Yeah Yeah Yeah

#9 (89 Grant Street, Boonton, NJ 07005) $2.50
by William Ham

The subtitle of this bimonthly upstart reads “A Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine,” but deep down, Yeah Yeah Yeah‘s heart goes pop, pop, pop. Like me, these folks obviously suffer from a goose-pimple dependency, one of the best addictions in the world and one of the least respected. (Try this test – walk into your favorite hipster hangout, proclaim “I just booted the whole Golden Triangle into my arm,” then get a friend to walk in afterwards and state that he has the new Morrissey CD, and just see who gets the most leprous treatment.) Nope, it ain’t easy being a pop addict, as recent revelations have made shockingly clear – not only do your tastes leave you open to all sorts of derision from people who prefer their music performed by craft-deficient trogs, but your heroes can’t even kill themselves to get respect. (I must admit that, upon hearing that Material Issue lead singer Jim Ellison pulled a Hemingway, my first thought was, “Geez… maybe Valerie didn’t love him.”) So yes, ’tis a brave course the Yeah3 crew has charted for themselves, enough to sneak beyond the occasional slippery shoals (like the awkward styles of one or two of its writers and the embarrassingly self-promotional column by one of pop music’s longest-lasting hangers-on, Rodney Bingenheimer) and set sail for sunny shores of harmonious glory. Yeah, I know, I’m starting to feel like I could use a shot of insulin myself, but that’s what this stuff does to people. The best stuff in this mag – like the articulate dissection of after-the-fact cult fandom in the guise of a Mission of Burma review by one G.F. McNett and the sad tale of Badfinger retold (a band that bested M. Issue’s tragedy quotient, with two inter-band suicides and a Mariah Carey cover of one of their songs) – does justice to pop junkies’ sugar-chucks as well as placing it in a greater context, and most of the rest of Yeah Yeah Yeah doesn’t drop too far from those heights.