make someone else money) and things would be fine. Also,
our culture is much, much more commercial than it was
twenty, thirty years ago. Making money tops everything.
Creativity in the service of commerce (commercial art, writing
ad copy, the jingles that we call U2 and Black Eyed Peas
songs) pays well.
But....to answer your question: My friend Ryan Wells and I
started Z Gun because we thought the world lacked a good
print zine and we wanted to challenge ourselves to do a
zine as good as Search & Destroy and Forced Exposure (why
aim low?). We had sketched out a fourth issue but after six
months of just a sketch we both knew it was over. We burned
out (“better to burn out than to fade away”). Too much time,
too many mediocre records coming our way, no desire to do
it just to do it. Neither one of us are nostalgic sorts or care
about the “Z Gun brand,” so figure it dead.
So would you say those
same reasons are what
killed the Static Party
blog that you two did
together? That blog
focused on ‘90s punk
stuff, and there was
definitely a sense that
that material was
overlooked more than
what you referred to as
the other “golden eras”
of punk-- do you still
think that’s true, or has it gotten its due more recently?
What other “golden eras” of music do you think have been
unjustly overlooked?
Yeah, Static Party ran its course. When we started that blog,
we definitely thought that 90s punk was under-appreciated. I
am not sure if we were correct about it being a “golden era,”
as we might have been too close to it to make that judgment.
When we’d go through our collections to find stuff to post on
Static Party, we were constantly running into great singles
from the late 80s, a time period that has a bad rep for music.
That isn’t surprising. There is good music being made all of
the time and the quality to crap ratio is pretty mu