Media

Just Like All of Their Readers, Vice Now Has a Trust Fund

Chuck Ansbacher | Tuesday 5 April, 2011 15:10

Vice Magazine continues to become one of the most unlikely mainstream crossover stories of the 21st Century. What was once a local Canadian monthly run by recovering and/or not recovering heroin addicts focusing on informative topics like injaculation has become an international empire. Boasting 750 employees in 34 countries with a circulation of 1.1 million and offshoots into industries like advertising, music recording and television, Vice has done what many consider to be largely impossible — hold the attention of a hipster audience for more than a single season.

With a new massive round of fundraising to the tune of tens of millions of US dollars from the likes of Viacom and WPP, Vice has become bedfellows with some of the largest media companies in the world. This is amazing news for the hipster bible, giving them the liquidity to expand into the massive “emerging markets” of China, India and Brazil.

Vice was already partially owned by Viacom, and the “Vice sells out”” story has been a mainstay of media blogs and complainy pants 30-somethings for damn near a decade. Vice sold out when they changed their name from Vice Montreal; they sold out when they moved to New York; they sold out when they put a BMW ad on their cover; they sold out when co-founder Gavin McInnes left because he was sick of them selling out all the time.

Technically there isn’t much news here aside from the fact that Vice has a lot more money than they used to. If you’re shocked to realise Vice isn’t being run out of the Old Blue Last basement, I’m sorry to shatter your fantasy world.

However, the new round of funding does give us an opportunity to reflect on where hipster culture on the whole has gone over the last decade or so. Ugh — save it for your dissertation you say? Well, yes, that topic is boring and long, and hardly relevant. The entire idea of a hipster culture has gone the way of Vice — co-opted by the same co-opters that have been co-opting everything worth co-opting since the hyphen was invented. Plain and simple, it’s done. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The Grateful Dead sold out arenas for decades after tie-dyed t-shirts were chic; Pearl Jam sells out arenas even though nobody has not been calling them daughter for twenty years; people are still on the cover of NME even though nobody gives a shit about who is on the cover of NME. Cultures don’t die, they just become old and irrelevant. Vice, it would seem, have been on their way there for some time… but haven’t arrived just yet. If they had, I probably wouldn’t have wasted all this time writing about them.

---