H8TR? DB8TR? 'XLR8R'!
Witty, fearless dance mag celebrates 10 years on the cutting edge of digital pop culture
Dance music magazines, like their rock and pop brethren, have become little more than billboards for the artist du jour with buy-it-now listings of the latest releases and not much criticism. The one major exception is San Francisco's XLR8R, which has been celebrating its 10th anniversary this summer.
The nine-times-a-year zine's exclusive, small-print, dismissive critiques and dizzying, technophile design are a godsend to a dance world that is otherwise spoon-fed superstar DJs, place-to-be parties, and cookie-cutter compilations. The electronic music explosion has, at times, had other keep-it-real proponents, most notably Urb magazine, but the economics of publishing have made it almost impossible to diss dance stars on the one hand and accept full-page advertisements from said stars' record labels on the other. XLR8R, however, has found a loophole that's become its lifeblood: By expanding into electronic-music lifestyle and fashion, the thick glossy has attracted national advertisers (Adidas, Diesel, Rockstar Games) interested in the kind of "early adopter" market that XLR8R readers represent. They're the kind of people who, when they discover hip clothing, home décor, or videogames, tell two friends, and so on. This lets the magazine grill even the scene's most sacred cows, making it a must-read for fans of digital pop culture.
XLR8R started in Seattle in 1993 on publisher Andrew Smith's 21st birthday, when the then-University of Washington journalism and graphic design hopeful printed up 2,000 copies of the first edition as a way to give some ink to the burgeoning dance-music underground.
"I did the magazine out of the University of Washington Daily newsroom," Smith says. "That went on for a while, until the paper's board found out, and then I went to Kinko's and started stealing computer time there."
After graduation, Smith continued to publish the zine, funding the money-loser with cash from odd jobs, including rave-flier graphic design. "When you're in your early 20s, you have a lot more energy, and you can stay up without sleep," he says. "I did all the ad sales, all the design; I wrote everything. I picked it up in my old Mazda GLC and distributed it myself."
In 1994, Smith and a few backers moved XLR8R from Seattle to San Francisco, which was then just beginning to assume its role as the dance music capital of the West Coast. "I came down to San Francisco to distribute the magazine, and eventually I was just like, 'I have to be here,'" Smith says. "It was illegal spaces, illegal samples - the whole thing was so underground. There was a huge do-it-yourself vibe about it. People my age were throwing parties, doing magazines, doing fliers. It went hand in hand with the whole desktop revolution."
The zine was free until 1996, when Smith and company decided to take it to national newsstands. In those days, XLR8R championed West Coast house, from the hippie stylings of the Hardkiss collective to the New York love of L.A.'s Marques Wyatt. Then came drum 'n' bass, the hyper-frenetic sound of the U.K. underground that took the magazine's writers by storm but had little lasting power. The zine also found its witty, fearless voice, frequently dissing trance superstar Paul Oakenfold (calling him "Steamin' Poo Oakenfold"). Letters defending and dissing the DJ poured in, creating the kind of dialogue about the direction of dance that had been missing from the community.
"The irony is, we got all this advertising for Paul Oakenfold CDs and gigs," Smith says. "Eventually, the advertisers decided to read the content, and then this whole rift happened. We got to where advertisers told us, 'You have to write about this trance artist or we'll pull our ad,' and we said, 'Pull it.' Trance for me is electronic music for beginners.
"From there," Smith says, he realized "styles seemed to fracture more. Genres are the least important they've ever been." The magazine hit its stride and found its theme - "accelerating culture." For Smith, that means writing about the underdog artist, unearthing the buried musical treasure. Lately, the zine has been going on about "intelligent dance music," laptop producers and blip-and-bleep artists you've probably never heard of (Kid 606, Prefuse 73, Numbers), but that's the point - making discoveries instead of affirming the industry's output.
"With dance magazines, a lot of people are new to journalism, and there's little tradition and there's lack of balls to the content," Smith says. "We're not just covering electronic music, but whatever is coming out that's new. I want to get my socks knocked off."
Published: 09/04/2003
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