Zine: Underground media beginning to gain popularity among youths

Evi Mariani, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta/Bandung

"Kylie Minogue quit her entertainment career to concentrate on a radical political movement. One of the reasons behind her startling decision was because she was fed up with the music industry, which she found full of manipulations."

"Now, she has a conscience that drives her to fight the world system, which, she thinks, benefits corporations only -- meaning just a handful of people. She says this system cajoles, sometimes forces, human beings to become consumptive creatures and continuous buyers of corporations' products."

The above news, which is, of course, untrue, appeared in Senyum Palsu (Fake Smile) vol. 2, a 40-page A4-size photocopy publication filled with handwritten articles on various topics.

The publication is a self-published media called a "zine" (pronounced as zi:n.) The only clue about the publisher's identity is a free web-based e-mail address.

Zines are underground publications that have been thriving among punk music communities around the world, especially in Europe, since the late 1970s.

Seth Friedman in his online article says the term "zine" was derived from "fanzine", a term that dated back to the science- fiction fanzines (fan magazine) of the 1930s and 1940s.

Most of today's zines carry punk philosophies such as anarchism, feminism and environmentalism, as well as the punk's Do-It-Yourself (DIY) spirit and techniques.

Zines also find popularity outside punk communities. They are embraced by youths feeling bored and fooled by the mainstream media.

With their proliferation into issues as diverse as punk, hardcore, political, personal or even comics, they share many similar characteristics: Uncommercial, nonprofessional, limited circulation, self-published. Initially, they were mimeographed, and then photocopied as Xerox machines became ubiquitous. With the Internet age, zines quickly adapted to technology, gaining a new term: "e-zine".

These characteristics are inspired by the DIY spirit that encourage people to try and be self-sufficient, including their need to express themselves or to provoke others.

How and when zines arrived in Indonesia is not really clear.

Aribowo Sangkoyo, 22, a writer and distributor of zines, says it came with the emergence of heavy-metal music communities in Indonesia. To his knowledge, the first zine was created by Brainwashed, a heavy-metal band, in Jakarta.

Aribowo came across the zine world through his music experience. The self-confessed punk (although he does not dress like one) has written some zines himself on subjects like education and punk news. He has already written 200 titles which lie scattered in his room in Jakarta.

Tristan (not his real name) of Bandung says he started writing zines in 1999. The 28-year-old first started writing on political ideologies before changing to articles about daily life.

"A zine represents your own personality. Anybody can write freely about anything and be anybody one wants to be in that zine," he said.

Tristan usually makes a few dozen copies of his zines, but if they gain in popularity, he would reproduce them. He once made 500 copies of his most popular issue.

The zines are sold at between Rp 500 (5.6 U.S. cents) and Rp 4,000 each to distribution spots known among underground communities as distros. Sometimes they are distributed for free among friends.

Zine writers and publishers not only violate copyright, they also abhor them. They mock TM (trademark) symbols and anti- plagiarism ideas. They celebrate piracy and believe in the "there's nothing new under the sun" credo.

"If the inventors of the word saya ("I" in Indonesian) had copyrighted it, they would be extremely rich by now," Tristan says.

The writers encourage readers to copy their zines freely or to steal their content, which are also compilations of others' ideas. Sometimes they cut a well-known comic strip such as Snoopy, and replace the dialog with their own words.

Zines' contents cover vast topics, most of them inspired by the ideologies of rebellious movements. They cite quotations from Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and poster slogans from the French leftist student movement of 1968, as well as anti- capitalist and anti-globalization movements.

In the absence of any rules, zines often contain expletive words and drawings that you would not find in mainstream publications.

Many zines urge their readers to turn off their televisions and start reading, and their messages often border on radicalism.

Shattered and Menggila (Going Mad), two zine titles, published book reviews of Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare, Herbert Marcuse's One-dimensional Man, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Why Work, a book about working outside the capitalist system.

Zines also touch on lighter issues.

Menggila Mad), for example, includes anime and manga (Japanese cartoons and comics) in between articles on anarchism and other serious topics. Jarum Pentul (Straight Pin) has a light piece on the writer's bedroom, or on how the writer likes cats and the British band Oasis.

Finding zines is not as easy as buying teen magazines. You must first locate the distros. A distro can be a small bookshop used as an underground hang-out, or a street vendor spot.

But then, zines were never intended to become mass media.

Mass circulation, on the other hand, is a different story: A writer, say in Yogyakarta, may produce and distribute 20 copies in the city; but someone in Jakarta may decide to reproduce 100 copies of the same edition, without the writer's knowledge.

"I don't think it's necessary to know how many people read my zines," Aribowo says.