A good case could be made that Rolling Stone was the last truly iconic American magazine. Like the Saturday Evening Post and Life before it, Rolling Stone achieved popularity and influence well beyond its circulation numbers by making itself the flagbearer of what, in its time, was a new and distinctive perspective on American modernity. And as was the case with those earlier titles, the freshness of that vision faded with time even if the magazine lived on. Charles L. Ponce de Leon’s Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism follows that arc over the course of the music magazine’s first 20 years and in so doing provides a masterful account of how countercultural sensibilities came to shape left-liberal thought in the late stages of the twentieth century. Like other scholars, including Fred Turner and Joshua Clarke Davis, who have grappled with the cultural legacy of the 1960s left, Ponce de Leon is primarily interested in what became of its anti-establishment spirit as the enterprises it launched became more and more embroiled in the decidedly establishment domains of business and politics. This is a question that has, to a great degree, shaped the field since the publication of Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool nearly 30 years ago. Ponce de Leon finds an original and insightful way of asking that question by focusing on the political dimensions of young people’s passion for music and the journalistic projects it inspired.

Successful magazines are often lauded for having a distinct personality, but as Ponce de Leon shows, Rolling Stone’s success owed more to the decades-long personality crisis that played out on its pages. Launched as an outlet for serious writing about rock music in the late 1960s, the magazine soon became stuck in a tug-of-war between that original beat and publisher Jann Wenner’s ambitions to turn Rolling Stone into a wide-ranging general-interest magazine. For more than a decade, Ponce de Leon argues, that contest furnished Rolling Stone with a productive tension that allowed its editors to expand the scope of the magazine’s coverage without losing its underlying coherence. In an intriguing argument, Ponce de Leon contends that this feat had much to do with a shared belief among Rolling Stone’s writers and the magazine’s core readership that rock music was in itself political, not so much in the sense of always bearing outright messages of protest, but in how it made the anti-authoritarian spirit embodied in its sounds a genuinely popular facet of the cultural milieu.

Never himself a radical, Wenner was fully comfortable with the idea that commercial success was a prerequisite if Rolling Stone was going to wield influence in society and politics. Much of the second half of the book focuses on the conflicts spawned by those ambitions. In a bid to grow circulation and diversify its advertising base in the mid-1970s, Rolling Stone embraced the accoutrements of professionalization—four-color printing, slicker covers, audience research, enhanced copyediting, more aggressive ad sales, and more. Yet throughout that transformation, Rolling Stone’s writers tried to hold on to the magazine’s status as a tastemaker, even as the musical environment went through seismic changes. The result of that “balancing act” was a publication with three different, and not always compatible, mandates. The first was to broadly cover the world of popular entertainment, meaning commercially successful figures from the world of music, film, and television. The second was to shine a light on what Rolling Stone’s staff considered the subset of artistically innovative and politically engaged musicians, directors, and actors who somehow managed to stave off the forces of homogenization and mediocrity. The third was to take the pulse of the times by profiling the social trends, cultural conflicts, and political battles that seemed to impinge on the prospects of progressive change in the world. As the magazine’s audience continued to grow and the political valences of youth culture changed in the 1980s, finding the right balance proved a difficult task. Why an article on human rights abuses in Honduras would appear in the same issue as an interview with comedian Eddie Murphy and a profile of the college rock underground was far less clear to a teenager picking up the magazine for the first time in the mid-1980s than it was for longtime readers, who understood that each story reflected the “Rolling Stone point of view.”

Studying a magazine is a difficult task. Should one focus on the content? The people behind that content? The publishing industry and ad business that shaped the publication? The audience? The material facets of the periodical and how people read it? All have to be addressed but only one or two can take center stage. Ponce de Leon focuses above all on the content and its creators. The research itself is based on a careful reading of every issue published during Rolling Stone’s first two decades and supplemented by oral histories with the magazine’s longtime contributors and publishing executives. As a result, the book reads as an exquisitely crafted summary of the musical trends and social issues that interested the people behind the magazine, who, essentially, serve as proxies for the large numbers of Americans who were left-of-center and resolutely remained so despite the challenges posed by the New Right’s ascendancy. Anyone interested in understanding why the “culture wars” proved so maddeningly ineffective to conservatives, even at the height of the Reagan revolution, could learn much from Ponce de Leon’s vivid portrait of the popular liberalism packaged and sold every two weeks behind the cover of the Rolling Stone.