The Language of Music Magazines

 In this article, the focal point will be based around the language of rock music based magazines, looking mainly at generic articles about Frank Iero, All Time Low, Green Day and whatever other rock icons you can list, written for 'Kerrang!' and 'Rock Sound' magazines. Firstly, looking at the discourse structure in a bit more detail and in particular of the articles involving the cover story. Within Kerrang!, an article including a write-up of an interview with Frank Iero is nothing less of what you'd read each week, where the length is usually around two pages of A4 paper in very small print in total in order to fit around the large amount of imagery that you see in this magazine… Looking at Rock Sound from the same viewpoint, it was surprising to find that the cover-story article, a summary of an interview with All Time Low, covered around three and a half A4 pages in the same size print. This is very interesting, as up until now, I'd assumed that the magazines were pretty much the same. Now, I assume this difference in length of content is due to the fact that Kerrang! Magazine is released weekly and Rock Sound magazine is released into shops monthly.

 

 Moving on to the headlines used in these magazines, they contain an odd mixture of seriously raw emotional-based headlines, such as Rock Sound's "FRANK IERO REVEALED! THE SONGS THAT INSPIRED A MUSICAL REVOLUTION" and lighthearted headlines that sound a bit like something your dad would say, such as Kerrang!'s "PIERCE THE VEIL: AMERICA'S HOTTEST BAND FACE THEIR FANS!". These continue throughout the magazine as captions to images, along with the use of covert prestige such as "brodown" (Kerrang!) in order to appear 'down' with the kids that are likely to be reading… Which acts as a brilliant example of how Giles' Theory of Accommodation can be applied to these magazines, whereby the writers of the articles try to converge their way of speaking, or writing in this case, to mirror the way that their target audience of teenagers speak. For example, using fillers in their writing such as "sure" and "boy" in order to break up longer sentences to keep it snappy and interesting.

 

 Finally, the use of deixis, or language that is context-bound, is very common within the two magazines, using the similar fan-based interviews as an example. Kerrang! carried out a fan-interview with Pierce The Veil in this issue, using the simple phrase "find out just what Mike thinks of Avril Lavigne…" will only be moderately understood in two circumstances: where the reader knows who Mike (Fuentes) is or where the reader was involved in this fan interview (which, luckily for me, I was!). The same sort of thing is found in Rock Sound's fan-interview with Tonight Alive, where they've used slang like "STREWTH!" to introduce the article, which of course is only understood if you're aware of British-Australian slang.

 

 Katie Plenderleith

All quotes are from Kerrang! Magazine issue 1566 and Rock Sound Magazine issue 199.