NY Rocker #57

The 1984 Conflict fanzine we talked about last time makes explicit reference within its pages at just how bad NY Rocker was by that year, and folks, it’s that exact era that this particular issue – NY Rocker #57 from May 1984 – resides in. And whew, it is indeed pretty bad. It’s not the voice of the NYC underground any longer, but rather an Anglophilic pseudo-music industry paper, reminding me just how rotten things were just north of the deep underground that year.  

What they’re covering is mostly garbage. The execrable Girlschool, The Smiths, Eddy Grant, another feature on X (the previous two issues I wrote about had X on the cover both times, just not their sell-out “year of change” X of 1984-85); Chrissie Hynde and all manner of commercial mediocrities across the board (Robert Cray??!), in every corner of the magazine. 

Patrick Albino writes in to vent about British provocateur and known Stalinist Julie Burchill having recently made her way to NY Rocker’s pages. Burchill was a bit more complex than that, politically, and eventually traveled from one pole halfway to the next, growing up enough to write this piece a couple of years ago. Editor Iman Lababedi takes the bait full-on and sounds about as much of a peace creep doofus as any Ruth Schwartz or Tim Yohannan response in that era’s MRR: “During an age that finds America’s right-wing lunacy reaching new dimensions of danger, you’re complaining about our printing a brilliant communist columnist. I know what side you’re on and it isn’t mine”.

Burchill’s column here is fantastic, actually, a wild review of various drugs and the current state of UK drug-taking. She’s said elsewhere that she had “put enough toot up my admittedly sizeable snout to stun the entire Colombian armed forces”. There’s a ton of UK/US cross-pollination going on in this issue, very reflective of the “Rock of the 80s” times when synth-pop and MTV were the centerpiece of mainstream rock writers attempting to shy away from Madonna, Springsteen, Prince, Michael Jackson etc. So it makes NY Rocker #57 feel far less of a fanzine than the previous issues I’ve discussed (here and here), and more like the new wave dreck Trouser Press was dishing out at this time, usually with worse writing. It reads at times like a non-benevolent corporate parent has taken over, yet that doesn’t appear to be the case, which is a bummer because it might explain why they took such a dive down the dumper.

Still, like Trouser Press in this era, there are moments. There’s a NY Underbelly column by Tim Sommer – he was in Even Worse! – featuring one of those rare Sonic Youth shots with Kim Gordon in glasses, along with small features on Swans, Ut and Sonic Youth. While the reviews are mostly of commercial records, the review section ends on a high note with a highly positive review of New Orleans’ Shitdogs (!). Three years later I’d see the Lazy Cowgirls play that band’s “Reborn” every single show, and have the singer of the Cowgirls relay to me personally the theretofore-unknown glory of The Shitdogs. 

Thing is, for $1.95 I’d have bought this every month had it been made available to me, reservations aside. I was a junior in high school at this point – and a Smiths fan – and I would have welcomed it into my home, while recognizing even then that it was fairly weak across the board. It’s a very different music publication than the one that had Byron Coley and Don Howland writing for it a couple of years earlier. What I learned is that the magazine had “folded” in 1982, and that this and only one other issue had been part of a brief – and totally unsuccessful – revival of NY Rocker. It ended up being the final issue, and I think that was most certainly for the best.