I remember, back in Ye Olden Days when I was a boy, you had to pay for music. Not just because you wanted to support artists. But because buying music was the only way you could listen to it.
I mean, back before we all had the internet in our pocket — back before many of us even had the internet in our homes — there were radios, often playing music for free. Music videos on TV. Sure. But if you wanted to listen to a particular song at the time of your choosing, or hear a band that didn’t have any hits on the charts, you had to go out and buy their record. Or, if they were in town, buy a ticket to see them play a show live.
So here’s the thing: back then, I was broke. Too broke to buy very much music. Worse, I was still at an age when it seemed important to me to know what all the new hot music was about.
The way I would solve that problem is that every Thursday, I would pick up the free alternative weekly newspapers — Now magazine and Eye Weekly — and read all the record reviews and all the live show reviews and all the previews. That obviously wasn’t the same as hearing all the music, but it gave me a sense of what these bands were doing, what passionate people thought of them, what the music scene in this city was like.
And I would read the rest of those free weeklies the same way, and for much the same purpose: the news section told me what activist countercultural types were thinking about issues that went beyond the topics of the main political parties and nightly newscasts; the theatre section gave me an overview of drama productions big and small; the movie reviews offered buying advice for Hollywood fare but also made me conversant in obscure foreign and indie films I knew I’d never likely see.
The back pages offered sex advice columns that were more blunt and spicy — and often more inclusive — than anything you’d read in your family newspaper. The classifieds seemed like the place to find a great job for a young person or an ideal student apartment. The “missed connection” ads in the personals were whole mini-narratives of romances that could have been — and a weekly ritual of imagining you might recognize yourself as a character in one.
And those papers were a resource when I was looking to leave the house and maybe spend some money: pages and pages of listings of events, and ads from bars telling you who was playing where, and a coupon that would get you into the Dance Cave without paying the cover.
For the young and broke, those papers were a one-stop city guide: advice for living, ammunition for fighting about politics, intel for discussing the arts. They let you know what was going on — not in the corridors of power, which you might learn from a daily paper, but in the streets where we lived and in the spots we wanted to hang out. Sometimes they were funny. Sometimes they were weird. They were usually a reliable way to pass the time in a coffee shop or on a subway ride. And they were free, which was the right price for my budget.
Later, I got my start in this business working at the free weeklies. It was as much fun as it looked.
I’ve missed them as they’ve slowly died off. Eye Weekly (where I worked) died long ago, and its successor the Grid (where I also worked) folded a few years after that. Now magazine has been visibly wasting away for most of a decade, and after the public quitting of all its remaining staff (who say they had not been paid for months) in September, it seemed to have reached the end. The same has happened in other cities across North America.
So I was excited to see the announcement of the launch of the Grind, a new “alt-weekly style” publication financed by its editors and launched earlier this month. It’s available in print at some Toronto bookstores and subway station newsstands. It isn’t available online. I ran out to find it.
“There’s a void in this city, especially with Now magazine seemingly out of print,” the editors write in the inaugural issue of what for now seems to be a bimonthly. “Toronto needs a gritty free magazine now as much as ever.” Agreed there.
It isn’t what those old free weeklies were, and it isn’t trying to be. It’s focused nearly exclusively, in its first issue, on political issues, with essays and reports mostly reprinted from leftist online spaces like Canadian Dimension, Press Progress and briarpatch.
It has no arts coverage or listings, which were always such an essential part of the link alt-weeklies gave readers to their cities — though the inaugural editor’s letter says they plan to expand arts and culture content. Even without it, the Grind remains dedicated to serving the young and the broke. Loudly, proudly, this is a paper for the working class, advocating on their behalf, telling their stories.
It doesn’t completely scratch my itch for the old, familiar alt weeklies. But then why should it? I’m a middle-class, middle-aged guy, employed gainfully in the mainstream media. It’s not made for me. It’s made as an alternative to me.
I hope they grow and thrive.
And reading it, getting the newsprint on my fingertips, reminded me to renew my subscription to the West End Phoenix, the other print-based inheritor of the alt weekly tradition in Toronto. Dave Bidini, who was both a contributor to and (with his band the Rheostatics) subject of coverage in those old alt weeklies, founded the Phoenix as a community paper, but in my mind it fills some of the same alt weekly hole, giving smaller, neighbourhood-level street coverage of the city’s faces and places, and celebrating local arts and artists.
The world is a different place, things change. Alt weeklies might not be coming back. But as much as both the Grind and West End Phoenix are working to keep their spirited newsprint tradition alive, I’ll be rooting for them. And reading them.
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