DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture Issue #25

By Emilie Zanger
Published: September 1st, 2005 | 1:31pm

In the introduction to her book, DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture, Amy Spencer lays out the DIY ethos as “the urge to create a new cultural form and transmit it to others on your own terms.” Spencer, herself a former zine writer and record-label founder, traces the origins of DIY way back, beyond the indisputably influential punk rockers and zine makers of the 1970s, such as Sniffin’ Glue’s Mark Perry, beyond the beats of the 1950s and ’60s with their self-published chapbooks, to the sci-fi fanzines of the 1930s. These small print-runs of mimeographed pamphlets were the first instance of self-dubbed “fans” of a cultural product (in this case, sci-fi magazines) channeling their passion into creating their own subculture, and with it, a community.

Spencer takes a social-historical approach, spanning the whole 20th century and continuing right up to the present day. Spencer includes enlightening interviews with some of the guiding members of the DIY community, among them GB Jones, co-founder of famed queer zine JDs, Lisa Jervis of Bitch magazine, Leah Kramer of Craftster.org, and John Hodge of SchNEWS. She focuses on zines and the lo-fi music movements that both influenced and fed off of them, analyzing the cultural and political forces that brought them about and drawing unlikely connections between movements in music, art, literature, and craft. She traces the way each pioneering group shaped and paved the way for later-comers to the DIY world: the skiffle movement of the ’50s, with its jazz influences and homemade instruments, and the ’70s punk scene; the dadaists with their mail art and the collages and appropriation of mainstream cultural imagery often found in punk and riot grrl zines.

Weaving together these diverse scenes from disparate moments in history, Spencer shows how the DIY community is always evolving and never really disappearing, because the human drive for honest, uncensored self-expression doesn’t go away.

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ABOUT THE BOOK
DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture (Marion Boyars Publishers UK)
377 pages, $17.95