Illustration by Michael Renaud
Boston’s weekly paper, The Phoenix, closed down this month, prompting a lot of soul searching and nostalgia here in town and at large about print media, the community it serves, and the end of an era. It's undeniable that something has ended-- but what, exactly?
The origin of The Phoenix, like many alternative newspapers, lies in the underground press of the 1960s. But that link can be misleading. Just as the underground music subcultures of the 80s morphed into the alt rock of the 90s, the alt weeklies of the 70s drew from the same pool of talent and readers as their more radical predecessors, but treated that community as a marketing demographic rather than a potentially revolutionary body. Information about drugs, cops, and music were replaced by articles (and ads) about food, the movies, and… music. The necessities for a drop-out life were swapped with the needs for a lifestyle dependent on free time (students), disposable income (young urban professionals), or both.
Which is not to say political coverage was left behind. On the contrary, alt weeklies like The Phoenix leave a legacy of shrewd political reporting. Especially at the local level, these papers may have offered more purposeful coverage than the scattershot global politics of the underground press (among The Phoenix’s numerous achievements in this regard was breaking the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal in Boston). What didn't translate to the alt weeklies, though, was the fundamental political gesture of the underground press as a model for life outside the mainstream-- most radically, a life outside profit and loss.
Alternative media, for all its efforts to promote ideas challenging enough to exist outside the mainstream, never presented an alternative to the dominant economic model we live in.
In 1969, at the height of the underground press era, “72% of underground papers reported [making] no profit whatsoever,” historian John McMillian points out in his book Smoking Typewriters. “Though they worked feverishly, most of them were jaundiced to the very idea of profit-making.” Many operated as collectives without owners, some without editors. “There wasn’t a hierarchical structure to what we were doing, so anybody could come in and get involved,” says a contributor to Austin's The Rag in the colorful oral history of the 60s underground press, On the Ground. “All the underpinnings were different than they were in straight society,” remembers one of the producers of Chicago's Seed. “There was a saying in the Seed, which I always believed: ‘Work is love made visible.’”
The alt weeklies, by contrast, always had a bottom line. Everyone in Boston knew The Phoenix as a business-- one that had expanded into radio, launching the alternative rock station WFNX (a powerhouse of the format, it was chosen for the world premiere broadcast of Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991)-- and one whose balance-sheet ups and downs were easily traced in the expansion and contraction of its editorial pages. No ads, no articles; The Phoenix made the equation clear.
Owner Stephen Mindich got out of alternative rock first, selling WFNX to Clear Channel in 2012 for $14.5 million. Clear Channel rebranded it as WHBA, “The Harbor” (playing your favorites of the 70s, 80s, and 90s...). The first and last song played on alt rock WFNX was the Cure’s “Let’s Go to Bed”, a lyric that surely sounded different in its initial go-round than in the wake of a Clear Channel deal.
So when Mindich gathered the staff members of The Phoenix together on March 14 and told them they were all out of work effective immediately (and without severance pay), it was a shock, but not exactly a surprise. “As everyone knows,” Mindich wrote in his statement that day, “between the economic crisis beginning in 2007 and the simultaneous radical changes in the media business, particularly as it has affected print media advertising, these have been extremely difficult times for our Company and despite the valiant effort by many, many past and current staff to attempt to stabilize and, in fact, reverse our significant financial losses, we have been unable to do so and they are no longer sustainable.”
Which brings us back to the question, what ended that day, exactly? Mindich is straightforward about it: a business, no longer sustainable from print media advertising. And WFNX, that pioneer of alternative rock? A business, no longer sustainable from terrestrial radio advertising. (Apparently, Clear Channel found its “adult hits” format no more lucrative. The station is now playing dance music.) In other words, alternative media, for all its efforts to promote ideas challenging enough to exist outside the mainstream, never presented an alternative to the dominant economic model we live in. It might even be said that both alternative rock and the alt weeklies did their part to reinforce that model by framing potentially explosive content within a conformist approach to the economy.
The underground-- past and present-- is not about
enrichment or impoverishment. It’s not about business at all.
Without romanticizing the politics of the underground-- I know first-hand there were participants in the underground rock scene of the 80s who were far from anti-capitalist, and the same was obviously true of the underground press of the 60s-- there is a stark difference between the pursuit of profit by alternative media and the goals of the avant-garde. Movements like the underground press coalesce around shifts in perception of daily reality-- “another world is possible,” goes one Occupy chant-- and take root in the imagination. That’s not a struggle for newsstand space or radio play. It’s a change that takes place internally for those who participate-- or witness others’ participation-- in a different way of life. It’s travel to a formerly foreign place, now familiar through experience.
The closing of The Phoenix and the sale of WFNX do not alter our imaginary landscape here in Boston. They do impoverish us as consumers, not to mention producers, of culture, but the underground-- past and present-- is not about enrichment or impoverishment. It’s not about business at all.
That’s what I found special about the underground rock scene of the 80s, when I first started playing in a band. It felt like we were participating in the invention of a different way of life, not a different way to make music. In fact, I never believed we made music in a qualitatively different way, which made the subsequent labeling of our “style” (take your pick: shoegaze, dream-pop, slowcore…) seem all the more cynical as the engines of the alternative rock business got underway. What I believed we were doing differently was never adopted by the major labels, promoters, radio stations, and media outlets that came to represent the "alternative." We were part of a community that seemed to be functioning without regard for profit. “What do you want?” asked the first record company executive who bothered to sit down with Galaxie 500, and began to offer us choices: a new car, our faces on billboards… As he got to the bottom of the list, he suddenly brightened and said: “Oh, I know. You’re in it forthemusic.” (He must have figured he was in for a bargain.)
He still wasn’t right, exactly. Yes, I’m in this for the music. But there’s something else that the alternative rock record exec would never get: I’m in it because, as the hippies of the Seed put it, this work is love made visible.
Alternative rock and the alt weeklies have lived and now largely died by the market. But the underground operates outside of the choices offered by that system. And I see it all around-- among many in music and the arts; in Occupy; in hacktivists who work for internet freedom; in the myriad uncalculated gestures we all make to one another in the course of a day. An alternative media mogul may not recognize the real value of these things, but they are real, and they live on.
Damon Krukowski is currently one half of Damon & Naomi, and you can find him on Tumblr and Twitter. The opinions expressed here are his own.