Suroosh Alvi, Gavin McInnes & Shane Smith, Editors: The Vice Guide To Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll

"Ideally, the ultimate coke album would be 12 tracks of 'Don't Stop Believin',' constantly building." So writes the staff of Vice, a magazine that likes Journey and drugs (not to mention sex, skateboarding, graffiti, and the various doings of irretrievable street freaks) about as much as humanly possible. Started in Montreal by a bunch of friends looking to capitalize on their fly junkie lifestyle, the free glossy magazine has come to serve as a taste-making journal of hipster culture in its most gleefully nihilistic mode. Past issues have featured gimmicks like a reflective mirror cover with a fake coke line rising off the page, and the content within is perfectly pitched toward readers ready to curl up with a "Vice Guide To 'Finding Yourself'" in which backpacking through Europe ranks low and "telling your dad to fuck off and being prepared to fight him" rates a 7 out of 10. The articles go out of their way to seem casual and tossed-off, but they're also savagely funny and smart, as seen in The Vice Guide To Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll, an anthology of material from 1997 to the present. Every piece ever written in Vice could (and probably should) be called offensive by somebody, but beneath their antagonistic swagger, pieces like "The Vice Guide To Eating Pussy" and "Was Jesus A Fag?" hide a deceptively human heart. The ceaseless needling–of gays, straights, whites, blacks, members of electroclash bands–is too equal-opportunity to be interpreted as anything but a perverse love-in, and the writing too sly and tight to be read as anything but self-aware. Defensiveness, however, is not part of the Vice aesthetic, which makes even the book's most mindless gut-punches hard to ignore. An interview with a guy who weathered a year-long acid trip teaches a voyeuristic temperance lesson, and an essay called "The Day I Joined The KKK (Was Super Fucking Gay)" makes for an unvarnished treatment of racism and the media. More typical than any kind of journalism are fleeting glimmers like those in "DOs and DON'Ts," a priceless compendium of fashion quasi-advice doled out in withering, spot-on blurbs that trade in their own singular language. The writers of Vice strain everything through the mind of a mad carnival barker, and the effects they command prove just as demented and magisterial.