on 3/18/03 4:59 PM, Perfect Sound Forever at perfect-sound@furious.com wrote:
At 05:10 PM 3/18/2003 -0500, Steve Smith wrote:
There are actually quite a large number of grassroots jazz tabloids, from New York's All About Jazz to similar efforts from Vermont to Los Angeles. Those strike me as being far closer to zine culture than to mainstream press.
Names! We need more names!
there are a bunch of webzines more eclectic in nature -- cosmik debris, rootdown, jazzitude, jazz review, jazz corner, but I wouldn't really say any of them is to this era what Slash magazine was to 1980. The paradigm has shifted. The contemporary counterculture is quite often like a training league for the mainstream, and a great many of these webzines and tabloids do not have the overt edge that came with the first two waves of punk rock (except rootdown, which is really right out of the graffiti culture). Vibe looks more like Cosmopolitan than Creem, even with Tupac on the cover. I'd say the best of these mags/webzines is akin to what college radio would have been like if it hasn't been co-opted into an enormous tool of the major labels. And let us not forget that the digital nature of the media makes it inherently cleaner. I was looking at some old SEARCH & DESTROY mags last week, and was amazed at how damn rustic they were. The whole desktop publishing revolution has made clean graphics available to everyone. No more kidnap typesetting... sigh. Dang. if anyone needs me, I'll be listening to every record Stiff put out before 1979. And wondering what happened to my youth. -- skip h http://www.skipheller.com