New Wave Outpost Forum

I'm sure a lot of you remember Trouser Press. When I was a kid it was one of the only mags around to find out about decent music, focusing on New Wave, Punk, Hardcore and what would later be referred to as "alternative". At 14 I wasn't yet making the weekend pilgrimages to the city (us kids in the surrounding 'burbs never called it "Manhattan") on Metro North, and the only music publications that were stocked in my neck of the woods were Circus, Rolling Stone and Creem....Creem wasn't always bad with the occasional punk review, but TP it was not.

A friend bought me the Trouser Press Record Guide for my 15th birthday, it had just come out, a massive volume with nearly a decades worth of punk, wave, HC, etc -record reviews. I pored over this thing for weeks, months and years and eventually it was packed away somewhere.

This morning I was going through my old bedroom closet at my mom's house and amongst the old notebooks, Star Wars figures and Matchbox cars, found the guide as I had left it, dog-eared and well read.
I opened it up and scanned the pages finding myself anticipating words and phrases, amazed that not only had I unwittingly committed so much of this tome to memory but that I had gotten it 20 years (TWENTY YEARS!?!) ago, almost to the day.

It made me think about how hard you had to look back then, how information wasn't at your fingertips like it is now. If you loved it, you had to go out and hunt it down. Good music and good taste were hard to come by. Now it's all so easy and accessible, it almost makes me resentful and sad for the younger generation that the passion has been sucked out of it for them.

I guess that's my point^...just thought I'd share.

I could've written this myself, dearly beloved.

I'm lucky enough to have held on to all my old issues of Trouser Press. I'm more likely to part with a kidney than any of them. And my TP record guide is dog-eared as well; I still use it as a reference

I totally agree.
Back when it took so long to find stuff, I'd say it totally made it much more special !

I've been using trouserpress.com (as well as The Great Alternative and Indie Discogrpahy) a lot lately as I'm perusing the offerings on the hub.
Grunch alone has so much I've never heard of and more than a few of the unknown artists in his share folder

I have the last three years of [i]Trouser Press[/i]. For a while after I moved in '83, I was getting two editions. They'd send one to my old address and to my new address. The old one would be forwarded to my new one. I miss that magazine.

It's hard