Usually we like to be the ones doling out gifts like it's your birthday, but this time another magazine honored us with something: We won the award for "Best Arts Coverage" in the Utne Reader's Independent Press Awards! Thanks dudes, we are humbled and appreciate it millions. Congrats to all the other winners, also do you maybe wanna go out tonight and celebrate with some champagne in a can? Read what Utne had to say about us after the jump.
Says Utne:
The Fader is your cool friend who knows where all the best parties and nightclubs are, is constantly digging up great new music, travels the world at will—and stops by once a month to tell you all about it. The best thing is, he doesn’t lord his intercontinental fabulousness over you but instead shares it freely so you can appear to be half as cool as he is.
That, essentially, is the appeal of the Fader, a magazine grounded in music culture but also branching into art, design, film, and fashion. It sends its writers and photographers out into the streets, clubs, and underground scenes in the United States and beyond, capturing the youth zeitgeist by osmosis. We’re always looking for the next article from Edwin “Stats” Houghton, the globe-trottingest Fader correspondent, who drops into musical subcultures like a paratrooper and sends back dossiers on what’s moving butts. His vivid dispatch from the kwaito dance-party scene in Johannesburg, South Africa, was so good we published an excerpt as “Post-Apartheid Pop.”
Trendy is often a pejorative, but the Fader unapologetically traffics in trends, staying on the tip because that’s its beat. It covers music genres from emo to hip-hop, noise to bubblegum, freak-folk to funk, with forward-looking eyes and sound-hungry ears. Read incisive, scholarly criticism elsewhere; the Fader is all about capturing the scene by getting caught up in it.