photocopied. stapled. handed to you. don't fake paper. evoke it.
history of riot grrrl chapbooks. a short essay on the kinko's economy. and we wrecked spotify's homepage on page 4. also: tape strips. lots of them.
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the zine predates the web by twenty-five years. the first wave came out of science fiction fandom in the 1930s — mimeographed newsletters with names like the comet, mailed between strangers who had read the same pulp paperbacks. the term itself ("fanzine") was coined in 1940 by russ chauvenet.
the second wave came out of the underground press in the 1960s — the los angeles free press, oz, international times. these were not strictly zines (they had paid staff, advertising, and printing budgets) but they shared the layout vocabulary: paste-up, mixed type, halftone photographs, hand-lettered headlines, visible production marks.
the third wave is the one most people mean when they say "zine." punk. 1976 onward. sniffin' glue in london (mark perry, twelve issues from 1976 to 1977). punk magazine in new york. maximum rocknroll in san francisco from 1982. these were photocopied, stapled, sold at gigs for fifty cents.
the fourth wave is riot grrrl. 1991 onward, olympia + dc. jigsaw, girl germs, bikini kill (the zine), fantastic fanzine. queercore zines followed: j.d.s, homocore, doris. the production technology was xerox. the distribution was hand-to-hand. the politics were urgent.
translating this to the web is a problem. the web is not paper. it cannot be photocopied. it cannot be stapled. if you fake torn edges with border-radius and a drop shadow, you have built impeccable's costume version of a zine. the school requires honesty. evoke. don't reproduce.
the moves that translate: typewriter monospace as default body. mixed-size and mixed-font ransom-note headlines, set inline with <span>s. halftone overlay across the whole page at 8–18% opacity, multiply blend. visible tape strips (rotated semi-transparent rectangles). page numbers in courier. issue numbers and dates. handwritten margin notes — permanent marker, the one webfont this school allows.
the voice changes too. zine writing is more personal than other schools. first person is fine. direct address feels direct address works. rhetorical questions. ALL CAPS shouting bursts. handwritten corrections CORRECTIONS in the margin. mistakes signal that the page was made by a person who had a deadline and a copier and forty cents.
the riot grrrl moment had a specific geography. olympia, washington — through evergreen state college and the kill rock stars / k records ecosystem — was the genesis. washington, d.c. — through positive force and the dischord records circle — was the second hub. the zines moved between the two coasts in xeroxed copies, via mail order, and in stacks at gigs. tobi vail (bikini kill drummer) was editing jigsaw from olympia. kathleen hanna was writing bikini kill. molly neuman and allison wolfe were doing girl germs from dc.
the first riot grrrl convention was held in dc in august 1992. it was attended by about a hundred people. the washington post covered it. newsweek followed. by 1994 the term "riot grrrl" had been featured in glamour and seventeen, which the original participants considered a betrayal. several of them stopped writing zines in response, on the principle that visibility had ruined the form.
the academic preservation came later. the riot grrrl collection was acquired by the nyu fales library in 2009 — about 90 linear feet of zines, posters, flyers, demo tapes, and correspondence. lisa darms (now at the new york public library) edited the published anthology the riot grrrl collection (the feminist press, 2013). it is the closest thing to a canonical primary source.
the queer zine archive project (qzap) was founded in 2003 by milo miller and christopher wilde in milwaukee. it digitizes and hosts queer zines from the 1980s onward, free and online. it's the largest such archive in the world. there is also the independent voices archive at jstor (alt-press digital), the punk rock and new wave magazine archive at duke university, and the smaller archives at evergreen state and reed college.
printed in newsprint. distributed by hand. all dates verified against the NYU fales finding aid and the qzap catalog. if you have a missing issue mail it in. we'll scan it. we'll send it back.
spotify's premium page is the most expensive corporate music object since MTV. green-to-black gradient, rounded white pill CTA, helvetica neue. the school of one billion subscribers. zine school doesn't oppose music corporations. it just refuses to pretend they invented music.
we used to call this PREMIUM. FREE.
listen offline. save your favorites. three months free. then eleven dollars and ninety-nine cents a month, forever.
$11.99/MO
$0.
for three months. then the rate above. cancel any time. nobody cancels.
cancel
before
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ends
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