By Jon Graef
Staff Writer

Every aspiring rock critic has some sort of emotional connection with Rolling Stone. I certainly have a personal investment with the magazine. It was probably the first magazine that got me to take rock music seriously, and the first magazine that made me think I could do this for a living someday. I used to collect Rolling Stone fanatically, and I would save every issue and re-read past issues when I got bored with the issue that I had just read. I think my brother called my habit "sad." I got insanely upset with my mom when she threw away my dozens and dozens of magazines that I had saved.

As time went on (and I started listening to less mainstream rock), it occurred to me that Rolling Stone was not the magazine that I thought it was. I started noticing things like how none of the major releases got anything less than three stars or that their lists of best records of the year only included albums that sold more than a million copies or that any reviews of any interesting albums were a paragraph long (if that) or the covers of Britney Spears in various pseudo-provocative poses. You get the idea.

As Sliver editor Pete Farrell has stated in the past, the magazine is a former shell of its counterculture shelf. The Maxim-ization of the magazine in the past five years hasn't helped. Actually, I take that back. It's helped alright. It's helped make the magazine more rebellious. Not in a true and intellectual sense, but rebellious in the same way that a financing firms market themselves to baby boomers. In other words, talking the rebel talk while actually affirming the status quo.

Rolling Stone is a trade paper now, sort of a Variety for rock stars. It is essentially MTV in print-form. This is why the collaboration between the two titans of youth pop culture makes sense, even if it means the musical apocalypse. In "I'm From Rolling Stone," six young whippersnappers engage in a competition for a Contributing Editor spot for an entire year. MTV films it all. There are three men and three women. All that's needed now is a wacky dad, a doting mother, a funny maid, and then they could have called it "The Brady Bunch."

I wanted to tune in, mainly out of morbid curiosity. However, it would be remiss of me not to say that another reason for tuning in is sheer vanity. I want to see if I am a better or a worse writer than the contestants on this show.

The good news is that some of the writers are actually quite good, and it's in the series' first episode that we are allowed the chance to get to know them. There's Russell, a 25-year-old former juvenile delinquent; Krystal, an aspiring poet and blonde hippie-check with romantic notions of Rolling Stone's sixties heyday; Krishtine, a 23-year-old hyphy performer and journalist with a massive ego; Peter, an Australian student on a crew scholarship to UC-Berkley; Tika, a lesbian African-American from Brooklyn (guess what her political leanings are); and Colin, a 19-year-old college student from USC. The first episode of the series consists of Rolling Stone founder and Editor-in-Chief Jann Wenner calling each person to tell them that they are coming to work for them, and then working on their first warm-up assignment.

The bad news is that the conflicts in the series are completely predictable, and thusly, the show is boring at times. Does the party boy do too much partying? Will the former juvie-kid have problems with discipline and authority? Does the girl with the massive ego have problems doing actual "work"?

Do I even need to be asking these questions since the trailer practically spells all this out for us already?

Despite the predictability of it all, the show is worth watching sometimes. The show gets some decent live footage of the interview subjects (in the first episode, Lupe Fiasco, We Are Scientists, and El-P). Russell and Tika are interesting people. They are the only people who strike me as capable of asking compelling questions, at least for now. Russell has some missteps with Ghostface Killah, but his interaction with Lupe Fiasco is priceless. He is easily the most interesting of the contestants. He is conflicted about his potentially winning the contest, and reacts sarcastically to pretty much everything anyone ever says. He gloriously screws with Jann's head, but smartly cuts to the chase with him as well. Tika, though she is portrayed as "serious black lady," comes across as the most real and has what will undoubtedly be an underrated sense of humor.

The rest of the contestants are, frankly, rank amateurs and I wonder how in the hell they got picked in the first place. Surely, they will blossom magically into writers searching for truth, justice and the rock 'n' roll way by the end of the show. What I am saying is that there are many amateur writers out there would kill to able to write professionally, even for just three months, and even for Rolling Stone. So to watch the second episode where the contestants/journalists/assholes screw up, whether it's Khristine inadvertently insulting El-P's intelligence or Colin bumbling like Schmucky The Clown through an interview with We Are Scientists, is infuriating. But then, it is a reality show. They probably planned it that way.

I will continue watching the show. Not necessarily because I enjoy it (though the show has some moments), but rather, out of obligation. For you see, rollingstone.com is having a contest that runs concordantly with the series in which you, the people at home, can submit 300 word articles that parallel with the plot of the show. So if the first episode is about writing up the local music scene, then the first assignment is about the local music scene, and so on and so on. A winner is picked each week, and the best writer gets a three-month gig writing for rollingstone.com.

I shall enter the contests, and then write about the experience, comparing my pieces with the ones that get picked. I will do anything necessary to my writing in order to win, whether it be dumb it down (very likely) or smarten it up (eh, not so much). Every other week, I'll write about this quest of sorts. I will write about whether or not I feel like I am whoring myself out, or if I am getting better, or if rollingstone.com is full of shit, or if they are actually picking good submissions. Expect my thoughts about assignments one and two sometime next week.

God help us all. Will I succeed? I think so. But I hope I don't.