I purchased my first copy of Spin at a Kroeger grocery store in Westerville, Ohio, in the middle of August 2004. It was my third or fourth trip to Kroeger that week, as I was helping my aunt move to the Columbus suburb and adjust to life two hours south of Canton, Ohio. Two or three meals in a row came from the Boston Market within Kroeger, which is how I ended up back at the store (on what I believe was a Wednesday or Thursday). When we were walking down the aisle with our rotisserie chicken and assorted side dishes, one magazine caught my eye – it had five guys dressed in white suits with black shirts, and a name I recognized from music videos I would see at five AM on Fuse: The Hives.
This was Spin, and this was my first edition. I’m not sure what all my seventh-grade self had to say to my aunt to convince her I needed this, but it probably involved puppy dog eyes and something like, “Doesn’t it look cool?!”
And I mean, it does look cool. I found a copy of the cover on the Internet:
The Hives on the cover of Spin: A life-changing purchase
This was the beginning of the end for me. I was already watching Fuse more-or-less constantly in the wake of our new digital cable subscription, and I was joining MySpace and PureVolume and any other site with music available. I abused our Windows Media Player many nights in search of new music. And, more often than not, I would peruse the Rolling Stone that came monthly for my dad. But that was my problem with RS at that point: As someone on the brink of her teenage years, RS felt like my dad’s magazine.
It didn’t feel like my magazine.
The minute I started reading Spin, I knew it was mine – starting with the fact that the Hives were on the cover, and I was convinced that they were a secret band that only Fuse and I knew about. How could Spin know who they were – and how could they put them on the cover? No one listened to them but me! I blew through the entire magazine in the course of a night, reading every feature piece, every review, every column. I adored the Spin Top 20, laughing out loud at most of the jokes within. The Ultragrrrl segment made Sarah Lewitinn my idol: She was everything I suddenly wanted to and had to be. It was the best magazine I had ever held.
The next day, my aunt offered to buy me a full year’s subscription to Spin as my thank-you for helping her move (and probably also for eating so many Boston Market meals). It was the greatest gift, and I couldn’t wait for my next magazine to come. I realized, or thought I realized, that I was going to be the coolest seventh grader in Catholic school history. I’m not sure if that’s exactly what happened, but Spin became the highlight of every month – not an exaggeration.
Our relationship started with a bang with the Hives on the cover, and it only got better: Artists including the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Foo Fighters, Kanye West, MIA, Lily Allen, MGMT and U2 would all greet me in the coming months and years. I became acquainted not only with great music, but excellent writers. While I obviously loved reading about, say, MIA, I was just as eager to read anything by Marc Spitz or Andy Greenwald. I knew the bylines as well as I knew the artists. Perhaps most important was, by eighth grade, my undying love and appreciation of Chuck Klosterman.
Klosterman had actually written for one of our local papers, The Akron Beacon Journal, when I was in second grade. I was too young to appreciate his writing, and I only vaguely remember him writing a negative review of Britney Spears at the time – because, being nine years old, I was incensed that someone couldn’t love the ultimate pop princess. I think I wrote him an angry email, and to this day I’m not entirely sure if I was even capable of articulating my anger about the review. In Spin, though, his pieces came to be among my favorite. He had a voice and a sense of storytelling that, even at 14, I envied. In my Catholic school’s yearbook, the eighth graders were allowed to write down their idols or inspirations or whatever. Next to my picture, instead of putting the typical fair (Mother Teresa, assorted aunts/uncles/grandparents, assorted saints, numerous sports players), I wrote that Chuck Klosterman was my idol. The girls who were in charge of typing up the yearbook pages spelled his name wrong, but I didn’t matter, because I knew who it was and that was all that mattered.
Spin also made me realize that journalism was the dream job. Going into high school, I signed up for Journalism I, convinced that I would be our high school newspaper’s editor-in-chief by my senior year. Nothing else sounded remotely interesting, and I had started to believe in fourth grade that I was going to be an author. I figured that journalism was just a more realistic version of that same goal, and one that would be perfect if I could go work for Spin after college.
My first few days in Journalism I were terrifying. I had a serious-business teacher, and I was one of the youngest in the class.
It was one of my first classes in the public school system, and most people seemed to know each other and know what they were getting into. Our first assignment in that class involved our teacher doing what was basically a press conference – we each had to ask her questions about herself, which she then answered and we had to convert into an article on her life. It was intimidating stuff.
I wrote that article the only way I knew how: Just like a Spin article. I aimed for that 1,000 word limit, carefully placing quotes and trying to make the story as coherent as possible. Turning it in was scary; even scarier was the next day, when my teacher came up to me at the beginning of class and asked how long I had been writing. Confused, I told her I had been writing in some way since about third grade. She told me that my article on her life was one of the very best in her twenty years of teaching. I wanted to vomit and go cuddle with Spin. That magazine taught me everything that would get me through Journalism I and, subsequently, three years of high school newspaper.
Spin and I rode many waves together in the coming years. When I moved to college at Kent State, Spin came with me, although my subscription was still delivered at home. I would pick it up whenever I ran home or have my parents drop it off. I always made sure to display the newest issue on my dresser, which was where most of my friends would sit when coming over. I had to display it! My Spin subscription only lapsed once, when one of my checks for renewal got lost in the mail. By then, I was following the magazine on both Twitter and on its website, so I didn’t miss too much. But when I started getting Spin in the mail again, it was a relief.
I knew Spin was having troubles, though, especially once I was older. At Kent State, every class I had talked about print as a dying medium. I can’t even talk much, since I became an electronic media major, going against my own print background. The writing was obviously on the wall. I watched, over the past year, as Spin went through a number of changes. Stereogum’s parents company, BUZZMEDIA, bought Spin; soon after, the website and print edition both saw huge makeovers. Most of the writers I spent my teenage years idolizing had moved on, many of them writing books and finding better gigs at bigger outlets or on their own blogs. Still, even with the makeover, I renewed for another three years, starting in June of 2012.
Now, I’m home for my winter break, and it’s the longest I’ve been home in over a year. A few days ago, I received a copy of Esquire in the mail, with a letter attached to it in one of those plastic bags. The letter explained to me that the print edition of Spin was done, and Esquire had bought the remaining issues of my subscription. It’s not ideal, although I did see others who received subscriptions to magazines like Car and Driver. I probably won out over them, to say the least. And Esquire isn’t terrible – but I’m not their demographic, and I can’t really pretend that I am. I flipped through it, but both my brother and my dad read more of it than I did.
I’m going to miss receiving Spin in the mail. While I can visit them online, I can say it’s just not the same. The pieces in the print edition were the first clues as to what my own future would be like. The print edition directed so much of my music taste as well as my other interests. Spin‘s writing served as a guide on how to hone my own style. I still have almost all of my Spins, the glossy covers scattered around my family’s living room and my own bedroom. Of course, I have to thank the magazine for introducing me to the music I love, and for introducing me to so many writers. I received Chuck Klosterman books for many Christmases, and I’ve since read most of Marc Spitz’s work. I guess, in the weirdest way, Spin has also managed to show me how to move through a career, how to literally roll with the punches and grow up.
I’m going to miss Spin a lot. But, as I said, they are still online, and I will still visit them daily. As for Esquire… well, we’ll see how that relationship works out.
