Main task: Detailed analysis of music magazines

Magazine: The Wire

Genre: Avant garde, jazz, experimental, hip hop, modern classical, free improvisation, post-rock and electronic.

Audience: Male and female 20-30 year olds who would consist of succeeders, radicals and underachievers. These people’s social values would include hedonism and post-modernism and I think on the jicnars scale they would range from E (unemployed) right up to A (higher managerial, administrative or professional).

Title: Having a title like The Wire suggests electricity; fast, modern and edgy – the type of music they’re displaying, it’s all modern and going somewhere. I imagine the kind of people that read this magazine are pretty damn cool, and that’s what I think this title is, cool. Also, I think it’s quite profound, not simple and straight to the point (such as New Musical Express) they’re trying to make you think. A magazine for intellectual/modern/avant garde/non-mainstream artists needs an unusual and edgy title.

Style: The layout used for the front page is incredibly minimal and simplistic, there’s nothing there that doesn’t need to be there; it’s a beautifully choreographed piece. The colour scheme consists of black, white and blue – the single blue word echoing the fashion choice of the artist. The font is a plain sans serif and the masthead is huge and bold, abbreviating the title to simply, “WIRE.”

Content: In this type of magazine you’d expect to find articles about completely unknown modern artists, you’d expect to find brand new musicians you’ve never heard of in each issue. These wouldn’t be any ordinary mainstream artists, they’d be experimental musicians who challenge the dominant ideologies of what modern music should sound like – people who treat music as an art form, not a money making machine. The variation of genre is also endless, there’s something for almost everyone and this can only widen the magazines demographic.

Mode of address: When it comes to addressing the audience, The Wire does what many music magazines don’t; they treat their audience as intellectuals. It’s a formally written magazine for a modern day format which is often consider to be (as Theodore Adorno once said) formulaic, simplistic and emotive – modern music depoliticising humans with its pseudo-individualist artists. The Wire takes modern music seriously, understanding its significance; it does what Cahiers du Cinema did for French cinema and what Sight & Sound keeps on doing for World cinema. The magazine features long and in depth articles about the music they have heard, comparing, contrasting and discussing its importance - reviews don’t have star ratings, they expect their audience to actually want to read about an album. It is what NME once was and would like to think it still is, but, quite frankly, nowadays it’s meaningless.

Photographs: The pictures taken and used for The Wire are very stylish and carefully developed; you wouldn’t find a quick/digital paparazzi snap, these look like pictures taken by artists of artists. The majority of pictures are shots of the musicians at work, whether it is in the studio or performing live, yet they are still professional and serious. So, because of this they are represented as serious and professional workers, who consider their job to of upmost importance, which is what this magazine and its readers consider modern music to be. Whereas a magazine like Top of the Pops includes images of film stars and other celebrities, The Wire only includes pictures of musicians and other people involved in the production of music.

Contents page: The contents page used uses three columns, and the only picture used is the same one used on the front cover, everything else is just writing in black & white, apart from the main features which are in blue. It’s all very minimalistic and straightforward, they just want to talk about music.

Double page spreads: The double page spread (just like the rest of the magazine) is simple and sweet, on one side there is a 3 column article and on the other one big picture of the musician in question. Out of all the double page spreads I’ve seen, although they have been similar, I think this one stands out – the whole thing just comes together so beautifully.

An example of the kind of music featured in The Wire: