Representations of Alternative Music in Irish Fanzines
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A Destabilising Pleasure: Representations of Alternative Music in Irish Fanzines. Ciaran Ryan Abstract This article focuses on the position of the fan in Irish alternative music cultures through their connections with media texts. In particular, it examines the emergence of Irish punk music fanzines. By assessing the role of these publications in distributing valuable information within a shared taste community, it demonstrates that this process needs to be considered as a fan practice. What is evident is that fans within such communities (or ‘scenes’) can occupy several roles simultaneously – writer, promoter, musician, and facilitator of information. Furthermore, this work touches on the links between the rough texture of punk/DIY music, its participatory culture, and the corresponding application of the same aesthetics to fanzine production. This analysis draws on over thirty-five years of archive material, as well as valued contributions from fanzine writers, to prove that DIY production is not just about opposition to a dominant culture, but that it is a fulcrum for pleasure for its participants. Keywords: Fanzines, DIY, scenes, punk, fandom, pleasure. Introduction In 1999, a new Irish hardcore fanzine1 was printed entitled Hurling Abuse. As with many fanzines, the second page had an editorial of sorts, with the writer Ed Monahan welcoming readers to his publication: This zine has taken me forever to put out, but here it is and I know a lot of interviews are well out of date, but hey better late than never, I hope with [this] zine to give Irish kids a look at what HC [hardcore] is all about and give something back to something that has been an important part of my life for the past seven years, and an important outlet for hate and positivity. This is more than just music; it’s a way of life (Monahan, 1999). Handmade and photocopied fanzines such as Hurling Abuse were a staple of alternative music cultures in Ireland for a number of decades. Fanzines are regularly depicted as pronunciations of rebellion against mainstream popular culture and society (see Duncombe, 2008) and “vehicles of subcultural communication” (Triggs, 2006: 70). Furthermore, as per Monahan’s proclamation above, the music and the hardcore scene he is part of “is a way of life”; the intertwined activities of making music, writing about music, and sharing it with others are meaningful aspects of individuals’ cultural and social spheres. Despite this, and perhaps partially due to the privileging of such activities as subcultural acts, limited attention has been paid to the similarities between the music’s texture and that of the fanzine itself. While appropriating mainstream genres, music in DIY scenes still manages to represent and invite identification with marginality or outsider status by breaking with convention and expectation. There is a roughness that comes with the recording and performance of such music, not commonly found in music that deliberately aims to have commercial appeal. Similarly the amateur Xeroxing and the material texture of fanzines, purposely eschewing glossy paper, gives a deliberately low-tech feel. For the most part, fanzines are cheaply assembled, containing grammar and design imperfections in a comparable way to the lack of studio sheen that can be found on Ethnomusicology Ireland 5 (2017) Ryan 101 most punk recordings. Even the quality of paper and the somewhat rushed feel (words crossed out in handwritten articles, for example) is at odds with the editorial chain-of-command in established music magazines. In this discussion, the argument moves away from merely positioning the fanzine and its corresponding community as a mode of opposition; instead, it considers the role of fandom within DIY music communities. It does this by looking at the emergence of print fanzines, which have served as a platform for dissemination of values and information. It demonstrates how, just like in the live punk environment, a disruption of the conventional roles of culture-making (audience, musician, writer) takes place, and how this distinguishes participants from fans of mainstream cultural activities. I argue that this conscious destabilisation led to significant pleasure for participants – pleasure in the sense of a networked togetherness, and pleasure on a more individual, corporeal level. Positioning the fan in Irish popular music studies Participants in music ‘scenes’ (Straw, 1991; Cohen, 1991) who are not producers of music are rarely the primary focus when Irish music is discussed. Audiences – and indeed, fans – tend to be overlooked in favour of discourses on identity (Campbell, 2011), nationality (for example, McLaughlin, 1999), and musicality. In the past decade, there has been a turn towards considering the experiences of others within music communities. While John O’Flynn’s (2009) fieldwork leans towards both traditional Irish music and some of the more commercially successful rock and pop acts, he does incorporate an element of audience studies. Mangaoang and O’Flynn’s (2016) in-depth mapping of popular music in Dublin actively considers the experiences and needs of music fans, across a wide variety of genres. Eileen Hogan (2016) also measured the practices of fans in her ethnographic study of music scenes in Cork city. Elsewhere, Gary Sinclair’s (2014) investigation into the Irish heavy metal scene demonstrates a significant shift; firstly, it is a move away from a narrative in popular music studies of Ireland that focuses on traditional music, successful rock artists (Bradby and Torode, 1984), or music of the diaspora (Campbell, 2011). Furthermore, he places fandom at the centre of his inquiry. While fandom scholars such as Paul Booth proclaim that “everyone is a fan of something [Booth’s emphasis]” (2010: 20), studies of music fandom have perhaps been more concerned with different fan responses to so-called ‘heritage acts’ (see Cavicchi, 1998; Devereux, Dillane and Power, 20112) or the relationships between groups of fans and current pop music sensations3. Mark Duffett argues that “there may be more to do in pursuing fan studies beyond the frame of stardom” (2013: 302), and it is noticeable that there have been recent studies ranging from fans of music producers (Hills, 2014) to – as in the case of Cornel Sandvoss’s (2014) exploration of fans of Ibiza – the connections that music fans have with place. Research conducted on those whose fandom is centred on non-mainstream musical acts or genres are still distinguished by either the extent of their fandom or how they are distinctive to others4. As such, both in Ireland and globally, limited consideration has been given to audiences of what can be termed DIY music 5 , particularly in localised contexts. Referring to key works of Ruth Finnegan (1989) and Sara Cohen (1991), Martin Cloonan (2005) spoke of a turn in popular music studies towards local practitioners with a focus on the “ordinary” music-maker. Such a shift has not occurred in the treatment of “ordinary” or local fans that operate within small music scenes. In a contemporary media environment – where talking about and making music is (technologically, at least) easier to do than ever – the lines between fan and Ethnomusicology Ireland 5 (2017) Ryan 102 practitioner can be blurred, and this can partially account for why those active locally are not conceptualised as fans. However, as Duffett argues, fans have never been passive: a supposedly significant division between making and consuming music was constantly breached by participatory practices - performing sheet music, dancing, DJing, singing along, or learning instruments by listening to records - which had always been encouraged as part of music’s collaborative pleasure. Fans were always music-makers even if they were not musicians (Duffett, 2015: 2). Aside from the pleasure that fans of music have traditionally attained through these practices that Duffett lists, there are other ways of being an active fan. The writing and production of music fanzines, a key ingredient of alternative music scenes in Ireland from the mid-1970s up until the early part of this century, allowed certain fans a more esteemed position within their respective communities of taste. However, there are some complications in trying to research what are at times either retrospective or diminished communities. There are difficulties in establishing the physical and stylistic parameters of a scene, and there can be a tendency towards rose-tinted nostalgia. The emergence of Irish fanzines Numerous fanzine writers (current and past), readers, collectors and musicians were engaged with as part of a PhD research project that I conducted between 2011 and 2015. In total, twenty-five semi-structured interviews took place, as well as three focus groups and random surveying. The interviews tended to ask respondents questions around their first encounters with fanzines, how did they feel the format differed to more mainstream publications, what were their own motivations to write their own. Additionally, there was a focus on what role fanzines played in their own contributions to taste communities. The willingness of those to share their experiences illustrates that their involvement in fanzines or independent music scenes was primarily a positive one. Furthermore, I encountered 207 different fanzine titles that were published in Ireland between 1977 and 2014 that specifically covered music6. The empirical research examines 127 of those 207 publications over 257 individual fanzine issues. Copies of the fanzines that were consulted with for this research came from a number of different sources, but the majority were accessed through a single private collection and The Forgotten Zine Archive7 in Dublin. A very limited amount of the archive material had been previously digitised through specialist websites such as irishmetalarchive.com. This signals a preference towards retaining physical copies of are essentially ephemeral publications. Irish and international fanzines are characterised by their roughness; the actual texture of the paper used is an indicator of the cheapness of production, and rejection of the principles of mainstream publishing.