I won't go so far as to title this post "How How Sassy Changed My Life Changed My Life," but said book, which I just read, mostly on a plane down to and back up from Raleigh, NC (well, two different planes), brought on some pretty serious nostalgia. (I'm a little late to the parade I guess; the book came out in 2007.) HSCML is a sort of biography of, or a "love letter to," as the subtitle claims, the "greatest teen magazine of all time." Who all out there was a Sassy reader? I freaking loved Sassy when I was a "teen."
I seem to remember it having its most profound effect on my psyche/personality when I was in about 8th grade. Reading this book, I realized for the first time as an adult how much of what I liked back then I got first from Sassy, since I certainly didn't get it from my hip urban friends--all the "indie" music I was into (like Teenage Fanclub and Juliana Hatfield) ... I read a profile of Claire Danes that got me excited about My So-Called Life before the show had actually debuted (I now own all the episodes on DVD). Sassy writers introduced me to the terms "Maneuver X" and "frisson."
One of the more interesting points in the book (there's not a ton of analysis; it's mostly just the story of how the magazine came to be, highs and lows etc., the True Hollywood Story) is the suggestion that Sassy started off with the mission of being inclusive, of sending a message to teenage girls that it was OK to be themselves, that they didn't have to conform to the standards of the skinny tan blonde popular chicks that comprised most teen mags. But after a while Sassy seemed to be promoting an image as much as any other magazine, just a different image: The Sassy reader was supposed to be this cool alterna grrrl.
One student who worked on one of the annual reader-produced issues (RPIs) felt like an outsider among the other outsiders on the reader staff. She may have been on a different intellectual plane from her fellow high schoolers, but because she didn't sew her own clothes and have piercings and shit, the other staffers looked at her as "normal" and a goody-goody. To her they all seemed to be conforming to the same ideal of noncomformity. This really resonated with me. Although I felt Sassy spoke to me in a way no other teen magazine did, I also felt it was over my head in terms of coolness. No Sassy staffer would ever stop me on the street to get a snap of my rad outfit (probably from the Gap), the way they did with Chloe Sevigny. That's right, Chloe Sevigny was discovered by Sassy.
Toward the end of the book, co-writers Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer wonder if today's teens would really need a Sassy--kids who feel like outsiders at school have more outlets now. They can just go online and find freaks across the nation. To boot, the signature voice of Sassy--knowing, insidery, snarky--that made it stand out from other magazines is now readily found on ... blogs.
When I read that, I thought, Fuck. Is my sassy blog persona just refried Christina Kelly? Seriously. I kind of think it might be. Talk about anxiety of influence.
Former Sassy interns, RPI staffers and devoted readers went on to create the next generation of third-wave feminist magazines: Bitch, Bust, and Venus Zine. And, uh, the pshares blog. I'm such an underachiever.
February 25, 2009
Sassy sassy sassy
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8 comments:
I was there when you purchased HSCML at Booksmith! I coveted it then, and I covet it even more now. I was a devoted Sassy reader back in the day, too. In fact, in light of this post, I think maybe Sassy is one of our biggest collaborative poetic influences?
I think it's one of the biggest influences on my life period...
I love this post--and it makes me long for the ability to pinpoint a specific popculture influence. I have been vaguely blogging about pop culture references, but I feel like mine are all over the place.
I was way, way to out of the loop to even know what Sassy was until after the fact. I had access to Teen and then Seventeen, but that was about it (though I did read Bitch and Bust in college). I knew about Degrassi Jr. High early, but didn't find out about My So Called Life until the show was almost over. All this is probably because I was either overseas or in rural Maine (which, in the 80s, was like east coast suburbia in the 70s in terms of pop culture).
Lorraine,
I wonder if our generation is uniquely attached to the pop culture of our youth. I'm not necessarily proud of this, but I find that "knowing the references" (i.e., having grown up with MTV and so on) is so important to me that I find it difficult to relate to people my age who didn't grow up in the U.S.
I'm sorry you missed Sassy! I think I still have a stack of issues at my parents' house somewhere, but I fear they're all cut up from when I went through my wallpaper-of-collage phase....
Elisa,
"I wonder if our generation is uniquely attached to the pop culture of our youth."
I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. In many ways, my parents are firmly stuck in the 70s, and the folks of my parents' generation who live here in San Diego also seem firmly attached to 70s pop culture--but maybe that has to do with an overall California nostalgia thing.
I used to make wallpaper collages all the time. Kind of miss doing it ; )
A whole bunch of 1970s pop culture (Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Grease, American Grafitti, 50s-style diners) was packaging childhood/teen nostalgia for our parents.
The marketing strategy behind Budweiser beer, long long ago, was to play off of nostalgia for the Olde Country, which was probably also a form of childhood nostalgia.
didn't sassy start up a mag called DIRT that was supposed to be sassy for teen guys? i vaguely remember buying DIRT because my sister read sassy and i had this idea of how cool sassy was-- but i don't think DIRT lasted long.
Yes, DIRT was only around for like 6 or 7 issues. One of the main guys behind it was Spike Jonze. There's a bit in the Sassy book about how/why that failed ... mostly they couldn't get any ad sales because the "reader" (which was semi-ill-defined) was just kind of grungy boys ... whom you can't really market like grooming products and fashion to. Poor ad sales was one of the main reasons Sassy tanked too.
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