Thirty years ago this winter, during the middle of the last media dinosaur age — that is, when a print magazine could be a cultural event — Time magazine put Las Vegas on its cover. It’s hard to imagine now, when most people spend 364 days a year not remembering that Time exists (except when its annual Person of the Year issue excites a brief social-media pass-around), but this was a huge deal. The cover of Time played a role in setting the agenda for the chattering class, and it devoted that cover story to heralding Las Vegas, still remaking itself five years into the megaresort boom.
Of course, Las Vegas received tons of media coverage (including a memorable Village Voice take on the new Las Vegas). But Time’s cover story was an unprecedented burst of validation from the highest echelons of MSM taste-making, and it was a (mostly) upbeat look at the city’s new vitality circa 1994. “A lot of people saw it as a sign of the big wide world taking us seriously,” says UNLV history department chairman Michael Green.
Even more flattering was the story’s throughline: that this town was no longer just a vice-plumped outlier from the mainstream, but rather, in its mix of spectacle, camp, hypercapitalism, and egalitarian access, a genuine reflection of the country: “Las Vegas has become Americanized, and, even more, America has become Las Vegasized.”
Needless to say, that had hardly been the outside media’s view of Las Vegas before. So this coverage was like an overdue coming-out party for the New Las Vegas.
But parties end, of course. Time came back to town in 2009, this time to cover our flipped fortunes in “the first major recession Vegas has experienced since it became a real city.” Another sample sentence: “Just as Las Vegas was the epicenter of the extravagant consumption of the past 20 years, now it's the deepest crater of the recession over the last year.”
But that’s another story.
