Ryan Canavan
smart guy
At some point last year my band got on a show last minute as part of a bunk tour. It turned out to be one of the coolest shows I’d played in a long time. The bands we played with were excellent, the crowd was good and enthusiastic, and the venue was really sweet. It was on the campus of Bard College in this little space that housed a coffee bar and a zine library. And somehow, in all their liberal glory, they let the students 100% run the place. It was rad. But a zine library! An extremely rare sight for a downstate New York college. Even weirder was that they had copies of my old zine that I didn’t even have. It was a truly humbling experience and gave me hope for a new generation of punk kids doing things their own way. As that memory faded into the back of my mind fall drifted off into winter, and winter soon gave way to spring. Suddenly, out of nowhere, these same kids who helped my band out back in the fall got in touch again about a completely different event. They were setting up a zine fair and wanted me to give a lecture/workshop at it. How about that! This was such a cool thing to ask about. So what to talk about? I tried to get an idea of who would be present and what to expect out of these other speakers. How could I bring something different to the table? It seemed as if there was going to be a focus on the more personal side of zines, so I thought I’d discuss, among other things, the long lost music zine—a forum once so common in underground culture you could spit and probably hit the sad sack behind some anonymous newsprint music zine. I wanted to give a history of the early to late 90s zine scene, how accessible they were, the relative ease of publishing a zine that arose with the affordability of getting a PC, and the different methods of creating and printing—from the handwritten xeroxed variety to the professional, offset printed variety. I brought examples from my personal archive. I thought it was worthwhile to discuss and discover these relics of mid-90s punk/ hardcore fandom. It was a beautiful day. So much so that everyone decided to set up shop in the courtyard outside the actual venue/shop it was supposed to take place in. While a crowd of 20 or 30 sat around me on this beautiful day, trying to tune in to my lecture, it was a mixed bag. Some kids were in rapt attention, and some looked at me as if I were speaking a dead language, passing around these foreign objects of weird newsprint matter, searching in vain for a delete key or download link between the pages. There was also some confusion as to why people would want to dedicate a large portion of their time to writing about bands and records, or reviewing things as opposed to producing a small handwritten diary zine, or some radical guide to dumpstering and smashing the state (with the help of Dad’s credit card of course). It appears that most music zines have gone online, or replaced with more personal handmade projects. Whereas those were once the oddball publication it’s now the music zine that is now the quixotic oddity viewed with confusion.
Overall, the workshop seemed to go alright as I attempted to connect zines, whether done on a professional level or with simply scissors and glue can be a DIY affair. It’s the heart and passion that goes into it that really matters. Regardless, these kids seemed to be more interested in my cut n’ paste traveling zines with covers made from leftover scraps of industrial-grade posterboard, and not so much my book-like music zines. Ah well, maybe music zines have gone the way of the dinosaur. I’d like to think otherwise. Well, I take that back because there sure were a lot of bad newsprint punk rock zines ten years ago. The few that survived and continue to thrive today just evolved, or lucked out, or are just good. It seems more and more, no one wants to help out a printed publication because it takes too long. It lacks the immediacy of the internet. By the time one goes to press (if they’re lucky enough to get that far) their information is outdated. It’s hard to keep up. But I’ll be damned if holding on to a tangible object, something with substance, doesn’t beat staring at a screen endlessly hoping to get something out of that. Because of this I think zines (and especially music zines) have to offer something more than just an interview about some band’s new record. They have to offer art, give a lasting impression, offer some really solid words to readers. They have to offer things that aren’t just reading fodder for the next fifteen minutes. They need to bring forth something that you’ll want to refer back to for years to come. Like the Farside interview in Anti-Matter #5. Who? What? Well, maybe most don’t remember the band or the zine. But that was a damn good interview and it has lasting power. It spoke to me and I remember quotes from that interview to this day. Like Steve Albini’s “What’s Wrong With Music” column that has been quoted and reprinted endlessly since it was printed over 15 years ago. Like anything from “Answer Me!” zine (if you’re into sick and twisted humor). Give us something tangible and memorable. It’s tough. But you gotta be smart. So speaking to a bunch of kids in a courtyard on a beautiful day— some getting it, some not quite—I was hoping that they’d go forth in their own endeavors and do something smart. Something that had substance and would be memorable. Perhaps I got down to specifics of printing too much, but hopefully there was something between the pages of the zines that I let them check out that spoke to them and inspired them to do something cool. Hopefully it’s worthwhile.
Listen to:
Helms Alee, Night Terror Young Widows, Old Wounds Night Owls demo Oak and Bone demo Mandate Of Heaven, Hun In the Sun Suicide Note, Empty Rooms
Challenge me: hanginghex@hotmail.com 8
:: THE NEW SCHEME ::