This year is the twentieth anniversary of what I will argue is the most influential magazine in the last… Twenty years.
SPY magazine was a monthly tribute to the festering underbelly of politics, economics and society in New York City and in America. They featured fleshed out exposes that illuminated the depravity and ginormous greed in corporate cultures like Wall Street and Madison Avenue. SPY magazine was that CEO’s personal assistant spilling the beans about who was bilking the company out of their retirement fund savings. DONALD TRUMP and his horrible hairpieces were always placed on Front Street.
You can’t imagine the party that was thrown when SPY finally shuttered their doors. It was a great relief to the classless upper-class that they could finally return to their normal obnoxious state of being. They could kick up the legs and dance without SPY magazine nipping at their well-heeled heels. Here’s a rundown of some of the usual suspects that were featured in SPY magazine who might not have remained so prominent in the public eye if the magazine was still on the shelves. PAT ROBERTSON, ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, BILL COSBY, NANCY REAGAN, LIZ SMITH, BILL CLINTON, MARTHA STEWART, PAUL McCARTNEY, DONALD TRUMP, OPRAH WINFREY, HILLARY CLINTON, GEORGE BUSH Sr.
My english teacher in Brooklyn Tech H.S. would bring in all sorts of publications for us to read. From the New York Times to Vanity Fair to The Observer. All those rags were lily white and they spoke to me as if I weren’t good enough to touch the paper they were printed on, but SPY magazine made fun of the whole lot. It stripped away pretension and privilege by showing that those who flaunt it the most deserve it the least.
It’s true that I knowingly co-opted the ‘Seperated At Birth’ theme from SPY, but what I failed to remember is that they also used to run a ‘Celebrity Math’ feature. I will tell you in a New York City minute that SPY magazine’s writing is what has birthed my sense of quasi-journalism and as I scan the blogosphere and even broadcast television I can see that the spirit of that magazine lives on. From Gawker to the Daily Show there are an endless amount of outlets carrying SPY’s DNA code of spot on humor and razor sharp snark.
If I could have told the editor’s of the magazine twenty years ago that GEORGE BUSH Sr’s drunken son would be a two term president and that ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER would be governor of California and that DONALD TRUMP would climb out of bankruptcy to become the King of New York City real estate they prah’lee would have told me to go ‘Get A Life’.
Yes! Spy magazine was something I enjoyed a great deal in the early 90s when a high school friend had a subscription for me to leech off of.
I don’t think I ever bought one but that was probably due to me being a broke teen at the time. It was great reading.
Snark + politics + pop culture + Meta-media analysis + Funny shit = Spy magazine as a father (one of many, Freddie Krueger’s-mom-prison-rape style) to this blog shit?
when we reminisce…..
nice post.