The Village Voice: Status Ain't Hood

Goodbye to Punk Planet

posted: 6:47 PM, June 18, 2007 by Tom Breihan

I wonder how the people at Vagrant Records feel

Maximum Rock and Roll still exists. This blows my mind. Every once in a while I'll be in Borders killing time, and I'll think about maybe picking up a copy, always eventually deciding that I'd be better off spending my $3 on a cupcake or something. Back when I was 13 or 14, that magazine meant a lot to me, though I almost never agreed with anything anyone ever wrote in it. The people at the magazine saw themselves as protectors of the punk-rock flame, staunch and fusty idealists who sneered at any music that smacked of art or money, of anything other than the protean three-chord gallop that most of the people involved thought punk should be. When the singer of the veteran British street-punk band the Varukers admitted in MRR's pages to liking the Jesus and Mary Chain, it was an earth-shaking revelation on the order of Neil Patrick Harris coming out of the closet or something. There's some chance that I'm just imagining this, but when some guy at a punk show severely beat Jello Biafra and called him a sellout, an MRR editorial actually defended the dude responsible for the beating. The magazine routinely put out jihads on bands like Fugazi and Bikini Kill, bands considered paragons of virtue in virtually every other corner of the world. MRR also employed a fucking amazing cadre of columnists, many of whom usually just told stories about getting drunk and doing dumb shit but managed to make those stories feel like great literature; very few writers have been more important in my life than the Rev. Norb. Nine years ago, MRR founder and dictator Tim Yohannon died of lymphoma, and the magazine's general viewpoint was obsolete probably before Yohannon even thought it up, but the magazine still soldiers on. As much as I loved those columns, the greatest gift that MRR ever gave the world was probably a punk-zine atmosphere so suffocatingly puritanical that a bunch of disaffected kids went off to start Punk Planet as a direct reaction. Today, Punk Planet founder Dan Sinker announced that the magazine was going under, that its next issue would be its last. Apparently, Punk Planet was undone by a shrinking readership and few bad distribution deals. And so MRR outlasted Punk Planet. Unbelievable.

I don't know if I can in good conscience call Punk Planet a consistently great magazine. Their reviews section was always butt-ass terrible, an overlong string of three-sentence snippets on self-released seven-inches that nobody would ever really need to hear. PP usually had some really long and ranty political articles, which I'd usually not read and then feel vaguely guilty for not reading, like I wasn't doing my punk duty or whatever. It also had a sex-advice columnist who usually made sex sound like the most tedious thing on the face of the earth. Still, I'm not sure I can adequately describe how important a magazine Punk Planet was for me. The magazine reacted against the MRR orthodoxy by jumping as far as it could in the other direction; music in any genre was potentially punk enough to squeeze in. I can remember seeing interviews with Mr. Lif and Mouse on Mars and Bright Eyes and Oval, and these guys would be sharing space with regressive three-chord bashers like Swingin' Utters or patron-saint indie-lifer types like Ian MacKaye and Steve Albini and Jello Biafra. And it's not like the magazine exposed me to these artists; for the most part, I was already listening to them, or I'd already decided that I didn't like them. It was just that I'd never thought of these bands in an explicitly punk context before, and it was liberating to be able to feel OK calling myself punk rock and still listening to this stuff. Through middle school and high school, I'd always considered myself a punk, and I went to great pains to figure out exactly what that meant. But as I got older and got sick of hearing a kajillion different iterations of the exact same two-minute song, I came to miss the sense of belonging that the self-imposed label granted me. Punk Planet made it a whole lot easier to grow older but to still consider myself a part of this nebulously defined punk thing, and that was important. These days, I can make my living writing Nelly Furtado live reviews or whatever without worrying that I've become a part of the monster. I'm not going to say that that wouldn't have happened without Punk Planet, but it would've been harder.

For me, Punk Planet peaked around 2000 or 2001. Back then, they had Trevor Kelly, a great interviewer and perhaps the most eloquent defender of MySpace emo working. I really liked a story he once wrote about trying to get Thursday into the magazine despite his colleagues' general skepticism toward major-label pop-emo. He eventually, maybe inevitably, ended up at Alternative Press and recently co-wrote an emo guide called Everybody Hurts that I keep meaning to read. The magazine also had a roster of columnists that I really loved, including Sam McPheeters and Al Burian, the former respective frontmen of Born Against and Milemarker, and Jessica Hopper, one of my favorite writers ever. All of those writers talked with moving eloquence about their day-to-day lives, about trying their hardest to maintain personal integrity and perspective, a constant struggle in the best of times. And even when it was cloyingly sincere, which was probably more often than I'd ever want to admit, this stuff really spoke to me. It's been a couple of years since I've picked up a copy of the magazine. Most of the writers I really liked are long gone, and I'm generally feeling OK enough with my adult self that I don't need that bimonthly shot of affirmation. Still, I always liked seeing Punk Planet staring back at me from magazine racks, bad reviews section and all. I'll miss it. And when Maximum Rock and Roll ever shuts down, if it ever does, I doubt I'll feel quite so bad about it.

Comments

I don't ever recall reading an editorial in MRR defending the guy who beat up Jello Biafra. I started reading like a year or two after the incident, but whenever it was discussed it was treated as something bad and definitely not punk.

Posted by: dkrow at June 18, 2007 7:27 PM

Excellent post, Tom. I worked for years in a variety of 'indie/punk' record shops, and I was always exasperated by MRR, for almost the exact reasons that you wrote about. Holier than thou, needlessly self-important writers whose idea of what was 'punk' was so mono-chromatic and set in stone that the entire process of just reading it was as joyless as much of the music they praised. It made a perusal of The Wire seem like an issue of Jack & Jill by comparison. I'm as surprised as you that MMR is still going; I cannot fathom who, in this day and age, still reads it. Punk Planet at least tried; I would guess that, in the next couple of years, we will be hearing about more and more music-based magazines shutting down due to lack of interest. It's a shame, but something that I've grown to just grudgingly accept.Which, by the way, is a shitty way to have to live.

Posted by: CharlieKane at June 18, 2007 8:07 PM

Jello Biafra lost me when he started publically ragging on his former good buddy Boyd Rice to try to score left-wing political points. I've interviewed Rice and found him to be about as much of a "Nazi" as Iggy Pop is. Actually, Rice is one of the most intelligent and interesting conversationalists out there in the alt-music biz, far more so than Biafra is, anyway.

Posted by: DaHata at June 19, 2007 3:17 AM

Posted by: DaHata at June 19, 2007 3:18 AM

not that i advocate this sort of thing - and i don't but biafra deserved to have his ass kicked. as the kids say, i knew him way back in the day. he was an a pompous ass and hated funk & r&b which are crimes worthy of ass kicking and bitch slapping.

Posted by: ramona at June 19, 2007 2:19 PM

fuck you, ramonahhhhhh

Posted by: dirty dish cloth at June 19, 2007 4:49 PM

Fugazi Were actually the last Band Tim Yo Would let Stay at The MRR House, yes, He hated their music- stripped down Punk Rawk like THE HUMPERS and RIP OFFS were more his speed at that point, but he always maintained great respect for FUGAZI's ethics. I guess the Laundry Mat at Clipper and Castro is/was Guy Picotto's Favorite in the U.S.- he would chill out and do the band's laundry down from the old MRR house each tour. I don't really remember Tim's thoughts on Bikini Kill, but they played Packed shows at Both Epicenter and 924 GIlman several times, both Tim-instigated institutions.

The beauty of Punk Planet is they actually took the " if you don't like they way someone's doing something, do it Yourself" , they didn't like the narrowing of MRR's focus/ Early 90's "not punk" fatwah and created their own thing-I think Tim was trying the same " let's get back to Rock'n'roll roots' house cleaning that aspects of early '70's punk initially was, but by the early 90's punk had grown ( and continues to grow ) so many different branches and facets that it didn't go over well with and alienated people who saw themselves being excluded from the DIY , Underground punk community they were and had been a part of.

Punk Planet was established as a reaction to that and while PUNK PLANET never matched the Strength MRR had and still has a networking conduit for small indie bands, labels, scenes and individuals ( MRR's most important contribution to the Independent music landscape, really) , Punk Planet quickly grew beyond an "alternate to Mrr" to come into it's own Voice and strength of great articles and solid features accross a myriad of indie music, politics and art.

Dan & PP- that voice will be missed.....and Apologies for not running more Ads.....

Ken Sanderson
Prank Records
MRR "shitworker" '92-96, 2004-present

And for what it's worth: The first time I ran into Biafra in SF, he was buying Issac Hayes "black Moses" at a thrift store!!

Posted by: prankrec at June 19, 2007 11:58 PM

i'm far from a biafra fan, but i did see him at a grandmaster flash show in sf around '82.

Posted by: jake at June 20, 2007 10:06 PM

Disclosure: I was a Maximum Rock n Roll columnist around 1996-1997 under the now-embarrassing name Jason Useless, which I think makes me the only person to write for both MRR and Pitchfork (funny, since I was very inessential to both publications).

OK, I'll be the one here to stand up for Tim Yo, at least partially. At the time of the big clampdown, the punk scene had exploded to the point where it was impossible for any one monthly publication to cover it all.

But that's what people expected of MRR. Every label felt entitled to buy MRR ads, every band felt entitled to have their records reviewed in MRR, every punk rocker expected to find out about everything going on in the punk scene in MRR. Anything short of total access to MRR's pages was "censorship", in the hysterically paranoid punk-rocker formulation. It wasn't like some personal 'zine that could cherrypick this band or that record - people expected MRR to be THE punk 'zine of record, a mantle MRR did not choose for itself.

So I really think that some decision had to be made about how to allocate those scarce 128 pages every month. Tim made the call based on strictly musical grounds, pushing aside stuff like Rain Like The Sound Of Trains (whose rejected MRR ad was the flashpoint of the entire hubbub) in favor of bands whose sound was more traditionally "punk". Drawing that boundary enabled MRR to maintain some sense of comprehensiveness within its specific bailiwick.

Obviously, the audience had grown to the point that it could sustain other publications with differing foci - witness Punk Planet, Hit List, HeartattaCk, etc., all of which sprung up as a reaction to MRR. Like so many controversies in the claustrophobic punk miniverse, in the end it really wasn't a big deal.

Personally, I never really liked Punk Planet, although I stopped paying attention to it by about 1997. Up until then, at least, the writing was uniformly awful except for old-school MRR-jumpers like Lawrence Livermore and Sam McPheeters. The review section was especially shitty. And I'm not especially suprised that MRR has survived. Who's still reading it? The same kinds of people who were reading it ten years ago, or twenty years ago.

Also, Tom, you might want to fact-check your assertions on MRR's attitudes toward Biafra's assault. MRR never defended the guys who beat Biafra up - MRR defended itself against Biafra's charges that the thugs in question were incited by MRR's criticisms of Biafra over the years. For real, that's a pretty hurtful charge you're making, so I'm glad you at least prefaced it with "There's some chance that I'm just imagining this".

Less seriously, MRR was the first place I ever heard about riot grrrl, and as I recall BK's records were always favorably reviewed there. I can imagine that Kathleen Hanna's appearance in that Sonic Youth video might have come in for some sniping, though. Ah, to be so innocently certain again...

Posted by: Jason Toon at June 28, 2007 11:37 AM

As if I haven't said enough, I should say that I haven't picked up a copy of anything that could remotely be called a punk 'zine in several years. I have no idea how good or bad Punk Planet or MRR have been in the meantime.

Posted by: Jason Toon at June 28, 2007 11:43 AM

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