DIY
This is a chord... this is another... this is a third... Now form a band.
- Sideburns, December 1976
Do-It-Yourself culture (DIY) is a form of cultural output (and a political movement) that seeks to break down the barriers between producers and consumers, blurring the lines between leaders and followers, musicians and fans. It is an ideology of personal empowerment, born of out of necessity and simple practicality. DIY means making do with whatever resources you have at your disposal, regardless of "talent," learning by doing (and frequently creating new forms of art).
On a political level, the DIY ethic is embodied by organizations such as "Jane" (a clandestine abortion service based in Chicago, IL, prior to Roe. v. Wade). On an artistic level, DIY took the form of handbills, posters, silkscreened t-shirts, and subway graffiti (the "Wild Style").
The late Sarah Jacobson shot her first independent film at the age of 20, distributing copies of I Was A Teenage Serial Killer via mail order.(34) After scraping-together enough money to film on location, using "one camera, one tape recorder, one mic, and, like, four lights,"(35) Jacobson released the feature-length coming-of-age story Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore (a 16 mm film inspired by the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis). To promote the film, Jacobson hit the road in her mother's station wagon, peddling copies 'Not A Virgin all over the festival circuit, eventually landing a spot at the Sundance Film Festival. An outspoken advocate of Do-It-Yourself filmmaking, Jacobson became the film critic for Punk Planet, and later worked a producer for the Oxygen network, before succumbing to terminal cancer at the age of 32.
As a filmmaker, I get my main inspiration from punk rock bands and scummy zine editors. Living at the copy shop, putting up flyers, selling T-shirts and tapes to pay for expenses, sleeping on floors of friends of a friend, working hard to promote my film 'cuz if I don't, no one will, and finding an audience who really cares about what my films are saying, building a relationship that grows stronger with each film I make.(36)
- Sarah Jacobson
Jacobson's work ethic (and career path) mirrored that of Harvey Pekar, the filing clerk from Cleveland, OH, whose autobiographical self-published comic book-American Splendor-had helped set the stage for the alternative comics boom of the eighties and nineties. In 2003, an Oscar-nominated movie brought American Splendor to the silver screen, using stories and dialogue ripped straight from the pages of the comic.
I live real simple and cheap, y' know. I don't have a car, and I eat cheap food, like I might have two hot dogs an' some potato chips for supper. So I started asking around, tryin' to figure out how much it would cost to publish a comic book. I found out I could save up enough bread in a year to publish one. So that settled it... I figured "Fuck it, I'll print it and if I lose money on it, so what?"(37)
-Harvey Pekar, American Splendor
Harvey Pekar could only draw stick figures. But his stories were so compelling that Robert Crumb offered to illustrate his comics.
Likewise, the DIY punk scene grew out of untrained musicians taking the plunge and simply learning by doing. Lack of technical ability became an asset, as punk and indie (independent) bands stripped rock music down to its most basic, primal elements, sometimes inventing their own guitar tunings or unorthodox styles of playing (e.g., R.E.M.'s Peter Buck). Again, this has parallels in the visual arts. The award-winning cartoonist James Kochalka got his start making Xeroxed "mini-comics," despite his supposed inability to draw. Ten years later, Kochalka teaches cartooning for a living, and his song "Hockey Monkey" is the theme song for Fox Television's The Loop.
We were going to break down every barrier-between performer and observer, between bad art and high art, between public and private. We wanted to turn a live show into an hour of Stockholm Syndrome, because when you don't remember who the enemies and heroes are, you get to arrange the world from scratch.(38)
- Lisa "Suckdog" Carver, Rollerderby
A product of "flyover territory," Jim Jones is a typical example. Beginning in 1980, the Nebraska native published 12 issues of Capitol Punishment -a guide to the Lincoln, NE (Capitol City) punk scene. In addition to the magazine, Jones released three cassette compilations featuring music by local bands. Through an underground network of tape traders and fanzines, Jones got to know Bruce Pavitt, then the editor of Sub Pop fanzine, and the two of them started corresponding, exchanging cultural ephemera through the mail. Jones would later relocate from Nebraska to Seattle, where he started Zero Hour, a publishing company.
According to Jones, the primary aim of punk was:
To decentralize everything. You were supposed to destroy the record companies, you were supposed to start your own bands... And you were supposed to create your own media.(39)
Peter Kuper is a cartoonist, whose work has appeared in Time Magazine, Newsweek, and The New York Times. He is the co-founder of World War 3 Illustrated, a political comix anthology.
Peter Kuper:
I was in art school at Pratt Institute with my friend Seth Tobocman [creator of War in the Neighborhood]. And we were both working on comics... There had been a collapse of that entire industry, so there were no more outlets. But he and I had done a fanzine together back in Cleveland, where we grew up. So it wasn't out of our realm to publish a magazine. Instead of waiting for someone else to do it, it was possible for us to find a printer and put the thing together. That was in 1979.
It was never like a vanity press where were we were just publishing our own work... And it seems like something valuable... Because if nothing else, you have created an historical document of your experiences during that time period. Like oral history.
DIY meant booking your own tours, silk screening and gluing-together your own inserts and album covers, designing your own concert flyers, and saving-up a few hundred dollars from your "shitty day job" to release your own records -often recorded in a single take, on minimal equipment, since no one could afford to spend $20,000 dollars to rent time in a professional recording studio (the first Nirvana album reportedly cost $600 to record). The legacy of this is several thousand LP records and seven inch singles, by hundreds of bands, in dozens of cities -all the more remarkable, considering the limits of the available technology (there were no CD burners-and no CDs-back in 1981!).
Tim Mac is a recording engineer who's produced albums for Babes In Toyland, The Melvins, Nashville Pussy, and The Cows.
Tim Mac:
I recorded Green Day for $37.50. I still have the invoice. And then we recorded-over it, and kept re-using the same master tape. That was on a half-inch tape that maybe cost thirty bucks, but-literally-no one had an extra thirty bucks... No one was thinking: 'Hey! Green Day is gonna play at Woodstock!' Nobody was thinking that in 1990. There were so many bands coming through the studio, that you didn't stop and think 'Which one is gonna be big? Which one should we save?' Its a shame that we were all so broke that we recorded-over all that crap!
Another manifestation of the Do-It-Yourself ethic was the group Positive Force D.C. Founding member Mark Anderson explains:
Mark Anderson:
Positive Force is a punk activist group. It was founded back in 1985, a time that some people recall as 'Revolution Summer.' It was quite a simple idea, and that was: punks talk a lot about changing things, but how much do we really do? And Positive Force was created precisely to turn the rhetoric of change into action for change.
In Minneapolis, the Profane Existence (PE) collective has been publishing a quarterly magazine since 1989, mixing record reviews with world news and political commentary.
During the Gulf War and then the Rodney King incident, we were giving out about 4,000 copies locally. We'd go all over. Not just punk stores, but anything even remotely alternative. We were trying to build bridges with other communities.(40)
- Dan Siskind, Profane Existence
In addition to the magazine, the PE collective also manages an independent record label, a screen-printing shop, and a mail order catalog specializing in anarchist literature, t-shirts, records and CDs (primarily "crustcore"(41) and anarcho-punk).
Ollie Stench (né Brad Beving) is a cable television personality and a member of The Ed Gein Fan Club, the "longest surviving" punk band in Minneapolis.
Ollie Stench:
Dan Siskind originally started [Profane Existence] as a magazine called the Minneapolis Alternative Scene. And he interviewed [my old band] Iron Fist for one of the first issues of M.A.S., so I kind of knew Dan a little bit. So between Dan and Mark [the guitarist for Destroy], I started to find out about Profane Existence and the whole crust scene.
It was too political, and too dogmatic, and too metal-sounding for my taste. But I liked the fact that this was an organized group of people doing a very coherent DIY enterprise.
So I totally got behind their philosophy of just completely bypassing everything, and printing your own magazine, pressing your own records, establishing your own dedicated distribution network -globally.
I didn't like their politics, I didn't like their music, but I liked their ideals.
Self-reliance made sense from a political perspective. But there were practical reasons for this as well: many smaller record labels had gotten burned by larger distributors, the most notorious of which, Dutch East India, was (somewhat fittingly) named after a Seventeenth Century colonial trading company (whose historical namesake massacred 11,000 Bandanese Islanders so as to maintain its monopoly over the spice trade).
My favorite trick is [Dutch East India] would make the numeral and literal amounts of the check different so our bank couldn't cash it... You can't have a mistake on every single statement without it being intentional.(42)
- Steve Albini, Big Black
By cutting out the middlemen, Profane Existence was less likely to be preyed-upon by rip off artists.
DIY culture differed considerably from that of the New Left. The underground made no claims to being a mass movement; rather, it celebrated atomism and the role of the individual. Cultural revolution was an organic process, beginning at the local level. Rather than waiting for someone else to do it for you, you simply went out and Did It Yourself:
Similar to a direct action, where 20 people in a rural hamlet can achieve more than 50,000 people on a march in London can, we believe that lots of people doing small gatherings is as effective in creating social and political change.(43)
Mark Anderson:
The fact is, if we don't do this we lose out. Progressives are not the only folk in this contest. Some of these conservative groups are extremely skilled at operating at this grassroots level; motivating people at a grassroots level to support their politics. We have to learn from that, and we have to do better than them.
