A punk zine (or punkzine) is a zine devoted to punk culture, most often punk rock music, bands, or the DIY punk ethic. Punk zines are the most likely place to find punk literature.
One of the earliest punk zines was the New York magazine Punk. It was started by John Holmstrom, Ged Dunn, and Legs McNeil, who published the first issue in January 1976. The zine championed the early New York underground music scene and helped associate the word "punk" with these bands, most notably, The Ramones. Punk received a flash of attention in England until 1977 when the punks across the Atlantic started making their own punk zines.
An early UK punk zine was Sniffin' Glue, produced by Mark Perry, who also founded the band Alternative TV, in 1976. However, the magazine never applied this term to itself, and indeed it is thought that it did not come into use until the early 1980s. The term punkzine was possibly coined amongst anarcho-punk circles, specifically by writers who objected to the connotations of the word fanzine, believing the first part of the word to imply the slavish following of pop groups, and unquestioning acceptance of celebrity culture.
The DIY aesthetic of punk created a thriving underground press; someone could not only start a band but also be a music journalist and critic. Mark Perry produced the first photocopied issue of Sniffin' Glue in London immediately after that Ramones concert in 1976. In the US, such titles as Punk, Search & Destroy (later REsearch), Flipside and Slash chronicled and helped to define the emerging culture. Such amateur magazines took inspiration from the rock fanzines of the early 70s, which themselves had roots in the science fiction fan community. Probably the most influential of the fanzines to cross over from SF fandom to rock and, later, punk rock and "new wave" was Greg Shaw's Who Put the Bomp, published since 1970. Punk zines were produced in many European countries in the years after the first productions for example the first appeared in Ireland in March 1977.[1]
The politically-charged Maximum RocknRoll and the anarchist Profane Existence were among the most important fanzines in the 1980s and onward. By that time, every local "scene" had at least one, often primitively- or casually-published magazine with news, gossip, and interviews with local or touring bands. The magazine Factsheet Five chronicled thousands of underground publications and "zines" in the 1980s and 1990s.
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