In late 2019, while the rest of the music industry continued its sprint toward digital, Jack White's Third Man Records went in the opposite direction and launched a quarterly print magazine. They named it after the mind-melting title track of Funkadelic's 1971 masterpiece — a nod to White's Detroit roots and the independent music scene that had launched the White Stripes. Maggot Brain was edited by Mike McGonigal, a noted Detroit music journalist who had founded the influential fanzine Chemical Imbalance in the 1980s, contributed to Spin, The Village Voice, and Artforum, and written books on Galaxie 500 and My Bloody Valentine for the 33⅓ series.
The first issue put Alice Coltrane on the cover. The mission statement was a litany of mourning for the print culture that had disappeared: "We miss cigar-smelling newsstands crammed with amazing publications from everywhere all at once. We miss Creem. We miss Ragtime Ephemeralist. We miss Spy. We miss NY Rocker. We miss weirdo newsprint thrust at us right by subway entrances. We miss Slash. We miss being able to find stacks of old Oz in the back of that used bookstore in the strip mall."
Each issue runs to over a hundred full-colour pages packed with art, music, literature, and unpublished archival material, with a single non-negotiable promise: to exist only on the printed page. There is no website, no digital edition, no social-media preview. The subjects are drawn from the vast, unruly territory of music that exists outside the mainstream consensus: Pharoah Sanders, Sleater-Kinney, Devo, the Swell Maps, Shabazz Palaces, TV on the Radio, the Velvet Underground. Every issue includes a column by the writer Lucy Sante, who has contributed since the first edition. The photography includes rare images of the White Stripes at Paychecks Lounge in Hamtramck, Michigan, from 1999. Art is by Nathaniel Russell and Marc Bell.
Now twenty issues deep, Maggot Brain has become one of the most distinctive music publications in America — a magazine that treats print not as a nostalgic format but as the only medium capable of doing justice to the music it loves. In an industry that has reduced most music journalism to algorithmic playlists and SEO-optimized listicles, it remains stubbornly, joyfully, expensively analog.
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