A Letter From the Editor

This article is taken from VICE magazine, v29n1: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.

I started reading VICE magazine 25 years ago, when I was 14 years old. More than anything else this has afforded me a rich and expert understanding of the unwavering (and some might say primordial) cynicism of the average VICE reader, a quality that has endured through three to five successive ‘golden eras’ for the company, though anyone with an opinion on the matter will insist there has only ever been one golden era of VICE, the span of which neatly coincides with whenever they first started reading or watching it.

VICE came to me in a lost world; in 1999 they stocked it in the one men’s fashion shop in my drowsy hometown that didn’t take your money and send you away looking like a Time Team volunteer or a grown-up home-schooled kid who spent years being whipped in a cellar by evil Christian parents. On the ground floor, they sold long, glazed leather donkey jackets to Mockney wide boys in love with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels VHSes and day dreams of Jakki Degg, and downstairs was where all the little piggies lived: 60 square feet of prime Thames Valley real estate, stuffed with Deftones hoodies and circus tent Bolt London jeans so stupidly heavy on the rails the brackets would tear all the plaster from the walls.

My friends and I went every day, to stare at all the things we couldn’t afford, and walk out with the one thing we could. There were about 30 people in the town who’d ever want to read VICE and everyone else (as I’ve already alluded to) was a sadist, so I’d work my way through the pages as other people skated and I sat there waiting to get punched in the face, listening to Misfits, talking shit about “Bush,” and chaperoning a dirt-cheap three-liter bottle of cider through the weekend, as it grew ever more backwashed and viscous—like some diabolical vinegar soup brewed in the mouth of a teenage boy, the kind of thing they maybe used to serve as a delicacy in ancient feudal cultures—from sunset Friday to Sunday evening.

It would be wrong to say I really understood what VICE was, or what anyone in it was even talking about, but they seemed to be having fun with their friends in some distant place where you could turn that kind of life into a magazine. These strange men in lilac silk shirts with their evil, snide mustaches, nursing their ‘gross jar’ and playing Elliott Smith to a dead rat they’d found in the street—Leslie Arfin, talking about infatuation and other drugs I never even knew existed—were like morally dubious older cousins, compelling and full of life-changing advice for a pubescent idiot growing up in provincial England before cameraphones were invented.

Advice like (paraphrasing): ‘Only wear one subculture at a time’ and ‘Never let a you-to-crush text messaging ratio exceed 1.5:1.’ Obviously, this advice is redundant in an era of jumble-sale TikTok fits and limitless digital communication—but did it make my teenage summers better? Yes. Were parts of it also potentially written by someone (naming no names) who went on to form a notorious far-right group in the United States, whose members have since been criticized for launching a militant assault upon American democracy? Also yes, but I was 14, and yet to be taught the harsh lesson that people who start magazines you like might one day go on to establish spiteful, deranged organizations that get proscribed as terrorist by the New Zealand government.

The world has changed a lot since then. It boomed. It went bust. It nearly killed VICE. But we are still here, at a moment when everyday life has never felt more awful or exhilarating. Which is why we’re bringing the mag back: to catalog all your miseries in the eternal glory of print.

We’ll be starting with The Rock Bottom Issue (v29n1), which will go out to members early this year. We currently have four empty pages set aside for publishing and answering emails from our members—i.e. you—so help us fill those by emailing any grievances, epiphanies, life tips, private philosophies, jokes, or nagging questions to [email protected]. (Please don’t send us any conspiracy theories, we get enough of those already.)

Beyond that, everything feels up for grabs. It can be liberating, hitting the deck, and maybe the best thing you can do when the whole world seems to hate you / want you dead is laugh at yourself. More than anything, we are entering into this with a spirit of curiosity. Let’s pick this thing up and see what we can do with it, and hope against hope that there has been no drop-off in the birthrate of cynics across all the shifting territories of the world. Because a person lacking cynicism in times such as these is a person not to be trusted.

I’m proud to be here. I hope I haven’t belabored that point. As I’m sure you’ll agree, over the course of its 30-year history, VICE has always been at its best when at its most sentimental and conceited.

Thanks,

Kevin Lee Kharas 
Editor, VICE magazine

This article is taken from VICE magazine, v29n1: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.