Categories: uncategorized
Date: 29 May 2006 10:19:01
Have just read DIY: the rise of lo-fi culture by Amy Spencer (publishers review and useful picture of cover here).
It's an extremely well written whistle stop tour of several aspects US and UK (predominantly) "underground" culture, involving writing and/ or music. It focuses mainly on zines and independent music, but does look at blogging and the electronic media aswell.
Because stuff is in bitesize chunks and it jumps about a bit, from 1930's sci-fi zines to 1990's queercore, 1950's skiffle to 1970's punk it is a really easy, interesting read. It frequently makes you think "well I never knew that", "I'll have to play with the search engine a bit to find out a bit more about that", or "I wonder what they sound like then".
It's one of those books, aswell, which can be read either just as a book or more critically as an academic text relating to art, cultural studies, social movement theory, 20th century social history, third wave feminism, queer politcs and so many other areas.
It's also a book which I think should be mandatory for anybody trying to understand the concepts of "alt worship and emergent church" for reasons that I will go into in another post.