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 crisis in mag land: part two
What’s next for the ailing Brit mag scene? Ever since its beginnings during the English Civil War in the mid-1600s, when seditious printed pamphlets were circulated round London’s coffee houses by young insurrectionists, British underground publishing has been part of our heritage. There have been a few blips of course, not least now, when a period of millennial insecurity and recession has made people shrink instead of shout.Despite the rash of quality websites available, the act of reading printed pages remains too engrained and too “natural” to be terminally threatened by web pages. Also, the use of the printed page to voice opinion outside of mainstream thought is too strong to be wiped out by rebel internet outfits. You can blitz a crowd with printed matter and actually, physically connect with them. The portability and physical presence of a magazine, like a book, makes it something to be pored over and lived with. Print, from photocopied pamphlets to full-blown publications, remains the thing that people sit around in pubs, read and discuss. Print is communion. The best magazines, like the best websites, are a platform for ideas and a forum for discussion. However niche their remit, they make the reader feel a part of something. This, combined with informed, entertaining and opinionated editorial, great photography and design, and right-on-the-money comment re the prevailing zeitgeist, is what people are waiting for again. Endless pages of reviews, profiles, gossip, products and ads render today’s style and music mags as nothing more than Argos catalogues for trendies. Chewing gum for your eyeballs. Vehicles of deception. Artist and punk-zine frontiersman, Raymond Pettibon, says, “If you look at all these slick magazines with their fashion and alcohol and cigarette advertisement… they don’t have much of a spine in any sense.” The best form of rebellion, or attack, is humour. It’s what satire-zines, from notorious 60s mags It and Control (16 issues in 40 years and still running) to Private Eye, Sniffin’ Glue, football casual bible The End, acid house’s Boys Own, slacker tome The Idler, situationist pamphlet Crash, art mag Inventory, Hoxton trendy-baiting Shoreditch Twat, new punk-zine Hardcore Is More Than Music, and anarchist news-sheet Schnews did, and do, so well – poking the finger while tickling the ribs. Anyone who considers today’s style or music mags rebellious is deluded. When you’re in the pocket of advertisers or the clutches of an obscenely rich and usually Philistine publisher, you are, as Bill Hicks so beautifully put it, “sucking Satan’s cock”. The real underground press exists outside of the confines of publishing houses and fashionable media enclaves. It remains the howl of disaffection you find on the street, in record shops, hunt sabs, protest marches and bars. It is publishing with purpose, not for profit. The future of the UK underground press lies in a marriage of digital and print. Mags supported by websites and vice versa, with no dictates from advertisers, supported by users/readers for users/readers – the only way for honesty and truth to remain intact. We need fresh mags and fanzines to rise out of the mire and explore the in-between spaces of contemporary culture, the areas ignored by commercial clamour. It’s an ideal, but where would we be without ideals?
Stuart Turnbull
Stuart Turnbull is ex-editor of X-ray Magazine and ex-Music Editor of Sleaze.
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see also
 crisis in mag landpart one conversation books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. games  games archive Gaming features and weekly columns from 2002 to 2008. |
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