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Issues

Thomas Frank’s “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent” is a once-in-a-generation lament that made punk rockers everywhere gasp at the futility of their attempts at rebellion. Meanwhile: Keith White turns his guns on Wired Magazine, Stephen Duncombe subjects himself to corporate edutainment, and Seth Sanders braves the theme-restaurant wasteland of Chicago’s River North. Joanna Coles describes the collapse of publishing while Charles Bernstein finds a few signs of life. Will Boisvert decodes the management theorists. Tom Vanderbilt bemoans the imperial arrogance of advertisers. David Berman recalls his time as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Produced in Chicago in December 1994.
 December 1994

no. 6—Dark Age

To fully appreciate this issue of The Baffler, you have to transport yourself to a time when the word “alternative” did not provoke a reflexive cringe. (Go back and watch the movie Singles, or just look at its theatrical release poster to get in the mood.) Because the war on corporate culture continues with Steve Albini’s “The Problem with Music,” an essay that compared the act of signing with a major label to traversing a trench filled with “runny, decaying shit.” Plus: Keith White’s legendary takedown of Details magazine. Then: Herbert Mattelart assails world music, Eric Iversen follows the search for the new Seattle, and Thomas Frank probes the nullity that is Pearl Jam. Maura Mahoney deflates the Beat revival, and Tom Vanderbilt wonders about the day when retro culture finally catches its own tail. Produced in November 1993 in the tiny office of WHPK-FM at the University of Chicago’s Reynolds Clubhouse, this was our biggest issue yet: 168 pages!
 December 1993

no. 5—Alternative to What?

The Baffler muscles its way into that great debate of the early 1990s: What exactly is Generation X? In their titular essay, Thomas Frank and Keith White tell the ad men and the Boomers to go pound sand. This is also the issue in which we introduced “Semiotics Mailbag,” our high-theory lifestyle advice column, and where we revealed that a glossary of slacker slang printed by the New York Times was, in fact, bogus, thus exposing what became known as the Great Grunge Hoax—and launching the phrase “swingin’ on the flippity flop” into the general lexicon. We produced this issue over three weeks in November 1992 on a Macintosh computer in Chicago, and upped our page count to 134. The idea struck us to boost bookstore sales by printing something provocative on the magazine’s spine. After rejecting one editor’s gnomic suggestion—“Not now, Caitlin, Mommy’s tattoo hurts”—we decide to go for straight-up insult: “Your lifestyle sucks.” Which appeared to be on the money, as bookstore sales went way up. We’re on our way.
 March 1993

no. 4—Twenty-nothing

Baffler no. 3 marks the first appearance of house anti-hero, Gedney Market, as well as the beginnings of The Baffler’s distinct style of cultural interpretation. To wit: Thomas Frank’s hipster demolition job and Rick Perlstein’s robust analysis of Scooby Doo. Laid out in a four-day marathon session in Kansas City, this issue was printed on a Macintosh laser printer there in the winter of 1992; at 108 pages, we doubled our previous output.
 March 1992

no. 3—Let’s Deviance!

The yellow issue was conceived as an homage to those familiar fears of “mass society” and the great concern of many decades past: conformity! “In a time when the ‘cutting edge’ has become a powerful tool for mediocratization,” our editor declared, “we proudly rededicate ourselves to its blunting.” The anxious-making midcult of the time included arts festivals sponsored by tobacco companies and the “affected playground cynicism” of nineties suburbanites.  Produced at the University of Chicago in the summer of 1990, our second issue ran forty-eight pages.
 June 1990

no. 2—Suburbia

Who told us to start it? Nobody. How much were we paid to do it? Nothing. Well, why then? Because we were allergic to the world, but we weren’t sure just why. Determined to find out, we generated a torrent of juvenilia. Among it, our comic explication of “Mark Trail” remains worth reading. One thousand copies of this forty-eight-page inaugural were printed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 1988 and distributed to bookstores by the editors (Thomas Frank and Keith White) in person.
 June 1988

no. 1—[Debut Issue]