But back to the gals. It's a trite point, made ever more trite by the fact that everyone says it, but the VF cover proves that musical talent is no longer enough to guarantee success: you have to be pretty. Barry White is by far the ugliest mug on this spread: everyone else is gorgeous, and musical talent is a distant second in justification for inclusion (much like it is, to be sure, when the record companies hand out contracts). Although, to be fair, I should point out that Sheryl Crow (or, as the great Austin Chronicle columnist Ken Lieck once put it, "MTV-augmented dwarf Sheryl Crow") is not at all attractive, but she does represent the kind of "give me something new that sounds exactly like everything else I've listened to over the last twenty years" artist that I suspect is highly popular with the VF demographic.

So, the articles. But actually, I'd be doing you a disservice if I failed to mention page 160, where VF highlights upcoming releases to watch for. All you need to read is the claim that Ryan-not-Bryan Adams' demos (helpfully described by VF as "outtakes from recording sessions") are "superior to most people's much-hyped, overworked 'real' albums," to understand where VF is coming from. This statement offers up delicious irony only two sentences later, when new releases by both The Wallflowers and Matchbox Twenty are duly plugged.

Okay, the articles. For real. I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to have lefty snitch Christopher Hitchens tool along Route 66 in a rented Corvette, but I think I remember something about him being a regular VF contributor, so as long as Si's paying the bill, why not? Hitchens is at his best when purveying invective, which, sadly, is not the case here, although he is able to cast some not-so-subtle aspersions on the hard-working blue collar citizens of this great country of ours (apparently, if you wear pink socks, they think you're a queer). If Hitchens seriously believes that Bobby Troup is responsible for the long-vowelled pronunciation of St. Louis, he needs to be swiftly introduced to the works of one William Christopher Handy. Eminently skippable.

Wolcott does drug memoirs. Not bad, if obvious. Especially good for the pre-Leatherface photo of Marianne Faithfull. Takes five minutes to read.

Elvis Costello's "what to listen to." Another sad documentation of Costello's decline into intolerable pretension. My only hope is that some long-suffering assistant wrote this for him. Skip, skip, skip.