Zines like Tim Yohannan’s Maximum Rocknroll, which he founded in San Francisco to promote punk and leftism as two sides of the same coin, understood politics and culture as inseparable. As Yohannan, a 1960s hippie-turned-punk, argued in the zine’s first issue in 1982, “[i]f punk is to be a threat, different from society, then any so-called punk who flirts with racism and sexism, proudly displays ignorance, resorts to physical violence and is afraid of knowledge or political action, is not a threat at all, but has gone over to the enemy[…] It is the ideas behind the music, the dress, the ‘zines that are important, not the leather-clad bands and haircuts.” Many similarly understood that punk could challenge conservatism, capitalism, and war through direct action and artistic dissent. As part of the previously mentioned Rock Against Reagan tours, punks protested the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, staging “die-ins” criticizing nuclear war and chanting a slogan—“No war, no KKK, no fascist U.S.A.!”—that originated from a punk song: “Born to Die,” by MDC (Austin and San Francisco). The same slogan is still in rotation at protest marches today, with “no Trump” swapped in for “no war.” Punks in Washington, D.C. founded the activist collective Positive Force in 1985, which held benefit concerts for progressive causes, delivered meals to low-income elderly people, and organized “creative protests[...] done either alone or within other actions.”
As Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra declared in the 1981 song “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” “Punk ain’t no religious cult / Punk means thinking for yourself!” Within punk communities, “thinking for yourself” often meant making, reading, and responding to zines. For an underground culture with scant coverage in the mainstream media, zines were vital. Constituting punk’s rich print culture, zines, because of their D.I.Y. nature and disconnect from considerations of profit, could be as irreverent and free thinking as the misfits who made them (not unlike Current Affairs). Typically xeroxed and stapled by hand, zines were distributed through the mail, at shows, and at whatever record stores would stock them; they were often sold for a few dollars or less, traded for other zines, or given away for free.
Let’s look inside a few. Maximum Rocknroll (1982–2019), the most prominent punk zine in the 1980s, crammed as much tiny typewritten text into its cheap newsprint as its margins would allow, even as the monthly exceeded 100 pages by the end of the decade. Its (in)famous letter sections and editorials were punk’s public forums, hosting contentious discussions over what punk was, if punk was “dead,” and how one could best be a punk. Its scene reports, which related the goings-on of local scenes, underscore zines’ practical function as punk’s newspapers of record. Assembled by a large team of self-identified volunteer “shitworkers,” MRR was what D.I.Y. looked like when scaled up.