Issue 50
Back in the very beginning of our history, the FADER was more of a project than a publication, an idea for a magazine that Lee Harrison had one day and which Rob Stone and Jon Cohen wisely took up with relish and gusto and support. The editorial staff worked in a weird, semi glassed-in room dubbed the FADER Fishbowl; it was the place where Eddie Brannan frequently used the intra office PA to play—to everyone, at full volume—the Johnny Paycheck chorus Take this job/ And shove it!, where one-time design director Rostarr drew a huge Rostarrian turd on the wall, where beers and cigarettes and takeout breakfast sandwiches from Lemon Lime went to die. It was a total shithole and people looked at you weird when you walked in and disturbed the inner sanctum and it was home to the people who worked there. The FADER, of course, has become much more of an Official Magazine since then—we started having to return publicist’s phone calls (for the most part) a couple of years ago—and there are now positions at the magazine like Production Coordinator and Online Editor, staffed by people who are now so integral to the magazine as to be indispensable.
Yet however far we have come, this will hopefully always be the magazine where Knox Robinson and Lee Harrison and Eddie Brannan once worked, with all the bravado and impunity and determination that they brought to the table. It is our legacy to do the unpredictable and impervious, to champion the unexpected, to occasionally be assholes about why we do what we do when we do it, to sometimes end up making huge mistakes and to sometimes, hopefully, luck into great wins. This issue presents the work of the last 50 issues, and it is in no way complete: it would be impossible to distill all the music and people that have fucked with our minds and iPods and CD players for the last ten years into these 212 pages, but we’ve tried to make sense of them as best we can.
It would be further impossible explain how the photoshoots and cover stories and shitty little newsprint visuals made their way into Word documents and onto servers and why those details are as much professional benchmarks as they are personal histories. In times of trouble and looming deadlines and annoying requests from precious editors or writers, my refrain tends to be, “We are a magazine, on sale for $5.95 at Barnes & Noble” as if somehow that reality will demystify the process and return our egos to planet Earth. As far as our distributor tells me, that statement is still factually correct, but as everyone who has ever worked here knows quite well, the FADER is much more than that: it’s an unending science project and a completely dysfunctional family that people quit and get excommunicated from and marry into but never really leave. It quite possibly might have been the best time of our lives, but we’ll probably never own up to that.
ALEX WAGNER
Yet however far we have come, this will hopefully always be the magazine where Knox Robinson and Lee Harrison and Eddie Brannan once worked, with all the bravado and impunity and determination that they brought to the table. It is our legacy to do the unpredictable and impervious, to champion the unexpected, to occasionally be assholes about why we do what we do when we do it, to sometimes end up making huge mistakes and to sometimes, hopefully, luck into great wins. This issue presents the work of the last 50 issues, and it is in no way complete: it would be impossible to distill all the music and people that have fucked with our minds and iPods and CD players for the last ten years into these 212 pages, but we’ve tried to make sense of them as best we can.
It would be further impossible explain how the photoshoots and cover stories and shitty little newsprint visuals made their way into Word documents and onto servers and why those details are as much professional benchmarks as they are personal histories. In times of trouble and looming deadlines and annoying requests from precious editors or writers, my refrain tends to be, “We are a magazine, on sale for $5.95 at Barnes & Noble” as if somehow that reality will demystify the process and return our egos to planet Earth. As far as our distributor tells me, that statement is still factually correct, but as everyone who has ever worked here knows quite well, the FADER is much more than that: it’s an unending science project and a completely dysfunctional family that people quit and get excommunicated from and marry into but never really leave. It quite possibly might have been the best time of our lives, but we’ll probably never own up to that.
ALEX WAGNER
Back in 2000, when someone handed me ISSUE 3 of the FADER (Beck/D’Angelo and Mos Def), it was the first time I had seen or even heard of it. I was defeated. At the time, I was working on a new music magazine that was about to launch and when the FADER dropped, it took all the proverbial wind out of my sails. It had beautiful paper, design, photography and—most importantly—compelling content.
But it wasn’t really a clear case of “If you can’t beat em…”. I actually spent two more years at another major music magazine, admiring from afar before eventually following a hunch that there was something special going on here, and I had to be a part of it. The biggest appeal, before I came on board four years ago, was that the FADER was never one to play by the standard music magazine rules: self-congratulatory anniversary and year-in-review issues, cover lines heralding the 100 Worst Rock & Roll Divorces, salacious record reviews full of snarky one-star (and one-sided) trash talk and the limitation of having to recycle the same handful of cover stars who had a) already been minting money for 25 years or b) weren’t wearing any underwear.
Instead, for the past ten years (and 50 issues) the FADER has been dedicated to shining a light on—and providing a platform for—some of the most diverse and brilliant new talent on the planet (that includes not only the artists we’ve covered, but our writers and photographers as well). Founding publishers Rob Stone and Jon Cohen laid out a mission when the FADER was launched in 1998, and it’s the same mission we live by today: to capture and document emerging music and culture. Artists like Outkast, the Strokes, Kanye West and the White Stripes are just a few household names that saw their first covers with the FADER.
Once a quarterly magazine, the FADER is now published eight times a year in the United States and six in Japan, along with a brand new dynamic website. We’ve also expanded to include an interactive PDF and podcast distributed through iTunes, a weekly newsletter, the FADER Suite903 compilation series, amongst other properties—and even bigger things are in the pipeline as we continue to innovate and cement our status as the authority on what’s next. We’re also extremely fortunate to have imaginative brand partners that support emerging music and collaborate with us to create even more content and events for our readers: the Southern Comfort & FADER 7-inch vinyl series, our Levi’s/FADER Fort in Austin (seven years and counting), the FADER/at&t Sideshow, just to name a few. It’s partnerships and programs like these that help highlight how we’ve always approached advertising from a non-traditional perspective and that our goal has been to build the FADER as a multi-media brand—and not strictly a print magazine. So against all of our better FADER instincts, we’ve decided to go ahead and give ourselves a little high five with a self congratulatory issue of our very own, and do something we’ve never done before: take a look back. I can tell you that we’ve had a slight case of the shakes, since the only direction we’ve ever known is forward.
ANDY COHN
Feature 1: New York Rock
Save Your City
"If you think we got off easy, that's bullshit, because we fucking know what we're doing." -Julian Casablancas of the Strokes, F09
Feature 2: Atlanta Hip-Hop
Bottom of the Map
"Gutter, ghetto, glamorous—the pain and the champagne in the same envelope." -Killer Mike, F32
Feature 3: The New Club
Last Night a Remix Saved My Life
"Our sound is sort of a synthesis of all the best pop music of now, done with the technology of now—laptops, computers, fucking mobile phones and Gameboys." -Teki Latex of TTC, F28
Feature 4: Island Life
Postcards from the ghetto archipelago
"We stressed out and frustrated and things wicked for we so… anyway!" -Mavado, F42
Feature 5: Trademarks
Signature style close up
Feature 6: Non Fiction
Documentary photojournalism in the pages of The FADER and beyond
+ FADER A-Z
An encyclopedia of the people, places and things that have mattered most in our first 50 issues
