By Hype Stalker

We always knew something was fishy about Bono showing up at all those UN gatherings and making nice with some of richest men on the planet. While most of you thought the rock star was doing it in the name of peace and love, we always knew that Bono was auditioning for the Old Boys Club of the super rich. Proof positive came this week as it was revealed that Elevation Partners, an equity firm boasting U2 singer Bono as co-founder and partner, will be a minority partner in the ownership of Forbes Media. That’s right, Forbes baby! Forbes, as in, so rich Soho House is where these guys send their servants to party. As in, so rich Brooke Astor’s son held back the extra Beluga snacks and feather pillows just so he could save up enough to golf with these guys. So rich…well, you get the idea. Bono, the emperor is officially unclad, so stop it with the bleeding heart stuff. Commenting on the new investment Steve Forbes said, “There’s a whole new wonderful world out there based in print but the Web and other delivery vehicles [are] beckoning. We want to move before [the competition] wake up to what we saw.” Er, Steve-o, if you are just waking up to the Web, you might as well go back to sleep—and have someone update the prescription on those coke-bottle spectacles while you’re at it…

A nod of class goes to returning Vibe Editor-in-Chief Danyel Smith for giving fired EIC Mimi Valdez the title of “Departing-Editor-in-Chief” in this month’s masthead. Wait…that’s totally bitchy! Nice. That aside, we do have to take a couple of pot shots and wonder why anyone would choose Janet “40-year-old cougar” Jackson as a cover subject for their first issue back in the saddle—and topless no less! Yuck. Predictably, Jackson’s human vibrator, aka the midget without-a-hit Jermaine Dupree, shows up just a few pages later in front of a studio mix board presumably banging out yet another bottom of the charts banger. Then there’s the Ice Cube feature—uhm, didn’t he, like, stop existing a decade ago? The capper is the six-page spread given to Nigo and his Bathing Ape fashion line. Do not be fooled by the rapper ads and the bootylicious photo spreads, anyone wearing Bathing Ape at this point might as well visit Target and stock up on the latest Isaac Mizrahi potato sacks. Looks like everything old at Vibe is new again, huzzah!… 

Finally, we’re trying to make sense of the recent pile-on of Bruce Ratner executed by New York Magazine and AM New York. NY Press has been pounding away at Brooklyn’s number-one real estate vampire for a while now, but it seems that everyone else just realized that Ratner has it in for the few remaining overlooked spots in Brooklyn—just when it’s so late in the game that any hardcore media coverage is essentially too little too late. Admittedly, New York Magazine did a nice job of photoshopping the new version of downtown BK in Ratner’s vision—it’s truly scary. Now if we could only muster up the testicular fortitude to cross the bridge and set foot in Brooklyn, we might care a little more.