The Hardcore Fanzine book by Gabe Rodriguez examines the hardcore zine titled 'Good and Plenty' between the years of 1989 - 1992. It looks at those issues and takes apart its their design, typography and the pre-internet era of underground zine culture which was in fact invented by this genre of music.
Good and Plenty has a personal significance to the pair: Christopher started reading it in high school, having discovered it through a friend who, like him, was getting into skateboarding, punk rock, and hardcore. Not long after, he started his own zine, which proved to be the first of many, and began acquiring a collection of hundreds of others covering similar themes. Being part of the hardcore scene at the time meant that he was continually designing album covers, posters, catalogs, logos, and making band videos, and he went on to pay for his design education using the money he made from distribution, including an MFA at Yale.
“Making zines basically was about applying and acquiring skills [in graphics, photography, layout and so on] even if you don’t realize it at the time,” says Christopher.
While stylistically and production-wise hardcore scene zines have a fair bit of overlap with their punk forebears—and of course, were produced with the same purpose of documenting the bands and areas at the heart of the genres—where they differ can be seen by zooming in on the typography.
The 1930 typeface City (designed by Jorge Trump and first used in hardcore on 1982 album The Kids Will Have Their Say by Society System Decontrol) and Princetown (released in 1981 by British designer Dick Jones for Letraset) were prominent in straight edge album design and by bands for their logos, as Kristian Henson’s essay in the book, “Vernacular Typography,” points out. The “adoption of minimal design” subverted a “firmly Northeast American aesthetic,” Henson writes, adding that hardcore fans “were creating a subculture laid out by a serious commitment and intensity that projected itself through the design of album art. Their aesthetic was the complete antithesis to my assumed notions of what was punk.”
What Henson means by that antithesis is the adoption by a small community of straight edge kids in New England of Varsity jackets instead of leather jackets, and Nike hi-tops instead of chunky black boots—which soon spread to hardcore communities nationwide. “It’s hard to explain how crazy this was,” says Henson. He adds that the conflation of punk and everyday suburban culture “managed to really aggravate the scene” as it moved to New York’s Lower East Side.
“Every designer may not be a zine-maker, but every zine-maker is a designer.”
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