As the editorial architect of Vice, his philosophy was “never bore,” so the magazine published articles about subjects that young people find compelling (namely, sex, drugs, and music). But the magazine’s voice — funny, blunt, and inflammatory — was more important than its content, and Vice made its name by printing the unprintable about gender, race, and sexuality. This was partly political; being polite about social problems, McInnes believes, only allows them to fester. But mostly it was in his nature: he is a contrarian in a politically correct world. Gavin McInnes, forty-one, has devoted his life to recapturing the moment when he first said “fuck” in front of an adult.
McInnes is no longer involved with Vice; he and his two partners split in 2008 over creative differences. For legal reasons, he can’t discuss the details, but he has hinted that he sold his shares for a handsome sum — and since then he has been working full time at being Gavin McInnes. And he works hard at it. My request for an interview elicited an instant response, and when we meet at his office in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood (coincidentally, on the day of the “worst hangover” of his life), he tosses me plenty of sound bites. Greeting me in Keds and a sweatshirt, he introduces his researcher, Bob (“This young lady is writing a profile about me because I’m fucking amazing. Has anyone written a profile about you, Bob?”), and fishes me out a copy of Gavin McInnes Is a Fucking Asshole, a DVD of his comedy sketches (retail value: $10, including shipping).
At Mustang Sally’s, a bar down the street, he makes a number of penis jokes, touching on Nick Nolte’s rumoured testicular surgery (“Talk about polishing a turd”) and his own issues with circumcision (“You never get a rational argument for it. The biggest one is ‘I think he’d want his penis to look like his dad’s.’ Why? For when we go penis modelling together?”). He also recounts pranks he’s played: after losing Gawker’s online Hipster of the Decade contest, he sent the gossip website a video of himself eating a bowl of cornflakes soaked in his own urine, apparently in protest. In fact, he had eaten the urine-soaked cornflakes months earlier.
As McInnes says several times, he is the same person he has always been. At his best, he is exhilarating, at his worst tiresome. He is often funny, but his material sometimes resembles a tumorous mass of F-bombs and AIDS jokes. His former partners, Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith, claim to have rejected the latter part. And the company has done exceptionally well in McInnes’s absence: today it encompasses an international network of contributors (many of whom grew up on Vice); VBS, an online television network co-launched with Viacom; and Virtue, an advertising agency. While it still publishes a magazine — circulation 1.16 million worldwide — it also produces videos about Africa, the Middle East, and skateboarding. And if Levi’s comes looking for some co-branding, Vice will farm out a few of its contributors to produce videos about the American workingman and his jeans.
In April, the company was the beneficiary of a reported $50-million-plus investment from communications leviathan WPP; the Raine Group, an investment bank; and former Viacom CEO Tom Freston. It will use the money to build more and better facilities for in-house content production, and to beam it onto laptops in Brazil and mobile phones in China. “Having this group aboard is like having a rocket strapped to your skateboard,” said Smith in a press release. “When they turn on the jets, you’re in for a hell of a ride.”
This is language — the language of public relations — that McInnes probably wouldn’t approve of.
Smith and mcinnes met as kids in the suburbs of Ottawa, first as dinner guests (their fathers worked together as engineers in IT), and then in the local punk scene, where they played in bands like Leatherassbuttfuck and Anal Chinook. Both were rambunctious, and where they grew up culture was a gruel of Hinterland Who’s Who Canadiana. After earning a degree in political science at Carleton University, Smith ran off to Europe, where he claims to have made a small fortune selling currency. McInnes devoted himself to punk, as much a cult as a style, while working toward a BA in English literature at Carleton, and later at Concordia. After finishing university, he stayed in Montreal, where he published a zine called Pervert.
At the time, Alvi, a McGill philosophy grad, was recovering from heroin addiction and starting a job at a community newspaper called Voice of Montreal, funded through a welfare-to-work program. McInnes came on board through a mutual friend, and the two decided to make the paper their soapbox. Needing someone to sell ads, McInnes called Smith, who sold them by any means necessary. Even today, Smith’s ambition pulls the company along like a grappling hook. “He would get really drunk and talk into my ear like, ‘We’re gonna be huge,’” says McInnes. “He would do that to everyone I know, actually.”
The two were symbiotic: one applied the same energy to selling the paper as the other did to making it interesting. Meanwhile, Alvi served as a kind of fulcrum between two hyperboles. The three of them bought it from its owners in 1996, renaming it Vice and taking it national by contacting acquaintances at radio stations, record labels, and cafés across the country, with whom they bartered ads for help with distribution (Canada, while vast, is also very small). The country had never seen anything like Vice — a free, national counterculture magazine — and the founders knew it. Nor did they make any effort to hide their ambition; in languid Montreal, in pinko Canada, ambition was a rebellion unto itself. “This is the first time young people have had a revolution that involves them getting paid,” McInnes told the National Post in 1999. “Everyone else was about rebelling against the man and eating beans.”
In 1998, playing a game of “bullshit the press,” Smith told a Montreal Gazette reporter that Richard Szalwinski, of the new media company Behaviour (which had recently acquired Shift magazine), wanted to invest in Vice. Szalwinski had never even heard of Vice, but the ploy got his attention, and he eventually became a partner, buying 25 percent for a reported $750,000. Suddenly in the money, McInnes, Alvi, and Smith decamped to Manhattan, where Szalwinski put them up in a sprawling loft in Chelsea and encouraged them to spend more than they made. Smith and McInnes, who had lived together in their former offices on Montreal’s McGill Street, bought a mountain property in Costa Rica.
Soon afterward, the dot-com bubble burst, the office Internet connection went down, and Szalwinski went missing. The three founders hunted him down in Nantucket and bought back his interest in the company for less than he’d paid for it. But despite its growing clout, Vice was still broke, so Alvi and Smith threw themselves into the business of publishing while McInnes, who wanted nothing to do with it, holed up in editorial. “Those guys had a real struggle, trying to get people to buy ads and market the Vice brand,” he says. “I was still writing the Vice ‘Guide to Eating Pussy’ and having a great time.”
After long days in the office, McInnes freshened up with drugs and went out in search of content. New York had more of it than Montreal did, and better contributors, too: Tim Barber and Ryan McGinley, who established the magazine’s visual identity (nudity a staple); Lesley Arfin and Amy Kellner, who proved that feminists can be funny; comedians like David Cross and Sarah Silverman; and cult figures like gay filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, and Jim Goad, whose zine, ANSWER Me!, had been a big influence. While Alvi and Smith expanded the business internationally — courting the “weirdo dollar” in every country to avoid having to kowtow to mainstream America — McInnes became the public face of the magazine. His voice gave Alvi and Smith something to sell, but his knack for saying the worst possible thing gave them headaches.
