Ray Gun: Out of Control

Amazon.com Review

Since the publication of its first issue in 1992, Ray Gun has set the perimeters of the cutting edge in publishing. Abandoning such conventions as headlines, columns, and even page numbers, the alternative rock-and-roll magazine created a chaotic, abstract style that broke all the rules, clearing the way for a slew of fringe magazines devoted as much to style as to substance. This self-consciously hip, unconventional approach soon emerged on album covers, concert posters, and MTV, signaling the birth of a bona fide movement. The same irreverent approach to production is applied to Ray Gun: Out of Control, forcing you to wade through a maze of random graphics and typefaces to unearth the articles and essays. The search is half the fun, though, as the pieces are enough to capture your interest, even against the backdrop of so much graphic noise.

From Kirkus Reviews

This anthology drawn from the pages of Ray Gun, one of the most visually idiosyncratic and original music magazines now being published, demonstrates just how consistently inventive and challenging the design of the magazine is but doesn't make the ``new niche cool'' publication any easier to understand. Kuipers, its editor, argues that too many magazines are addicted to ``the megalomaniacal need to control people, to steer culture away from the radical and toward the safe.'' One way in which they do that is by compartmentalizing art and text. Ray Gun doesn't: Words flow over images, dense blocks of text are squeezed into spreads featuring glowing color photographs or collages, a wide variety of typefaces are crowded into an issue. Another way in which magazines assert a rigid worldview is by strictly defining the roles of artists, writers, designers, and subjects: Ray Gun has recruited John Travolta, William S. Burroughs, Quentin Tarantino, Frank Zappa, and Keith Richards, among many others, as contributors, providing ``an open forum'' for the artists ``who define youth (or music) culture.'' The anthology offers a stunning gallery of cutting-edge design, but its highly experimental mix of images and text is likely to make it of interest only to designers and the already initiated. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

This book ... looks more like a collection of printers' errors than a book. And although the graphics are punctuated by interesting essays on the magazine's brief history, they are lost amid the confusing morass of type and image.... this assemblage is more confusing than outrageous. -- The New York Times Book Review, Steven Heller