Commentary Is Not Culturematic
Jon Savage on punk's fanzines, in England's Dreaming:
The established media could propagandize and comment, but they could not dramatize the new movement in a way that fired people’s imagination. A new medium came from an unexpected source, boosted by developments in printing technology that made photocopying cheap and accessible for the first time.
Commentary is not culturematic.
Coverage arrives from outside, in someone else's format, at someone else's speed.
New scenes stay misread until they invent a form that carries their own tone, speed and internal references.
The photocopier was not better journalism. It was punk in a form you could hold, steal and share.
A fanzine is a meme machine, not a message.
A movement needs more than coverage.
It needs a medium cheap enough to be made badly, in a hurry, by the people living inside it.