I was hanging out with my friend Genevieve a few days ago, as she was going through her music collection to find stuff she didn’t want anymore. One album she came across was a split EP in CD form from a little no-name label, from two obscure bands that probably aren’t around any more. Four of five songs from each band. On vinyl, each band would have had a single side of a 7-inch record to themselves here. CD technology allows us to put it all on one disc the size of a coaster. Which is great for those of use who don’t have room to spare to store records.

Now, in looking at this EP, I noticed a few things. One was that the album had no bar code on it, not even as an added-on sticker after production. Whoever had done this was expecting to only sell them perhaps through the mail, or at shows. The second thing was that, going through the linear notes, was the surprising lack of any sort of “real” internet presence for these bands or this small label. There was contact information posted in the form of personal e-mail accounts, but that’s about it. No label site, no Myspace.com account or Purevolume site, nothing.

Nowadays, you can surf a site like Myspace and find hundreds, if not thousands, of small-time independent punk rock record labels using Myspace to have a solid online presence, to say nothing of the thousands upon thousands of bands that form every day and put up a Myspace page for themselves to establish an internet presence, sometimes without even having any recorded music. The rise in general “computer-savviness” of younger people these days has also brought about such labels and bands finding their own regular websites and domain names on their own, thanks to cheap internet site hosting and a growing level of knowledge in how to create websites. It seems almost impossible for bands to exist in 2006 without some sort of internet presence to showcase their music, to allow for getting contacted for booking, and even for potential label A&R people to seek them out as the “next big thing”.

Even five years ago, such a phenomenon would have been impossible. The long tradition of punk and hardcore traces itself back to DIY and non-mainstream press. Independent zines, newsletters, and catalogues, flyers, and word-of-mouth networks go back to the days of the infamous Black Flag criss-crossing America, playing anywhere that would take a chance on a punk band, and letting their friends know that such venues existed. The Internet boom certainly helped in expanding communications, allowing for an internet version of the book Book Your Own Life (www.byofl.org), and websites for bands so that they could get their music out to people who had never heard of them before.

In 2005, members of several long-running and defunct East Coast hardcore punk bands such as Ensign, Ex Number Five, Mouthpiece, and Lifetime, banded together to form The Fire Still Burns. The Fire Still Burns have, so far, released a 7-inch single on Koi Records, as well as an EP on Blackout! Records. This is just in their first two years of existence so far. TFSB owe much of, if not all of, their rise in popularity thanks almost exclusively to Myspace. Epitaph Records band Matchbook Romance, formerly known as The Getaway, were “discovered” when Epitaph head Brett Gurewitz heard an mp3 posted on the internet punk news site punknews.org. He flew to the East Coast to see them perform and signed them to his label, arguably the most well-known independent punk label today. Another newer Epitaph band, I Am Ghost, proudly boast on their Myspace profile about having only played 4 local shows before getting noticed and signed, selling, as Myspace states, over 20,000 copies of their Epitaph debut .

And yet, in comparison, you can find bands such as Tragedy. The infamous Portland, Oregon, hardcore punk band formed in 2000, and is known for rarely giving interviews, putting their material out on their own label (Tragedy Records), and maintaining no internet presence at all. They have no label site, no blogs, no Purevolume site, no band site, no Myspace (beyond several fansites). They have rarely given interviews and even the contact information listed for Tragedy Records on their releases is sparse. And yet, despite all of this, they still tour and have a dedicated fanbase, having toured as far as Europe.

Beyond their label, Jade Tree Records’ profile on their own website, the only place to find out information about Toronto’s Fucked Up is their blog site, found at http://lookingforgold.blogspot.com. An unusual site, in comparison to other bands, but until recently, it was the only place to find out any information about Fucked Up. Even then, the blog has only been active since November of 2005. Like Tragedy, Fucked Up, who formed in 2001, has a solid fanbase thanks to a slew of vinyl EP releases over the years and constant touring.

How could this happen? As I’d sat there on Genevieve’s couch, staring at the poorly-drawn cover of this EP, I was reminded of what it was like when I first began to dip my toes into punk rock, looking through catalogues and linear notes of albums, and finding almost no information on the internet about punk rock at all (this was back in 1997-1998, when I lived in Athens, Greece, and punk rock was strange enough to frighten the Greek shopkeepers on my block to avoid me as I walked around). I depended on paper mediums and word-of-mouth to find anything out at all, from new releases to tours to basic info on where my favorite bands were from or if they were even still active.

It makes me feel incredibly old and jaded to think this way, but the almost constant overflow of digital presence that the punk rock culture now has seems to deaden it. On one hand, it can make it easier for kids to access and find out about, which for young, alienated and misunderstood kids in the middle of nowhere, far from bustling culturally-overflowing places like New York, is incredible. However, it also does seem to reflect an expectation of almost instant recognition. I remember thinking that a band that could get the money to afford internet hosting and post tour dates outside of local clubs (you can’t flyer the whole nation!) had really “made it”. Now, anyone with a modem and some badly-done promotional pictures can create a website for their band, and they expect that someone will hear or see them and make them big, the next AFI or Green Day or Matchbook Romance.

The internet has almost taken all of the work out of independent, DIY culture, out of the constant touring and, in a way, of the personalization of independent underground networks of contacts and bands. And in the end, sometimes the work itself is all that we have left to set us aside from the mainstream ideals that we’re all about not being a part of.

Tags: DIY, essay //