Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture
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Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781621064848 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Microcosm Publishing |
| Publication date: | 11/28/2017 |
| Series: | Scene History Series |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 547,978 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 14 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ZINES
But what are they? That's the first question I'm usually asked when I start to talk about zines. My initial, and probably correct, impulse is to hand over a stack of zines and let the person asking the question decide, for this is how they were introduced to me.
Some years back I went on a trip to Boston to visit some old friends playing in a band. There I planned to hang out and work as their "roadie," lugging equipment to gigs, setting it up and taking it down. I had played in a couple of punk rock bands in the early 1980s and I suppose part of me wanted to feel again some of the excitement and energy that comes from being in a band and part of a subcultural scene. Fortunately, my descent into nostalgia was nipped in the bud; when I got there the band had broken up. I had little to do except walk around the city, sneak into Widener Library, and hang around my friends' apartment. Scattered around their apartment, piled precariously on the coffee table, buried under old pizza boxes, forgotten in the cracks of the sofa, were scruffy, homemade little pamphlets. Little publications filled with rantings of high weirdness and exploding with chaotic design. Zines. Although I knew about zines from my days spent in the punk scene, I had never really given them much time or thought. Now, with plenty of time, I spent hours going through them.
I was awestruck. Somehow these little smudged pamphlets carried within them the honesty, kindness, anger, the beautiful inarticulate articulateness, the uncompromising life that I had discovered (and lost) in music, then later radical politics, years ago. Against the studied hipness of music and style magazines, the pabulum of mass newsweeklies, and the posturing of academic journals, here was something completely different.
In zines, everyday oddballs were speaking plainly about themselves and our society with an honest sincerity, a revealing intimacy, and a healthy "fuck you" to sanctioned authority – for no money and no recognition, writing for an audience of like-minded misfits. Later I picked up a thick journal crammed with zine reviews called Factsheet Five, leafed through their listings, and sent off for hundreds of zines. I discovered tens of thousands more at the zine archive housed in the New York State Library. I even began to publish my own zine and traded mine for others. As I dug through mountains of these piquant publications, a whole world that I had known nothing about opened up to me. It was incredibly varied: zines came in more shapes, styles, subjects, and qualities than one would imagine. But there was something remarkable that bound together this new world I had stumbled upon: a radically democratic and participatory ideal of what culture and society might be ... ought to be.
In an era marked by the rapid centralization of corporate media, zines are independent and localized, coming out of cities, suburbs and small towns across the US, assembled on kitchen tables. They celebrate the everyperson in a world of celebrity. Losers in a society that rewards the best and the brightest. Rejecting the corporate dream of an atomized population broken down into discrete and instrumental target markets, zine writers form networks and forge communities around diverse identities and interests. Employed within the grim new economy of service, temporary, and "flexible" work, they redefine work, setting out their creative labor done on zines as a protest against the drudgery of working for another's profit.
Defining themselves against a society predicated on consumption, zinesters privilege the ethic of DIY, do-it-yourself: make your own culture and stop consuming that which is made for you. Refusing to believe the pundits and politicians who assure us that the laws of the market are synonymous with the laws of nature, the zine community is busy creating a culture whose value isn't calculated as profit and loss on ruled ledger pages, but is assembled in the margins, using criteria like control, connection, and authenticity.
I came to realize that, considered in their totality, zines weren't the capricious ramblings of isolated cranks (though some certainly were), but the variegated voices of a subterranean world staking out its identity through the cracks of capitalism and in the shadows of the mass media.
Zines are speaking to and for an underground culture. And while other groups of individuals come together around the shared creation of their own culture, what distinguishes zinesters from garden-variety hobbyists is their political self-consciousness. Many zinesters consider what they do an alternative to and strike against commercial culture and consumer capitalism. They write about this openly in their zines. What was amazing to me, coming from years of sterile academic and political debates on the Left, in which culture was often in the past dismissed as irrelevant to the "real struggle," was that zines seemed to form a true culture of resistance. Their way of seeing and doing was not borrowed from a book, nor was it carefully cross-referenced and cited; rather it was, if you'll forgive the word, organic. It was a vernacular radicalism, an indigenous strain of utopian thought.
I began my study of zines in earnest near the end of the 12-year conservative drive of the Reagan/Bush era. Against this juggernaut, the radical political opposition, in which I was an active participant, acted out a tragedy seemingly unchanged for decades. One variant went as follows: Leaders organize a "mass" demonstration. We march. We chant. Fringe groups hawk their ridiculous papers. Speakers are paraded onto the dais to tell us what we already know. We hope the mainstream media puts us on the news for five seconds. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Nothing seems to change. Certainly there were lively and successful models of demonstration and organization, like those of ACT UP in its heyday or the WTO protest. But these stand out against the relative failure of the rest. The social movements of the decade that spoke the language and captured the imagination of the public were those not of the Left, but of the Right.
In zines I saw the seeds of a different possibility: a novel form of communication and creation that burst with an angry idealism; a medium that spoke for a marginal, yet vibrant culture, that along with others, might invest the tired script of progressive politics with meaning and excitement for a new generation. Perhaps most important, zines were a success story. Throughout the 1980s while the Left was left behind, crumbling and attracting few new converts, zines and underground culture grew by leaps and bounds, resonating deeply with disaffected young people. As a punk rocker, Left politico, and scholar of culture, I was intrigued by their success. Perhaps, I thought to myself, zines were the crack in the seemingly impenetrable wall of the system; a culture spawning the next wave of meaningful resistance.
And so I decided to make the politics of zines and underground culture the focus of my study. By politics in this case I mean simply what zine writers articulate, either explicitly, or as is often the case implicitly as being the problems of the present cultural, economic, and political system; what they imagine and create as possible solutions to these problems; and what strategies and chances they have for actualizing these ideals on both a small and a large scale.
As I spent more time with zines and zine writers, immersed in this underground world, I realized there was a minor flaw in my theory/ fantasy of underground culture as vanguard of world revolution. Witnessing this incredible explosion of radical cultural dissent, I couldn't help but notice that as all this radicalism was happening underground. The world above was moving in the opposite direction. The election of a president who "felt our pain" notwithstanding, politics were becoming more conservative and power was becoming more concentrated. More disturbing was that zines and underground culture didn't seem to be any sort of threat to this above-ground world. Quite the opposite: "alternative" culture was being celebrated in the mainstream media and used to create new styles and profits for the commercial culture industry. The history of all rebellious cultural and political movements is the history of the unavoidable contradiction of staking out new ground within and through the landscape of the past. But today this laying of claims may be harder than ever. No longer is there a staid bourgeoisie to confront with avant-garde art or a square America to shock with counter-cultural values; instead there is a sophisticated marketing machine which gobbles up anything novel and recreates it as product for a niche market. When the New York Times gushes over zines, when punk feminist Riot Grrrls are profiled in Newsweek, when "alternative" rock gets its own show on MTV, and when the so-called Generation X becomes an identifiable and lucrative market in the eyes of the editors of Business Week and Advertising Age, rebelling through culture becomes exceedingly problematic. The underground is discovered and cannibalized almost before it exists. Alternative culture was discovered not just by the entertainment industry but by the academy as well, particularly by radical scholars, much like myself, looking for the latest historical agent to hang their political hopes, or blame their failures, upon. In the academic world, however, there has been a lot of sloppy thinking about the relationship between culture and politics. Critics have invested capitalist ideology with a totalizing power and reach, arguing that all cultural expressions are inevitably expressions of the logic of the status quo. Or more recently, they do the opposite and make the most outrageous liberatory political claims for the most banal of cultural acts. My purpose here is not to extol or dismiss for scholarship or social change gains from neither, but to understand the politics of zines and underground culture.
The powers that be do not sustain their legitimacy by convincing people that the current system is The Answer. That fiction would be too difficult to sustain in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. What they must do, and what they have done very effectively, is convince the mass of people that there is no alternative. What I want to argue in the following pages is that zines and underground culture offer up an alternative, a way of understanding and acting in the world that operates with different rules and upon different values than those of consumer capitalism. It is an alternative fraught with contradictions and limitations ... but also possibilities. We can learn from both.
But what are they? Try again: zines are noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves. While shaped by the long history of alternative presses in the United States, zines as a distinct medium were born in the 1930s. It was then that fans of science fiction, often through the clubs they founded, began producing what they called "fanzines" as a way of sharing science fiction stories and critical commentary, and of communicating with one another. Forty years later, in the mid-1970s, the other defining influence on modern-day zines began as fans of punk rock music, ignored by and critical of the mainstream music press, started printing fanzines about their music and cultural scene. In the early 1980s these two tributaries, joined by smaller streams of publications created by fans of other cultural genres, disgruntled self-publishers, and the remnants of printed political dissent from the sixties and seventies, were brought together and crossfertilized through listings and reviews in network zines like Factsheet Five. As the "fan" was by and large dropped off "zine," and their number increased exponentially, a culture of zines developed. By the early 1990s the two editors of the early Factsheet Five, deciding upon a title for a commercially published version of their zine, could honestly and accurately refer to The World of Zines.
When I think of the typical citizen of this world, I see in my mind Christine Boarts, the 35-year-old editor of Slug & Lettuce. Dressed in black from head to foot, hair multi-hued dreadlocks, rings lining her ears and nose, tattoos circling her wrist and gracing her shoulder, she still thinks of herself as shy and quiet, the weird girl who sat at the back of the class in high school, in a town where "there was nothing goin' down at all." But, as the Velvet Underground song goes, "you know, her life was saved by rock & roll."
It was in the small punk scene in the central Pennsylvania college town where Chris grew up that she found a community (outside her liberal family) where "it was okay that I wasn't like everyone," and it was through her zine that she forged connections to the larger underground scene which gave her the "inspiration and direction" to chart a course for herself outside the mainstream. Surviving on a shoestring, she has just put out her eightieth issue of S&L, fitting it in someplace between organizing punk shows, shooting photos of live bands, crisscrossing the country in a van, and developing photos as her primary job. Living on the outskirts of a society that equates success with material acquisition, status, and stability, Chris is poor, marginalized, and perfectly happy. Most zinesters are young and the children of professionals, culturally if not financially middle-class. White and raised in a relatively privileged position within the dominant culture, they have since embarked on "careers" of deviance that have moved them to the edges of this society; embracing downwardly mobile career aspirations, unpopular musical and literary tastes, transgressive ideas about sexuality, unorthodox artistic sensibilities, and a politics resolutely outside the status quo (more often to the left, but sometimes to the right). Like Chris, they're simply "not interested" in the "big game" that is the straight world. In short, zine writers and readers, although they'd be horrified to be tagged with such a pat term, are what used to be called bohemians.
It is white, middle-class culture, and its discontents, that informs zines and underground culture. But since one of the attributes of zines is their diversity and unpredictability, the portrait of a young, white, formerly middle-class bohemian looks less and less representative the further one delves into the world of zines. Not all zinesters are young: much older writers like Los Angeles Science Fiction (SF) fan Don Fitch, who describes his age as "76 going on 17," put out zines like From Sunday to Saturday. Some zinesters, like Freedom, a Staten Island high-schooler who publishes Orangutan Balls, are workingclass. And Franetta McMillian, an African-American woman from Delaware, publishes Sweet Jesus, while two Los Angeles Chicanos, Lalo Lopez and Estaban Zul, put out Pocho "Kickin' Butt for La Raza" Magazine.
Zine publishers are identified less by who they are, then, and more by what they believe; the best description of one I've come across is actually a composite portrait written in 1946 of a similar genus: the "little magazine" editor or writer of the early twentieth century:
Such a man is stimulated by some form of discontent whether with the constraints of his world or the negligence of publishers, at any rate something he considers unjust, boring, or ridiculous. He views the world of publishers and popularizers with disdain, sometimes with despair ... [and] he generally insists that publication should not depend upon the whimsy of conventional tastes and choices.
"The whimsy of conventional tastes and choices" certainly plays little part in the subjects picked by these writers, whose zines span almost every field, from the sublime to the ridiculous, making a detour through the unfathomable. But one thing gives coherence to this eclecticism: zinesters' fascination with the margins. These may be the margins of literature or music, explored through a science fiction fanzine like STET or the punk rock Philly Zine. Or perhaps the perimeter of politics surveyed through the anarchist essays of instead of A magazine, the conservative libertarian rants of Inverted-A HORN, or Finster's feminist-infused stories, opinions, and photo-collages.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Notes from Underground"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Duncombe.
Excerpted by permission of Microcosm Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
ONE ZINES,
TWO IDENTITY,
Losers,
Everyperson,
The Political Is Personal,
The Politics of Authenticity,
Manufactured Selves,
I'm Against It,
THREE COMMUNITY,
A Club of Our Own,
Clubhouse,
The Scene,
No Rules,
Revolution Grrrl Style Now!,
Communities Against Society?,
FOUR WORK,
Taking Work Seriously,
Sabotage,
Slack,
For Love, Not Money,
FIVE CONSUMPTION,
Participatory Culture,
Talking Back,
Burning Bridges,
DIY,
The Politics of Form,
Fun,
SIX DISCOVERY,
SEVEN PURITY AND DANGER,
Reluctant Subjects,
Irony,
Originality,
The Ghetto,
Factsheet Five versus Factsheet Five,
Opening Up or Selling Out?,
By Fire or Ice,
Falling Out of Favor,
EIGHT THE POLITICS OF ALTERNATIVE CULTURE,
A Nonchalant Revolution of Sorts,
Haven in a Heartless World,
NINE CONCLUSION,
TEN NEW AFTERWARD,
Do Zines Still Matter?,
NOTES,
INDEX,