SUPERDOPE 1.0 – WHERE WE TRIED TO CONQUER NEW MEDIA

A few weeks ago I posted the first issue of my 90s music fanzine SUPERDOPE from 1991, and made a promise that eventually I’d get all eight issues that I’d published scanned and posted here. I will keep that promise. Yet there was an “issue” of the magazine that virtually no one ever saw, and that I plum forgot about until I unearthed it from a keepsakes box last month. In 1999 I was a grad student in Seattle, and had published Superdope #8 – a print issue – a few months previous. I was on the fence about actually painstakingly putting together another issue (and paying for it), and thought that maybe I’d reconfigure things a bit and publish an “email newsletter” instead. You know why? There were no blogs. That’s right – no blogs. You don’t remember, do you?

So my “SUPERDOPE 1.0” idea lasted all of one “issue”. I only had about 30 email addresses to send it to; I remember going into the alt-banana-truffle newsgroup and spamming everyone there with this as well, to little effect. The long and short of it was that I still wanted to review records & CDs I liked, I just didn’t want to have to do any heavy lifting. Luckily a few years later Blogger and Wordpress and all that started up, so I shifted these energies to a blog called AGONY SHORTHAND. In the meantime, here’s a scanned Word document containing the reviews I emailed to an uncaring world back in Spring 1999. I still like these records, too. Click on it to make it larger and more readable: