Milwaukee’s Juiceboxxx just posted a link on twitter to some scans he put up on RaverGeek.com of the legendary Milwaukee rave zine Massive. In all, there are four complete issues of the magazine, spanning five of its six-year lifespan. It’s an important six years too. 1993-1999. This was the time when a good chunk of the world thought that electronic music wasn’t just the next big thing, but the future of music (for better or worse) and magazines like Spin, Mojo, and Rolling Stone were asking question’s like “Is the Age of the Guitar Over?”. From any objective viewpoint, you could see the parallels between rave culture and hippie culture. Would 1997 surpass 1967 as a time of peace, love, music and drug-fueled social change? Would Generations X and Y finally shut the Baby Boomers up by doing it better, with new technology and a totally alien form of pop?

Well probably not. The questions might seem naive or redundant now, and might best be served in parody or homage, twenty years from now on That 90’s Show or MAD MEN in fat pants. The part that I find really important of the rise of rave culture is that it coincides with the rise of the internet, and personal computing technologies as a whole, with the rise of graphic design, of photoshop, and of scanners and copy machines becoming a home appliance. This last thing gets taken for granted, because it’s not so cheap that it’s become available to all the plebes and put Kinkos out of business, but it’s a big deal. Self publishing has flourished to some extent in the last fifteen years, as traditional publishing has floundered.

The result is that the look of the rave scene, an underground phenomenon advertising itself to itself in the form of cheap flyers, zines and websites, tightens considerably.

But because of way that the accessability of technology trickles down from the top, it doesnt tighten uniformly.

Take a look at this early issue of Massive Magazine…

And now take a look at one of it’s contemporaries…

I find it kind of exciting that these two magazines co-existed.  P.L.R.M. looks a lot shoddier, but having printed a lot of zines on my own dime, I wouldn’t doubt that as much, or even more, time and care got put into its production as with Massive. You do not hand staple multiple issues of something that you do not love.

I definitely reccomend going through the zine archives on the site. Some of the articles are laughably misguided (in their view of both the future, and in hindsight, the present). Others turn out to be kinda prophetic. Most of the names are completely unfamiliar to me, but it’s really exciting to see ones that aren’t, and that some of these DJs and musicians are still killing it five and ten and fifteen years after these articles were written about them. Most of the articles are written with a kind of boundless optimism that isn’t present in a lot of today’s media (both big time and the blogosphere).

RaverGeek is also an amazing resource because of it’s flyer archive. I spent over an hour combing through them today, and while I was sad to see there wasn’t anything I remember going to, none of the old Treehouse or Charybdis parties (no Wonka!), there was a lot I remembered.

Rave flyers are, traditionally, some of the ugliest things you’ll ever see. There are two many colors and too many bad fonts and poorly rendered information and always ALWAYS too much information, but there is still an evolution. In fact, some of those old flyers help me to better understand some of the ugly flyers I see today, in that I can see where a couple of these old dogs stopped learning new tricks (feel free to turn the ridicule back at me, whenever I can’t find a designer to make a good flyer, I go way over the top making something ugly just for the hell of it).

Included here are some Chicago parties that seemed notable…..

This one doesn't look too bad, but it had some money behind it. I was about ten when this show happened, far away from being allowed to go to shows, and I still hated missing it. I still have a cassette sampler from the show I found at a used record store, that was the first place I heard "Halcyon (On & On). Check out the inscription on the botton- "WARNING: DO NOT EXPECT A ROCK CONCERT. nasa is a seamless interactive dance experience with talent and audience feeding off each other's energy."

This is from 2009......

2009! The year that we're living in! We've come a long way, baby?

It’s more than a little bit weird. Punk rock started out in gutter. To be fair, it started out in the gutters AND in the art schools, so there was always a tinge of glamour here, a titch of situationism, pop art, and the avant garde, but the tools of the trade were the tools of the poor and they were intentionally that way.  The flyers were all hand drawn, hand screened, or collaged and then photocopied by hand. What started out as a necessity became an aesthetic, so that 30+ years later, with nice professional cameras and editing software available to the majority of the scene, the flyers  are still hand drawn and screened and collaged and it’s not crude in any way, some people have elevated it to a kind of art form.

Okay, they were elevated to an art form a long time ago. Gary Panter, who designed the Screamers logo, is a high fallutin deal in the indie comics world, and designed the set for Pee Wee's Playhouse

The thinking is, no matter how much a new subculture tries to disregard the past and think to the future (or the nihilistic/hedonistic present), the aesthetics that develop, by coincidence, by necessity, or as a product of the hive mind will stick. I taken ecstacy at several raves, and wearing fat pants was never a benefit (but twirling glow sticks was). I’ve thrown my body around several circle pits and shit kicker boots have often saved me a lot of discomfort (conversely, having a finned-out mohawk was often a painful inconvenience). Even as they evolve, rave flyers will always be a product of the 90s,of JNCO jeans and Cross Colours jerseys and Geocities web pages, with a bunch of shit thrown together, but they’re going to keep evolving until they’re something beautiful (to the completely objective, non-nostalgaic eye).