In the Mind of the Bourgeois Reader

By L. Palmer

This zine is only a few years old, but it's kind of interesting how fast zines about music (and the internet) can get get dated.

I liked the to do list on the cover (or at leas the idea of it), and was a little disappointed that the zine only dealt with a few of the items. I think the idea of a "to do list" zine has a lot of potential. Maybe I'll steal it. I also liked the lofi style of this zine and the images of paperclips that appear on the top of every page. It's cute.

However, the contents of this zine are less cute. They consist of a lot of complaints about Northampton (isn't that where Alan Moore lives?), how it's a cultural wasteland, how nobody ever goes to shows, how everyone is a scenester, and so on and so forth.

You know what? I'm willing to bet I lived in a worse cultural wasteland than Northampton. It was an industrial town in South Korea that had, as far as we could figure out, no live music scene, one (tiny) art gallery, and not much to do. So what did me and my friends do? Did we sit around complaining about how nobody ever did anything and everyone was boring? Well, yes we did actually, but we also organized events, put out a magazine that told people about things they could do, and tried to make living there more fun. Yeah, it gets old when every event you go to is organized by you or your friends, but it's better to constantly try than to do nothing.

Okay, so that's not all that's in here. There are some reviews of shows and bands (that I actually looked up, indicating that the creator can apparently write about music in a way that makes it sound interesting), but they're often written in a similar style ("why is there such backlash against this band?" "This band are a bunch of sellouts.").

Should more people go to shows (or experience art in some way)? Yeah, probably, they can be fun, but the bitter way this zine is written doesn't really make me want to go to shows in Northampton. Still, as I said in the intro, this zine was made three years ago. A lot can change in that amount of time, and hopefully the scene in Northampton is now great and amazing, leaving the zinesters to create zines about how awesome everything is. Hurray!