This, to me, is like finally admitting that your very old friend has grown to become a exhausting cunt. Flashback 10 years ago and Vice played a steady role in shaping me and my interests as a young man. I used to grab a copy from Casino or Wellgosh and literally read it cover to cover every single month. Well written articles about true crime, or people from worlds I cannot imagine were neighboured by extremely honest reviews of music, film and pornography. The humour was crass, and un-PC. I had never seen anything like it. It was free, and indie, almost like it was made by the people for the people. It was punk. It was so exciting to me at that time and I imagine it played a role in why I started coming here and hammering a keyboard.
Now ten years or so on, Vice is bigger than ever. A culture symbol amongst young people with 4.3 million likes on their Facebook page. Don't get me wrong, they still produce content I really like. Their Youtube presence has it's highs, and their sister brand 'Noisey' (The musical leg of Vice) is capable of gold. The recent 'Noisey Atlanta' series was incredibly gripping. I am still, and will continue to be subscribed to their product. But as ever when a company of their stature reaches that kind of stage it started to tail off. They are no longer on the way up, so why not cruise? When we used to get articles about Black Nazi gangs in Americas prison system we now get clickbait articles about whichever of the 6 or 7 things on their left wing hipster agenda they're choosing to push today. It's like they've found such a clear formula for what gets hits, they just stick with that. I didn't ever think I would see Vice driven by numbers or clicks.
Not only is this down to the dwindling sense of integrity the publication once had, I think it's down to the people it's written by. I can't stand the sort of cunts that work for Vice. Hipster wankers clad in their best American Apparel flannel shirt and tatty Vans getting bad tattoos ironically, all pretending to be from London. Trying to trick everyone into thinking they're poor while their rich parents send them secret money. The sort of nerds that write Vice are the lads that get their phones robbed at house parties because they leave them on the side in the kitchen. You know the sort. Or girls who were fucking losers at school with zero social skills who turned 18, got Tumblr, subsequently learnt to suck dick properly and now just knock around with guys because of the free drugs. It's like these days every other article is a wankfest written by the young people of London, for the young people of London usually having a dig at how crap life outside of London is, it's such laziness, yet it constantly gets a free pass because of how great their magazine used to be.
I find it upsetting because it's so big these days, and the people who are wrapped up in that little world are all so self assured so it's only going to grow. They have an army strong with desperate little wannabe wankers all subscribing to second hand culture so they can pretend they were there, back then. Wether it's retro sportswear or making up shit about pretending they remember pivotal moments in the grime scene, Vice is written by those desperate-to-be-included little nerds for those desperate-to-be-included little nerds and it's a shame because it used to be fucking magical.
I first thought about writing this yesterday when I got upset over an article they published regarding some cat cafe in Leicester. Fuck the cafe, I don't care about that place, but they've bashed Leicester and the Midlands before. Regularly. Anywhere that isn't the capital city of the country for that matter. The thing to remember is all these losers who write Vice these days all come from these nowhere places. Posh lads raised in the countryside and shires who are using Vice to reinvent themselves and latch onto a sense of identity because they were never really ever from anywhere. You see it at Universities all the time. People go off to Uni and cheer and chant about where they study, as if that somehow defines their identity. I love London, but there is something about how great London is that when people move there they forget who they are and where they come from sooo quickly.
I guess I'm really struggling to come to terms with how much one of my favourite publications ever wants to alienate anyone that isn't the hipster tossers who write it for the sake of likes and hits.
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