Rewind: Punk Planet

ZineWiki

I kind of wish I'd discovered Punk Planet earlier, when I was still slogging through back issues of Spin and Cream in an era glutted with teen junk magazines and corporate rags better suited to baby boomers than punk rock dilettantes. It debuted as a zine in 1994 and ran through 2007. Two years later its website, the place where I experienced my first taste of "online community" closed its doors. Although I did regularly read the magazine, my main exposure to Punk Planet, as subsequently the zine world, was though the website, so I'd like to focus on that.

I bought my first "real" computer belatedly, in my mid-twenties and still viewed the world through the eyes of AOL. PP was one of the first sites I found independently and I quickly latched on to its like-minded community of miscreants. The running joke was that there were no "real punks" on Punk Planet, but a lot of overeducated, underpaid twenty-somethings with too much time to kill. I never  considered myself a punk and physically cringed at writing down the zine's moniker (sorry, more than a decade later I still think the name hasn't aged well), but neither did the brunt of the community. Most of the regulars were fellow music nerds of all stripes and I liked having a space to talk about music, something I rarely got in my moderately conservative, scene-free town.

As antithetical as it seems, their website was also my introduction to zine culture. I still maintain that zine aren't the great equalizer they set out to be: in the pre-internet days you had to live in a place with even a modicum of counterculture awareness and zine-making can be a colossal time-and-money suck. But PP's site led me to a world I didn't know existed, or didn't know could exist on a relatively large scale while retaining most of its street cred.

In the past few years so many great magazines have faltered: No Depression, Paste, Harp, and Venus among them. So retain an internet presence, some just went the way of the dodo. I don't want to turn this into a long-winded screed on "the death of print," but it's easy to forget a time when you couldn't just drop by a band's Facebook page or Google tour dates. And for those of us stuck in the middle of the country, independently produced magazines were indispensable. Punk Planet may have not been the hippest, nor the most underground, but it was a gateway drug for a lot of young music fans.