by CHRIS BARRY

Since its humble beginnings as a local newsprint zine known as the Voice of Montreal, Vice magazine has gone on to become a minor cultural dynasty. Offensive to many, refreshingly irreverent to others, the Vice formula has proven pretty damn lucrative for the three delinquents who founded the rag way back in 1994. In spite of countless libel suits and a corporate world not always so eager to associate their big advertising bucks with such a defiantly brazen publication, Gavin McInnes, Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi now preside over a media empire currently encompassing a chain of retail stores, a clothing line, a record label and a budding film and television production company. In town to promote their new book, The Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, Gavin McInnes took a few of his very busy minutes to sit down with the Mirror and enlighten us all to the cultural phenomenon that is Vice. This is what he had to say.

Mirror: So where are you living now?

Gavin McInnes: Brooklyn. I couldn’t bear to pay $1,500 U.S. a month to live in a shoebox in Manhattan. Especially coming from Montreal, where I had a massive loft for a third of the price, literally. But I think rents are starting to come down here, thanks to the terrorists.

M: God bless ’em. As a burgeoning media baron, have you any profound thoughts on the Canadian magazine industry?

GM: Well, I can say a lot of negative shit about the American and British magazine industry too. But if you want me to single out the problem with Canadian magazines, I would say it’s a problem with Canadian entrepreneurship. Just a general lack of balls. This overwhelming conformity and this need to appeal to the way things have always been done in the past. Like, “Um, let’s ask the most sycophantic and generic questions possible.”

The Canadian economy is just so conformist and socialist and it’s in desperate need of an overhaul and I think this is exemplified by these sort of pussy-assed, ass-licking magazines with no sense of personality. And I think the reason Vice has sort of re-written this code has 100 per cent to do, not so much with our contributors’ irreverence, but with our ability to market that irreverence. ’Cuz anyone can do, say, the Vice Guide to Anal Sex, or the Vice Guide to Eating Pussy, but to sell it to corporate America, or corporate Earth for that matter, redefines the context and makes it interesting again. So the problem is not just content in Canadian mags, but that Canadians have an inherent fear of capitalism. They’re scared to make a buck. And they love mediocrity. They love it when you’re just doing okay, but as soon as you start doing well they freak out. Canadians don’t want to do well. They’re scared of getting As in school, you know, they want Bs. I think the ideal Canadian mark is a C-plus.

The corporate embrace

M: If you say so. Have you run up against much resentment in Canada because of your relative success? A lot of people accuse Vice of having sold out.

GM: We’ve been hearing of Vice selling out since we first started getting colour pages. I think it goes back to what I was saying about this Canadian love of mediocrity and not progressing. It’s the same as everyone wanting to have their little pocket bands. Like when Pleased to Meet Me by the Replacements got huge—even though that was an amazing album—people would refuse to accept it. The whole thing in America is to champion the underdog. And when someone appears to be less than an underdog, then you shit on them. I think as a corporation that is making money and moving up, you need to open your ears to criticism but also be aware that 98 per cent of it is just random teenage negativity. To be honest, I don’t think that often about critics. I’m more worried about a better magazine coming along and crushing us. That’s something I could talk about for hours. But some second-year university student saying we sold out or something doesn’t really register in my mind.

M: Speaking of sophomoric criticism, I saw a nasty piece on Vice in the Village Voice last month where the writer was saying, and I quote, “In fact, Vice’s clumsy attempts to clobber the paper tiger of political correctness are almost comically passé.” Do you think there’s any truth to that assertion? You know, not about your alleged lameness but that the culture may have finally progressed from this frenzy of knee-jerk political correctness that was so prevalent in the ’80s and ’90s?

GM: Well, the thing about Vice that I want really want get across, and I’ve always felt this passionately, is the ones who are screaming “Keep it real” the loudest are the ones who are the most full of shit. The ones who are worried about you saying “retard” or “nigger” are the ones who have never met a retard and couldn’t give a shit if all black people suddenly spontaneously combusted. Their agenda is very clear and it’s classism. It’s telling the working class how to speak, how to talk to the handicapped, how to talk to the Afro-American—even though they’ve never done it. They just love dictating etiquette.

But the way to talk to an Afro-American is the way you talk to anyone. If somebody is robbing you or grabbing your girlfriend’s ass you go “Hey fuckface!” But Americans are so petrified of racial issues. They’re so PC and liberal that anyone underprivileged can get away with murder down there. They all like to pretend PC is passé, but it’s way worse than it was 10 years ago. It’s gone from this surface thing in the universities that would come up in some silly debate among 21 year olds to this intrinsic part of American culture that has bled in to the media, the economy, the way people interact with one another. Basically, it’s become a part of America’s DNA. Our December issue is guest edited by people with Down Syndrome. We’ve got a 10-page fashion shoot of people with Down Syndrome, they wrote 90 per cent of the articles. And people may think it’s Jackass and totally anti-PC, but the bottom line is we’re dealing with fucking retards and trying to get their text in. Calling their parents six times a day and copy editing the work of retards, well, I’m sorry, but it’s not the same as screaming “Retard” at someone from the side of your truck. It’s a lot of fucking work. But I think the stuff that got Vice banned five years ago would probably get applause today. So yeah, I think we’ve lost that blind liberal fascism.

Progressing conservative

M: You use the term liberal somewhat disparagingly. But deep down I suspect you, Mr. McInnes, could be considered a liberal—minus some of the rhetoric perhaps, but a liberal nevertheless. No?

GM: Well, in a way I think the conservatives are the real liberals. I think the liberals are just posturing.

M: Do you consider yourself to be a social libertarian?

GM: I consider myself to be a New Conservative. Vice invented that term, the New Conservatives. They are conservatives with the balls to fight and they don’t care if you’re gay but they’re not ashamed of western culture. They’re not so pro-diversity that they’re going to step on a country’s history. I’m on the Earth to expose jokers. My job is to pick non-physical fights with people.

M: I suppose Vice has made a handful of libel lawyers happy over the years, you know, as a by-product of all these non-physical fights.

GM: We’ve had 14 serious lawsuits. But I have a personal theory about all this libel stuff. Everyone in America is so litigious but who actually goes to court? I think it’s all people paying lawyers and doing settlements because they’re petrified of their lawsuits going anywhere. It’s like this whole sub-industry of fear, where people pay lawyers to do settlements. We’ve had nightmare after nightmare of these lawsuits but we always say, “No, no, no” and send letters back and forth until they give up. So yeah, we get endless lawsuits, tons of grief, but nothing for us has been all that bad. We’ve had other issues that hurt us much worse. Like, we lost a year’s worth of skateboard ads because they objected to some of our content. And that was worth 150,000 bucks. So you can talk about lawsuits or content or any other facet of Vice, but Vice is 100 per cent about trying to seduce these corporate advertisers without diluting the content. And it’s a daily struggle.

Smack trumps smokes

M: I understand you guys have opted to take a principled stance against tobacco advertising.

GM: Yeah. You know, we like drugs, but we’ve kind of noticed that there’s this drug called tobacco that kills more people than all the other drugs combined so we sort of stay away from it. Heroin has killed a lot of people too, so we promote it very rarely. A lot of people who worked for the magazine have died from heroin—most of them in Montreal. I could talk about heroin for hours. I like it, and I do it, like, three times a year, but I guess I’m blessed with the ability to resist it. Even our editor now in New York is an ex-junkie. Heroin seems to be an intrinsic part of our magazine. :