Magazine Graveyard: Vox

I fail to remember exactly what happened to this magazine — I think it was swallowed up by one of it\’s rivals — The NME if memory serves correctly. I know with these articles I should sit there on wiki and painstakingly research stuff but they are, after all, supposed to be opinion pieces and my own impressions. I like wiki, don\’t get me wrong, but if I were to sit here and churn out what, to me, seemed like a re-hash of the wiki article i would feel the whole thing to be pretty pointless.

Anyway, that aside — Vox should have served as a lesson to a lot of magazines that came after. It is another magazine that I think suffered from a change of format — it used to be large and as it\’s size diminished so, it seems, did it\’s relevance. For a long time Melody Maker and NME seemed to have been in a handbags at dawn fight against each other — trying to become in some sense the polar opposite of each other but somehow unable to achieve this. They became almost indistinguishable although I might give the NME that it was that little bit edgier. But neither of those magazines were a patch on VOX — the articles were better; the ideas were better — an the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. So, what did it do? In an effort to compete with its perceived rivals it became them — it threw away every distinguishing feature that it possessed and it dove straight into the formless morass that was the Melody Maker/NME universe and it became as bland and eventually unreadable as they were. The intelligence of the articles slowly evaporated and were replaced with same collection of snarky reviews, top ten lists, and scrapbook quality bullshit that some people seemed to be satisfied with. God, it made you want to cry — what it did do is make you stop buying it. And like a hand which you aren\’t sure if it\’s waving or drowning — it disappeared under the quicksand of it\’s own mediocrity.

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