If I have a mantra for this blog, at least one for 2023, it is this: I DO NOT DO THIS TO SHIT ON THE EFFORTS OF OTHERS. I think it's important that I stay away from needless negativity and not pointlessly eviscerate others for the sake of grandstanding or clickbait. After all, what the fuck have I done with my life? Saying that may imply that I wish to shit all over Punk Planet, but that is not the case. It was, for the most part, a publication which largely passed me by and was not really my thing, but it was one which at least deserves some sort of appreciation.
Punk Planet was started in Chicago by Dan Sinker in 1994 and ran for 80 issues until 2007. Taken from the words of Sinker himself, it was essentially started as a reaction to what he felt was Maximum RocknRoll's increasingly narrowing focus of what was "punk" and his desire to keep it all more open-ended. And while that sentence may sound like a snippet of one of the most boring letters ever sent to the editors of MRR/Flipside/etc., that was the case and they ran with it. The issue pictured is #41 from February of 2001. It was the first issue of the magazine I ever purchased and one of only three I ever did.
Again, at the time, I was working at Missing Link, so the purchase of the issue makes sense, as I fumbled around and attempted to grapple w/ what The Kids were buying in the shop. I can also say with some certainty that I bought this issue because of the DC HC cover story and Greg Sage interview. PP started at a point for me when I ceased buying MRR and had really lost any and all interest in punk/HC-derived underground rock music and was switching over to jazz, Krautrock, psych and electronic music for a good half-decade. That a magazine wished to cover MRR's vague sphere of sound w/ a broader, more collegiate sensibility didn't register a blip on my radar and I was only dimly aware of its existence until I started working at Missing Link in 1999.
Punk Planet followed the basic MRR formula almost to a tee, in the sense that it was a mix of columns/editorials, interviews, political articles and music reviews, though, as stated, there was just something so friggin' wholesome and positive about it, so lacking in any kind of snarky/smart-arse attitude [of the Forced Exposure/Touch & Go/Motorbooty variety] that the writing mostly leaves me bored. For pure information, PP had its fine points. The DC HC article here, which is basically just two chapters from the-then soon-to-be-released Salad Days book by Mark Anderson and Mark Jenkins published in full, is fantastic (and I mostly really enjoyed the book), and the Wipers/Sage interview is excellent. If you were into bands like (International) Noise Conspiracy and The Locust, which I wasn't and aren't, then I'm sure they also hit the spot.
The record reviews are hit or miss, depending on who wrote them, and generally lack the gravitas required for me to give a shit of what said person thinks of the recording, regardless, though the 'Reviewer Spotlight' section at the top of each page in the reviews section, in which a contributor writes about a 'classic' record they've been revisiting, was a good idea and often more interesting than the contemporary reviews.
When I was a teen, MRR's political articles were often a major revelation to me and, for better or worse, did shape my political outlook greatly, and it's not that the political articles in PP are necessarily bad, it's just that, by the time a mag such as this hit my orbit, I was of the opinion that I didn't buy music magazines for articles on politics, and hence I just didn't tend to read them. There's even a piece here on POETRY SLAMS, and please give me a clip over the ear if you ever catch me perusing it.
I've written before of this purple patch in underground rock music (late '90s/early '00s), and this issue exhibits much of it, w/ many an ad for HC/punk/emo also-rans, though it also reminds me of how wildly popular, and indeed huge, this scene was at the time. Prior to the decline of CD sales and the collapse of various distributors (the Mordam/Lumberjack tanking was a huge blow for a lot of the players here), there was a good living to be made that exists no more.
Look, Punk Planet existed and was very successful for a number of years, producing approximately 16,000 copies per issue at its height, but was brought down, like so many others, by distribution/payment/bankruptcy issues. There was/is a book-publishing arm of PP, which produced the We Owe You Nothing compendium of interviews, which I own and recommend, but for the most part it was a periodical which never fully gelled with my sensibilities or exhibited enough humour for me to give it two thumbs up, or maybe it just came too late to have a visceral impact on my largely fully-formed mind.
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