_U_K
Like (I assume) just about everyone reading this, I’m pretty shell shocked at the moment. Things are moving fast, hard, and brutal.
In fact, I don’t want to write my little newsletter at all. I just made the mistake of going on FB for the first time in months (just for a few minutes, but it was enough), and it was the horror show I expected.
So, holding forth regarding current events at the moment feels like adding to the noise. But the reason I started this “newsletter” thing in the first place was…Steve Albini died a while back, and I posted a brief thing on IG about it. It was short and quick and in no way said all there is to say about him, and what he did while he was on this planet. His life, and how he walked through it, and what it meant to people, could not fit in an IG post, nor should it. It needed more time, space, and made real clear to me that “this is NOT the right place to engage about this, but it’s pretty much the only game in town, right now”.
And then I thought “fuck this game. This is a stupid game.” So I decided to try to engage in a different way, and start a substack (but they can be weird too, so I did this). And here we are.
That might seem like a simple story about Steve, or me, but it’s not.
I think it’s a story about what we’re all going to have to do, starting right now, whether we like it or not.
For those of you who don’t know, Steve Albini was a punk/ musician/artist, recording engineer/ writer/etc etc etc. He was in a band called Big Black (another great band with the unfortunate and regrettable name of Rapeman. Steve was not beyond reproach and mistakes, which he was capable of copping to, LIKE A GOD DAMNED ADULT) and later Shellac. He recorded Nirvana’s In Utero (and 500 other records you love, and 500 you didn’t, and probably 1000 you’ve never heard), had a studio in Chicago (my old band Low did a few records with him), and played poker very well. There are a million things he did. With intelligence, care, and a resolute ethical and moral compass. I wish this were the time and place to lay all that out, but it’s not the time or place. Not anymore.
Steve and Big Black were one of the defining figures of the underground culture I cut my teeth on, from the mid 80’s to…I don’t know when it “ended”. Maybe Nirvana’s In Utero. (Yes, when the money showed up.) It’s squishy, really.
But in the decades before that, an entire ecosystem developed, that sprang out of virtually nowhere. It, again, is not a time for splitting hairs or history lessons, but basically it was this: a bunch of people (mostly kids in this case, in distant parts of the country and the world, with no internet to connect them) looked around and said “we need to make something new, something that isn’t there”. The systems were not functioning for them. Somehow, organically, it got built. Never discussed or codified by the people creating it, but they made something. And I was part of it. It wasn’t just music (or even “punk” music), it was zines, and comics, and art, and a political and ethical framework for how to try to survive.
Slowly, the dots connected, and something got built that wasn’t there before. It was not utopia. It was catty and bitchy and full of shit, at times. People didn’t agree on much, and were often too busy acting cool to say what they did agree on. But it WAS a community, and a reasonably functional one, with its own economy and means of communicating, and support systems that moved and worked independently of…how the rest of the world functioned. For a VERY long time, the rest of the world barely noticed its existence. And that was fine. Preferable (the Germs had a record called “What We Do Is Secret”. It was, until one of them ended up in Nirvana). It was underground.
I wrote at length about the term “punk”, and how its been rendered meaningless in my book FOLRATH. It’s dumb, and misleading. But whatever name it’s given, at whatever time in history (see my Surrealist post), that’s the basic impulse, what’s at work. And the core of it is: I’m not a child, not an idiot. I KNOW this is “the way the world works”. I live in it every day. But “the way the world works” is stupid and senseless and greedy and in many ways fucking moronic, so I’m going to go do a different thing. And since it doesn’t exist yet, I (let‘s be honest, WE) will have to build it, or invent it.
Shit is falling apart, rapidly. In a way that’s both shocking and totally unsurprising.
It is, in the most painfully clear way I’ve ever witnessed, also “the way the world works”. And it’s barely fucking functioning.
Is this the same as starting a band, or a music label, or a zine? No. Come on. Am I saying that this current nightmare can be avoided in the same way as it being 1993 and arriving in a foreign town with a broken van and $5, knowing no one and flat on your ass, and stumbling into a basement show and someone says hey yeah, crash on my floor. I know a the bass player from Prurient Crutch who can look at your alternator, if you buy her a few beers.
Why? Because you're part of this community, and that means something. You’d do the same, because we look out for each other (if you're not a dick. But maybe even then). And you would, and you did.
30 years later, that’s what changed my life, and how I (try to) move through the world. Not the music, the bands, the comics and the zines. All those things were just a natural expression of that ethic, that community.
So, maybe I am saying that’s the way forward. Making communities that don’t exist yet, but need to. I am all but positive that for certain things, it might be the only choice that remains, before long.
That might be all there is left. And all signs point to: it’s overdue.
I know this is simplistic.
You know what else is simple? The fact that most people find (and disseminate) much of their information, formulate opinions, organize and co-ordinate chunks of their lives on Meta or X. I do too. Not because I like it, but because “it’s the only game in town”. I want out, so I started a newsletter. How do you let people know about it? Well, there’s Meta or X. I am not fond of that. There’s a microcosm, huh? I’m not talking about my specific deal, here. So deeply entrenched that you have to build a shovel out of air. But it‘s a seam to open. We all know it’s bullshit, and we’re being played for suckers, so what next?
It’s going to take making something that’s NOT there, right now. Do I know how that will work? IF it will work? Hell no. No one knows how or if ANYthing works right now, except the people who are lying to themselves and everyone around them.
And I know that writing about this makes me feel like there could be a way forward, at least in some small way. That “underground” was training wheels, for what’s likely in store. Maybe not even training wheels. It’s all too much, and it’s all too big. But it‘s something.
It’s what I got, at the moment.
—z
I don’t want this newsletter to be a place where “I’m selling you stuff”, or as a means of “promoting what I do”. But at the same time, I make things. The book pictured at the top was a series of zines I put out between 2015 and 2018, that my pal Larry later collected and published in a single volume on his Misfit Lit imprint. It’s an “novel” about my (stupid) youth, in the “underground” culture I just wrote about. It’s wildly entertaining and I’m really proud of it. I’ve sold out of it a few times, and just got a new printing done, so it’s back in the SHOP, if you want my sense of that time and place. What it was like and what it meant. I wrote an “outroduction” to the collection in. 2022, and I feel like it might be the most distilled (and, sadly, still pertinent to right now) thing I’ve ever written. So I’m posting it here.
