UK Magazine about dance music and clubbing. Unlike the kind of electronic music mags that actually take the music seriously, Mixmag combines club and record reviews with a large number of fairly silly articles such as "I shagged a horse on E!", how to make record decks out of hamsters and why you're gay if Eminem's Stan is your favourite rap tune.
Drug references are frequent and none too subtle, making Mixmag basically FHM for pill heads. One imagines that the only reason there hasn’t been outrage at its blatant condonement of ecstasy use is that a Tory MP or Mail journalist has never picked up a copy.
The record reviews are concise and fairly comprehensive, covering just about all areas of dance music, despite the bias towards house and trance. A large section of the magazine is also devoted to listing their top 100 clubs across the country (number one in April 2003 was Technique in Leeds, by the way) and is heavily interspersed with photos of fine looking clubbers.
Mixmag boasts of being "The World’s Biggest Selling Clubbing Magazine", and its prestige is evident when in the film Human Traffic, one of the characters blags free entry into a club by claiming to be a Mixmag journalist, promising high profile promotion. The magazine invited readers to write in with stories of such real life scams and it turns out that pretending to be from Mixmag is indeed a popular and effective method.
The back pages of the magazine are the silliest, including excerpts from something called the Mongo Hotline – a phone number for clubbers to call in the early hours and vent their bizarre and inane verbal diarrhoea.
See www.mixmag.net