King magazine (2001- ), “the illest men’s magazine ever”, is the hip hop world’s answer to white-boy Maxim, which has to make do as merely the best-selling men’s magazine ever.
King has three main parts:
- Advertisements for rims
- Pictures of beautiful, half-naked women
- Articles on things like cars, sports, music, computer games, fashion, liquor and, of course, women. And even serious issues, like race.
King grew out of the Eye Candy pages of the hip hop magazine XXL. It was created with Maxim as a model.
The writing is not strong and without the women there would not be much of a magazine left, but what women it has!
If you want to do some serious reading, get the New Yorker. If you want to look at beautiful women, get King.
King has the best-looking women of any magazine that I know of. Even its white women are better than the ones in Maxim.
What Mozart is to Muzak, King‘s women are to women in other magazines.
An example: For years I have seen pictures of the singer Mya. And I saw her again this morning in King, but that picture makes all the others seem like nothing, like water to wine. She is not perfect or pretty in the picture, but she looks like a woman, like a woman you have wanted for a long time, like a woman you would leave your wife and destroy your whole life for. That is how a woman should look.
King looks at women the way a man does. The other magazines, even magazines like Playboy, look at a woman as an object, something that is pleasing to look at but has nothing inside. Mannequins with flesh. No soul. They think beauty and being perfect looking are the same thing.
Another thing King gets right: they pick women who are truly beautiful, not women who are supposed to look beautiful because they satisfy some checklist of skin colour, hair length or size of certain body parts. They trust their judgement as men.
But King is not perfect. I do not like every woman they have. And with some women I can see that they took the easy way out and gave us bare, Photoshopped flesh rather than the woman’s true beauty. This was true for Gabrielle Union, Jill Marie Jones and Lizz Robbins. The bare flesh was nice, King, but these women are more beautiful than just that. Bring them back again and do them justice!
The two other magazines that are the most like King are Smooth and Black Men. The women in Smooth are not as good – they are too air-brushed to take seriously – but the writing is much better. Black Men is a more well-rounded magazine, but its women are soulless.
Compared to Maxim, King has better-looking women and more of them, but less to read. They also have more on fashion and liquor than Maxim.
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