Prelude to a Lick
By Scott Hefflon
Photo by Pia Schachter
I haven’t written an Editor’s Rant in two years. Not since the 10 Year Anniversary Issue. For those not good at math, that makes this the 12 year anniversary issue. And?
To me, it’s not especially remarkable that we’ve added a few new columns this issue, and that we expanded on a few we started over the last couple issues. If you don’t progress, you stagnate. And I get bored way too easily to rest on my laurels. Do I even have laurels? If I have them, I’m surprised I haven’t driven them into the ground, cuz I have a tendency to break stuff cuz I push it too hard. Work hard, play hard, stay hard. If I were so lame that I needed a slogan to describe myself, that’d probably be it.
A few things about this issue…
We brought back a column called Garbage Pail, but retitled it Mental Shrapnel. Funny little wordplay and “what the?” illustrations to make you laugh and look at life a little differently. After hearing too many people say “dude, I never knew you were funny” because I spend most of my day bitching about late reviews, late checks, another bin of mediocre bands hounding me for coverage, I decided to bring some humor back to Lollipop. Why not? Lots of life sucks and we’re powerless to change it, so why not at least get a laugh out of it?
We started a new column called Other Fun Stuff, cuz none of us came up with a better title for it. Any ideas? People send us stuff other than CDs to review, and we stumble over cool little products out there, especially while surfing the web because there’s nothing good on TV between commercials selling us the same lame crap.
Like it or not, individuality is often expressed by what you buy, or buy into. Based on that disheartening premise, I figured the least we could do was find some cool crap for you to waste your money on in order to establish a sense of identity. And hell, who doesn’t love people coming up to them and saying “that tee shirt rules, where’d you get it?” or something? Since “alternative” merchandise is sold at the mall for any shithead to purchase, we kinda have to dig a little deeper, ya know?
The Model Gallery and Band Gallery got bigger, but perhaps more notable is the different approach to the Fashion Gallery. We’re a rock mag. We should look like one and act like one. While this launch of “Rock & Roll Fashion” or whatever might fall victim to my tendency to clusterfuck layout with tons of smaller images (a lot of people hate that, by my name’s first on the masthead, dig?), I hope to tweak the idea as we go along, showing cool band tees, cool posters, cool clothes, and have settings and “themes” that look familiar to “people like us.” I don’t often hang out on a runway, with my shirt open, looking away dramatically, so how am I supposed to connect with magazine after magazine of photos like that? Real people, real situations, stuff we’d really wear. Makes sense to me…
