Scarce

Reading John Robb's excellent Punk Rock: An Oral History, what struck me from the beginning were the reoccurring tales of the difficulty early fans had in finding information about their new favourite bands, let alone getting hold of their records. Allegiances were formed on the strength of single paragraph reviews in the music press; overnight cross-country pilgrimages were made to see the bands play; the photocopied fanzine was the organ of record. (This was at the grassroots level. The Sex Pistols of course were the brainchild of an arch media manipulator. You had to work hard to avoid hearing about them.)

All of which William Gibson describes far more eloquently in his essay "1977" in Punk: An Aesthetic. He describes the shock of the new upon first seeing a stack of UK fanzines brought back to Toronto. "Today we know what new things look like before we encounter them physically. Usually we know what they'll look like before they even exist." He identifies grunge as the last of the pre-digital counterculture movements, the last to start its slow burn to popularity away from the gaze of a public always hungry for something new.

Even though I grew up in the pre-internet world, I find it hard to image what it would be like to experience such scarcity when nowadays even the most niche form of entertainment is, from its very earliest days, its very inception, only ever a Google away. Rather than fighting to have their voices heard across the great open expanse of culture, these day new experiences struggle to be heard above the cacophonous din of a million competing entertainments. Will the next significant movement benefit by the increase exposure the internet allows? or instead be drowned in a sea of noise?