Ray Gun: Out of Control [Hardcover]

Marvin Scott Jarrett (Author), Dean Kuipers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 13, 1997

In four short but inspired years, Ray Gun has captured the imagination of American alternative culture as a forum for debate and as an arbiter of credibility on music, graphic design, culture, and style. Out of Control celebrates Ray Gun and its sister magazines in a potent blend of the very best from their past stirred up with a larger dose of challenging new graphics, writing, photography, illustration, typography, fashion, and music from the cutting edge of today's youth culture. In it the Ray Gun creative team and literally hundreds of contributors - including many essential tastemakers - set out on a quest to track the critical search for identity in a youth culture that is itself media-driven and identity-mad.

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (June 13, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684839806
• ISBN-13: 978-0684839806
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #570,726 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ray gun - out of control, November 5, 2000

By 

"urbannoise" (atlanta, usa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ray Gun: Out of Control (Hardcover)

this book is a collection of spreads from the early years of raygun and other magazines whose art direction was lead by david carson. there is a lot of controversy surrounding carson's work, and carson as a graphic designer. i find the work visually stimulating and closer to art than most design i've encountered. i personally admire the intuitive beauty of this book and have spent countless hours looking at it. while i do not recomend carson's other books i do recomend this one.

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Out of Control pushes the envelope, July 31, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Ray Gun: Out of Control (Hardcover)

Use this book for ideas that will stun and amaze your staid audience whether it be in print or on the Web. I look at it as one giant idea book - it pushes the limit of type and design and gives us a new art form

6 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A magazine picture book?, July 27, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Ray Gun: Out of Control (Hardcover)

"Out of Control?" I don't get it. Is this a picture book, or a book that is supposed to honor the magazine? Magazines are about content and design, but here all we get is design. Now, I like design, I like it a lot, and hope to one day get into magazine desiggn, but this book seems to undermine what the magazine should be about. Design vs. Content. How well does the design and presentation relate to the article? I have no idea from looking at this. This is a picture book. From looking at this from a distance (which you are apparently supposed to do) Ray Gun is a nicely laid out and designed magazine. But what's it about? I love design, but I don't give a damn about a publication about information (no matter hhow good the design) if I can't have access to that information. As far as I'm concerned, this collection should showcase and celebrate the representation of information. IAs I've said, I enjoy the design and designers, but Ray Gun was started as a great means of maing the aarticles fun to read...lure the reader in with the design and hook 'em with the words. This may or may not have worked, but the intention was there. No matter how much of a design magazine this is, Ray Gun is the bible of mushc ansstyle, not a graphic design monthly. I think that this collection is a slap in the face to the people who wrote the articles in the mag. Buy "Out of Control" if you want a picture book, but if you want to get any idea at all about what the actual magazine is about, bo to the periodicals section and pick it up.