Music Magazine Archives: Rock (review)

Music Magazine Archives: Rock (MMA: Rock) is an online collection of the full runs of approximately a dozen rock magazines published from the late 1960s to the present. It features cover-to-cover scanned images, including advertisements, and the editorial text is searchable. NA Publishing has produced the database in a partnership with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library & Archives and Bowling Green State University (BGSU) Music Library. The resource is aimed at academic libraries with pricing based on the type of library from two-year colleges to Association of Research Libraries members. It is available for onetime purchase with an annual access fee or pre-paid five-year subscription.

Content

Unlike many periodical databases whose strength is in the breadth of coverage, MMA: Rock provides a very focused collection. All the publications deal with rock music and its associated culture, and these consumer magazines are aimed at a specific audience. The content makes it clear that the publishers did not care to reach the broadest possible readership but were targeting those in the underground, subculture or alternative culture. In particular, the promised addition of CREEM serves as a needed counterbalance to the widely-available Rolling Stone. The latter has established itself as the journal of record for rock, but it has had a different editorial outlook from CREEM, often ignoring or dismissing acts that CREEM heralded during its 1969–1989 run. Hitting a sweet spot between artisanal fanzines and slicker mass media, these professional magazines are neither excessively personal and precious nor blandly commercial. These are the work of competent staff with a particular point of view that often veers from the dominant narrative of its times.

Articles are available as both the original image and as accessible OCR-processed text. For some articles, OCR-processed text is missing or riddled with errors when the task clearly exceeded the limits of automation due to text at askew angles or background images that interfere with contrast even for readers with perfect vision. The transcriptions begin with a linked disclaimer, including, “The searchable text and titles in this collection have been automatically generated using OCR software. They have not been manually reviewed or corrected.” The zoom function helps to overcome such difficulties, giving this resource an advantage over print. Users can adjust the width of the columns containing the images and text transcription.

As an example of distinctive content, Royal’s World Countdown has a hand-drawn map of the festival grounds for 1967’s Monterey International Pop Festival and a hand-written list of the names of legendary session musicians in the Wrecking Crew as members of the festival’s all star house band. (June 1967, 2–3). An issue of Slash, which documented Los Angeles’s emerging punk scene, includes the results of their first readers’ poll that gives a glimpse not only of their culture of favorite and hated bands but also of their demographics: “And dare you think that Slash is a leisure class publication, a full 70% of you work (!) for a living, while only 10% mooch off mom & dad (1% none of your business, 5% welfare, 3% blackmail and/or pillage).” (“The Results of the 1^st Slash ‘yousaiditnotus’ Readers Poll…,” Slash, January 1979, 12.)

Little of this content is available elsewhere online. Some articles are in Rock’s Backpages (RBP), but that content is licensed from individual writers rather than cover-to-cover for the publications as a whole, and RBP is strictly text without any images, such as the artist photos and stand-alone comics found here. The Trouser Press Web site compiles reviews from their book-length album guides, and the only content from the original Trouser Press print magazine is selected cover images. The complete run of Slash was posted online in 2015 as a single, massive PDF, followed by a 500-page edited collection in 2016. Maximum Rocknroll...