DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture

For those readers already familiar with Michael Azzerand's "Our Band Could Be Your Life" (cited in this book) or Kaya Oakes "Slanted or Enchanted" (published later) Amy Spencer's disconnected, narrow history of the DIY culture might appear to simply be retracing limited steps. The Minutemen's "jamming econo" ethos sets the foundation, but fails to incorporate much more beyond a background on the (now-obsolete) art of writing zines and nurturing mail-order punk labels, despite the culture's rich history and significant modern-day presence. (Azzerand's book thoroughly discusses legendary punk label distributors, while Oake's traces independent publishing back to the beat poets).With that said, I would recommend this book only to younger readers (let's say mid to late teens) who are already engaged and inspired by DIY, but not all that familiar with (some of) its roots.

good book.

This book read really quickly, and was full of neat information that I never knew before, but I can't help wishing it had been better written and edited. I caught several (as in way, way too many) grammatical errors and typos. On top of that, the style was close to awful, with strange sentence construction that distracted from the point of the work.Like I said, the information was neat, but the analysis was bare bones, and mostly made huge assumptions in the reader's familiarity with the subject matter. I very much enjoyed learning all the historical details I never knew before, like that sci-fi fans wrote the first real zines in the 1930s. But when it came to the more modern stuff, the eras I know more about, there was little in the way of new or exciting information. Thought-provoking analysis would have made up for this, but it just wasn't there.I got this book on a recommendation from one of the feminist magazines I read, and I'm not terribly upset to have it in my collection. It'll make a good source to cite for clear historical info. Other than that, it's pretty lackluster.

I knew nothing about this topic before I picked up this book. I didn't even know that there was such a topic for me to know anything about. But now this book has opened my eyes. Lo-fi culture is all around us and growing. How could I not have noticed it? The truth is, I had simply never considered it in the way that is set out by Amy Spencer in such an eloquent and entertaining fashion.She guides the reader through a lot of fascinating information, telling a story you can really get to grips with by putting everything in its cultural context.It's riveting in a way that I never expected! And now that I've finished reading it, I do find myself looking at the world - the cultural world at least - in a new way.

This book is a wonderful collection of facts, giving you a wave of information about DIY music and publishing (although she mainly sticks to 'zines, not self-published books or anthologies) The style of writing is pretty dreadful, and it made for slow going, and there was little cohesion between areas. Rather than have a thesis, the book concludes just about every chapter with comments like "And that's part of DIY culture." or "DIY culture is really important"If you're looking for basic information on DIY music and publishing, and don't mind the lack of a coherent flow, it's a great book. However, if you're looking for insight on the world of DIY, you won't find it here.

I found the writing to be so-so, hard to get through with some grammatical problems that made parts of the book flow oddly. Other than that problem I found in to be a good read,I was happy for the history lesson. I wish there was more discussion on the whys of the growth and spread of the zine world and diy culture instead of just a bunch of factoids.

Very interesting read and came very in handy during my uni research project about zine culture.