Badass Rolling Stone Editor Fucking Swears Up a Storm He Doesn't Give a Shit
I’m not a regular editor I’m a cool editor
Rolling Stone got a new editor, Noah Shachtman, over the summer. His hire was announced with splashy New York Times story where he stood against a concrete wall looking pensive with his boss in the background, completely unlike the splashy New York Times story about the relaunch of this website where the editor sat on a windowsill with her boss in the foreground. Good for both of us.
Shachtman, who was previously the editor of the Daily Beast, is very into his new job. Which is great, we love passion. And Rolling Stone can still be cool sometimes, Jeff Ihaza works there. But I worry about Shachtman being the spokesman for the brand. Here’s one of his tweets from today.
A lot going on here. David Byrne of the Talking Heads? You might know him better as the bandleader to so many of Noah Shachtman’s friends over the years. Ella AKA @lorde? I mean, you might know her as Lorde, but Noah Shachtman knows her as Ella — her given name. Noah Shachtman was really fudgin’ stuff up on set, cussin’ up a storm and probably saying things like “yeah baby” in the Austin Powers voice.
Yes, Shachtman has being doing some pretty cringe-y tweets lately. Here he is seemingly mocking some people on Twitter who say Rolling Stone doesn’t do music anymore by putting some letters in the sentence in upper case for emphasis. Does he pull it off? No.
Here he is saying that a cover under his editorship (like, the third one, maybe?) is “instantly” one of the most iconic covers in Rolling Stone’s 54-year history. I don’t know... maybe. Hard to see where this one fits in among the ironclad top three Rolling Stone covers of all time: John and Yoko, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Pope Francis.
Here’s an “a” in response to this tweet. Why not try quietly keeping your thoughts to yourself :) ?
Listen, I don’t want to tell anyone how to run their publication. An editor’s vision is a precious and personal thing — and really, Noah, you’re doing a great job. But, from one editor to another, maybe let the work speak for itself, like I do.
