Third Man Launches Quarterly Print Magazine ‘Maggot Brain’
While the rest of the industry continues the light-speed sprint to the digital beyond, Jack White’s Third Man Records is going back to the future with a new quarterly print magazine that pays homage to the classic title track of Funkadelic’s 1971 album, Maggot Brain. The magazine will be edited by Detroit resident and former Amazon music editor Mike McGonigal, who has contributed to Spin, The Village Voice and Artforum and is the author of books on Galaxie 500 and My Bloody Valentine.
The 100+ page mag is “packed with phenomenal content – art, music, literature, and unpublished archival stuff + more,” according to a statement.
“We miss cigar-smelling newsstands crammed with amazing publications from everywhere all at once. We miss Creem. We miss Ragtime Ephemeralist. We miss Spy. We miss NY Rocker. We miss weirdo newsprint thrust at us right by subway entrances,” reads the announcement of White’s latest analog venture. “We miss Weirdo. We miss Locus Solus. We miss Off Our Backs. We miss Low Rider. We miss Kicks. We miss The Voice. We miss Motorbooty. We miss Avalanche. We miss Grand Royal. We miss Slash. We miss the Gentlewomen of California. We miss Raw. We miss being able to find stacks of old Oz, It, or Black Panther newspapers in the back of that used bookstore in the strip mall. We miss the red and black. We miss the crowding into See Hear. We miss Index Magazine.
“We miss anything that Joe Brainard did a cover for, that printed words by Lucy Lippard, that ran yet another bare-chested image of Iggy Pop, that told stories for no reason other than they must be told. And yeah, we are aware how cheesy that last bit sounds, but we are pretty much cool with being cheesy — just look what the fuck kind of politics irony, disaffection, and that laziest vice of privilege have got us into. And yes, you get it, we love print but we do not merely live in the past surrounded by the moldy old, really. We mean, fantagraphics is still publishing new issues of Love & Rockets, plus there is so much new stuff… We’re not luddites, but. Just please don’t ask us where our website is.”
The debut issue ($12) promises stories on late Gits singer Mia Zapata, Swell Maps, Alice Coltrane, late cult singer Daniel Johnston and J. Dilla. Future issues promise pieces such as an oral history of The Raincoats’ first 7’, fiction by Forest Juziuk, Shana Cleveland’s illustrated tour diary of her recent European tour, new translations of Unica Zürn, a “Jukebox Jury”-style feature with Iggy Pop, as well as a profile of the women who sang with Parliament-Funkadelic.
Click here to buy a subscription.
A post shared by Third Man Records (@thirdmanrecords) on Dec 3, 2019 at 7:47am PST
