I love and miss Maximum Rocknroll

The moment that changed my life forever was November 2008, when I turned 16. For my birthday, my parents bought me my first guitar and amp, a left-handed Fender Squier and a tiny Marshall. I awkwardly (and poorly) taught myself music fundamentals on that motherfucker; I would join up with a high school friend and we’d form our first band together the next year. I’d end up playing that friend’s borrowed jazz bass upside down in my first (and heretofore last) punk band just a year after that, opening for bands like Toxic Holocaust, Teenage Bottlerocket and Total Chaos.

But for all that, the guitar wasn’t what changed my life. It was the deep yellow manila envelope my parents handed me, direct from Northern California with handwritten address information and a big, blocky black stamp in the corner: MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL. Inside this envelope was a gateway I’m still walking through 16 years later, even as I’ve left behind pretensions of musicianship. Inside was my ticket to a world full of loud, angry music made by people who were not only loud and angry themselves, but deeply seemed to give a shit about the direction the world was headed in.

Maximum Rocknroll was a punk zine, but that maybe sells it too short. From 1982 to 2019, a collective of shitworkers toiled to put together a major connective node in the international network of punk scenes. The letters section was like a window into an always-revolving discourse around punk (more realistically it was like a porthole into an overflowing portajohn of shit-talking). The columns were always this weird and fascinating combination of trashed oldheads and fiery radical new blood with all sorts of hot takes on the government, corporations and their corners of the world. Occasionally there would be a news section where volunteer punks would send in stories of protests and other actions. Lining all of these occasionally-excellent pieces of writing were ads ranging from fucked up quasi-personals to records from bands you absolutely had to listen to. They had to jam them up front (and some in the back), you see; the scene reports, tour diaries, band interviews and other in-depth features the mag’s contributors would do demanded your full attention.

MRR was always dedicated to contemporary punk, and even when they ran pieces on punk history, they were usually about punk from places most folks in the West hadn’t been to. I learned about Soviet punk in the pages of MRR; they did an entire issue on punk in China in December 2016, but also a whole issue on punk in the Philippines followed by a two-part Alabama punk history feature just a few months later. This was, I think, the magazine’s main strength: tell punk’s story, but from all angles – fuck the idea that punk was a strictly SF-LA-NYC-London thing. It did this strangely well. And it did this in spite of a dying print media landscape, increasing rents, and a cultural environment getting progressively more hostile to its existence.

My favorite part of any issue of MRR was the backmatter, the 40 or 50 pages or so of reviews. There were all sorts of reviews: book reviews, movie reviews, zine reviews. But the kind of shit I ate up with each edition were the music reviews—imo, the main attraction of the magazine. Everything else was great for context, but the actual music itself made that stuff stick. Demos, debuts, reissues, cassettes, flexis, splits, EPs and LPs, CD-Rs – just send two copies of whatever to Maximum Rocknroll, PO Box 460760, San Fransisco, CA, 94146, one for the archives and one for the reviewer to listen to. And the reviews themselves were something special. Here are two examples:

U-NIX – “Star” EP
Finally another fuckin’ hardcore record on Lumpy! Portland, Oregon’s U-NIX pump through five fast blasts of wild and raging fury, with all five of the songs featuring wildly dynamic riffs and song structures. One of the best releases on Lumpy since…well…Q and NOSFERATU! Don’t sleep on this. (JD [- Joan DeToro])
(Lumpy)

THE COWBOYS – LP
Sometimes punk is easy to identify, and sometimes (like with this album) it’s buried deep under, and bubbles up just often enough to remind you that, yes you are listening to a punk record. But you probably also can’t describe what’s punk about it. This record sounds like if WEEN were trying to copy late-era REPLACEMENTS. Or if ROYAL HEADACHE suddenly became huge stoners. And they dress like a bunch of high school kids going to a PAVEMENT show in the ’90s. Not to mention the singer can actually legit sing. But hey, Bloomington, Indiana is a weird place. It’s a town that creates complicated and confusing humans, who in turn create complicated and confusing music. This album is great, and I’m not sure how to describe why. But I recommend you get high and listen to it. (FS [- Fred Schrunk])
(HoZac)

Every review in every issue of the mag going back 37-some-odd years is like this. Just a single paragraph for the writer (marked by their initials at the end of the graf) to express why an album sucks or is great or somewhere in the middle. No scores, no endless pages of prose. In the issue I pulled these two from, 31 reviewers wrote about one of the dozens of albums that featured in the section. Ten writers reviewed all the demos, and eight of them reviewed the zines. Movie reviews, to my knowledge, were basically always handled by Carolyn Keddy.

What I love about these reviews is their economy, but also their unwillingness to make their review a simple up-or-down vote, a resistance to becoming just a “consumer reports” kind of guide. You could tell if a record really pissed off a writer versus just made them bored; ditto if they heard something they kind of didn’t like but saw something interesting in that other people might dig. I don’t think you could ever accuse MRR of being “unbiased” but it was hard to say that they weren’t at least fair. Some of the more prominent writers there, like Bruce Roehrs, had a particular style and an even more particular taste, to where if you listened to an album they recommended, you could always tell beforehand what you were getting into (Roehrs in particular was deeply, deeply into Oi!).

I’ve thrown away a lot of shit in my life and I’ll probably throw away a bunch more before the decade is out (hello, piles of Verso books…). But the one thing I haven’t been able to give up is the big stack of Maximum Rocknrolls currently mouldering on top of my dresser. These motherfuckers are dusty, their bindings are coming loose and falling apart, but even my limited collection – just a broken handful of years marking the end of MRR’s print run – just has too much history inside it to throw out. Thousands of albums, hundreds of bands, dozens of interviews and scene reports… Even if the information in each issue is now out of date, it’s proof that the shit that happened in these places I can’t visit for various reasons actually happened. It’s my tether to a better world – one that still exists even if it’s harder to find, no thanks to all the enshittified tech we’re surrounded by daily.

Maximum Rocknroll went out of print officially in May 2019. The last issue is a difficult issue to read, essentially four decades of punks casting a eulogy out for a cultural institution that simply had refused to die up to this point. It felt impossible that anything could actually kill it, and yet when we heard the reasons it felt all too possible. Like, oh, right. The “real” world exists. Capitalism and its malcontents. But reading the “Never Again” issue also clues us into just how profoundly MRR affected everyone it ever touched. Columns by Félix Havoc and Al Quint coped with the loss of a publication that had been home for their writing for decades. Lefty Hooligan, the first person I’d read outside of Jello Biafra who expressed support for, and an understanding of, anarchism, ended his column with a sendoff to the mag and its founder, Tim Yohannan. But even in its final issue MRR could not help but be informative, with a scene report from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas by Andres Sanchez, band interviews with Piñén, Chronophage, Provoke, and Apsurd; there’s a fucking two-page spread wall of text just titled “IN SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE,” a feature on Winston Smith, the punk artist who made shit for bands like Dead Kennedys, even more band interviews I mean fuck – by the time we get to the reviews we’ve read over 130 pages of Culture, babey.

It is, in many ways, the most fitting sendoff they could have given the magazine.

And along with that sendoff, a surprise: Maximum Rocknroll would (have to) continue to exist in some form. There was an entire warehouse full of punk albums that MRR was responsible for archiving; that had to continue. There was also a radio show/podcast, MRR Radio, which played every Sunday for hundreds upon hundreds of episodes going back to the early 80s (pre-MRR in print, even). Columnists still needed a home for the writing they’d do with or without the mag. There were still scene reports to publish, interviews to conduct, features to write. And of course, there were still boatloads of albums to review, still coming in from all over the world.

Maximum Rocknroll dot com had never been thee best website, but it had been functional. About a year before the announcement that the zine would be ceasing publication, though, they did a whole revamp of the website to better reflect MRR‘s new online future. There were sections for articles, columns, reviews and news; a place to go for back issues of the magazine as they were put up online for sale; a radio section, a new storefront; an FAQ page, a new About page, and a Contact form. It has remained unchanged for at least five years now.

All of the typical content that used to find its home in the pages of MRR also continued unabated, at least for a while. But around October 2020, it seems like internal tensions finally overtook the collective that made up MRR. Despite releasing a statement “renewing our efforts to fight white supremacy in punk through transparency, changes to our leadership, and content policies” and pushing a new strategy of uplifting the voices of BIPOC punks, the zine instead seems to have ceased publication of all non-review writing as of April 2021. The only stuff that gets posted now other than reviews and the radio show are year-end top-tens.

There’s a lot left unknown (at least to me, an outsider) about the state of MRR as a project. The fact they’re still accepting and reviewing music, that there is a consistent pool of shitworkers doing that labor, suggests they’re still active in some capacity. But it’s a black box, a void. Is the archive still going strong? Who knows. Are there plans to bring back non-review content? Who could say? Despite that statement above promising “more transparency” in who runs the thing, it is currently unclear who all runs the site in general. Maybe that’s not a big deal; maybe it’s just the same as it ever was.

What I can say is that I appreciate the still-ongoing reviews. I appreciate that there are still folks writing single paragraphs that manage to encompass an album’s entire essence, maintaining that economic-yet-expressive craft. I appreciate the Bandcamp embeds. I appreciate the continued commitment to showcasing punk from all over the world. I appreciate the fact that even though we’re talking about a music website in 2024 they’re somehow still running on the magazine-ass review schedule and posting reviews of albums that came out six or more months ago, today.

I appreciate that Maximum Rocknroll has continued to refuse to die.

Maximum Rocknroll is no longer the world’s premier international punk zine. Nobody can exactly take that title away from them at this point, but like, it’s hard to be the best at something when you no longer technically exist, you know? The thing has changed, for better or worse. Hopefully, over time, we’ll see that it’s been for the better.