Forward, Into the Past

We return, battle-scarred but unbowed.

GREED Volume 1, Issues 1 - 6

by Kurt Sayenga

WELCOME to GREED Magazine Volume 2. Volume One was a music/arts zine I published in the late 1980s. It grew out of the small but influential Washington, D.C. punk scene and attempted to cover all things underground with a sense of humor and an attention to graphic design. GREED folded just before many of the niche bands, artists, writers, and films we celebrated “broke out” in the wake of Nirvana.

“Breaking out” has many meanings, from “a forcible escape, especially from prison” to a violent eruption of acne on once-spotless skin. While indie/alternative comics experienced the salutary effects of breaking out, the music scene was less fortunate. Much of the unpopular sound we championed back in the day is now considered iconic, but thanks to predatory “disrupters” and the robber baron who owns Spotify, the music world has flattened into a state of near-total entropy where few but the blandest thrive. In spite of it all, what we used to call “underground art” endures; in some cases it has risen to surface level, allowing a few lucky creators to eke out a living.

Humor ran like rhyolitic magma beneath the placid crust of GREED Volume 1, and Volume 2 will continue this satiric tradition, but with a bit less vitriol. Many of the things my collaborators and I scorned have been normalized by the diabolical mediocrity dissemination machine we call the Internet. Now we are all trapped in a hyperreal purgatory where eyeballs are “captured” and graphic design has been reduced to a handful of bland multiple-platform-compliant templates — like the one you’re looking at now.

There are some advantages to GREED v.2’s digital incarnation. We can appeal to the sense of sight and the sense of sound. Plus – brace yourself – sometimes we can make the pictures move. I know, it seems like magic, but it’s true! 

We are also free from the tyranny of page limits. You will get the unexpurgated versions of our lengthy but entertaining conversations with interesting people. Plus a lot of shorter pieces, because who has the time?

This platform is the closest thing to true DIY publishing: it goes directly from publisher to reader with only one middleman (Substack). I would never claim that anything that has anything to do with the Internet is punk rock, but it is an evolution from the rough-and-tumble world of print. There are no Mafia-owned distributors taking a huge cut of the cover price and “forgetting” to pay us. We do not have to deal with record company flaks trying to leverage their advertising money to influence who gets interviewed and what is said about them. No printers to lose our photos and original art, screw up the halftones, smear the ink, get the colors wrong, and fail to return our layout boards. (Those of you who worked in design before Adobe transformed publishing will know what I mean.) There is much to loathe about the digital world, but in some ways, comrades, it does give the workers a way to control the means of production.

Along with new material featuring our favorite creators, we are going to reprint some of the most-requested pieces from Volume 1. (Hard as it is to believe, old issues of GREED sell for good money on the Internet. I would rather the least cringe-worthy pieces were free to all.) The result will be a double-exposure of past and present, two times which are quite different and yet much the same.

Many of our posts will be free, but I do hope you will subscribe so we can pay our writers and artists. Some of us work in the so-called “entertainment industry,” and thanks to corporate avarice and the ill-considered embrace of streaming, that industry is rapidly collapsing. On the plus side, this gives us the time to create a torrent of eclectic stories, pictures, and films just for YOU. We hope you enjoy some of it.

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Headline taken from the Firesign Theater album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. If you know who the Firesign Theater were, you might remember Blank Reg from Max Headroom. At the time the idea of an “old punk” was hilarious. Turns out the only thing they didn’t correctly predict was the ubiquity of full-sleeve tattoos.