The Mission Statement
Our goal is to take your contributions to musical culture and to put these contributions in front of new eyes. Should you choose to collaborate with us on RAPMM, your work will be made accessible to individuals who are passionate about music and who produce their own content--content intended for other individuals who are similarly committed. In the process your publication and its legacy will be amplified, with all of its contents and contributors exposed to a readership who in turn, has its own readerships.
Like a game of telephone conducted with 21st-century technology, we seek to expand the cultural and economic capital deservedly attached to your work. There is no database in existence comparable to what we’re planning for RAPMM. It’s our goal that inclusion of your publication could lead not only to citations and quotations by other music writers, but also to opportunities for economic recompense elsewhere. Our licensing contract is non-exclusive with these sorts of potential opportunities in mind.
The majority of zines, and many music magazines, were launched as passion projects and not for economic profit. Likewise, our own motivation for RAPMM is a passion for the art, creativity, and historical documentation found in the pages of these publications. We are a not-for-profit organization, and our primary goal is to increase awareness of your publication’s value and its utility for music researchers--a value that has only increased over time--and just as important, to treat content licensees with fairness and respect.
We have a negotiable contract drawn up and ready to share, with our entire budget allocated to paying licensees, in-house labor, and costs associated with scanning and building the digital platform for the archive.
Given the steady growth of research on music magazines and zines (see below) and the ever-growing number of independent documentary films, Hollywood biopics, TV shows, podcasts, and other media focused around both iconic and lesser-known musicians and music scenes, we believe the timing is perfect for a digital archive like RAPMM. This reflects changes in popular music itself, where quotations of the musical past have become routine with sample-based music, mashups, curated playlists, retro-leaning artists, and the licensing of vintage music for film and TV. Simon Reynolds refers to this paradigm shift as “retromania” in his book of the same name (2011).
This retromania tends to focus less on dates, places, and events (like in traditional historiography) than on what music means and how music feels for people across various settings and periods. This is why we think that a resource like RAPMM offers huge value over and above typical scholarly resources like an encyclopedia. Magazines and zines are the best possible sources for these highly personal perspectives: meaning and affect, fandom, group dynamics and individual idiosyncrasies, all informed by various historical and cultural factors.
What’s more, music magazines have always had the most power and impact when aggregated—think of the magazine rack at your local bookstore or record store (RIP)—versus single objects in isolation. This is what we seek to emulate with RAPMM, bringing this experience into the digital realm.
And so we make this appeal to consider being included in our digital archive. In the section that follows we give a small taste of how magazines and zines have entered the conversation on music history, and contemporary culture, across a wide variety of contexts. The ideas, opinions, and perspectives that were given voice in your publication deserve to be a part of this conversion as well. If we can help this to happen in any way we will have served our purpose!
These People Are Saving the History of New York’s Downtown Scene -- Sadie Stein “I always think there’s a certain visionary quality to people who have the wisdom to save the archives of an era,” says Fournier. “And there’s often a certain honesty to those materials.”
A Big Digital Archive of Independent & Alternative Publications: Browse/Download Radical Periodicals Printed from 1951 to 2016 -- Josh Jones “While the future of independent media seems, today, unclear at best, a look back at the indie presses of decades past may show a way forward. Paradoxically, the same technology that threatens to impose a global monoculture also enables us to archive and share thousands of unique artifacts from more heterodox ages of communication.
Toward the Study of Framing Found In Music Journalism -- Jordan M. McClain and Myles Ethan Lascity “The article concludes that music journalism should be a priority site to learn about critical issues (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, celebrity) woven into the popular culture content of such media coverage.”
A Hidden Landscape Once A Week: The Unruly Curiosity of the UK Music Press in the 1960s-1980s, in the Worlds of Those Who Were There -- Mark Sinker (ed.) “In its heyday, from the 1960s to the 1980s, the UK music press was the forging ground for a new critical culture, where readers could encounter anything from comics and cult films to new musical forms and radical underground politics.”
Boy Howdy: The Story of Creem Magazine -- dir. Scott Crawford “Capturing the messy upheaval of the '70s just as rock was re-inventing itself, the film explores Creem Magazine's humble beginnings in post-riot Detroit, follows its upward trajectory from underground paper to national powerhouse...then bears witness to its imminent demise following the tragic and untimely deaths of its visionary publisher, Barry Kramer, and its most famous alum and genius clown prince, Lester Bangs, a year later. Fifty years after publishing its first issue, [Creem] remains a seditious spirit in music and culture.”
Cataloguing and Description of Fanzine and Zine Collections in American Archives and Libraries -- Jeanne Swadosh “Because fanzines and zines capture individuals’ relationships to political and social realities, it is in the best interests of the library and archival communities to preserve fanzines and zines as research materials.”
Preserving the Image of Fandom: The Sandy Hereld Digitized Media Fanzine Collection at Texas A&M University -- Jeremy Brett “Fanzines have been important aspects of fandom for decades [but] whole generations of media fanzines are disappearing and with them, the creative record of this colorful phenomenon. Texas A&M University is involved in creating a unique digital repository consisting of thousands of scanned and archived [film and television] fanzines dating from the 1960s to the present.”
Fill a Void: The DC Punk and Indie Fanzine Collection at the University of Maryland -- John R. Davis “Fanzines have long been a critical communication tool for fans of everything from science fiction to comic books to celebrities. These self-published periodicals allow fans to write—often at an exceedingly granular level—about subjects that the mainstream press typically ignore.”
Media Form and Cultural Space: Negotiating Rap “Fanzines” -- Murray Forman “Rap fanzines disrupt the traditional content of the teen fanzine, in the process creating a new cultural space within which meanings might be generated.”
Travelling the New Grrrl Geographies -- Marion Leonard “Using riot grrrl as a case study [this chapter] will consider how a subculture can maintain a sense of ‘community’ when its participants do not meet in the collective space of a club or music venue, but are broadcast over a wide geographic area. [...] Consideration will be given to how [zines] described and promoted ideas about riot grrrl and to what extent they shaped the ‘movement’ itself.”
The Fanzine Discourse Over Post-Rock -- James A. Hodgkinson “This chapter [shows] how the virtual scene of post-rock is discursively created in music fanzines.”
Kerrang Magazine and the Representation of Heavy Metal Magazines -- Simon Jones “By considering how representations are formed over over an extended period and in relation to particular heavy metal icons, it is demonstrated that certain arguments and assumptions about masculinity and male privilege in heavy metal culture are oversimplified.”
Spreading the Message! Fanzine and the Punk Scene in Portugal -- Paul Guerra and Pedro Quintela “This article adopts an approach that goes beyond the Anglo-Saxon reality and looks at fanzines as communities founded around a cultural object--producing texts, photos, and other materials regarding the Portuguese punk scene from the late 1970s to the present.”
Not For You? Ethical Implications of Archiving Zines -- Kirsty Fife “Zines often exist as the only representation of ephemeral and otherwise undocumented spaces, which makes them incredibly valuable as primary source material....if zines are archived, it is imperative that archive workers are critically thinking about and incorporating the originating politics of zine culture into protocols for cataloguing, access, interpretation, and use of these materials.”