Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
The August 13, 1987 issue of Rolling Stone featuring Mötley Crüe and Whitney Houston documents American popular music at a moment of extraordinary commercial diversity and cultural tension. The pairing of these two acts in a single issue is itself historically revealing. By the summer of 1987, Mötley Crüe had navigated the band's near-destruction through addiction and legal troubles to release Girls, Girls, Girls in May 1987 — an album that debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 and demonstrated that the band's commercial momentum had survived the chaos of the preceding years. Whitney Houston, meanwhile, was between her two landmark albums: her self-titled 1985 debut had produced four number-one singles and made her the most commercially successful new artist of the decade, and Whitney, released in June 1987, had debuted at number one and was generating its own string of chart-topping singles at the time this issue was published. A Rolling Stone that featured both acts simultaneously was documenting the breadth of what "popular music" encompassed in the summer of 1987 — the span from glam metal arena spectacle to polished pop perfection that somehow coexisted at the top of the same charts. For collectors building archives of vintage Rolling Stone magazines, issues that capture this kind of cross-genre cultural diversity are among the most historically interesting in the publication's 1980s run.
The broader context of August 1987 American music gives this issue additional documentary significance. The late eighties were the commercial peak of both the MTV era and the CD format's adoption, and the music industry was generating revenue at levels that would not be surpassed for decades. Mötley Crüe and Whitney Houston represented opposite poles of the era's commercial music landscape — the first appealing to a white male rock audience that consumed albums and concert tickets, the second to a broader crossover audience that had made her the best-selling female artist of the decade — yet both were products of the same maximalist production values and promotional machinery that defined the era. A Rolling Stone that housed both within its pages was functioning as a documentary record of that shared commercial moment rather than an aesthetic endorsement of either. Collectors of 1987 magazines focused on music history will find this issue captures the late-eighties commercial music landscape with unusual representational breadth.
Both subjects' subsequent histories give this August 1987 documentation additional retrospective weight. Whitney Houston's trajectory — from the commercial dominance of 1985–1987 through her later personal struggles and 2012 death — makes her peak-period Rolling Stone features primary documents of her career at its most artistically and commercially unambiguous. Mötley Crüe's survival from near-dissolution to a Girls, Girls, Girls-era commercial resurgence is one of the more dramatic comeback narratives in rock history. This issue captures both acts at a specific and well-defined high point.
About the Publication
Rolling Stone, founded by Jann Wenner in San Francisco in 1967, was by August 1987 the dominant music and culture magazine in the United States, with a circulation in the millions and a readership that had evolved well beyond its counterculture origins into a broad mainstream audience that consumed it as the authoritative voice on American popular music and culture. Its biweekly format combined major artist cover profiles and interviews with music criticism, cultural journalism, and political reporting, directed at an educated, rock-literate readership that treated the magazine as a primary source of both music news and cultural context. By 1987 its coverage of acts as stylistically diverse as Mötley Crüe and Whitney Houston reflected the breadth of what American popular music had become under the homogenizing commercial influence of MTV and the album-oriented radio format.
Key Highlights Inside
- Mötley Crüe feature — Coverage of the band during the Girls, Girls, Girls album and tour cycle, documenting their commercial resurgence after the near-dissolution of the band's previous years — one of rock's more dramatic comeback stories captured in real time.
- Whitney Houston feature — Coverage during the Whitney album promotional period, June–August 1987, documenting Houston at the peak of her commercial dominance as the best-selling female artist of the decade.
- August 1987 commercial music landscape — The cross-genre pairing of glam metal and polished pop in a single issue documents the remarkable commercial diversity of the late-eighties American music market at its most simultaneously productive moment for both genres.
Note: Specific article titles, bylines, and additional named content beyond the Mötley Crüe and Whitney Houston features have not been confirmed from available sources for this issue. The highlights above reflect only what is verifiable from the listing and well-documented facts about the publication and its subjects at this date.
Condition & Rarity
Acceptable condition with typical age-consistent wear and plastic protective covering represents an honest mid-grade assessment for a nearly forty-year-old biweekly music magazine. Acceptable is a lower condition grade than good, and collectors evaluating any surviving copy of this issue should assess the specific nature of the wear from available photographs — cover surface condition, spine integrity along the staple binding, and the completeness of the primary feature content are the key evaluation factors. The plastic protective covering indicates deliberate preservation. The listing does not specify label status; collectors should confirm from photographs whether an address label is present on the cover, as this affects display-grade evaluation. For an issue with the cross-genre historical significance of this Mötley Crüe and Whitney Houston pairing, research and documentary value remain meaningful at the acceptable grade, with display quality dependent on the specific surface condition.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
Late-eighties Rolling Stone issues capturing the era's commercial music landscape at this level of cross-genre breadth are worth searching for carefully, and this August 1987 number documents two of the decade's most commercially dominant acts simultaneously. The broader Rolling Stone magazine archive at OriginalMagazines.com spans many decades of the publication's run and regularly surfaces landmark music cover issues from the 1980s worth examining closely. For collectors focused on the specific late-eighties music moment this issue captures, the full 1987 magazine collection documents one of the commercial music industry's most productive years across a range of titles and genres.