An Introduction: Part 1
In 1993, I started a hardcore fanzine that tried to make sense of a scene in transition. In Part 1 of 2, I try to explain why I felt Anti-Matter was necessary then—and why it feels relevant again now.
I.
There’s an old aphorism most regularly attributed to Mark Twain that says, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” and in my experience that’s mostly true. If you stay alive long enough, the rhythms get clearer as the distance between points gets wider. Patterns emerge, and if you pay close attention, so too will the words you need to sing along with the new version of that familiar song.
I don’t think about Anti-Matter—the fanzine I started working on exactly thirty years ago this month—as a document of history as much as I consider it a document of memory, and in my mind, there’s a distinction. “Memory” is a deeply individual device, comprised of my experience, my personal taste, my assumptions and biases, and my objectives for doing the work. Put simply, Anti-Matter remembered what I wanted to remember. “History,” on the other hand, is a collective effort, built on consensus and drawn from a variet…