Commentary Is Not Culturematic
Jon Savage on punk's fanzines, in England's Dreaming:
Established media could comment on punk but could not dramatise it. Cheap photocopying gave the movement a medium capable of firing people's imagination.
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.