Friday, November 14, 2008

Old Music Zine Depression

Just scored 3 Issues of Forced Exposure (late 80's era) from Mystery train at a good price and I've been wholesale swallowing (mostly) good-bile style in big foamy shots for a few days now. I can even feel it's wordy influence weaving through me right now, and hey, why resist? Just stop me if I use the word pud or dizz. Anyhow, mostly psyched on the Big Black tour diary and anything Albini related, cuz, damn man, that's one of the men who I've always liked best. So along with that Big Black high comes the general goodnessvibes of saving some totems of underground journalism from oblivion. These "zines" of yore (made of paper, rotting, tearing) are getting harder and harder to find and the good ones were hard to find when they were hot off the presses (in the 90s at least, when I was buying these things). Forced Exposure and Bananafish especially were pretty annoying in the "artistic" review policy, but made up for with some of the best interviews with some of the best men and women in any realm EVER. And even searching on ebay for anything but the last couple of issues(and I'd much rather read an interview with the Birthday Party than Chris Knox, guys) is likely to yield little. So, you just keep on looking and building a library right? right. That's what I do. And yeah, it was good to walk by the newstand recently and see a new issue of Chunklet. That's a good one. The rest that still exist seem to fall into the overly glossy slicky who gives a fucky category.
Oh, so here's the depression session: even at it's most disagreeable to me, I've been able to respect the thoughts and reccomendations of Mr. Coley (Byron, one of the main guys on the page). He's obviously a duder who knows his shit thoroughly, and though I've never met the other editor Jimmy, he also seems to slide in that ilk. Despite THIS, these issues are a cascade of hundreds of reviews of bands and records that have come and gone, and even with positive props, I'm sure they've slipped out of the memory of the most encyclopedic of record hoarders. In addition we have adverts layed on top of this. So since FE really scrapes hard at giving the reader a heave of the far reaches of the underground, we the modern reader gets a window into the nondreams of hundreds of alsoran nomatter bands. Depressing. How many band members who at the time were getting good highs of promise and dressing in black jeans are now dead, stupid or boring? or sad?
I've gotten a very similar vibe when buying rekkids at college radio sales. I bring home some LPs by bands that were "names" back in the day, and they are pretty good, but it feels kind of like a slice of pizza in outerspace. Nice Strong Arm and Breaking Circus and Riflesport albums are like slices of pizza in space. They have all the right ingredients and are good by any human standard but when they are floating in blackness, what do they have to offer us? And if you go to the WOZQ record fair in 2002 and buy them back from outer space, they are just "okay" slices of pizza.
OH THE FUTILITY!

2 comments:

DJ Mike G said...

Slices of pizza in space....brilliant. I get hip hop depression when I read my old rap magazines from 1995. Shit that was considered bad then is like light years ahead of what's coming out now...the game done changed and not in the right direction.

breaking world records said...

man, pizza in space, for real, i had a hearty fuggin chuckle at that.