GB Jones on zines

The next installment in my series of interviews about the zine's past and present comes courtesy of G.B. Jones of Fifth Column, a beloved Toronto post-punk band. On top of making cool music, Jones is also known for her art, films, and, of course, zines.

When I talked to Jones on the phone for this interview, she just kind of dived into it and we went from there.

G.B. Jones: I guess I started working on zines in the 1980s. I was helping my friend Caroline Azar [also of Fifth Column]. She was doing a zine called Hide with her friend Candy and they would put out a paper issue and it would always be accompanied by a cassette tape.

So we were working on that and what was really exciting about that was, because we were in Fifth Column at the same time, when we would tour all around Ontario to London and Peterborough and Ottawa and Guelph – I think we did the same five towns – and we would meet a lot of interesting bands and we would end up writing back to them and asking them to send a recording to put on the cassette tape. So it was a great way to be able to stay in touch wtih people that you’d met, especially for us as a group.

We started meeting bands who would come to Toronto to play. It just became this way to put out this document of a scene that existed at that time of groups that were playing together and other people that were doing things together, like filmmakers and photographers who Hide also interviewed.

We were talking to people who were outside mainstream culture at the time. You coudln’t go to Hot Topic and pick up your punk t-shirts. Green Day weren’t on top of the charts. Punk was really underground.

And we were also not really a quote-unquote punk band; we were a post-punk band doing weird experimental stuff and we were interested in other people who were doign something unusual.

There was no internet then, as hard as it is for people to imagine what it was like at that point. You really had to write to people and write letters and wait to hear back from them. But it kind of made it more meaningful because if somebody is taking the time to write to you, and vice versa you were investing a certain amount of energy.

Now, if you write an email and someone writes you back ten minutes later, it’s not the same investment of energy. You don’t have to go to the post office.

Fanzines were incredibly important. They were truly a source of information. They had actual addresses and information on msuicans and photographers and other fanzines you might not have heard about. You can’t really even estimate how important that was. It was really one of the few sources of information to find out what was going on in this world that you would not read about in mainstream magazines or, god forbid, on TV, unless it was some misrepresentation of how evil and horrible these kids were.

It was filling a role of artistic and musical expression, and information and companionship. Oftentimes you’d be living in an area where you couldn’t really connect with people who were like-minded. So it really filled so many different functions.

That’s really where the scene existed for lot of people. It didn’t exist in their town. They wouldn’t be going to shows in their town; oftentimes the scene would be happening in the mail.

In a sense that has a lot of similarities in the virtual world that we have now.

LW: I'm really interested in asking about your zine manifesto, the one you wrote in the '80s with Bruce La Bruce. It's often cited as an important piece of writing for zine culture.

G.B. J: I think in a lot of ways the punk scene by that point had become more, how can I say this? I think at the beginning punk was really challenging and wildly non-conformist in so many ways: socially, sexually, in terms of gender roles and women doing an incredible amount of creative work.

Then, at the point that we wrote that manifesto, things had returned to a more traditional, more conservative kind of scene, especially with the advent of the hardcore scene.

It was very much becoming about the days of having four boys in the band and worshipping them and you saw less women in bands and less alternative sexualities or lifestyles.

I think it was kind of a big shocking for people to read that manifesto and realize that there were all these people out there who didn’t think that the present state of punk was all that great, and that it really wasn’t as threatening to the mainstream as it prided itself on being.

I would say it was basically just a mirror of the mainstream world except it had different music and different hairstyle. And then of course we got tons and tons of letters from that, so obviously there was a certain significance.

Although I should say there were groups then that were challenging things, that didn’t conform to stereotypes, but I think the fact that we were wrote a manifesto was very challenging for a lot of people who wanted to think they were very progressive but who’d managed to exclude a lot of people from their scene, like queer people and people who were outside of established gender roles.

So it was like were presenting that as a challenge to them.

LW: As the ‘80s were coming to an end, did you have any observations or feelings on where zine culture was headed?

G.B. J: It seemed like one really useful function of zines is to be able to question all of the complacency and all of the things that mainstream society and also so-called alternative culture really take for granted. I think it’s really good to have these voices that come out of nowhere, basically, to really challenge things, and I think there’s always room for people to do that.

Their voices don’t always necessarily get heard in MRR or even mainstream publications, so I think that’s a role zines will always be able to fill because there will always be a need to challenge the status quo.

And it’s really interesting because kids I’ve been talking to recently are tlaking about how much the riot grrl scene and the queercore scene meant to them, and how that’s kind of vanished.

Obviosuly there are people still doing stuff and there’s a certain amount of activity on the internet, but it’s not really quite the same thing.

I guess they still feel a real need for that kind of thing.

As much as there was a whole bunch of activity at that point in time in the `80s and `90s and things during that period of time changed a lot and created a scene where all these different kinds of people could participate, I think a lot of kids nowadays don’t feel like there is that kind of scene nowadays, and I think they feel a need to recreate that kind of scene.