| Editor's Desk |
SMART BAD; MAD GOOD some thoughts on intellectual discourse from the editor and how the Spite issue of Pop Music came to be |

Ladies and Gentlemen,
On that fateful Tuesday, after sleeping in until noon, finishing off a box of Frosted Mini-Wheats, leafing through the cartoons in The New Yorker, and watching a few episodes of a Singled Out marathon, I was struck with a great sense of boredom, by which I mean purpose.
And that purpose was to offer my views on pop music to the world. After making several long-distance calls to friends who I knew would be at work, I set to my task without delay.After minutes of intense concentration, I had produced a fifteen-page manifesto on pop music, comprised of an analysis of its downfall and a detailed blueprint of events necessary for its revival, which mostly depended on the people who would become the staff for this magazine somehow gaining a great deal of undeserved attention from groupies.
What we need, I thought, is a good, old-fashioned bitch-out. Of everything.
With The New York Times, National Public Radio, the Atlantic Monthly, Village Voice, New Republic, The Nation, The Jim Leher (however you spell it) News Hour, and Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, the world is more than full of smart, well-considered opinions from all frequencies of the political spectrum on everything from Bosnia to cajun cooking. What could I possibly add to this huge traffic jam of information?
The answer is this magazine: Spite. An on-line forum of bitterness, resentment, regret, guilt, pettiness and anger - on any subjects we damn well feel like.
So I threw out my manifesto and spent an entire commercial break carefully tapping out the somewhat irrational piece on Miss Morissette, which became the focus for this issue mainly because it was finished first.
We also complain about:
Why bitch out Alanis Morrissette? Because I FELT like it, all right? You don't agree? WHO CARES? I WAS FED UP! Oh, you say the article isn't that funny? Well, I DIDN'T MEAN FOR IT TO BE FUNNY! What do you think of that? I WAS JUST A LITTLE PISSED OFF! ALL RIGHT? It's called "SPITE," not "FAIR THINGS!"
So, please, peruse away. If you're reading this, you probably wrote for it anyway, and won't get much further than your own name, but that doesn't mean this magazine isn't very very important. I don't know why, but it is.
And if by chance, I don't know you, and you have some spiteful thoughts of your own, by all means send them along to the Email address at the bottom of this page (and most pages). If we do this again, we don't want to actually have to write anything. I don't get any more sick days until next year.
Bradford Contemporary
Editor, Spite Magazine
New York City
December 1996