An ode to magazines: A personal journey through the pages that shaped me

The world is being rocked right now; many industries are taking a knock, and some, like the magazine industry, are taking a downright fall.

The past two weeks have seen two of SA’s major publishing houses announce their closure. Associated Media Publishing and Caxton’s Magazine Division will soon be no more and 14 long-standing and iconic magazines will be missing from the shelves. The dolefully disappearing sister of the print publishing realm is finally packing her bags (phone. kindle, laptop and chargers first) and making a swift exit from the burning building.

It has been a slow and sickening descent, and the disturbance to our media landscape will be felt for many sad calendar moons to come. Perhaps this unfortunate ending, on the back of the virus that stopped the world, will ultimately be less cruel than it’s long-suffering fade away. However, many in the magazine and media industry now navigate an unfathomable and uncertain time. My thoughts, love and strength to them and their families.

Meeting the smash hit world

I grew up an absolute magazine junkie. As a tween in the 90’s I discovered Smash Hits, Top of the Pop’s and NME Magazines through my friend, Mary Chen. Her mother travelled regularly between Johannesburg and Taiwan, bringing her piles of music magazines and Spice Girl-inspired fashion on return trips. Yes, including an imitation pair of those infamous Union Jack platform boots. We took turns teetering around her house, we flipped through eye-opening pop music goss, we drooled and imagined this wild world out beyond the pages.

The local CNA started stocking these international mags, giving us more access to this exotic music scene. My best friend and I would make monthly excursions to get our copy of Smash Hits, unknowingly skewing our music taste with a Brit-pop disposition. We sucked on the pukka teat of British pop culture; the characters, the humour, the outrageousness of it all. The magazines came with kitsch gifts that we loved all the more for the fact that you couldn’t get anything like it in South Africa. Stickers, buttons, lippy and sunnies; we decorated our space cases with these rare spoils.

Pwoar! Blimey! Give us a snog! Nice one mate! These magazines were, perhaps ironically, culturally embellishing our suburban minds, they exposed us to another world before we understood there was another one to know about. The magazines cost between R80 and R100 each, depending on the exchange rate; a lot to spend on a print magazine back then and it turns out, even now.

Pwoar! Blimey! Give us a snog! Nice one mate! These magazines were, perhaps ironically, culturally illuminating to our suburban minds; they exposed us to another world before we understood there was another one to know about.

In my early teens, going through the ‘skater phase’ and living curiously far from the ocean, I took a liking to skate and surf magazines. I would buy Zigzag and Blunt Magazines (and Vans stickers I had nowhere to stick) and stuck posters of tanned surfer boys riding crisp blue waves on my walls. But really, I wasn’t after eye candy. It was the connection to the free-thinking, experiencing-life that those magazines illuminated. It was about being part of sub-cultures that had whole magazines dedicated to them. An intrigue that grew into obsession and led me by the ear through my 20’s.

SL Magazine really brought it home; tapping into the heady localised counter-culture of post-90’s South Africa. Student Life introduced me to the edgy, raw, multi-colour and fresh-flavour of my country’s youth, long before I’d left school and had access to such freedom myself. Each issue came with a CD strapped to the front cover, exposing me to underground and experimental local music. It’s where I first heard the names Felix La Band, Max Normal and African Dope Records; the sounds emanating from this mystical place by the mountain called Cape Town.

Make mine a Cosmo

In my late teens and early 20’s, in the throes of discovering the feminine mystique, I became ensconced with the sharp poses and provocative headlines on the cover of Cosmopolitan Magazine. It was a modern women’s magazine that shied away from conservative, homemaking pretensions and gave women permission to take their lives in their hands and run free in whatever direction was calling.

I subscribed wholly to the fun, fearless female bible. Tomes of Cosmo could be found stacked on the shelf next to my dad’s old HI-FI, they took pride of place next to the portable Sony Discman ingeniously rigged to boom from the speakers. Eventually, the shelf sagged under the weight and they had to be re-homed to the floor in the corner of my room; the white spines with black text broadcasting title, issue number and date are still visible in my mind’s eye.

A double-page spread for Wonderbra with tuggable cleavage would back onto an article navigating the corporate ladder, with impassioned advice on how to land your next promotion. And nowhere did it suggest using your cleavage to do so - sexuality was your feminine right, your promotion was a hard won mental strategy. The magazine gave women the confidence to undress in the bedroom and be equally unrepressed in the workplace. This was out there, this was it, this was me. I wanted to be Cosmo editor someday; I wanted to sip pink cocktails while sub-editing articles in a corner office in bitch heels.

This was out there, this was it, this was me. I wanted to be Cosmo editor someday; I wanted to sip pink cocktails while sub-editing articles in a corner office in bitch heels.

Cosmo was a companion during a time I was absorbing the multi-directional destiny that was available to me. The magazine unpacked the navigations of life, career, relationships and sex with a reverent kind of openness; an invitation to take up space in this life. It empowered an understanding of my place in this world, as a human and a women, before I’d been tainted by first encounters with sexism, masochism, and before even my understanding of the historic journey the women who came before me had taken. Women who etched the way through blood, sweat and derision, to earn the liberation I could so easily skim off its silky pages.

My Cosmo-world came to an end as I readied for a stint in London. I offered the whole lot to someone on Cosmo’s Facebook Group, in the days well before brand pages and ad spend. She had to take them all and ‘give them the respect they deserved’ - and I remember solemnly transferring them in a big brown box from one car boot to another. In a matter of weeks, I knew my Cosmo days were truly behind me; paging through a UK edition in Tesco, I came to see its shallow interior, the farce of glossy girl power. It had lustre, but it was missing matter. To be fair, our local version was streaks ahead in the depth department, but I was now trying on new shoes and they weren’t going to be stiletto’s. We take what we need, while we need it, we let the rest go.

Dazed? Perhaps. Confused? Not so much

Dazed and Confused Magazine was a tonic to my soul. My time in the UK was a redirection back to the culture vulture within. It was a light switch for the international underground, which ran thick and fast, a throbbing current of mind-expanding substance, the surface of which I had only experienced via the internet. Art, music, film, fashion; a hot pot of previously inaccessible creative culture could be found in a multitude of diversions on textured matt pages, both at my fingertips and a tube ride away from experiencing in the flesh. Posed with overwhelming choice, I jumped right in.

It was all new to me. It was thick with subversive integrity; it was gritty, it was minimalist, it was art. I paid my £3, I amassed new piles. They culminated, they ripped open a cultural consciousness I hold close to this day.

This was a time for exposure to thought-provoking ideas and slews of curious characters on adventures of expressive inclination. It was all new to me. It was thick with subversive integrity; it was gritty, it was minimalist, it was art. I paid my £3, I amassed new piles. They culminated, they ripped open a cultural consciousness I hold close to this day. The Pandora’s Box of the London newsstand included Dazed, I-D and the always hefty, Another Magazine, the three of which I would ruefully tear out the pages when I packed my sojourn into boxes heading back home. A bundle of deadweight pages that deserted their covers, because a two-year magazine collection was an unnecessary expense to ship home.

Magazine’s had found their homesakes online, Dazed was digital and brands had started moving onto Facebook pages. The content flow had begun in earnest and ‘churn’ was far off from being a term for too much. I went home with hundreds of almost-Instagrammable images, taken on Blackberry before Instagram was a thing. A log of my real-life immersion into the current - the counter - the creative - culture of my day. I got to taste it, I got to lick the damn pages.

A book cover lover

After this, I relinquished my magazine obsession. I guess I went digital. I guess I had enough loose pages for a life-size collage. I guess, me and magazines had to break up at some point. I’ve caught myself swooning over covers of Conde Nast Traveller, I had a brief subscription to House & Leisure while nesting in my first real home. I took up a membership with a local indie writing journal that soon became defunct. I eventually resisted the urge to throw money at beautiful wads of paper. In my defense, I finally chose books over magazines, and I never looked back.

For me, magazines were printed signs of life. They teemed with stories from big and small corners, eking out enlightenment and discernment. They dropped a plough in mainstream top soil and unearthed sizable nuggets of something other. They opened windows to lifestyles and cultures that blew my little mind. Magazines shaped me in ways I will always appreciate and turned me out into the world in ways I will never forget.