The World According to Vice.

512 Pages·2010·28.04 MB·English

by  Vice

EDITED BY
Andy Capper, James Knight and Bruno Bayley EDITOR IN CHIEF VICE
GLOBAL
Jesse Pearson

DESIGNER
Stacy Wakefield

EDITORIAL ASSISTANCE
Piers Martin
John McDonnell
Alex Miller CHAPTER ILLUSTRATIONS
Johnny Ryan

VICE FOUNDERS
Suroosh Alvi
Shane Smith

VICE MEDIA GROUP EU CEO
Andrew Creighton

THANKS TO
Alen Zukanovic at Inkubator

CONTENTS
Title Page

INTRODUCTION
By Andy Capper and Jesse Pearson

THE STATE WE’RE IN

DISPATCHES FROM A WORLD OF VICE

VBS, OR THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED (JUST NOT ON
TELEVISION)

(DON’T) TRY THIS AT HOME

PHOTOJOURNALISM

INTERROGATIONS

Acknowledgements
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
THIS IS A CONVERSATION BETWEEN ANDY CAPPER, BRITISH
EDITOR OF VICE, AND JESSE PEARSON, THE EDITOR IN CHIEF OF
VICE GLOBAL, WHO IS AMERICAN.
Andy Capper: Jesse, we have to do a thing where we talk about the last eight
years of Vice magazine being in Britain.
Jesse Pearson: Why?
AC: We’re doing a book with Canongate that’s apparently going to open us up
to a “whole new audience”. I’m very excited about that.
JP: Hmm.
AC: Please?
JP: What is it that you want to say?
AC: Well, this book is for a Brit audience and we are here to talk about yours
and my experience of how the British Vice started and how the special
relationship worked and survived against the ridiculous odds; and I guess how
the start of British Vice and then Vice EU coincided with the start of both our
careers as editors here.
JP: So this is for the kind of audience that likes Ant and Dec…
AC: Yes, that is correct. You seem to have your finger on the pulse of Britain.
JP: I like British people. I think they have the best sense of humour in the world,
apart from New York City Jewish people. Russians come third. But I think Brits
are too fond of making lists and doing weird awards things. Like the whole
Christmas number one thing—to me that’s insane.
AC: You should have been there when it was East 17 vs Oasis. It was one of the
cultural highpoints of the last 100 years of Britain.
JP: I also like the way British people get weepy and have sing-alongs while
drunk, because I do that too and I also like their attitude with regards to partying,
which is pretty much Friday from 5 PM until Sunday, or rather Monday, at 4
AM, going for it.
AC: It’s more like Thursday from noon. One of the first stories we did together
was when I was sent to Paris for the weekend to meet the sapeurs. I wrote the
article and people seemed to like it but I was not actually sure if I found any
sapeurs.
JP: There was also a grime article pretty much every month.
AC: We were the only people who wrote about it in such detail aside from
Grime Monthly or whatever. We did those articles ’cos that scene at the time was
like a young, black version of Eastenders, with all the gossip and chit-chat and
“incidents”, which were turned from people quarrelling violently at pirate radio
stations to shootings, stabbings and jail sentences. And now, some of those kids
from that scene are Britain’s biggest pop stars—Dizzee, Tinchy, Wiley. It’s nuts.
Let’s give people some more history. What was Vice like eight years ago,
before the British office opened and you and I became the editors?
JP: People liked it in the main because of the DOs & DON’Ts, I mean, it was
great because it was like nothing else. The focus of the magazine was more on
retardation in general, but that’s what attracted me to it.
AC: It started as a reaction against the tail end of the 90s, which was a time
when a lot of people were being overly pious about things, I feel.
JP: It was the funniest magazine around. And, yes, coming out of the liberal arts
education prison I had been in for five years before, it was very refreshing. My
college was one big, long take-back-the-night rally. I had to constantly be getting
talked to about how insensitive I was, so Vice appealed to me for sure.
AC: Those sensitive types are like the self-proclaimed “socialists” who’ve never
had to be poor or work a hard job but have rehearsed polemics about workers’
rights. Not that workers shouldn’t have rights, but essentially the people who
yell about them the loudest generally have no idea what the fuck they are talking
about.
JP: It’s easy to say you dig blue-collar people if your family is not blue-collar.
But I have to admit I mostly read the D&Ds and the guides to funny shit. I was
into more sophisticated things such as i-D and Sleazenation, you know, timeless
things like that.
AC: Where I grew up in Southport, which borders on being a hick town, I
honestly didn’t know what i-D was about. As a kid, I didn’t understand the
concept of “fashion magazine”.
JP: Oh, well, re: i-D et al, to be honest, I started looking at them for tits because
there was no “alt porn” back then. Those were the best places to see the nude
boobs of the sorts of girls I liked.
AC: We shouldn’t talk about other people, it’s a bad vibe. Looking back over
the glorious career you’ve had as the main editor, and from which period most of
this book comes from, which would you say were your favourite issues?
JP: My second issue was the Special Issue. It was the first time the majority of
an issue was given over to one group of people.
AC: What was the thinking behind that—giving over the issue to a small group
of people rather than “check out the world through our gay magazine lens” like a
lot of other people do?
JP: It started to become clear to me that to do themes like we were doing, we
needed to go all the way and get every single page of the magazine in line with
the theme, and so we had a run of issues where every single page was dedicated
to one theme.
AC: That’s kind of where that “immersionism journalism” started that I always
talk about when other people interview me about what Vice is. And I guess that
style of journalism became our hallmark, right?
JP: Well, I have to say, we acted like we invented that and we 100 percent did
not. Ever hear of a guy named George Orwell?
AC: The name rings a bell. Is that the guy who wrote The Da Vinci Code?
JP: Yes, that’s correct.
AC: Yeah, we definitely didn’t invent immersionism in any way at all but it
became what we did.
JP: The whole thing from our perspective was to let the subjects tell as much of
the story as possible. There were obvious ones like the Poverty Issue and the
Mentally Ill Issue, all of which involved me going and staying with the people in
the mag and you and other editors doing the same.
And then the Cops Issue came out which was a classic. For a magazine like
Vice to come out with an issue all about our respect for cops was pretty good.
The thing about cops, or one of the things we wanted to get across, is how
insanely funny they can be, and who has better stories than cops?
Soldiers and ER doctors I guess can compete, but not many other professions.
AC: I guess VBS started out of that immersionism journalism thing. Remember
when that started? It was when Spike [Jonze] said to Shane [Smith, Vice CEO],
“Why don’t you film your articles?” But let’s just talk about the magazine here.
There’s a whole section about VBS later in the book.
JP: Yeah, well, immersionism started to turn into a bit of a crutch for the
magazine and I think it’s important to keep changing things up and so we
stopped doing as much.
AC: We started doing longer interviews, like huge interviews with people. But
that in itself was also a kind of immersionism.
JP: Yeah, but they weren’t just interviews like: “Let’s ask the guy from a band
what inspired his stupid shitty boring new record”. I think that the interview is
one of the best and most maltreated formats there is. It’s direct in the same way
immersionism is, if it’s done right.
AC: It was a natural extension of what we were doing. My favourite interview,
but also possibly my hardest and worst interview, was with Shane MacGowan.
JP: Yeah, Mumbles MacGowan. I wish that one were longer.
AC: It was four hours of transcription and the time we spent with him was
amazing, but we only got 800 words of understandable stuff. And Shane is so far
the only celeb we’ve put on the cover non-ironically.
For those who are new to Vice—such as the person who has just had this
book bought for them for Christmas and is thinking, “What is this shit?”—why
did we never put celebs on the cover?
JP: Because people only put celebrities on the covers to sell magazines, and we
don’t care about selling magazines.
I think that our Fiction Issues were a big step for the magazine.
AC: How did that change people’s perceptions of Vice, do you think?
JP: It made them think we were even more pretentious than they did before.
AC: Haha. Why did people think we were pretentious anyway?
JP: It’s probably because they didn’t actually read the magazine. Instead they
listened to what other people had to say about it — “hipster, etc, etc”.
AC: There is currently an advert on British TV based on “how many hipsters
can you fit in a car” or something and one of them is carrying an issue of Vice.
JP: Good, good.
AC: It’s basically God saying to us both, “The last eight years of your life? With
all that stuff you did? This is what it boils down to: two seconds in an unfunny
advert for a shitty car.”
JP: You could look it at that way, I suppose…