NEW YORK - Most editorial decisions at Blender, the irreverent music magazine that has thrown a scare into Rolling Stone and won a "launch of the year" award from Advertising Age, are conjured in a tiny conference room dominated by an armless punching bag dummy just like Mariah Carey's.
The dummy was acquired under the auspices of journalistic research, an accessory to an article the magazine ran on the diva's reinvention, and it has been customized by the staff to the point where it has a new identity: dummy as editorial muse.
Unlike Carey's punching bag, the Blender version wears a black fright wig with heavy-metal Osbourne overtones, green horns, a Jim Beam basketball jersey (love thy advertisers) and a gigantic crucifix that could have been pilfered from a rapper's jewelry box. Though he enjoys them, none of the sartorial embellishments were the idea of Blender's relentlessly savvy editor in chief, Andy Pemberton, a budding boxer and bass-strumming member of Blender's house band.
"Tragically, no, I can't take credit for dressing up the punching bag," says Pemberton, who usually wears jeans and sweatshirts to his midtown office but glammed it up in honor of being interviewed. "I dress like a tramp; no one is less venerable than me," adds the editor, a skeletal, porcelain-pale British import with a typically British knack for eloquent enunciation.
But Pemberton's editorial ideas, many of them copycats of the formula he used a job ago in London to make Q the premier music magazine in Britain, have transformed Blender, whose brother publications are the male-oriented Maxim and Stuff, from a four-issue experiment with an initial printing of 250,000 copies in 2001 to a 10-issue juggernaut that just announced an increase to 410,000 copies as of January.
Too bad about its being named after a kitchen appliance.
Pemberton's button-black eyes zero in. "I know, I know, it's a terrible name," he blurts, then claps a hand over his mouth, self-censorship after the fact.
The ambitious type, Pemberton joined Q magazine in 1997 after realizing that his three-year stint as deputy editor at Mixmag, a dance music publication, was not going to end in a full editorship. By 1999, he was the editor of Q, but in August 2000, after a corporate reorganization, he left on less-than-felicitous terms, a British euphemism for being fired. The offer to recast Q with an American accent came at the right time.
"At the time, American music magazines were really boring, dry as toast," he says. "A little too much about the glory of rock and the majesty of roll. A little overproduced, like an Eagles album. At Blender, we don't hold pop stars in such reverence; we're not waiting for the next pearl of wisdom to come from their mouth. The reader is king."
Geared to the Napster generation, Blender delivers informed entertainment in a tone he describes as "skeptical enthusiasm" - Pemberton, by the way, takes responsibility for coining the term "trip hop," even if the Oxford English Dictionary entry fails to credit him. That such songbirds as Janet Jackson, Christina Aguilera and LeAnn Rimes obligingly strike provocative cover poses has given the magazine ample bang at the newsstand. After blushing boyishly from the effort of ticking off the list of scantily clad lovelies enlisted as frontwomen, he notes that the Eminem cover was a hot seller.
"Eminem is the No. 1 pop culture star out there right now; he's like our Elvis," he says, sounding editorial. He notices a skeptical slant to his visitor's brow. "No, I'm serious. He really is a 21st-century Elvis." And this from a stalwart Beatles lover; Revolver was the first and only rock record his parents permitted in their home in tiny Chevington.
Has Pemberton noticed the facelift at Rolling Stone, whose publisher, Jann Wenner, called the competition from Blender "good and healthy"?
"They've made it a little bit like Blender, haven't they?" he purrs. "The design is busier. Shorter articles; more entry points. I find it very flattering. Not that we invented the formula." It's a British thing. As is this bullpen-style office, where Pemberton's desk is in the midst of the action. There are no dividers here. It makes, he says, for a pleasant dearth of office politics.
Pemberton got his dose of politics at college - it was his major at the University of Leeds - and at his first job as assistant editor at The House Magazine, a weekly review of pending political bills written by and for members of Parliament. His job was soliciting the articles.
It was, except for a tour of the House of Lords and a couple of trips to 10 Downing St., a dull enough gig to send him straight into freelance work as a rock reviewer. He made $15 in his first month but stuck to it. He bonded with Chuck D of Public Enemy. He interviewed R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe. And here he is generating buzz in New York City; word has it Chuck D even requested a Blender subscription.
Pemberton raises his arms in mock victory; it doesn't get any better than that.