Waffles, Beer, and Music
An Interview with Josh Jackson
Sex sells. And, in the music/film industry, most people are buying. Except at Paste magazine where co-founder and editor-in-chief Josh Jackson has decided to sell something a little different. As it turns out, people are buying that too. Jackson has helped create a music magazine that manages to stay above the fray of politics, sex and industry gossip. The result: Paste is one of the “fastest-growing independently published music magazines in the country.” Its refreshing take on music, film and books is something that satisfies both the true culture-aphile and the casual observer.
TDS: Actor (and skater) Jason Lee said that Paste is “so deliciously sweet, I often put it on my waffles in the morning instead of syrup.” Additionally, Paste has had great critical success, won numerous awards and has a large fan base. What is the main contributor to your accolades?
JACKSON: I’d like to think it has to do with us striving to be real and authentic and creating a magazine and website that we’d want to read instead of targeting a particular demographic or trying to achieve some level of coolness. The great thing is that from the time we start planning an issue until we send it to the printer, our goal is to make it better than the last one.
TDS: Paste has steered clear of gossip and politics while other trade publications seem to be featuring more of it. How do you manage to stay true to the mission of Paste and remain commercially competitive?
JACKSON: We’ve been fortunate that remaining true to our mission has seemed to result in us being commercially competitive. Our mission rang true with a lot of people. That said, no one’s ever gotten rich off of what we do.
TDS: Does Paste have a metric by which it determines what it features? If so can you explain your decision process?
JACKSON: There’s sort of an unarticulated graph each potential article falls on with an axis of how good the art we’re covering is and how good the story about the art potentially will be. So if we have the opportunity to let a writer we love shadow ?uestlove for three days, it scores high on both axis. If we have an opportunity for a phone conversation with Nickelback, it scores pretty low on both.
TDS: The tagline for Paste is "signs of life in music, film, and culture." Paste reviews video games. Can you explain how "signs of life" are found in video games?
JACKSON: Well, we’re not a high-brow magazine and I personally love video games. I love the storyline of Fallout 3, playing a character with moral choices who ultimately has to save the world by sacrificing himself in the end. There’s not a lot of thoughtful writing about video games out there. Most of the places you find game reviews spend most of their time dissecting the gameplay instead of weighing in on what a game says about our culture. I want Paste to be the place to go for meaningful essays about video games.
TDS: Given the advances in digital content (ease and speed of distribution), what does the future hold for magazine publishing?
JACKSON: Well, it seems everything is conspiring to kill magazines—the ridiculous inefficiencies of the newsstand, the rising paper costs, the latest dips in the advertising industry and, as you say, the advances in digital content. But I think there’s still a place for long-form journalism, and I don’t think it’s the Web. Our focus is constantly shifting online, but people come to our website for news, reviews, humor and quirky commentary.
TDS: In the online world traffic tends to be the ultimate goal. Do you feel quality over quantity can win in this scenario?
JACKSON: It’s tough. I realize it’s going to take discipline not to be ruled by what garners pageviews. We launched a “List of the Day”, and it immediately increased our traffic 25%. I think it’s a really fun feature, and I love coming up with them. But lists are not the heart and soul of Paste. We’ve got to keep offering thoughtful analysis along with Web candy, and we’ve got to make sure we’re imbuing even things like lists with our “Signs of Life” ethos.
TDS: What is Paste's philosophy with regard to online content?
JACKSON: Our website is meant to be comprehensive. Everything that’s in our magazine also makes it online. We want it to be a place where people can discover new music, film, books, TV shows, video games and weird art exhibits. The tools to offer video, streaming radio and interactive features allow us to do so much more than just with print.
TDS: Is digital distribution affecting the way songs are being written? Are full length albums dying?
JACKSON: I’ve always been more of an album guy than a singles guy, but album filler is dying. I like that listeners have the choice to buy an album or buy a single. As for how it affects the industry, I think radio-friendly pop acts are the ones that are suffering. But why should anyone have to buy the whole Leona Lewis album when they can get “Bleeding Love” for 99 cents?
TDS: You traveled around the world a lot and grew up overseas. How has this shaped your musical and cinematic preferences?
JACKSON: We published our first annual International Issue last year, and it was the most fun we’ve ever had putting a magazine together. I always want Paste to be introducing great music from all over the world to our mostly American audience.
TDS: A lot is said of "personal preference" when it comes to artistic tastes. How do you define "good" art?
JACKSON: It’s kind of like with porn: You know it when you see it. I’m a big believer in personal preference. I don’t think art is quantifiable, even though we assign a number to everything we review. Is Sufjan Stevens a better artist than Maroon 5? I certainly think so. But if you disagree that doesn’t make you wrong. That just highlights a difference in tastes. But our job as critics is to relate our encounter with a piece of art. So when we say, “The new Franz Ferdinand record is awful,” we follow it with the things we don’t like about the record. Other critics will disagree, but it’s in that conversation that we learn to appreciate the art more deeply.
TDS: You stated in a Paste editorial column once that people should be "wise consumers of culture." How does one go about doing this?
JACKSON: I think discernment is an underrated attribute. We can mindlessly just listen to what’s on the radio and what’s on TV. Or we can examine why we consume what we do and make a little effort to find out if there’s art out there that will be more satisfying—emotionally, spiritually, intellectually. The latter is more appealing to me.
TDS: Your blog is titled "High Gravity." Besides going well together, what do good beer and good cultural artifacts have in common?
JACKSON: Everything. Except maybe that the Belgians don’t make the best music, as far as I know.
TDS: Who are the top three artists (authors, musicians, filmmakers, etc.) that have impacted your outlook on life the most?
JACKSON: Authors: Flannery O’Connor/Walker Percy – It’s hard for me to separate the two as they both hit me at the same time in college and helped shape my view of the messiness of the human condition—the sin that needs redemption. Musicians: Vigilantes of Love/Mark Heard – One led me to the other and both raised the bar on what I look for in songwriting. Film: Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief is probably my favorite film, but it always feels weird crediting a director for putting someone else’s story (in this case Luigi Bartolini’s novel adapted by Cesare Zavattini) on screen.
TDS: Is there anything new from Paste that you want to share?
JACKSON: Always. We launched a fun little non-partisan web app/Facebook app called Obamicon.me a few weeks ago that was something of an Internet sensation. And our first book—An Indie Rock Alphabet Book—just came out. Plus, I can’t say much about it, but we’ll be shooting our first TV pilot this spring.
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