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Joseph Rathgeber: anticon and Beyond

anticon was a time, a team, a blip on a screen, 
       a group, a label, a stable of men.
anticon was a movement, a moment, an underground scene,
       a business, a base, a stance against the status quo.

anticon was a voice, a mic, a 4-track backing track,
        a collective, a corrective, a fix for the pre-millennium tension.
anticon was a concept, a conspiracy, a crew on a mission,
       a shout, a scream, a call out to listen

anticon was a scam, a hoax, a marketing plan destined to fail,
        a process, a project, a product for sale.
anticon was a wave, a wormhole, a wish for acceptance.
        a way forward, a way out, a way away from the present tense.
The bottle of humans that was anticon: doseone, Yoni Wolf, Controller 7, Sole, DJ Mayonaise, Odd Nosdam, Alias, pedestrian, and Jel.

Call them a collective, a crew, or any and all of the above, anticon started with collaborations and compilations from different points on the map (Maine, Cincinnati, Chula Vista, Chicago, and parts unknown), but on the cusp of the new millennium, they got it all together in the grey area of the Bay Area. Now, underground scholar Joseph Rathgeber has compiled their definitive history.

One rapper I talked to called him “a professor of word salad,”1 but Rathgeber’s loosely aphoristic, epigrammatic style wanders somewhere between the manic musings of Dave Tompkins and the futuristic philosophy of Rammellzee. Like me, he matriculated in the zine trade and graduated to books.

Joseph Rathgeber: As a zine press, Caltrops has been actively documenting and analyzing the underground rap renaissance since 2020, disseminating handmade zines direct from the kitchen table to the rest of the world. Catch Us Before We Fall Off inaugurates Caltrops Press as a publisher of hip-hop books.2

From 1,200 Hobos to 1,200 pages: The definitive history of anticon (Caltrops Press, 2026)

Rathgeber’s Caltrops zines have been a steady wealth of in-depth analysis of some of the most obtuse recent releases by some of the most complex and compelling underground artists of the decade: billy woods, ELUCID, Fatboi Sharif, Armand Hammer, and ShrapKnel, among others. Yo, kid kinda nice.

doseone: Joe [Rathgeber] is part person, part pen. Someone who grows because of other’s writing and grows wilder still within his own. It’s an honor to have our creativities intertwine…3

One could estimate the impetus of anticon’s beginnings in the game, but like some lo-fi, hip-hop, jazz version of Genesis or The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, Apogee (doseone, Yoni Wolf, Josiah Wolf, and Mr. Dibbs) represents the direct precursor to anticon’s most known and most creative period. They recorded everything and yet the only tape one might find is a bootleg, a testament to the sporadic and ephemeral nature of the hydra-headed genius(es) at work here. Their improvised, theatrical rehearsals and performances—decidedly interchangeable designations—collected the scraps of previous projects and composed the compost from which grew others. The later assemblies of different members included Deep Puddle Dynamics (doseone, Sole, and Alias, as well as Slug of Atmosphere and Rhymesayers Entertainment; another candidate for the coalescence of the collective), Themselves, cLOUDDEAD (another one), Why?, subtle, Reaching Quiet, So-Called Artists, Greenthink, and so on—row, row, row, rotating rosters. It was all a beautiful mess at best, a catalog of risks, “some careless, some calculated,”4 with pregnant promises of vision and never getting paint on spectacles again.5

“My dream would be to see a movie of just live studio footage of some of my favorite records being made with no commentary or anything, just a good behind-the-scenes look — all the arguments and the epiphanies.”6
— Yoni Wolf

Rathgeber has ingested that mess, investigated that dream, and interrogated those responsible—all of it and all of them, which resulted in a 1,200-page, two-volume mega-tome. Part prose-poetic pastiche, part oral history, Catch Us Before We Fall Off: A [Ch]oral History of anticon. (Caltrops Press, 2026) is the kind of deep dig you wish someone would do on all of your favorite artists, bands, collectives, labels—an excavation of all the burial sites, an autopsy of all the bodies. For fans of all things anticon, this is the definitive history, “an audacious document of a pivotal moment in hip-hop history.”

Jel: It wasn’t being played on the radio, but it was bumping at the Scribble Jam.7

The lore is true. Scribble Jam is another gravesite in this ruined geography, another node in this invisible network. Starting in 1996 in a parking lot, Scribble Jam hosted and boasted some of the most legendary battles in hip-hop’s short history. Emcees, DJs, beatboxers, and B-boys all battled for underground supremacy. Artists like Juice, Eminem, and Rhymefest, as well as anticon artists like doseone and anticon-adjacent artists like DJ Abilities, Eyedea, and Sage Francis made or built their names exchanging weaponized wordplay and battle-sharpened skills at Scribble Jam’s many hectic melees.

Archived by any means, many of anticon’s early documents were recorded on 4-track tape machines, what Rathgeber, channeling Marshall McLuhan, describes as “medium and message, DIY, unbridled bedroom creativity spinning around magnetic tape spools.”8 I, too, once compared the “primitive and unadorned nature” of anticon’s output to adjacent lo-fi indie-rock outfits hiding behind the same wow and flutter: Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Hood (the latter of whom would collaborate with members of the collective). In similar spirit, theirs was not an aesthetic choice but a necessary one. With an excess of output from the rhymers-only room, the 4-track bridged the bay between process and product, between the ether and something tangible, between table talk and a cassette tape. The hiss was the ignorance of which bliss is made.

“I tested my chassis on the road and drove faster accordingly.”
— doseone

Dan Hancox: doseone is the label’s most out-there, artful rapper, and his ghostly, nasal rhymes are the centrepiece to the bizarre compositions of Themselves. The distorted drones and drum samples, clunking pipes, feedback and abrupt time signatures of “It’s Them” and “Live Trap” do to hip-hop what Columbus did to world geography. Such experimental creations will not be to everyone’s tastes, but repay repeated listening—with not a gold necklace in sight.9

Alias: Who the hell’s that guy?10

Rathgeber describes doseone’s style as “an invitation to get lost in the funhouse,” an invitation “to be riveted by the skillset, rapt by the rapping,” and adds, “sometimes the mental plane which doseone operates on feels unreachable, his messages utterly abstruse.”11 dose’s style is varied, verbose, sometimes sing-songy, sometimes chanty… It’s shanti, shanti, all over the rap; divisive, polarizing, an affront to all those frontin’ on the mic.

If music fandom is radically subjective, then hip-hop fandom is even more so. I’ve been in many discussions where mentioning anticon was anathema, I’ve been in several situations where admitting to liking them was an irreversible faux pas. To quote Hua Hsu in The Wire, anticon “embodies all the fascinating contradictions which both sustain and complicate the culture.”12 As pedestrian puts it in his Foreword to Catch Us Before We Fall Off, “In the vacuum of crew, molecules of burning gas will as a rule go solo. And so, a posse cuts both ways, loosens into them and you, now uniquely incomplete.” And from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark…”13 Deep lines were drawn, not in sand but hella underground.

Their underground was “twilit tunnels and secret passages”14 from trading tapes to downloading songs, from CDs to mp3s. Their underground saw a seismic shift, the tectonics of an industry in upheaval, where ever-new forms of bootlegs were balms and “clandestine comforts.”15 Their underground was both burden and boon.

Sole: Underground music was tape trades and Napster. The whole groundwork for a market existing for the label came out of widespread sharing of that music.16

anticon was baptized by bandwidth, they stepped from one era to the next over the cataclysm of the internet. Adapting to the new tech as they adopted it, anticon took advantage of the early bit trade. Downloaded on the down low, spreading at the speed of P2P, their music moved from around the way to around the world through wires and wormholes alike.

“It was as if we came home from a semester at sea with nothing to eat but dreams.”
— pedestrian

Rathgeber finally describes the anticon aesthetic as “a fleeting moment in time—rap-as-literature; sonics-and-phonics thoroughly plundered; altruistically allusive and relentlessly referential; an irreverent and foolish yet holy pursuit of art.”17 Maybe it was just “a fleeting moment,” but maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the attitude. Maybe it was the Sole/El-P feud. Maybe it was just too many halfway crooks in their kitchen. Whatever it was and whatever you think of them, they followed their own path accompanied by their own drums. Like the Wu-Tang Clan before them and Odd Future after, anticon came together for a brief period, jumped in the deep puddle, splashed spectacularly, rippled to the edges, and then subsided.

dosone: The whole paper towel was wet with our experiment.18

anticon was a time, a team, a blip on a screen, but if you’re interested in indie discourse and rhymes outside the lines, Rathgeber’s Catch Us Before We Fall Off interjects anticon back into the history, the conversation, the cypher.

.

Joseph Rathgeber. [photo by by Ananda Lima]

Roy Christopher: You and I came to this writing racket making our own zines. Aside from that, what’s your background?

Joseph Rathgeber: My mother recently found my fourth grade report card. My teacher, Ms. Kroll, wrote, “Joseph is doing as little as possible.” That was an accurate assessment. When it’s come to education and employment, I’ve been unmotivated and directionless. Near the end of high school, I had to be reminded to apply to college, and I only worked enough (washing cars) to afford a weekly plate of fries from Six Brothers Diner (R.I.P.). When my parents threatened to kick me out of their home, that Atmosphere lyric that goes “I rather live in a tent than bust my ass to pay the rent” was all the ideology I needed.

Ultimately, I got an English degree from a state school here in New Jersey. Again, no thoughts of a “career” in mind. I was reading poems, plays, and novels anyway, so it made sense to do so in the pursuit of a degree. I also had a concentration in Creative Writing, which just means I took a lot of workshop classes and minimized my workload even further. I found plenty of time to do what I really wanted to do, which was record rap music. I also started writing about music in the form of record reviews for Tiny Mix Tapes. Anyway, with no career options to speak of after college graduation, my girlfriend (now wife) and I decided to pursue the “alternate route” to teacher certification. Basically, you find a teaching job at a Catholic or private school and complete night classes during the first year of employment. That job also paid for me to get a Master’s a couple years later. They didn’t even require it be a Master’s in Education, so of course I went for English. I was encouraged to continue toward a PhD or MFA, but, again, the motivation wasn’t there and neither was the money.

At that point, I was still paying off my student loans from undergrad. When I first started writing about billy woods’ music in 2021, he made some good-natured crack about me being on sabbatical for the semester, and then something about me being the department chair. I like to think of that compliment as my framed PhD diploma. In reality, I teach high school kids how to analyze literature. I also constantly urge them to consider diverging from their predicted life path. It’s noble work.

Various Caltrops zines. [author photo]

RC: Aside from the zines, you’ve written other books in the past. Why a book on anticon and why now?

JR: I’ve been pretty vocal about how this anticon book is a decade in the making, so “why now” feels interminable. When I first conceived the idea, it was because I had great affection for the music that emerged from anticon’s salad days, roughly between 1996 and 2003. I had some thoughts about hip-hop and otherwise that I wanted to explore through them and their work, but at some indeterminate point the vision for the project began to swell. I like to be thorough, and so my vision for the project went from something manageable to monstrous as I decided I had to write about all the music from that period and tell the stories of all the players.

Eventually I decided to have the players tell the tale themselves. Suddenly, I realized I was juggling both an oral history and a critical commentary. The former required that I learn how to make contacts with artists, conduct interviews, and integrate those transcripts into a narrative. Bear in mind I had no real experience to speak of and had to slowly prove my credibility to these people, not to mention earn their trust as I ventured deeper into the project. Ultimately what resulted was an unwieldy conglomeration. The result is Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home biography of Dylan and Michael Gray’s Song & Dance Man analysis of his body of work in one. It’s Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces subcultural commentary and the oral history of Please Kill Me combined.

I’m a fool, frankly, for even attempting this. Nonetheless, I got it done and I feel more than good about it. A more direct answer to “why now?” would be that over this decade of working on the book anticon has been absent from the story. Retrospectives of late ‘90s/early 2000s underground hip-hop include the likes of Fondle ‘Em, Rawkus, Def Jux, SoleSides, Hiero, and others, but anticon has been routinely and, in my view, deliberately omitted. The book examines why that is while inserting them back into that conversation in the process.

RC: How did you get into zine-making in the first place?

JR: Like most, I’ve always appreciated the DIY nature of zines. As I became more and more disillusioned with publishing poetry and fiction through the conventional means and processes, I decided life’s too short to fill out submission forms and wait months or even years for responses, be they rejections or acceptances. That traditional way worked fine for a time, specifically when I was young and seeking validation from institutions and perceived authorities in the field. But zines and chapbooks were more immediate, and the medium matched the urgency of the art.

I will say this: I have received far more validation, praise, and opportunities in the years I’ve been doing things myself and on my own terms. And I’m always going to prize the tangibility of zines, the intimate pasting, folding, stapling, and mailing of an artifact that is transferred to someone else’s hands. Those things will last. Podcast episodes will soon be lost in the ether.

Rathgeber at Gutter Bar. [photo by Suchi Jalavancha]

RC: What’s next for Joseph Rathgeber and Caltrops Press?

JR: Personally, I’m champing at the bit to write fiction again. Between the anticon books and the underground hip-hop renaissance I’ve been documenting over the last six years, I’m very eager to open up the notebook with all the story ideas I’ve had to look away from until these current projects reached a conclusion. I have been writing plenty of poetry over these years, though, so I’m sitting on a couple of manuscripts and trying to figure out what to do with those. I also miss doing public readings.

As for Caltrops Press, the plan is to continue publishing books about hip-hop. The next one will be a book about the work of Armand Hammer and billy woods and ELUCID as solo artists, also written by me. That’s basically done and will come out Spring 2027 if, as DOOM once said, everything goes according to plan, man. I want to open up the press to proposals by other writers, but I’m intimidated by anything “business” related and don’t have the wherewithal to send out 1099s and all that shit, so it’ll have to be people I’m close with first. Caltrops, as a zine, just hit issue 30, and I don’t plan to stop there.

Notes:

  1. Interview with the author, September 15, 2026. ↩︎
  2. Joseph Rathgeber, “Book Release: Catch us Before we Fall Off,” Caltrops Press Substack, September 8, 2026. ↩︎
  3. Interview with the author, September 15, 2026. ↩︎
  4. Joseph Rathgeber, Catch Us Before We Fall Off, Vol. 1, Caltrops Press, 2026, 2. ↩︎
  5. cLOUDDEAD, “I Promise Never to Get Paint on My Glasses Again” [10” EP], Mush Records, 2001. ↩︎
  6. Quoted in Roy Christopher, “Yoni Wolf and Richard Adams: The Sound of a Handshake” (pp. 211-215) in Roy Christopher (ed.), Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes, Seattle, WA: Well-Red Bear, 2007, 214. ↩︎
  7. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026. ↩︎
  8. Rathgeber, 2026, Vol. 1, 334. ↩︎
  9. Dan Hancox, “The Download,”  New Statesman, London Vol. 18, Iss. 849, March 7, 2005, 43; The gold-chain thing is a whole other story. ↩︎
  10. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026, 555. ↩︎
  11. Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026, 100. ↩︎
  12. Hua Hsu, “Anticon: Hip-hop’s Oddball Alliance,” The Wire, #200, October 2000. ↩︎
  13. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, New York: Putnam, 1962, 61. ↩︎
  14. Rathgeber, 2026, Vol. 1, 17. ↩︎
  15. Ibid. ↩︎
  16. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026, 567-8. ↩︎
  17. Rathgeber, Catch Us Before We Fall Off, Vol. 2, Caltrops Press, 2026, 496. ↩︎
  18. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 2, 2026, 565. ↩︎

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Literary Indulgence Book Festival

The third annual Literary Indulgence Book Festival was a blast and a blessing! I participated in a “Voices from the Classroom” panel with with Sherna Spearman-Lott and PeTika Tave. We talked about teaching and technology and read bits from our books. Below is a short clip of me reading a bit called “Nomads and Monads” about the affordances of different screens from Chapter 4: Time of the Signs.

Thanks to Sherna, PeTika, Marie Morton, and everyone who came out to share and support reading, writing, and learning.

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The Unexplained #8

The eighth issue of “The Unexplained” came out sometime during the summer of 1988. I remember being very proud of this issue. Looking back at it now, I can see the beginnings of the end of the first wave of our little pastime.

The growing tension(s) between the hardcore riders and the event organizers spilled out into the open at the two contests covered herein: NBL events in Rome and Jeckyll Island, Georgia. Call it a generational divide, a youthful restlessness that recognized that “freestyle” contests were kind of silly, or just the cyclical nature of so-called action sports, but it wouldn’t take long for such events to disappear completely.

The-Unexplained-8Download

Anyway, It looks like I’d figured out how to properly fill an issue with stuff. In addition to the BMX contests, there’s local (southeast Alabama) skateboarding coverage, an interview, zine and video reviews (the Plywood Hoods’ underground classic Dorkin’ in York), rumors, and more.

It’s also evident with this issue that I’d learned a bit more about cameras and copy machines. I hope you dig the results.

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The Archipelago featuring Roy Christopher: Against the Human

Versatile journalist Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou recently invited me to appear on his show The Archipelago on Stegi Radio in Athens, Greece.

Yannis introduced the episode as follows:

There are some cultural products that are based on the human experience. Some others draw inspiration from beyond the human experience. And then, there are some who are against the human itself.

The music of industrial metal band Godflesh is such an example. And when Roy Christopher began to write a book on the band’s seminal album Streetcleaner, his project gradually over time became Post-Self, a philosophical treatise on the non-human.

In this episode, Roy Christopher, cultural critic, Instructor at the University of North Florida and author of the book Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, talks about the music of Godflesh, the philosophy of that which is not human and the great legacy of Marshall McLuhan.

Many thanks to Yannis, the Archipelago, and Stegi.Radio for having me. Listen to the full discussion below or on the Stegi.Radio site.

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Peter Relic: Bust a Move

Peter Relic and I were rivals. Unbeknownst to him, for decades, we were arch rivals. Coming out of high school and coming out of undergrad, I wanted to be working in magazines. My heroes — Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, and Spike Jonze — all worked in magazines — the coolest magazines. When I was in high school in the late 1980s, they helmed the BMX and skateboarding magazines that my friends and I read religiously (Freestylin’, Homeboy, etc.). When I was in college in the early 1990s, they were doing Dirt (a.k.a. Sassy for boys) and Grand Royal (with the Beastie Boys). One day in the masthead for an issue of Dirt, I saw the name Peter Relic for the first time. He was the intern. He was the “new kid.” He was exactly where I wanted to be.

Me and Peter Relic anti-socially distancing in Savannah, March 2020.

I told him all of this when we first met in 2019. I’d moved to Savannah to teach at the Savannah College of Art and Design where Peter works in the publicity department. I told of my envy seeing his byline in XXL, Vibe, Rolling Stone, and Rap Pages. We laughed and rode bikes and talked about music and zines and poetry. During my three years living in Savannah, we had many long talks and many bike rides. We even collaborated on a few things.

Since I moved away, Peter finished his book, Bust a Move: Matt Dike, Delicious Vinyl, and the Hip-Hop Hits That First Conquered Pop (Citadel, 2026). As I wrote about it,

Part mystery, part oral history, Bust a Move exposes a hidden hub in the hip-hop network and the characters it connected on the cusp of the 1990s. This is the secret story of music obsessive Matt Dike and a Who’s Who of those who knew him, as well as a fresh look at how LA Loc’ed and loped onto the map of rap—Relic’s writing is as delicious as the vinyl.

Thankfully, once we met, our decades-old, one-sided rivalry didn’t hinder our friendship.

Roy Christopher: How has our rivalry affected your writing career?

Peter Relic: Rivalry is usually healthy, right? You know, we both came up in the decade called the Nineties, when there was this super lively ecosystem of music magazines, and we wrote for some of the same publications, so I had seen your byline for many years before we met. There was always a vibrant ontological angle to your writing that represented a break from the norm. It was refreshing. You inspired me to go a little deeper with my own investigations. It also meant that when we finally met, we had a foundation for a friendship.

RC: True, and I think it’s hilarious that you told Mike D “no” to helping with the Beastie Boys Book (Random House, 2018).

PR: Well, you know, I knew Mike D a bit in the Ill Communication era, and even dog-sat for him once when the band was away on tour. Great dog, Rufus. And yes, it’s true, Mike D did reach out to see if I could work with him on the Beastie Boys Book. That must’ve been 2016, and I had just started a new full-time job at the time so had to politely decline. Beastie Boys Book turned out to be a real treat, I think — both Mike and Ad-Rock are gifted storytellers. (Side note: the guy who wound up working on Beastie Boys Book, Keven McAlester, is also an intrepid documentary filmmaker. Keven’s doc You’re Gonna Miss Me, about Roky Erikson, is well worth your time.)

RC: So, the book… How did you happen upon this amazing and surprisingly untold story?

PR: What Delicious Vinyl achieved is one of the great DIY success stories of all time in music — really in all art and business, full stop. I had no idea going into it how crazy it was. I think the huge success they had in 1988, 1989 meant those songs achieved a sort of cultural ubiquity that had a flattening effect — you know, there couldn’t possibly be much of a story there. In fact, the opposite proved true.

Then there was a moment around 2010, when the world was treating hip-hop as this music of historical importance, and telling the story of the culture in books and in documentary films at a volume and with a degree of seriousness that seemed significant. I started thinking about who was important, and why, and I noticed that the story of Delicious Vinyl — the key LA label that cross-faded the culture into the mainstream — was being overlooked.

I approached Delicious Vinyl cofounder Mike Ross and said I’d like to write a book. Mike’s cool, he said sure, go for it. He also told me that he hadn’t seen his former creative partner and Delicious Vinyl cofounder Matt Dike since 1994. I thought that was odd. Little did I know that the mystery of Matt Dike would become an obsession, a sort of hypnotic beat that drives the entire narrative.

RC: The story really reads in part like a mystery. Why are you telling it now?

PR: These songs — “Bust a Move” by Young MC, and Tone Loc’s hits “Wild Thing” and “Funky Cold Medina” — have far, far outlasted the shelf life of most popular culture nuggets. Every generation seems to love and get up to these songs, and they still trigger something, they inspire us to have fun. There’s a fantastic fight montage in that newish Sydney Sweeney boxing movie Christy set to “Bust a Move,” and it’s like, why this song when there are millions of other songs to choose from? There’s an enduring resonance. I wanted to dig into the creative process and see if there was some sort of secret about how these songs were made that would illuminate a key moment in hip-hop culture. The revelation floored me.

RC: The whole music journalism world has changed a few times over since you and I were grinding out stories. Who do you like writing about music these days?

PR: Great question. We’re at an age now where I’m reading young writers writing about artists I don’t know. There’s something really edifying about that. I had never heard of the band Twen before I read a great piece by Taylor Lempke on Pop Passion.

Peter Berry writes incisively about Vince Staples, which continues to incentivize me to enjoy his music. Ramona Park Broke My Heart (Motown, 2022) is such a dope and daring album. Is it a coincidence that Vince Staples is a rapper from LA who banged as a teenage Crip, just like Tone Loc did decades earlier? It’s all connected.

To mention one more: there’s a young Spanish writer named Andrea Abreu whose novel Dogs of Summer (Astra House, 2022) totally rocks. It’s 180 pages of lip-of-the-volcano hilarity and madness starring these pre-teen girls who are obsessed with the bachata band Aventura, and the narrator describes their songs as “whisking my insides around with a stick.” I love it.

RC: Sounds visceral. What’s coming up next for Peter Relic?

PR: A book of poetry with Margins Press out of Ojai, California. A book about two airplanes colliding over Tybee Island in 1958. Watching the cucumbers grow (not a euphemism). Speaking of vines and taproots, shout out to Vaishali at Holy Cow Vegan whose beet salad with garlic oil makes summertime divine. Yo, Roy, bring that beet back!

This newsletter is supported strictly by its readers. If you enjoy my work, consider becoming paid subscriber or buying one of my books! Thank you!

Out to Launch

Bust a Move is available for preorder now from Citadel Books. The move finally busts next week, and there’s a launch event on June 30th at Delicious Pizza in LA. Peter Relic will be in the building!

Thanks to Peter for answering my questions and for being a better friend than rival.

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Front Wheel Drive #47

This one’s kind of weird as a .pdf. It had two covers, so originally half the zine was oriented one way, then at the centerfold, you’d close it, flip it, and start again from the other side. I scanned it all the right way up though.

FWD47Download

This one’s from sometime in 1997.

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RAD RAG

I present the following with more than a little embarrassment, but history is history and youthful folly has its way with all of us.

One day during the summer after our ninth-grade year, I went over to my friend Matt Bailie’s house to ride bikes and listen to music. There’s nothing unique about that. That’s what we did most days during those summers, but the latest Freestylin’ Magazine had just come out, and inside was a two-age spread on ‘zines.

Opening the magazine to those pages, Matt said, “We could do this.”

So, we did.

Rad Rag, our first attempt, was done on a coin-operated copy machine at a local drug store. I walked up and down the strip mall it was in changing ones for dimes from sympathetic merchants to pay for it. As such, we couldn’t do two-sided copies, so every page is blank on the back (also hence the odd number of pages).

Anyway, here’s where it all started: the first zine we ever made as teenagers.

Rad-RagDownload

More of these as I scan them all for the anthology, Collecting the Kid: Zines, 1986-2026.

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Front Wheel Drive #46

I’ve been slowly, quietly compiling an anthology of my zines, and this was one I didn’t have a copy of myself. Front Wheel Drive #46 was a ten-year anniversary issue of sorts. It came out sometime in 1996, a decade after my first zine in July of 1986.

FWD-46Download

The working title for the anthology is Collecting the Kid: Zines, 1986-2026 (with apologies to El-P), and it includes ‘The Unexplained’, ‘Front Wheel Drive’, and a bunch of one-offs and further failed attempts.

Special thanks to Craig Gates for scanning and sending this issue my way. Many more of these to follow.

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Aging BMX and Skateboarding Zine Kid Brings The Mediated Pain

An interview with me by R.U. Sirius for Mindplex Magazine.

Originally published on Mindplex Magazine, this wide-ranging interview starts with my two newest books and then goes much deeper into their origins, my research, and my writing in general. Many thanks to R.U. Sirius, luminary of the liminal and co-founder of Mondo 2000 Magazine, for the thorough read and thoughtful questions and to Mindplex Magazine for publishing the results.

Read on!

Image by Tesfu Assefa for Mindplex Magazine.

Roy Christopher is, in his own words , “an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid,” with a history of writing and publishing about life, music, film, and everything else from a perspective that might be best labeled post-punk, although no label quite captures his restless textual extravagances and insights. Christopher has two books currently in circulation and both of them chart the post-everything mad bad dangerous and intriguing zeitgeist we’re all experiencing in the delirious 21st century.

Book one: The Medium Picture is a cogent Post-McLuhan romp through the mediums of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and the speedy subcultures that emerge, conjugate and mutate as young people find the others using style, tools (well… skateboards) and (dare we mention?) content. In the words of technoculture writer Howard Rheingold, “Roy Christopher is old enough to recall vinyl, punk, and zines — social media before TikTok and smartphones. The Medium Picture deftly illuminates the connections between post-punk music critique, the increasing virtualization of culture, the history of formal media theory, the liminal zones of analog vs digital, pop vs high culture, capitalism vs anarchy.” Yes, all that.

Book two is a stranger animal. The title — Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body — might lead my Mindplex readers to assume that this will be another exploration of the obsession manifested amongst various stripes of transhumanism and singularitarianism with escaping or transcending “the meat” and, surely, about the cyberpunk genre’s dark-but-fascinated critique of this same pursuit. And yes, that’s part of it. But the main title here is post-self not post-body — so where does that take us?

You might be thinking of AI — the project fantasized by some fanatics that would have us giving up the human self — giving up consciousness of selfhood by sacrificing it to our technological betters. That’s not what’s driving the book. There are stranger and more original multivalent narrative impulses at work here.

And I’m not herein referring to the pursuit of transcendence of the self via drugs, technology and mind tricks as practiced by the likes of John Lilly, although that too is part of the rumination.

But here’s where we finally land — the book at first and at last takes up the desire to end the self by the only method known to work… by dying. And, as it transpires, possibly by taking all the other humans along. It’s a dark trip for our dark moment, navigated partly via references to that master of understated deadpan text revealing 20th century western human perversity, J.G. Ballard. It doesn’t stop there. Christoper brings the pain with an emotive exploration of black metal. Here, aside from Christopher himself, our guide in this trek through the darkness of black metal leading you to varied visions of absolute pain and annihilation is Justin Broadrick, founding member of Godflesh and a central figure in extreme metal and hardcore industrial music.

I interviewed Christopher via email and began by discussing The Medium Picture.

Image by Tesfu Assefa for Mindplex Magazine.

R.U. Sirius: The Medium Picture doesn’t just present a coherent narrative of how the mediums have been the message — how they’ve altered how we share and receive mediated communication and creative work — it indicates a kind of firehose or changing medias — all piling up upon each other, all pretty much remaining present in some form however diluted in popularity.   And this got me thinking about Napster which happened just after the magazine’s dissolution and seemed the final proving point that digitalization was changing everything.



But the other weird thing is that Apple, with the iPod, engineered a kind of retrenchment. The salability of recorded music seemed broken, and the convenience and reliability of Apple Music brought it partly back from the dead… but just barely.  In any case, what would you say about the not-so-straight line of alleged progress in medias and how we relate to them?

Roy Christopher: By analogy, I have been taking an evolutionary view of media technology. Darwin saw genes as waves of possibilities, passing from species to species in random configurations. The species themselves weren’t the point, they were mere collections of genes interacting with each other in their environment, assemblages of traits and trivia. Species are organizing principles, much in the way that media platforms are. An LP is around 45 minutes long—23 minutes per side. A CD is over an hour (80 minutes). That’s why a release by a band in the 1960s is typically shorter than one from the 1990s. The technological limits not only determine the shape, size, and duration of the artifact but also our expectations of it.

RU: I did a search for artificial intelligence in the book. It’s scarce. So, what’s the addendum to The Medium Picture. Is AI … or what they’re calling AI…  becoming the all-in-one app? Or will it be a great diversifier?…  or just some clusterfuck where anything useful, artful or fun goes to turn into slop? 

RC: I’d like to think one can apply the archaeological and ecological approaches to media in The Medium Picture to emerging media as well. What passes for AI will be like the other epochal changes we’ve seen in media. Remember in the 1960s when television was going to kill movie theaters? Remember in the 1990s when the internet was going to kill the book? None of these changes happen as fast as we think they will. Theaters are still around, and books are doing fine. MP3 trading and streaming haven’t prevented vinyl records from selling more now than when they were the primary format for music—even at four times the price! So, yeah, AI will eventually change almost everything, but it will take longer than we think.

RU:  I was pleased to see Malcolm McLaren’s subversive take on new media possibilities (audio taping particularly) acknowledged in The Medium Picture. Reading the book, it almost feels like punk as a culture literally had to happen. So much of the semiotics (skateboarding particularly) around the use or misuse of new technology feels like punk.

Is there an inevitability of young people finding their own use for technology… with attitude? (Hip hop/rap included) Or did punk save us from an intolerable dullness by some acts of will?

RC: There’s something inherently punk about youth, and young people are always at least two steps ahead of the co-opting capitalist marketing machine. Taking what’s there and making it your own is the very spirit of punk, from the repurposing of turntables in hip-hop to the affordance mining of skateboarding to any other intentional coloring outside the lines.

RU: You spoke to, read and studied a lot of writers and thinkers about mediation and the impact it’s had on humans recently and in the past. Of all the people you came across or spoke to in your research, is there one that really blew up or illuminated your sense of the medium picture?

RC: In the Preface to TMP, I write that if I were to follow through with the book’s cover image, inspired by Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, and name TMP after the three people who shaped it, it would be called Gibson, Eno, McLuhan. William Gibson’s thought hangs heavy over a lot of my work. Nearly every time I come up with a way to theorize and think about the process of technological mediation or cultural evolution, I find Gibson got there first. Brian Eno’s thinking on music and media is both vast and deep, and I’ve been yammering about his idea of edge culture for years. He kindly granted me permission to explore and expand on it further in TMP. I can only hope I did his thought and gesture justice. And anyone who tries to do what I attempt to do has to contend with Marshall McLuhan, whose name and thought are evident in all of my work. If you want to study media and mediation, he’s the starting point.

But to answer your question more directly, it was talking to Ian MacKaye that not only helped make some of the connections stronger but provided new ones as well. MacKaye is the cofounder of Dischord Records and the bands Minor Threat and Fugazi, two of my all-time favorites, among others. His views on the importance of independence, keeping personal archives, punk’s reliance on paper, and more aligned with and realigned the arguments in the book. I am proud that he became a larger part of it than I’d imagined at the beginning.

RU: The coming of “AI” accounts for some of the apocalypticism of the current zeitgeist. But you apparently believe AI as a media is still part of the continuum of mediated formats. So how would you relate the issues and questions and possibilities raised by The Medium Picture to what I read as the apocalyptic spirit of the newer book? Is there a “medium picture” connection to Post-Self? 

RC: They are definitely connected beyond by my being the author of both. There was even a time when I tried to put them together as one book. That exercise convinced me definitively that they were separate statements.

If The Medium Picture is about how we mediate our worlds with our technologies, then Post-Self is about all the ways in which we wish we could leave our frail human bodies behind for the mediated world we’ve created. If one is about mediated ontology, the other is about escaping into it.

RU: Moving into your book Post-Self, there seem to be two peculiar narratives running through here. One is the posthumanity that was, in some ways, popular during the cyberpunk/transhumanoid 90s, and then this very dark exploration of what Mark Dery in his intro calls the Misanthropocene.  This kind of captures dual au current moods, given that the earlier version of posthumanity — transcending the meat via technology lingers and even accelerates with the enthusiasms of billionaires and tech bros — and then, by the end of the book, it seems as though Post-Self suggests a satisfactory solution might be to end embodied existence by classical means … by killing everyone in a giant black metal apocalypse. Have I got that right?

RC: That’s a blunt summary, yes.

Post-Self is a survey of the escape routes out of our human bodies, an exploration of all the ways we attempt to expand or evade the limits of our corporeal cages (e.g., machines, drugs, rapture, death). By ending with death and extinction, it concludes that we can’t. There is no escape. This is not an exit.

In the Afterword, I tried to bring it all back to a positive note, pointing out that though we can’t escape, at least we have each other. We’re all in this together.

RU: It’s a wild ride. 

Let’s start with the meat as it was understood by both dystopian cyberpunk novelists and by cyber-transhumanist enthusiasts. There are various states of rapture we can experience  — from the intellectual pleasures of abstract thinking to the pleasures of psychedelic or meditative altered states. The body, in this context, can be a drag. Pain, incapacitation, ad infinitum interrupts or stops the rapture. Softening or ending the tribulations involved in embodiment seems like a reasonable pursuit. 

So where do we draw the line? Do we not cure diseases? Not triage an ER visitor? 

RC: Some people wanting to escape their body via any means doesn’t mean some others don’t mind taking their chances. Every day someone makes decisions in answer to your questions. The line is drawn by a multitude of contingencies—legal, ethical, economic, religious—and they’re all sliding scales.

RU: Okay, what do you think are the boundaries regarding offering relief or escape from aspects of messy embodiment?

RC: We all do what we can with what we have, right? Isn’t that the burden of the body in one tidy cliché? The same goes for the augmentation, which means the rich always have more. And that’s where the contingencies come back in. Augment to each their own unto their economic status.

I think everyone should do whatever they want with their own bodies as long as it doesn’t impinge on the limits of the next body over.

RU: You jump fairly quickly into a discussion of Ballard’s Crash and Cronenberg’s film version of the book. What are the resonances with the current moment?

RC: Ballard’s brilliant satire of our technological death-drive mixed with our sex-drive—the “drive” part being literal as the car is a special case—can be mapped onto most technologies since. Look at the contemporary conversations around smartphones, social media, and AI. If you invented something that killed as many people daily as the car, you wouldn’t be able to manufacture and sell it, yet the impact of these technologies is still a net loss for us. Ballard (and Cronenberg) illustrated this using the simplest analogy and most widespread technology.

RU: Also, in terms of Cronenbergian body horror, many narratives revolve around pursuing enhancements and alterations. Horror and fascination seem intertwined with a kind of ambiguous desire for a less prosaic future. It’s all in some ways experienced by many contemporary people as aesthetically pleasing.

RC: The cyberpunks looked to prosthetics as inspiration for future elective extensions to the body—extensions as a matter of want instead of need. Benjamin Bratton points out that insurance companies are the real designers of cars. It’s a spectrum that runs from augmentation for its own sake to risk assessment as speculative design, from risking it for the hell of it to “designing the risk away,” as Bruce Sterling puts it. The only available path to the future is through a loophole.

RU: So, black metal. It seems to be made almost exclusively by white people. One guy quoted in the book rants about wanting to see not just mass death but maximum misery and suffering. Of course, the first dumped off steerage in civilization collapse are the poorest people with the darkest skin. They already see a lot of misery and suffering. Do you think apocalypse desiring coming from, for example, Norway has an intrinsically racist component? The rants do rather remind me of some of the misanthropy associated with Boyd Rice and other American freaks who play along the edges of naziism.  

RC: You don’t have to look very far to find a racist component in so-called True Norwegian Black Metal. One of the genre’s founders, Varg Vikernes (Count Grishnackh) of the bands Burzum and Mayhem, is proudly racist, homophobic, and boasts of familial ties to nazis.

The destruction of all of humankind is one of the aspects of black metal that I apply in Post-Self—not the destruction of some of us or certain kinds of us—all of us. The withdrawing into oneself and the return to simpler times closer to the earth are two others, discussed primarily via the American black metal of Deafheaven and Wolves in the Throne Room. I do not condone the racist aspects of black metal, but I also don’t give them any attention in the book. The “giant black metal apocalypse” you mention doesn’t care about race.

RU: When you conceived of Post-Self, did you start by thinking about the various ways that people profess or plan to transcend the meat while preserving consciousness or did you start by thinking about the wish for annihilation or was it the congruence between those two pursuits that made you want to explore the topic?

RC: I started by wanting to write a book about Godflesh’s first full-length record, Streetcleaner. I had been penciled in a couple of times to write entries in the 33 1/3 Series, where each book is about a record. After typing out a straight-forward proposal, I tried to approach the record from an angle that would give me more to work with creatively. I thought of it as an ancient artifact, unearthed by some future civilization. As I tried to interpret the record through those eyes from the future, connections started to emerge.

For one, the cover art is a screen-cap from a hallucination sequence from Ken Russell’s 1980 movie Altered States. The story is about psychedelic drugs and sensory deprivation tanks and a scientist trying to escape their body through their mind. It’s loosely based on Dr. John C. Lilly who did a lot of experiments with ketamine and sensory deprivation tanks and trying to trying to explore the universe through his mind and through these drugs. So, the novel and screenplay—both written by Paddy Chayevsky—is loosely based on him. Anyway, there’s one string of connections: escaping the human body through the mind via drugs.

At the beginning of the title track, “Streetcleaner,” there’s a sample of an interview with the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas discussing his motivations: “I didn’t hear voices. It was a conscious decision on my part. It was a power thing. I simply acted on my fantasies.” In addition, there’s a serial killer from England known as the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. When he was active, he sent poems to local papers, signed “The Streetcleaner.” Sutcliffe and Lucas killed sex workers, believing they were cleaning up the streets. So, there’s another connection: destroying the human body for higher purposes.

The rest followed from there, and eventually I had a whole book of escape routes beyond the limits of the human body.

RU: It seems that young people creating identities out of musical genres might have been a late-20th Century thing (in a way, starting in the 1970s at least in the west) and that this sort-of musical tribalism has passed. Would you agree? And if you do, is there something you would say about that as relates to The Medium Picture?

RC: I don’t think the tribalism has diminished, but the musical genres, like their attendant technologies, have splintered to a point where we share fewer and fewer of them. That is, the tribes align along different interstices. “The media,” which once was “the mass media,” has trickled down from a one-to-many broadcast model to more of a one-to-one, individualized state. If we’re all watching a channel on broadcast television, we’re all seeing the same shows. If we’re all on the same social network, no two of us are seeing the same thing. The limited access to content via broadcast media used to unite us. Now we’re only loosely united via the platform, and the platform itself doesn’t matter. The same goes for genre.

We still need to connect, but less of it happens by dint of genre distinctions. That is, less of the work is done for us simply by categorization. In 1994 Megatrends author John Naisbitt asked which of the cultural movements of the 1990s would become universal and which would remain tribal. I would say far more of them became tribal, but the tribes are smaller and more numerous. It’s the long tail of cliques.

RU: Do you have a final thought in terms of what you hope readers will take away from your books? A throughline or whatever?

RC: I hope my work shows readers that they can do whatever they want to do—in the most punk-rock, DIY sense. I am privileged to write about whatever I want because I don’t rely on my writing for anything else. Dan Hancox at The Guardian described my book, Dead Precedents, as “written with the passion of a zine-publishing fan and the acuity of an academic.” That’s the kind of compliment you hope for, and it comes from pursuing a certain kind of goal.

The desire to tell others about something cool is the core reason I do just about everything I do. It’s the reason I make zines. It’s the reason I make websites. It’s the reason I’m a writer. It’s the reason I’m a teacher. It’s the reason I write books. It’s the reason I’m writing this right now. I don’t do it for my income. I don’t do it in the academic pursuit of tenure. I do it because I want to tell people about this stuff. In content and form, I write about underground enterprises, and I write with that spirit.