Is This Power Pop ?

On publishing a physical fanzine in these digital days

I‘ve been known to say that the legendary punk fanzine Flipside was the first place I ever got published—but that’s not technically true.

Prior to my article about a local band getting published by Flipside, it appeared in a photocopied/hand-stapled zine some friends of mine handed out around our high school (with a circulation of maybe 50 copies). Most of it was the analog era equivalent of shit-posting as written by wildly unpopular teens, but a few of us liked to write about music too.

The guitarist for the band I wrote about worked at a cool record shop near the beach. It was the kind of place where you could hold up an album in hopes of getting a nod of approval from the slightly older punks behind the counter.

If you got the nod, you definitely bought that album—if you didn’t get the nod, you quickly put it back.

I was only a teenager, much younger than the band I wrote about, but still somehow brave enough to stop by the record shop to show the guitarist my article. His nod of approval was all the reward I needed.

So, I was surprised when he waved me over to the counter weeks later. He handed me the latest issue of Flipside, open to the page where my write up had been reprinted—along…