another 90s staple bites the dust.

before there were blogs, there were zines. in the early to mid 90s, zines seemed to pop up like cold sores during winter exam season. anyone with access to paper, glue, and a xerox machine could start a zine, and many high school students, college students and the first 20-something gen-x slackers decided to postpone adulthood by putting out zines and playing in post-grunge bands that sucked. it was a great time in history.

stay free!, one of the most well-known zines and one which has (or had, at some point) a worldwide circulation is soon to be no more.

stay free was not originally a nyc magazine. it actually started out in my little hometown, chapel hill, north carolina during the time i was in high school. i know this to be a fact, because i saw issues lying around in carrboro when i would go to the cat's cradle, and back then, the zine was mostly about the local music scene in north carolina. (back then, people were buzzing about chapel hill being "the new seattle" or something, although, in retrospect, i don't get what was so great about it. 99% of chapel hill bands were lo-fi doo doo. in my present state of mind, i would totally find those bands annoying and their fans annoying too. but i digress.) i also remember it for another reason: "stay free" is also a brand of feminine hygiene products, and i'm immature, so it stuck with me. (update: apparently, that's where the editor got the name...)

anyway, in law school, one of my law professors distributed stay free! issue 20 - the copyright issue in class, and much to my surprise, i learned that the magazine had moved to brooklyn, and people considered it a nyc magazine.

well, that's that. zines are dead. but from the stumps of past trends come new ideas, new media channels, new art forms. from the grave of zines, blogs have risen.

what's next?