Carbon Copy Magazine Wants You to Celebrate Pop Culture

Carbon Copy Magazine, a new literary magazine dedicated to pop culture, is set to launch its inaugural issue this fall. To more fully understand its mission, check out its charming FAQ page:

What’s the difference between Carbon Copy Magazine and carboncopymagazine.com?

With the .com it’s an e-magazine. Without ye ole .com, well, poof!: it’s a physical literary and arts magazine. Think of it this way (and here we’re cribbing from Twain): the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug. We’re just not sure which is which. That’s up to you, fellow sellouts.

How would you describe yourselves?

Andy Warhol — a painter, sculptor, music producer, director, filmmaker, photographer, publisher, and writer — is our pop-father, and we’ll let him do some of the talking for us: “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”

So how do you feel about pop culture?

Some ironic times, we’re told by the pop culture that feeds us pop culture that pop culture is bad for us. Some other times, academics and hipsters and octogenarians bemoan that what is popular is pathetic, is a waste of time, is unhealthy, is dumbing or numbing, et cetera, ad nauseum, amen. No, no, no, no, no. Friends, if something becomes mainstream, how can that be inherently bad? The Road is a Pulitzer Prize winning book, and it was also an Oprah book club selection, and it was morphed into a movie that raked in $26,930,456 worldwide at the box office. And it’s motherfucking amazing in both its forms. And it’s part of pop culture. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love; sold the movie rights, which were morphed into, hands down, the best Julia Roberts movie ever; and made buckets of Benjamins selling E.P.L. swag. And her TED Talk on art and artists is gripping and inspirational and poetic. Someone and their somethings can be entertaining and good as sunlight, as real maple syrup, as a unicorn that farts rainbows (well, there’s probably nothing else that would be that good). Not everything has to make us feel deeply. Apples to Apples? Brittney Spear’s hit single “…Baby One More Time”? The Cat in the Hat? Dick Tracy comic books? Email? The flick Friday Night Lights? TV’s Glee? All good stuff indeed and the alphabet goes on, daddy-o. We’re allowed to have fun. We’re allowed to have some time to think very, very, very, very little. Some people meditate. Some people watch Hot in Cleveland.

And?

Is that seriously your question? Sigh. Okay. Well, pop is not just Justin Beiber and Hannah Montana. (However, sometimes we wish that pop was just Justin Beiber and Hannah Montana, because then our friends’ posters and t-shirts of them would seem less creepy.) Pop is exactly who we are, how we live, and how we communicate with the world. And what’s so great about pop is yes, it’s really, really fun. And it’s more often than not some sort of celebration of who we are. So it ain’t any more shallow or any more thoughtful than any other piece of art. It all depends upon how you define “shallow” and how you define “thoughtful,” both of which seem a bit arbitrary to us. A lot of thought goes into Diet Mountain Dew commercials, for example. And it can’t be too shallow because Diet Mountain Dew is Matt’s cocktail of choice. Sure, there is shitty stuff in pop culture, but there’s also a lot of shitty academic poems and shitty “high” art and shitty indie music. No one thing is automatically more precious than the other. No one thing is automatically more sacred than the other.

You can learn more through their submissions page, too. They are taking submissions until September 1st. What are you waiting for?!