Suroosh Alvi held up his smartphone to show me a picture of a billboard.
“This was sent to me from Sunset Strip in L.A.,” he said. “These things are popping up everywhere — it’s insane. They’re on yellow cabs in New York City, Austin, Texas, last week.”
The black-and-white billboard image showed a ravaged street, littered with garbage, and an old television sitting on the ground with the word “VICE” taking up the screen. “News from the edge,” read a line of orange type in the top right corner; at bottom right, “Series premiere, April 5 at 11 p.m. HBO.”
VICE has come a long way since its modest beginnings in 1994 as a free monthly culture magazine called Voice of Montreal. From Voice to VICE; newsprint to glossy; local to national to international; Montreal to New York to the world; print to online to television; the VICE story is one of constant evolution. And this latest step is a big one.
“For our brand, it’s a very important moment,” VICE co-founder Alvi said. “It’s the culmination of years of work and building and learning. And HBO is just a great home for us. We can be ourselves, say what we want to say, do what we want to do.”
Executive produced by Bill Maher — and airing right after his program on Friday night — the VICE show is “VICE doing 60 Minutes,” according to Alvi. Correspondents are sent to all corners of the world to bring back outrageous stories.
“The basic premise is the absurdity of the modern condition, how crazy s–t is,” said co-founder Shane Smith, the show’s host, reached on his cellphone in New York. “My first piece is on suicide bombers in Afghanistan, where 6-year-old kids are used as bomb transportation devices. From there, the stories get crazier and crazier.”
Episode 1 has the above-mentioned story plus another segment on political violence in the Philippines; Episode 2 follows a woman’s escape from North Korea, and looks at the “world’s most dangerous border,” in Kashmir, focusing on political tensions between India and Pakistan.
“It’s what I signed up for 19 years ago,” Alvi said, “but we didn’t have the resources to get out there, into the field. I think we always had the desire, and a global perspective. Now, this is a dream: ‘Where should I go? Oh, there’s some crazy s–t happening in Angola — let’s go over there.’ Who gets to do that?”
It was Friday afternoon, a week ago, and I had caught Alvi on a rare trip back to the city he once called home. We were sitting in the Old Montreal offices of the PHI Centre, a resolutely modern, not-for-profit multimedia art space founded by Phoebe Greenberg, owner of the nearby DHC Art gallery.
Arcade Fire recently took over the building to hold Kanpé Kanaval, a benefit for Haiti. This weekend, the PHI Centre screens Reincarnated, the VICE-produced documentary about rapper Snoop Dogg’s trip to Jamaica to record a reggae album under the name Snoop Lion.
Alvi was in town for the day to meet with PHI representatives, who have asked him to be one of the centre’s guest curators and oversee a month’s worth of programming, tentatively scheduled for April 2014.
“No one has ever asked me that before,” he said. “It’s an honour. It’s flattering, and it’s a fantastic opportunity for me and for VICE. It’s a challenge — how do you bring a building to life?
“It’s a state of the art facility, with the latest in technology; the way light flows through the building; everything has been thought through and executed to the most minute detail. It’s an incredible space.”
VICE’s partnership with PHI is not new. “They invested in the music division of VICE several years ago,” Alvi said, “when we left Atlantic Records and needed financial assistance. … That’s where the relationship started.”
To find himself collaborating with PHI once again — and to be planning another project in Old Montreal, just a couple of blocks from where he started Voice of Montreal as part of a welfare pay program, nearly two decades back — is like coming full circle, Alvi said.
“One thing I might want to do in this space is a history of VICE, on one of the walls,” he said. “I’m really excited about what to do here. There’s the music angle, the photo angle, the film angle and then the panel discussion component — I’m just riffing, now.”
Alvi was born in Toronto, but lived in Montreal on and off growing up, as his mother taught at McGill in the 1970s. He attended McGill, before heading back to Toronto for grad school, dropping out to teach English in Eastern Europe, and eventually settling back here in the early-’90s.
Now a New Yorker, with VICE headquarters established there for over a decade, Alvi still considers Montreal home. His Pakistani roots have come in handy in establishing the company’s increasingly global vision.
One of the first documentaries VICE made, in the mid-2000s, was Gun Markets of Pakistan, in which he led viewers on a trip to a remote village where handmade guns are churned out around the clock.
Another was Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which found him seeking out hard rock music in the violent Iraqi capital. Both went viral, garnering massive views online.
“Those were great surprises that taught us so much about media, and the ability for content to travel,” Alvi said. “Gun Markets was the first thing we did, and it’s still going, clocking views, and it’s relevant for geo-politics. Heavy Metal was this weird little story in the magazine that showed us how a piece of content can live online, as a feature film in theatres, on TV, we made a book out of it. Millions of people saw it; it showed us how big our audience could be.”
After producing hundreds of hours of footage for years, which it posted for free on its website and YouTube, VICE was offered two dedicated YouTube channels last year: one for its documentaries and the other, Noisey, for music.
“We were consistently in the Top 10 out of the 100 channels (that YouTube created),” Alvi said. “We defied all expectations, and proved that people will watch long-form documentaries online — that it doesn’t have to be 30-second videos of cats on skateboards. We proved you can make quality content and people will consume it, no matter what the format or medium is. That was validation.”
And it was just a warm-up. With its HBO show, VICE is set to enter the mainstream on its own terms. It’s still wild and wacky VICE, but the magazine’s irreverent humour of old has matured as it expands beyond niche markets to speak to a more grown up, global audience.
“We’ve always aspired to make authentic content, since Day One,” Alvi said. “Sometimes it’s not polished, and not slick, but I hope it’s honest. When it’s honest, people can identify with it.
“We ended up creating something new that is one part news, one part entertainment, one part — I don’t know, but you put it all together and it creates something that doesn’t really exist in the mainstream news or mainstream content-creation world. There’s the rest of the world and there’s VICE doing our own weird s–t over here. Something has happened to make the VICE stuff a true alternative.”
And an alternative that the mainstream wants a piece of. VICE’s greatest feat may be its ability to continue expanding, appealing to an ever-bigger, broader global audience without sacrificing its outsider attitude. As it enters the world of television, the test will be whether the magazine’s rebel yell can resonate through the TV screen in your living room. Alvi thinks so.
“VICE is a kind of an omnibus,” he said. “We do politics, music, underground freaky s–t, drugs, sex, but there’s a mature end of our audience, an older side. The HBO show is geared to that a bit more, but it’s still VICE doing what VICE does. We’ve always said we do smart things in a stupid way and stupid things in a smart way. We’ll see what this show becomes. It might be us doing smart things in a smart way, finally.
“I think it’s time for us to be less stupid.”
VICE premières Friday at 11 p.m. on HBO. Details: hbocanada.com/vice.
Visit VICE’s YouTube channels at youtube.com/vice or youtube.com/noisey, and VICE’s website at vice.com.
The Snoop Dogg documentary Reincarnated, produced by VICE, screens Saturday and Sunday at the PHI Centre, 407 St. Pierre St. in Old Montreal. Call 514-225-0525 or visit phi-centre.com.