Gavin McInnes

Interviewing Gavin McInnes is for a 25-year-old magazine writer, sort of like interviewing the architect of your personality. That said, you’d think I’d have been more prepared. I leapt at the chance to interview Gavin when it came up, thrilled at the opportunity to talk one-on-one with of the neatest people in the publishing industry ever, and then was completely terrified when I found out the article was meant to be for the fall fashion issue, since I know nothing about fashion, other than a vague understanding of things I like or don’t like to wear.

Gavin is the now 40-year-old co-founder of Vice Magazine and former writer of the infamous Dos and Don’ts. He now maintains his own project, Street Boners and TV Carnage, where he does more or less what he did with Vice. So instead of doing any real research on what kinds of things I would ask about fashion, I just came up with some really general questions and watched all of McInnes videos on YouTube. Gavin was generous with his time and gave a long phone interview while seeding the grass of his upstate New York home with his with his wife and two children.

Lets start with what a typical day for you is like? What do you get up to?
Well, it’s rare to have a typical day for me. Today for example, we decided the city was too hot. We drove upstate. I have a place up here, and I’m just focused on my lawn. I’m at a weird point with it where I feel like giving up. Cause the soil up here is so shitty. Some people just kind of accept that their whole lawn is going to be clover but I feel like I don’t wanna accept that. I feel like I can fight it, you know? If you can get to a point where the soil is fertile enough, where the grass can have a fighting chance, then you’re good. The grass is like a skinny boxer. You don’t think he’s gonna win, but if you keep him fed, clothed and trained he can beat up Mike Tyson. But anyway, what I do in the city is I rent an office with a bunch of people. Like-minded people and just hunker down. I just write a lot, just hunker down. Back in Vice days, I just lived at the office. If I had an idea at four in the morning I could just crawl over to the computer and hammer it out. But now being a dad, it’s weird to me. I have more of a schedule. It’s like, “Now its time to be funny.” So what’s ION about?

It’s a free magazine, you know arts and culture. We do ten issues a year. National publication…
So you copied me.

Yeah, more or less… I think we’re less scathing than Vice though.
You copied me and you did a weaker job. You know if this was grade four, we’d be fighting. It’s a big deal copying in grade four. Remember? I’m talking about in grade four where someone would discover Chuck Taylor’s, and then someone else would wear them? And would be like, “She copied me!”

Where do you think good style is? Like, what’s the foundation of your approach?
Well, my background is punk rock and there was a thing in the Eighties with skinheads, who were really scary, where you’d get beat up for your Doc Martens.

I remember kids getting jumped for their Nikes in high school.
Well that was because they were so expensive and people wanted them. With the Doc Martens it was more like, “You can’t have them.” So that sort of started a culture of rules. Where we were all about the rules, and maybe that sort of bled over into my fashion philosophy of today, where I’m obsessed with rules. But I think anyone who’s really making a living at it, I mean you talk to anyone at Vogue or any sort of fashion editor and they’re obsessed with rules more than the skinheads were.

Right that makes sense. Where do you fit into that?
Well 99 per cent of the time it’s women. They’re so inside of it that they’ve lost all humour. And I guess women have pretty high stakes. They’re trying to find a mate, to reproduce. They pretend it’s something else and they just like the clothes, but…

Well that’s sort of what men are trying to do too right? Isn’t it just peacocking?
Sure, but men are just trying to get a blowjob. So they’re sort of nervous about it but I don’t know how important it is to them. They’re not freaking about “if they look good in these shoes.”

But don’t most women claim to dress for other women?
Yeah, but that’s still for men in a sense because you’re competing. You’re competing because you wanna get the best mate. I mean it all goes back to primal stuff. And then with the gays it’s the exact same, except they don’t have to worry about procreation. So what I think is unique about my angle, is that it’s the perspective of a male that doesn’t see it as that serious and can joke around about it.

You’re a fairly infamous character. Is there anything you want to set straight about yourself here?
The rumours are true, I’m a bad guy. I just got a tattoo, it says “Ain’t no nice guy.” It’s a popular song. Lemmy does a great version of it… Hold on a second.

Overheard in the background, a small child’s voice followed by…

Hi Buzz!

It’s Buzz Lightyear to the rescue! Go fly Buzz! Go fly!

Was that your kid?
Yeah. Dressed up as Buzz Lightyear.

That’s adorable.
[Laughs]

Wait, how are you seeding your lawn and talking to me at the same time? You’re not wearing a headset are you?
No [laughs]. If you ever catch me wearing a headset I give you permission to punch me in the face as hard as you can. And that goes for any of your readers.

You seem just as interested in writing jokes as you do writing about fashion in Street Boners and the Dos and Don’ts. Is it more about one than the other?
Well, what happened was, back when Vice started we needed ads. We were totally new to magazines—none of us went to journalism school and everything was, “Well, what do we do?” So we actually asked the advertisers “Well, why aren’t you advertising with us,” and it was because we didn’t do fashion shoots. We didn’t like doing them. Even people that I respected, you know, editors I liked that would do them—they were still so pretentious and shitty and pointless. Anyway, so we said, “We can’t do that. Maybe we can do a comedy version.” So we’d have someone dressed up in our advertisers clothes and that would be a do, and then next to them would be someone dressed in stuff we found at the Salvation Army, and then we’d make jokes about how bad they looked. And that worked and everyone was happy. We didn’t feel like total sell-outs and the advertisers got what they wanted.

And that evolved into the Dos and Don’ts?
We started going with that but we were in Montreal, and NOWHERE is like Montreal. Maybe it’s because French people have more testosterone, but they’ve bullied the rest of Canada into thinking that they’re special and that they’re hard done by. They’ve even called themselves the niggers of Canada. The FLQ, I think, said that. Anyway instead of Canadians going “Psh” they go:

“Really? Well what can we do to help?”

And then the French go “Well first of all we’re gonna need lots of money.”

“Okay, yeah, yeah by all means, here’s some money is that enough?”

“No. we need Toronto’s money too.”

“Okaaaay… yeah okay.”

“Oh, by the way, you know Alberta? We need some of their oil money. And what’s going on in British Columbia? Are they speaking French over there? Well they’re gonna need to start speaking French.”

“Okay, uhm, anything else.”

“Yeah we need more money and a grant, for culture.”

“Okay, we’ve given you quite a bit of money though are you sure you need all this?”

And anyway it’s created a culture of entitlement where, and no Americans believe me when I say this, but it’s not uncommon to see a woman walking to work, head-to-toe, totally normal looking, going to her job as a secretary or something, with… a court jester hat. Just wearing a court jester hat, with bells and everything. Acting totally normal. So it’s just like shooting fish in a barrel and then I moved to New York and there were even more freaks. I drifted away from doing just one page to doing four, and if I just did the Don’ts it would be shitty. It would just be making fun of people. The short answer to your question is I didn’t get there from fashion I got there from comedy.

Other than being funny what do you think the appeal of it is? Why has it resonated with so many people?
Well even the Street Boners book, I’m reading it and I’m like, “Who doesn’t want this?” Even that Vietnamese lady that collects cans, how can she not want this? You don’t even have to read the jokes. Just pick it up flip through all the weird pictures of people. There’s almost 2000 of them! And I think that’s why it has such a big appeal. Just the sheer amount of them. I’ve been doing it for 15 years now. I think there are 6000 of them floating out there, but I’m almost done the fourth book so 8000!

So is the Street Boners book that’s out now the first volume?
That’s the first one. There’s a Dos and Don’ts 2 that was completed I don’t know what happened with it but it’s done. I might just make one copy of it for myself. You know there’s this thing where you can make a book now?

Like a vanity pressing?
Yeah, one book. You could make a book and put a fake logo on it, like Taschen and then just have that on your coffee table when girls come by. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Oh, psh, Taschen.. Fuck I don’t know I just hammered that out for those guys…”

You were nominated for hipster of the decade by Gawker. That’s kind of dumb, but I’m curious how you perceive your relationship to hipsterism.
You don’t have the Street Boners book do you? This is all well covered in the book. You know it obviously doesn’t matter; it’s just a silly game. All that shit is just a backdrop so kids can party and get laid. It’s not like it’s classical music or opera. It’s just a type of partying.

So it’s not important?
I was talking to a guy in New York and he was like, “What’s the hipsters legacy?” And I don’t understand why young people need provide us with a legacy. All they have to do is have fun. All young people need to do is get laid and listen to music and party. They don’t even have to know what they’re doing at the time. So don’t say that you’re mad that hipsters haven’t given you a legacy, or they’re shallow or something. I want kids to be shallow. What do you want them to be? Shut the fuck up. Baby boomers like to pretend they were all hippies. Hippies were a relatively small movement. Kissinger stopped the war by the way—not hippies. He ended it by blowing it up. Then won a Nobel Peace Prize for it. A lot of people were kind of mad about that.