Hardcore Punks and Cyber Furries: 80s subcultures, broadcast theory, and new media
This is a recent media theory paper I've written.
“This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band”
In 1976, punk fanzine Sideburns #1 formulated a DIY ethic that would be fully embraced by Hardcore Punk in the 1980s, in ways that anticipated many aspects of New Media. Another subculture that emerged in the 1980s, the Furry fandom, shared many of the nascent New Media characteristics of Hardcore. These two seemingly unrelated subcultures serve as a useful lens to explore some of the characteristics of New Media and Transmedia storytelling, and also to examine the limitations of the Mass/Elite model of Broadcast Media theory.
(That the characteristics of New Media and Transmedia predate the internet is not controversial. Lister et al acknowledge that “’old’, analogue media”, from the novels of Sterne and Joyce, to the films of Kurosawa anticipated new media forms , while Jenkins concedes that “For all of its innovative and experimental qualities, transmedia storytelling is not entirely new”.)
The Furry fandom was the name adopted by a group of fans at the NorEasCon science fiction convention in 1980 who discovered a mutual interest in anthropomorphism and animal characters in science fiction, fantasy, comic books and animation. The immediate antecedents of the fandom were the Underground Comix movement of the 1960s and 70s, such as Dan O’Neill’s “Air Pirates Funnies”, which was published partly as a challenge to the Disney Corporation’s hegemonic domination of the animation and “Funny Animal” comics culture (indeed, O’Neill deliberately provoked legal action by Disney in a long-running effort to make the “Mouse Liberation Front” a cause celebre).
Dan O’Neill’s Air Pirates Funnies
Hardcore Punk was the name given to a style of music that emerged from Punk explosion of the mid-1970s: louder, faster, more furious, and fiercely independent. “We played with The Clash and thought they were wimps”.
The music industry in the early 1980s seemed, on face value, to confirm of the key tenet of the Mass/Elite framework: “The few producing on behalf of the many … discourag[ing] the mass from taking initiative”. By 1983, the music industry had recovered from “floundering among the ruins of punk”, as Michael Jackson became “a one-man rescue team for the music business”. The original punks had either “sold out” to the mass market or compromised as “independent” labels. Michael Jackson and Madonna were the King and Queen of Pop. The capitalised, hegemonic elite sitting at the centre of a media empire broadcasting to the passive masses seemed secure. Hardcore, on the other hand, was the fringe of the fringe: if the mainstream music industry disdained the “independent” music of the 1980s, even the independents scorned Hardcore.
Hardcore Punk band Black Flag
But, just as the nascent Furry fandom elected to step outside the mass broadcast sphere, and began publishing fanzines (a portmanteau of “fan” and “magazine”, usually abbreviated to simply “zines”) and Amateur Press Association (APA) comics, the Hardcore Punks also embraced the DIY ethic with fundamentalist zeal. In California in 1979, Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn was driven by exasperation to found SST Records, to issue his band’s first EP. Similarly, Melbourne music fan Phil MacDougall formed Reactor Records in 1983 to provide a home for the Hardcore bands he saw being ignored by even the independent labels.
Like the Furries’ APAs, fanzines were integral to Hardcore. Usually typewritten (if not hand-written), and assembled with the help of marker pens, glue sticks, Liquid Paper and photocopiers, these rough and ready publications were run off by the dozen and traded, either at rock-bottom prices that barely covered costs, or often for free. Fans and bands traded zines, not only in individual cities, but around the world via informal networks established by telephone, letter and word-of-mouth: “every scene [bands were] going through, all of a sudden bands are springing up, and bands are starting to network”. Furries convened informal “Gallacci Groups” (named for seminal Furry artist, Steve Gallacci) on the fringes of established science fiction conventions, “to discuss anthropomorphics in SF, comic art, and animation, and to show off each other’s sketchbook art and draw in each other’s sketchbooks”. The first “official” Furry Party was held at Westercon, in San Diego, in 1986. ConFurence Zero became the first exclusive Furry convention, in California in 1989.
These rock-bottom, informally networked operations serve to undermine the Mass/Elite framework’s concept of a centralised system of production, with clearly demarcated producers and audience. The Hardcore labels ran on a shoestring: the $120 production cost for the first Depression single on Reactor was split five ways between MacDougall and the band members. Royalty payments were a novelty. Such business models resemble more closely the “networks of small, minority and niche markets” characteristic of new media, than the highly capitalised “centre of a circle” of the Mass/Elite.
Hardcore Punks functioned as “nodes in a web” of their own making. Black Flag singer Henry Rollins talks of “allies in New York … San Francisco … Vancouver … [w]e always had friends everywhere.” These networks were genuinely global: fans in Australia traded cassettes and zines with fans in Britain and France. Even without computers, fans were able to “shake hands around the world”. But it was the Furries who appear to have made the early leap to the internet. In June 1983, the Tiger’s Den BBS became the first known exclusively Furry presence on the internet, after splintering from a general science fiction BBS earlier.
Not only were Hardcore and the Furry fandom both genuinely “networked publics”, they also anticipated the “Produsage” revolution of New Media. Although Lister et al assert that a rigid technological demarcation of “what was acceptable for public distribution” remained until the 1990s, both Hardcore and Furries broke the distinction much earlier. Furry APAs and early Furry comics such as Steve Gallacci were published in tiny runs. Hardcore bands pressed records in runs of 500. A nascent produsage was also evident in the Air Pirates Funnies’ scatological re-imaginings of Disney characters, or Furry characters like “Red Shetland”, a Furry reworking of sword’n’sorcery heroine Red Sonja, and in Steve Gallacci’s “Bad Rubber”, an anthropomorphic parody of “Blade Runner”.
Rowrbrazzle 17, an early Furry APA
More notably, the fans were taking control of the means of production thanks to readily available assets such as “copy shops”, and relatively cheap multi-track recorders. Depression front man Smeer built a recording studio in the living room of his suburban Melbourne residence, Hardcore House, partly with the aid of other fans, who helped collect and glue together the thousands of used egg cartons that formed the studio’s sound-proofing. Such collaboration was typical of Hardcore Punk, in contrast with Levy’s depiction of the Mass media with “simply no place … for true reciprocity or nonhierarchical interaction among the participants”. Theil-Stern highlights the Internet as “a medium that encourages interacting with the audience”, but the pre-Internet Hardcore punks had “an almost fundamentalist belief in breaking down barriers between artist and audience”.
“Go and form a band,” urged Sideburns fanzine; “Support your scene” was the byline of Shit On Brisbane zine. When, as a teenager, I wrote an article for a local fanzine, I was instead encouraged to use it as the foundation to start my own zine. In turn, other local fans mined my knowledge. In true Transmedia fashion, “Participants pool[ed] information and tap[ped] each other’s expertise … drawing together like-minded individuals to form new knowledge communities” . Bands and fans learned from the ground up, and passed on their expertise by word-of-mouth and zine, even such simple nuggets of knowledge as how to mail-order other zines. Depression’s first album was physically assembled “in a working bee, with members of the band and friends … invariably with a slab or two of beer”. The Hardcore scene was awash with the “shift from ‘audiences’ to ‘users’, and from ‘consumers’ to ‘producers’” characteristic of New Media and Transmedia. Henry Rollins described it as touring and “pollinating”.
Instead of fixed texts being received passively in a one-way, linear flow from (elite) producers to a (mass) audience, Hardcore Punk also offered its participants genuine “registrational interactivity”: the ability to “write back into the text”. Tape-trading was a core activity of the Hardcore scene. Cheap twin-deck cassette recorders enabled fans to quickly make copies of tapes and pass them on. Songs by different bands were copied and reassembled into ad-hoc compilations and given away, or mailed to friends in the network. Far from protecting their ownership, bands encouraged such activity. Fans mailed “scene reports” to other zines: a Melbourne zine like Pallative [sic] Treatment might publish a scene report from a Polish punk. Articles were cut and pasted between zines. Hardcore tapes and zines became true New Media texts: non-hierarchical, networked, unfixed and collaborative.
The Furry fandom also strongly encouraged creativity and artistic endeavour in its members. However, while Furry APAs were openly predicated on collaboration - only participants in APAs received copies - the stories in them still tended towards the more traditional author-audience model. But as the fandom migrated to the internet, a rapid change occurred.
Following the creation of the Tiger’s Den BBS in 1983, FurryMUCK became the first Furry MUD (Multi-User Dungeon - also Domain or Dimension; the exact terminology is amorphous) in 1990. Like the Tiger’s Den, FurryMUCK was collaboratively built and hosted at a Furry “commune”, Squirrel Hill. By 1996 it had more than two thousand users around the world. The first Furry newsgroup, alt.fan.furry was also created in 1990.
MUDs are multi-user environments, online virtual worlds which Sherry Turkle calls a “laborator[y] for the construction of identity”. The initial development (and name) of MUDs owed much to the table-top role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons which became hugely popular in the 1970s and 1980s. MUDs are strongly characterised by role-playing, fantasy, and world-building (Transmedia stories are also based on “complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories”). The influence of Dungeons & Dragons, and MUDs, had an immediate impact on the Furry fandom. Furry fans began adopting “Fursonas” (a “Furry persona”: an anthropomorphic persona - often one of many - that a Furry may adopt and role-play in the fandom). Such fluid personae (”build[ing] a self by cycling through many selves”) are typical of online activities such as MUDs.
“Role-playing and fursonas, that appeared all of a sudden (to me) at the Confurences [Furry conventions] around 1992 or 1993,” Furry historian Fred Patten recalls. He specifically attributes the change to Dungeons & Dragons and the internet. “To me it seemed like the annual Confurences were suddenly filled with new, young fans who insisted on being known only by obviously false Furry names like Graywolf or Tommy Tiger, and who wore an animal costume or at least a tail all convention long”.
As the Furry fandom flourished, in step with the growth of the internet itself, the Transmedia characteristics of role-playing, fursonas and collaborative authorship and fantasy world-making became ubiquitous in the fandom. So much so that younger Furries came to accept them as necessary aspects of belonging to the fandom: “It was in the late 1990s when somebody at a Confurence accused me of not being a real fan because I did not have a Fursuit or a Fursona”.
A “Ref Sheet” for a Fursona
Both Hardcore Punk and the Furry fandom anticipated key concepts of New Media. But in the Internet era, the Furry fandom has particularly flourished as a “networked public”, and as Transmedia storytelling. In doing so, it has also been modified by the “structural affordances” of the Internet. While affordances do not dictate behaviour, they configure the mediated social environment such that certain common dynamics emerge. So as the Furry fandom migrated online throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it simultaneously metamorphosed as it grew. While the early hallmarks of networking, produsage, collaboration and registrational interactivity continued and grew, newer behaviours such as role-play, identity formation, and complex world-building crystallised as surprising (to older fans) new facets of the fandom, and what was once a fringe of the science fiction fandom became a vibrant subculture in its own right.