MTV’s SN magazine, a tiresome rote exercise in the branding of bland corporate entertainment as somehow daring and edgy. I used to defend MTV and its spinoff projects from the unholier-than-thou culture critics. I can’t anymore. It’s not that SN (or MTV itself) is a dangerous influence on our children; just the opposite. It’s an irrelevant nothing, as loud and as trite as the global-superstar acts it showcases. And it’s a mouthpiece for the major record labels, an institution whose sleazeball tactics against its own fan base are giving it a public black eye from which it may never recover.

I’m now adding this paragraph later that same day. Upon further pondering, SN is superficially not all that different from some of the more superficial alt-music magazines of recent vintage (you know, the ones filled with one-page, big-picture, few-words puff pieces about rising young alterna-celebrities). You can interpret that as meaning either that the independent music press has sunk to MTV attention-span levels, or that MTV’s nakedly stealing indie-music shticks for the umpteen-hundredth time to prop up its illusion of street credibility, or something in between the two.