Vice

Vice magazine co-founder Gavin McInnes, explains to the Times' Style section why white-trash chic is in these days:
"For middle-class kids just out of university and living in Williamsburg. the closest thing right now to bad-ass culture is blue-collar culture, so you have hipsters play-acting blue collar. Instead of saying, `I'm a PlayStation-reared, e-mailing-all-the-time Friendster loser,' they're getting lots of tattoos and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs."

Anyway, besides finally revealing why Gothamist doesn't/isn't allowed to live in Williamsburg, Vanessa Grigoriadis' article continues to parse the Vice brand as well as the purposeful button-pushing by McInnes and co-founders Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi. (But no mention of Ryan McGinley's little stunt with McInnes.) Gothamist was also amused by this photograph by Andrea Stern for the Times, where the founders try to look all ironic but seem sillier than even they expected. Ah, all in the fine old tradition of great comedy coming from Canada.

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By Jen Chung in Arts & Entertainment on September 28, 2003 10:56 AM

Comments [rss]

ibn bruccio

we get Vice here in Melbourne, Australia. for the low-brow, cashed-up and bored it's yet another reason to embrace US cultural hegemony. for the high-brow, artsy and anxious its a piece of boring, lowly, capitalist-dweeb shit. i hate it a lot.

billy

christ man. give it a rest. who in the entertainment industry in the entire world deserves more respect than vice trio for what vice was (95-2000) than any of you snivelling envy ridden fools. there wont be a product of that quality for years to come.

reeding

he also supposedly wrote a letter to gawker saying that he's not backpedalling (yeah, right) when he says it was all a spoof to see if there would be any fact-checking. what a dork.

Mase

At first, upon merely seeing the photograph, I thought the post was about "Office Space." Without doubt, whatever they were attempting to convey in the photo failed.

viceroy

See, that's the danger of this whole "I'm being ironic (but no really I'm joking...) wait, I'm kinda serious" culture. You get guys who ar eallowed to spew homophobic, racist rants, but everybody just goes, "oh, they're just being wild boys, let'em live." No, I think it's more than that. They are sheperding in (albeit somewhat under the radar) the it's hip to be intolerant set. The fact that they have a non-white guy as a team member only proves that uncle toms come in all shades. In the NYT article, the guy says he disagrees with his partner, but he says it almost apologetically and does very little to voice his own opinion. He is cowed. The funniest, and most predictably republican thing is that the main guy IS from Canada but talks and writes about closing America's borders. YES, I AGREE, LET'S START WITH VICE, GET THE F-CK OUT OF OUR COUNTRY, PLEASE.

Jen

McInnes is very worried about making sure Canadian middle class kids can live la hispter vida loca in Williamsburg. Honestly, I don't know if anyone took this article seriously, it seems like one big goof.

Rosecrans

I like this bit especially:

"He actually leans much further to the right than the Republican Party. His views are closer to a white supremacist's. 'I love being white and I think it's something to be very proud of,' he said. 'I don't want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.'"

Jen

Thanks, Deanne. My head very cloudy on Sunday morning. Anyway, according to this Village Voice article:

"One of the accompanying photos shows an unconscious McInnes; McGinley has stripped him naked below the waist (and apparently sucked his dick for a laugh)."