Finding a copy of Forced Exposure #10 in 1986 at Rockpile Records in Goleta, CA was one of those proverbial “trigger events” that dramatically sped my progress down a path of sub- underground music obsession. It would not be hyperbole to note that this particular fanzine was where I truly learned just how extensive, inventive and widespread the American & global independent music scene(s) were, while also getting some of my first critical filtering techniques that helped me better separate the truly excellent from the merely good-enough.
During the 1980s, I read every Forced Exposure magazine that came out with such a slavish devotion that it practically helped build the record collection that I have to this day. What I loved, and even today still love about it, was that it was the most accurate “consumer’s guide” I’d ever read, in the sense that if Jimmy Johnson and especially if Byron Coley said it was good, it almost always was. That to me has always subsequently been the litmus test for a good fanzine. “Can I trust your taste?” (please, let’s leave my own questionable taste out of this).
I’ve always admired those who might be trustworthy gatekeepers, and there’s no doubt this magazine helped me want to attempt to pretend to be one myself. I also thought, at age 18, the way Jimmy & Byron snottily but cleverly dismissed annoying halfwits like Jello Biafra was unlike anything I’d ever seen from the underground press to that time, and those guys helped at the time to provide me with a far more wizened (and newly subjective) perspective about music than anyone else, ever. In a nutshell, if you “came of age” in the 1980s and have the sort of general music taste that might lead you to peruse, say, my own Dynamite Hemorrhage, calling Forced Exposure your “favorite” magazine of that era is nearly self-evident. It was virtually everybody’s favorite at the time.
Forced Exposure #6 is where the levee broke for this magazine. For the first time, bands not on the breakneck hardcore touring circuit nor even remotely connected to hardcore were being spotlighted, praised, and interviewed in a somewhat juvenile (understandably so, given editor Jimmy Johnson’s age) yet incredibly informed way. Bands such as the Dream Syndicate, the Birthday Party and even Venom (!). I may be 100% wrong on this, so correct me if so, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time Byron Coley bared his pen in Forced Exposure‘s pages, after being a resident scribe at the New York Rocker and the excellent Take It! fanzine. He interviews Los Angeles’ weird fake-Christian punk band RF7 and scribes a few reviews, in the apostrophe-laden and made-up word style (spuzz, spoo, zug) that was hilarious, exciting & yes, a bit annoying at times.
Most of Johnson’s stuff sticks to the ‘core or the nearly-‘core, but he also dips a toe into some raving reviews of goth heavyweights of the time like the March Violets and Southern Death Cult (much like Touch & Go used to go ape over the Virgin Prunes). Another Boston teen, Gerard Cosloy, was a fanzine up-n-comer himself at the time, and he submits the Dream Syndicate interview, and it’s a good one, very “in the moment” when that moment was just after their incredible debut LP The Days of Wine and Roses.
Like any fanzine from this time, it’s a blast to look back & see the brand-new punk & post-punk records that people would gladly trade a kidney for in 2024 going for $3-$6 in advertisements. An additional treat is how out-of-step Forced Exposure was with the Maximum RocknRoll hardcore punk orthodoxy of the time, which was over-the- top “politically correct” before any of us had ever heard the term. Exhibit A is an interview in #6 with the Nig Heist, easily the most un-PC band of the day (GG Allin and the F.U.’s notwithstanding), and Exhibit B is a screed against the “Rock Against Reagan” collective, something championed by lefty punk bands MDC and the Dead Kennedys, making the case that the whole thing was a charade designed to buy a particular hippie named Dana Beale some more dope. Coming from the west coast, the first time I saw a punk rag that dared to question the Orwellian judgment of MRR was phenomenally refreshing (Flipside, the other popular west coast punk mag, was almost completely and totally apolitical).
The Forced Exposure of 1983, which is when #6 came out, would prove to be worlds apart from the musical universe of Forced Exposure #18 ten years after. But we’ll get there. I wrote about FE #9 and FE #15 as well, if you want to hit those links.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 