Crack Team of Digitizers Preserving Music History

Do you miss those cutting-edge hip hop and rap magazines from the eighties and nineties?

Does your favorite academic library have incomplete runs of your favorite rock and folk music magazines and the pages are torn or missing?

For the past seven years, I have been on a crack team of digitizers at sister companies Reveal Digital and NA Publishing who are creating amazing collections of exact digital reproductions of important political and cultural newspapers and magazines from the nineteen fifties onward (with a few that dip into the forties). I’m the guy who figures out who the rights holders are, then researches how to contact them or their heirs and invites them to include their publications in the collections.

Our goals are to preserve these publications, which too often yellow around the edges and crumble as they age; and to make them accessible to current and future readers, for whom if it isn’t in electronic form it doesn’t exist.

Underground Press

Our premier collection was the landmark Independent Voices, which, when it is finished, will include some 1,000 underground, alternative, and literary newspapers and magazines from the fifties through the eighties, encompassing the Civil Rights and Vietnam era antiwar and liberation movements.

 

 

 

 

Rock Music Magazines

Our current series is of music magazines. The Rock collection is complete with minor exceptions, including sourcing of a few remaining issues of CREEM.

 

 

Folk Music Magazines

Folk, including Sing Out!, Broadside, People’s Songs Bulletin, and others, is smaller than Rock but scanning and digitizing continue and it is growing. We’d still like to add a few titles.

 

 

 

If you loved the music, check out the magazines in our collection that covered it:

http://mma.napubcoonline.com/
username: sales@napubco.com
password: Seeger

Hip Hop and Rap Music Magazines

Next is Hip Hop and Rap. We’re still in the crucial rights-gathering stage. Current and former hip hop and rap editors and publishers:

• Would you like your magazine to be digitized at no cost to you?
• Would you like to receive keyword-searchable digital files to put up on your website at no cost to you?

Then email me today at ken@azenphonypress.com and let’s talk.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Ken

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Survivors of Clinton Defeat Meet at Panera

Survivors of Clinton defeat meet at Panera, still stunned after week but determined, waiting for lunches to arrive.

First declares week long enough to mourn. Time to assess what went wrong and move on. “Our resolve, our courage, our love all are being tested,” she says. “If love is politically correct, then let’s celebrate political correctness, not run from it.”

Second reflects on mood of country and concludes: “Hatred and cowardice won this time around, even though love had more votes. Let’s find strength in that fact.”

First imagines good folks who worshipped Trump when they realize he used them to get what he wants and doesn’t need them anymore: “They’re going to be real disappointed.”

“How can we do outreach to them on issues where we share common ground?” asks second. “That’s our challenge as we build new coalitions and a better community.”

Floor staff person brings lunches, soup and salad for her, soup and sandwich for him.

I Felt a Shiver

Dateline Ann Arbor, Temple Beth Emeth ballroom: I arrived at 6:35 a.m. I was the thirteenth in line. Seven more followed immediately behind me.

I felt a shiver as I waited and it wasn’t from the cold and I recognized it as being either because I was going to vote for the first woman president or because I was going to vote against the first possibly certifiable lunatic. As a country, we’ve got our work cut out for us after the election no matter who wins.

When the polls opened at 7, sixty voters stood behind me. By the time I left, the line extended around the hallway toward the sanctuary.

Relief that it’s over. How can we best prepare for the next phase?