How fanzines escaped the indie ghetto and learned to love Taylor Swift
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Version 0 of 1. It could be a fanfic brunch date between Taylor Swift and Ellen Page or a quasi-academic essay on a collaboration between Ronnie Wood and One Direction. The subjects of 2015’s most exciting underground publications are a world away from the stapled-together, photocopied, fanzines of yore. The new wave of fanzines care not about dusty seven-inches and blokes in T-shirts, but instead the Technicolor world of pop superstars such as Taylor, 1D and Kanye West. Especially Taylor. In these magazines, the debate about whether pop should be taken as seriously as rock ended long ago. They surf the wave of “poptimism”, the mid-00s turning point in pop music - think Robyn, Annie, et al - where mainstream acts were finally afforded the serious critical attention of their rock contemporaries. It’s a pure, perfect little package of one particular part of pop culture Writers such as the New Yorker’s Ellen Willis advocated taking pop seriously in the 1960s and 70s, but it was Tumblr and blog culture that fuelled the most recent burst of poptimism. There, writers unable to find a forum for their ideas about pop in the mainstream press have been able to write critically at length about mainstream stars. Some of those writers have now migrated away from the internet to the old-fashioned zine, the counter-cultural organ that’s long been a constant in punk and queer scenes. While pop zines did exist in the pre-internet era, those titles have have largely died out: all three Bananarama zines are dead, as is the International Kylie Network. After 26 years and 41 issues, the Pet Shop Boys’ fan magazine, Literally, is the last old-schooler standing alongside. “It’s a very pop thing, a fanzine that’s just about one artist – not to make it for any other reason than that it expresses a deep interest and focus on one person,” says Chris Heath, the award-winning journalist who has written every issue of Literally. “While you could argue that it becomes more irrelevant in the internet era, I think it also becomes maybe of more worth, because one of the great things – and great problems – about the internet is that it’s boundless. And there’s something great in opposition to that about seven inches by five inches. It’s a pure, perfect little package of one particular part of pop culture.” The modern pop zine’s most popular subjects reflect the names that dominate mainstream media but they also reject mainstream narratives. “With the internet, it doesn’t really feel like you’re putting out anything that feels like a project,” says Tess Purchase, the 18-year-old editor of The Girl in the Dress: The Cultural Significance of Taylor Swift, a brilliant 34-page study of Swift’s self-validation through song. “Zines come from genres that don’t have such a broad audience as pop, and it’s wanting to have that intimacy back in something that’s so large – and corporate, to an extent.” After calling for submissions through Tumblr, Purchase rejected several in-defence-of-Taylor pieces. “I didn’t want it to be: ‘This is why you should like her.’ I was writing for people who were already interested.” So The Girl in the Dress became a mixture of academic theory and critical deep-read delivered with giddy enthusiasm. “When people talk about pop it’s often done objectively – or pseudo-objectively – and people don’t relate to pop that way,” says Becca Coates, a 20-year-old student who collaborated with Purchase on a second zine, I Wear Heels Now, to document Swift’s transformation on her last album, 1989. “They relate to it in a personal way, and a zine gives people the opportunity to talk about that personal fan experience.” Veterans of the so-called punk wars may bristle at an underground format being dedicated to mainstream pop millionaires. “But in a way it makes more sense for there to be pop fanzines because pop appreciation is as much of a subculture now as things like punk were in the time of Sniffin’ Glue,” says Popjustice editor Peter Robinson, who as a teenager put together zines on the KLF and PJ & Duncan (complete with giveaway Ant McPartlin eyebrow). “What used to be underground is now extremely mainstream and what used to be mainstream actually doesn’t have that many outlets.” That may sound odd, but pop genuinely doesn’t have many outlets for informed discussion, whatever the complaints in the comment threads whenever the Guardian writes about Swift or One Direction. British pop mags are aimed squarely at kids, while mainstream pop coverage trivialises or hand-wrings: it’s either Harry’s tragic heartbreak or Miley’s filthy video. Pop rarely gets to exist on its own terms, as something that fans obsess over. And online fandom can be an overwhelming place. “Being able to make something physical makes an individual’s experience of being a fan unique,” says Erin Fae, a 33-year-old New Yorker who recently published the 96-page Mess of a Dreamer: A Taylor Swift Fanzine. Grace Ambrose has been editor of Maximumrocknroll, the staunchly DIY San Francisco punk zine active since 1982. “I’m not surprised at all that fans are taking it upon themselves to facilitate the discourse they want to see about the objects of their obsession,” she says. “Zine culture traffiks in the highly personal – the impulse to produce something that otherwise might not have a clear place in the media landscape, to say something that doesn’t fit neatly into journalistic expectations – and of course fandom fits into that.” You think we’re silly for enjoying pop music, or taking pop music seriously, so we’re gonna do an academic reading of it “These zines are taking something seriously that’s thought of as such a non-serious, silly form of art – if it’s thought of as a form of art at all,” says 21-year-old Martha Perotto-Wills, a student who contributed an essay called Pretty Lies: Taylor Swift’s Blank Space Video, Subversive Femininity and Self-Construction to the I Wear Heels Now zine. “You think we’re silly for enjoying pop music, or taking pop music seriously, so we’re gonna do an academic reading of it, coming from a place of sincerely loving the music and having an emotional reaction to it and turning that into really clever, interesting analysis that doesn’t take the point of view that you have to be detached from the art to be able to critique it.” Away from the prescribed narratives around these acts, zines become a tool to explore massive acts’ radical potential, no matter how vanilla their public image, and offer an individualistic take on the world. “Pop music and zines is the general made specific – a perfect match,” says One Direction zinester Laura. Fellow artist Callie L is working on an essay that views One Direction’s performance of Where Do Broken Hearts Go on The X Factor with Ronnie Wood through the queer theory of the late American LGBT activist Vito Russo. “Zines have a history in subversive movements, so if you’re a non-binary young person who is looking to see themselves in pop culture, there’s a certain amount of queering that one has to do and look for in the culture,” says Shannon Watters, an editor at comics publisher Boom! Studios, who has produced two fiction zines: A One Direction Fanfic Not About One Direction (Actually About Teen Lesbians) and In Which It Is The Day Before Taylor Swift Comes Out And She Is Having Brunch With Ellen Page. “And these are artists that make it really easy to do because they’re so personal.” Meanwhile Kanyezine, edited by Australian artist Annabel Brady-Brown, uses Kanye West as a creative springboard. “At the last Melbourne Zine Fest, I had a few people coming up being like: ‘Why are you wasting your time on this guy, like he needs any more attention?’” she says. “But for me it’s about the idea that really fun, interesting, exciting work can be created from the ideas and symbols that someone like Kanye gives everyone.” It’s that ethos that keeps Chris Heath working on Literally. “Every year that we continue, and the more absurd it seems that we do it, it seems all the more worthwhile to me,” he says. “It’s something that doesn’t need to exist at all, which is perhaps the best reason of all for it existing.” |