Forty years ago, UC Berkeley student Jann Wenner started a bimonthly magazine with $7,500 and turned it into an essential component of popular culture. That’s no small achievement, considering his limited resources and the fact that the offices were far outside New York’s media orbit, in San Francisco south of Market Street. For better or worse, you can attribute the entire cottage industry of music journalism to Wenner. Not only Spin, Vibe, Blender, and the online magazine Pitchfork but also the pop music criticism in newspapers and the armchair critics on the Web—it all began with Rolling Stone. (Full disclosure: I’ve written for the magazine.)

Wenner’s secret was simple but revolutionary: he took pop culture seriously. Like Wired in the ’90s and Dwell today, Rolling Stone both articulated and defined a lifestyle—that’s lifestyle in the “living your life” sense, not the advertising buzzword for consumer lust. Wenner gave his writers space to stretch out in, and the magazine was attuned to the aspects of the culture that mattered most. That pretty much came down to rock music. Wenner understood that the ’60s was a decade with a shockingly fast churn rate; rock was the one constant, the continuous sound track. Vietnam, legalizing weed, civil and equal rights—all were covered within the larger context of rock.

The magazine not only profiled the giants of popular culture; by the early ’70s it was a cultural icon itself. It was such a big deal to be on the “cover of the Rolling Stone” that Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show had a hit song of that name in 1972. The list of writers who got their start there is long and distinguished: Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Timothy Ferris, Tim Cahill, to name a few. Wenner turned a freelancer named Hunter S. Thompson into a star by publishing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in consecutive issues in 1971. These writers weren’t workaday hacks; they were heads and freaks with talent, which is why they resonated with readers.

Today, of course, Rolling Stone–bashing is a favorite pastime among those who once loved the magazine, and some regard it as tabloid trash, not greatly different from Us (now Us Weekly), the People-like publication Wenner started in 1980. But something odd has happened lately: Rolling Stone is readable again. Working with a strong stable of writers, Wenner, who has ripped through as many editors as Yankees owner George Steinbrenner has managers, is making the magazine more than a repository for flash-in-the-pan pop effluvia.

Rolling Stone was never terribly cutting edge, though, and from its inception it was criticized for being too mainstream, too slick, too beholden to advertisers. And Wenner has always been enamored of celebrity, but that worked in his favor at the start, because his heroes were our heroes: Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones. He revered them enough to match them up with writers who treated them as important artists, not fodder for mindless puffery. That was revolutionary in its way. Underground

But Wenner knew that his publication had to walk a fine line between hip knowingness and gushy fandom if it was ever going to reach a large audience. The magazine started going south when the content began to tip toward the latter. In 1977 he moved Rolling Stone to New York—perfect timing, as it turned out. Rock music, so deliciously subversive for a time, became very big business in the late ’70s—a development, incidentally, that Wenner had antici­pated long before, and the magazine reaped the financial rewards. Then Jaws happened, and Star Wars, and the blockbuster-movie era was upon us. As film stars became the new rock stars and celebrity culture emerged ascendant, Rolling Stone reflected this change.

But the transition was more complicated than slapping Richard Gere or John Travolta on the cover. Rolling Stone had established a covenant with its readership: to maintain a baseline level of integrity below which it would not descend. That’s where the delicate balance came into play. For a while, only hip film stars like Dennis Hopper were allowed inside; the magazine would cover entertainment, but with curatorial care.

That such covenants are always illusory, predicated on idealistic notions of purity, is beside the point. When Wenner started putting movie stars on the cover, many of us felt betrayed, as if a cherished old friend had suddenly converted to Scientology. He had degraded a beloved institution by turning it into a brand, slapping the Rolling Stone name on cheap album compilations and advertising cross-promotions.

Wenner has no problem with selling out, but I suspect that compromising the writing in his magazine would be tantamount to a rejection of all that he holds dear. Gifted writers, attracted to the magazine’s legacy, are again doing good work there. National elections have always energized Wenner, and now that 2008 is around the corner, he has shored up the political coverage.

Matt Taibbi has become Hunter Thompson’s gonzo heir. Taibbi has fashioned a similar persona, a bemused and occasionally drug-addled commentator on the insanity and high silliness of the American political process. He is right in the thick of his dispatches, folding his discussions of serious issues into comic monologues that owe a huge debt to Thompson. In a recent issue, Taibbi, on a bus ride to a demonstration against the Israeli bombings of Lebanon, feels deep discomfort when someone pops in a DVD of Legally Blonde: “As the movie’s bikini-filled first half-hour rolled over the bus’s video screens, a stunned silence descended over the two-by-two rows of black nunlike hijjabs…. Maybe I was imagining it, but a half-dozen scarf-covered heads turned to glare at me, the sole available representative of the white man’s depraved, poorly acted

This is funny stuff, a nod to the writing that made the magazine great to begin with. Even Wenner’s reflexive liberalism has softened a bit, as evidenced by Ben Wallace-Wells’s evenhanded profile last fall of Michael Bloomberg, New York’s Republican mayor.

The all-important music coverage, which has waxed and waned dramatically over the years, is solid right now. I cringe when I see someone like Christina Aguilera on the cover, but I also know that Wenner is a man who values money as much as music. (And Aguilera’s most recent record was very strong.) It does no good to turn a blind eye to popular artists; I just wish Rolling Stone would do it without fear or favor. It has never been any good at criticizing big rock stars for releasing meretricious garbage, though it is always strong at explicating what makes an artist great.

And what do you know? Wenner’s number-one music man, Bob Dylan, is in the midst of an artistic and commercial renaissance. Suddenly, putting Dylan on the cover isn’t a rank grovel to a personal favorite but a sound editorial decision. Novelist Jonathan Lethem’s recent interview ranks with the magazine’s best Dylan stories, and there have been a lot of them. Lethem’s observations about being a relatively young fan (“Eighties Dylan was my Dylan, and I bore down hard on what was there”) dovetails nicely with Dylan’s rediscovery of his mojo. “The drama of my projected relationship to my hero, thin as it may seem to those steeped in the Sixties or Seventies listeners’ sense of multiple betrayals,” Lethem writes, “was the one Dylan described in 1997—the relocation and repossession of his voice.”

Is Rolling Stone the magazine it once was? That’s asking far too much of it. It still revels in superficiality, but the features are well written and lively, and they’re running nice and long again. Looking for an arbiter of what the best and the worst of pop culture have to offer, a reader could do far worse than to scan a copy each month. For a pop culture publication that has endured for 40 years, that’s saying something.