were pretty vague, and nothing ever materialized. The July-August 2008 issue was the final one.

In light of all the recent music magazine shutterings, the Option story probably isn't that unusual. It's even likely that, as consumer habits change and markets shift, most if not all magazines will enjoy a finite lifespan; only one in several thousand ever has a shot of lasting long enough to be considered "an institution" like Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair. But it did last for 13 lucky years, and a lot of folks, myself included, loved it dearly, which is why being privy to Option's numerous eventual missteps was so frustrating. In all my conversations back in the day with the editors I don't know if I ever leaned across the desk and asked, "Why are you doing this? Have you considered this instead?" - mainly because it wasn't my place to do so. It was their magazine, after all, and they were supposed to know what they were doing.

 By the way, I never got a kill fee for the Tad story, dammit.

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Johnny Mnemonic is the pseudonym of a "highly-regarded" national writer with, he advises us, over two decades' experience working as a music critic, reporter and editor. We've never met him face-to-face, and he further advises he will be delivering his blogs to us via the "double blind drop-box method," whatever that is, to ensure his anonymity.