Total Sell Out Now On Sale!

By Emily Pohl-Weary

(published in the January/February 2001 issue of This Magazine)

I'm sipping a sold-my-soul-to-the-devil cup o' mega-chain coffee. Why the hell didn't I put my foot down about going to the locally-owned coffee shop next door? Here I am, being interviewed by yet another conservative mag journalist about just how cute and quirky zines are. Have I finally done it this time--sold myself right out of the underground?

I've been making little folded-and-stapled pubs for about six years now. I was drawn to the do-it-yourself art world precisely because I was sick of trying to fit into a society I didn't agree with. (My mother raised me to criticize mainstream culture through a Marxist value system, planting me firmly in the role of social outcast.)

Now, I'm increasingly called on as an "expert" on underground culture and have to make decisions about exposing myself to the mainstream media more. I'm not really sure the underground needs another spokesperson and it makes my comfortable position on the margins just a bit less comfortable.

I'd like to believe that it's possible to appeal to a broader audience and still maintain my ethics and ideals. But I had to know that reporter was never going to understand why me and two other women make Kiss Machine. And I shouldn't have been surprised when, to make his piece appeal to a businessy crowd, he turned me and our zine into a familiar saleable product - the MTV stereotype of the slacker fanatic. He never intended the article to be about the substance of my work, it was about how hip zine culture is.

Like old-school hip-hop, DIY ethics are all about creating art for personal reasons, not financial ones, and keeping it accessible and socially relevant. There's a moral code that comes with joining a community of people who bother to spend long nights photocopying and then distribute their work themselves. It's all about compromising neither the message nor the medium, and rejecting the lure of big media's we-rule-the-world benefits.

After the interview, I spent a lot of time worrying about whether I should tell my zine friends about it. DIY activists subject people the mainstream deems more media-friendly to fierce scrutiny. Talking about how so-and-so is a sellout is as central to the zining experience as purchasing your first long-reach stapler. For zinesters and other DIY types, you can sell out without even making a cent. At times, I've seen it approach lynch-mob mentality. People are only too ready to jump to conclusions about zinesters who bask in the limelight. But that's not always fair. The anonymous creator of the zine Infiltration calls himself Ninjalicious in public, and goes to enormous lengths in order to avoid attention. Ninj subscribes to the philosophy that even if his zine becomes famous, he's not about to be dragged along with it -- he never reveals his real name when he's being interviewed, wears a mask to cover his face, and shies away from the camera. Recently, he's decided to stop doing interviews at all, because he prefers to let his zines represent him.

This scrutiny can be a bit of a pain, but ultimately it's a good thing. It forces those of us who are (un)fortunate enough to get caught in the spotlight to question our motives, and analyze our actions with the same moral code that we use to examine others. Selling out of zine-land essentially means that a person has chosen profit or self-interest over their efforts to decentralize the mega-media and provide a forum (however tiny) for marginalized voices to be heard.

I wasn't exactly keeping it real sipping coffee with the mega-media guy in the mega-coffee outlet. But what option did I have? Tell him to piss off? Hand over my zine and my rep for him to do with as he wished? Try to manipulate the end result?

Instead, I showed up, sucked back some java and spouted my usual anti-capitalist, pro-indie view of culture and art. And I have to admit, kind of enjoyed the attention - and the free coffee!

In the same way that it's good for scrutiny to be turned on zine makers who flirt with the mainstream and accept its privileges, sellouts can paradoxically strengthen the DIY community by making it turn a critical eye on itself, and reaffirm its position outside the status quo. The zine community can only shape its countercultural ethics by bumping up against the things it opposes. Maybe that's OK sometimes.