Rolling Stone's hilariously bipolar cover features

As a longtime subscriber to Rolling Stone who's lost almost all of my interest in actually reading the magazine (it usually winds up on my counter for a few weeks before I manage to even page through it), I'm continually amused by its desperate attempts to simultaneously satisfy its baby boomer audience, who count on it to be the reactionary standard bearer for 60's rock, while trying to woo the young audience, who I assume buy most of the iPod cases that occupy 70% of Rolling Stone's ad space. Basically, the magazine's incredibly half-assed strategy for pulling this off is running cover stories that oscillate between paleo-rock "legends" with no discernable reason for being on the cover of a contemporary music magazine a decade into the new millenium and whatever flash-in-the-pan pop culture phenomenon they can get to pose for a picture and sit for an interview. The main reason I find this entertaining is that I'm fairly convinced that the bulk of Rolling Stone's readership is 60's/70's Lost Causers who need a hit of nitroglycerin to tamp down their angina every time the magazine hits their porch with some teen singer on the cover.

As a demonstration, I present to you the three Rolling Stone covers for the month of April 2010, beginning with the obligatory sop to the boomer base:

I (obviously) didn't bother to actually read this article, but I assume the latest scuttlebutt on Jimi Hendrix is that he's still dead for 39 years. However, Rolling Stone must have thought that they'd earned major capital with the oldsters on this one, because the cover of the next issue features the cast of motherfucking Glee:
To be honest, I thought Rolling Stone covers had reached their nadir late last year, when they put that Indian kid from the Twilight movies on, but even that has something to do with vampires, which is kind of rock-and-roll if you don't think about it too hard. I'm at a loss for how anybody who works for Rolling Stone could even pretend to care about Glee for any reason other than the potential to sell a few magazines in a shitty economy. And then comes the coup de grâce:
A tip: if you are prepping a piece with the thesis statement that there are 40 reasons to get excited about music, and your first reason involves the Black Eyed Peas, you aren't doing a very good job. In fact, you may have just convinced me to never listen to music again. Enjoy your coronaries, original Woodstock attendees.