Maybe. I dunno. Maybe it's the hippy in me but to me, "counterculture" means celebrating things outside of the mainstream. Vice, on the other hand, is unerringly, relentlessly negative about everything. I have yet to see something they don't piss on. The further away it is and the harder it is to piss on it, the prouder they are to piss. Like that whole North Korea thing - "we went as journalists to North Korea so we could highlight what a douchebag Kim Jong Il is." Uh, yeah. It's the whole "rat-eating deathcamps" angle that most people are going on, not what a fashion victim its dictator happens to be. Dunno. I distinctly remember a film review about a snuff film in which they mentioned watching it in Moscow because Russians are bored with death, therefore snuff films are lame. OF COURSE SNUFF FILMS ARE LAME! You don't need "framing" to make this point! Vice: "We've been bored by more exotic locales than you'll ever visit." Seriously? fuck off.
I think the reason you never understood Vice is that you were too mature for it, and just not the target demographic at all. Being young, pissing on everything is a way to make yourself feel above it all. At that stage, one might not realize that boundless negativity is not only something something that doesn't help the world, but also something that makes you feel bad about yourself. Cynicism is a shortcut to feeling like an intellectual. At least it was for me.
The problem with this is that Vice cost very little on the newsstand but could be had for exorbitant amounts of money several weeks in advance to large corporations that wished to market to youth. I worked at the company that did the music programming for Urban Outfitters and Abercrombie and Fitch. Our subscription was thousands a month, but we got the next issue back when the kidz were looking at the last issue. I've always known Vice as a marketing organization, because it was full of trend articles and projections that - I'm now realizing - probably weren't in the newsstand version.
Edit: And I'm so bored with cynical negativity. It's a snake eating its own tail.Being young, pissing on everything is a way to make yourself feel above it all. At that stage, one might not realize that boundless negativity is not only something something that doesn't help the world, but also something that makes you feel bad about yourself. Cynicism is a shortcut to feeling like an intellectual.
This explanation of cynical negativity is bang-on! How did you get past it into another sensibility?
Mainly, I just grew older, I think. I realized that it's very easy to be dismissive, and not actually clever. Also, thinking positively makes me feel better, and it's a more useful mode of thinking. I remember vividly the first time I did mushrooms, I felt like I was way too much of a negative person, and I strongly felt that it was wrong. I don't know how much of an effect that ended up having on my personality, but I think it did make me more aware of it.
Altered states of consciousness can lead to new ways of thinking. I was on some mushroom extract -- who knows what we were taking back then -- on Salt Spring Island (B.C), on the beach looking at intertidal lifeforms, seeing into the life of things. I decided then and there to take a biology course. Brings to mind Wordsworth's line from Tintern Abbey While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.