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With Scissors And Glue You Can Make Something Unique

A ‘zine is a labour of love.

Posted 25th September 2009, 7:20pm in Features, by Gareth David
With Scissors And Glue You Can Make Something Unique A music blog can be a beautiful thing. A hub of interesting and informative writing, opening eyes to music old and new. A place to write ridiculous amounts about bands and music that no sane thinking person would ever commission you to write and that will probably never be read by anybody else who cares as much as you do. A training ground for those who may want to be paid for their words one day, or just a soapbox for your passions to be vented. That’s a great thing.

But I’ve personally come to a point where there’s too much. The fact that anybody can set up a blogspot or a wordpress or tumblr in less than a minute, can be incredibly liberating, and it’s great that anyone can so swiftly have a voice and a platform on the big, wide internet, but I’m unsure of how many people actually have anything to say. The blogosphere (yuck) is, more than ever, awash with badly misreported news articles lifted from more established web-zines, and offering no personal insight or opinion on top. Their main point of worth seemingly being that it supplies the author with the line “I write a blog” for their canon of small talk.

A ‘zine is a labour of love. It’s hour upon hour manually loading a photocopier, fixing paper jams, with staples hanging from your fingers. It’s a germ of an idea that comes together over time. That takes so much more effort to see to fruition, that if you ever truly thought “nah, this is shit, probably not worth it” then you’d not allow yourself to suffer to the end. Because with scissors and glue you can make something completely unique that doesn’t work within a wordpress stencil and doesn’t look like anything you’ve read before. Because a ‘zine gives you so much more opportunity to pick your audience and write exclusively for them. A ‘zine begs to be read from cover to cover and tell a complete story along the way. There are no keyword searches here. Though I’d understand these points would be of detriment for a lot of people.

I am not stupid or willfully indie enough to say ‘zines are better than blogs. They’re completely different; and can both serve completely different purposes. Your blog-posted thoughts on whatever album leak you’ve just downloaded (safety wink) mightn’t be relevant by the time you’ve got enough material to print a ‘zine. There’s no comparison as far as immediacy and ease are concerned. But there is no romance in html. And to cradle 24 sides of warm A5 in your arms is so much more satisfying than to copy and paste a url into a facebook message.

And if you wasted three weeks making this waste of paper that you always knew was going to be used as a beer mat more frequently than it was going to be read, then you must have meant it, and you’ve given it heart. There’s a lot to be said for heart.
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