A few summers back in the pandemic, the infamous early aught’s Philly 3-issue “zine” Cherry Coke reared its head again, and more recently, received a review on Jay Hinman’s site Fanzine Hemmorrage.
I really thought the thing would die—the young person who reprinted it with the permission of its author, Tom Lax, gave me a copy at the Petty Bunco Day Party, I smiled politely—but since it’s resurfaced again, I wanted to get some thoughts down on the topic.
It should come as no surprise that in my days as a young woman navigating the local music scene, both as an audience member and active participant, I have encountered my fair share of toxic nonsense—harrassment, bullying, stalking, sexual assault, and on. I am not going to talk about the darker shit on here, but I think discussing how I was personally impacted by CC is fair game.
I’ll preface my take with this: The creator and his cronies may have a completely different take on their intentions, the reception, how it has been viewed in retrospect, and their own memories. That’s fine and they are entitled to that. But they aren’t the truth. Perhaps mine isn’t either, and as someone whose academic interests touched upon media and social memory to significant extent, I think this is fine. Truth is always somewhere between the poles.
The summer of 2001 was the year I graduated college, a mediocre art school student on the 5-year plan. I had already been going to shows at the Khyber for almost a year, trying to drink up everything that was offered to me as a newly 21-year old (musically, metaphorically, literally). R5 was still a pretty nascent and growing endeavor, so this was a point in our city’s nightlife history where 21+ show still ruled the roost. This was also the time when I started doing my regular spot on WPRB, and recently discovered a Pyra Labs service called Blogger, which let you post content to the web with relative ease, thanks to a new friend who also tipped me off to a local listserv called Dummytown1. That’s how I first learned about CC, when someone posted to the listserv about it on June 28, 2001.
As you can guess, the reaction was pretty divided: Some folks loved it, others hated it, some thought they were gonna get blamed for it, some didn’t believe the writer was real, others did, some wanted to know if she was single (yuck, gross), others desperately tried to uncover their identity, some thought what’s the fucking point.
Eventually, it did bleed out into broader public sphere with mentions in the Philadelphia Weekly, Philadelphia City Paper (both in the a.d. amorosi column and the “I Love You / I Hate You” advertisement section). Someone even launched their own broadsheet, The Dummy Papers, with their own perspective on the whole thing2.
At some point in the hubbub, various folks started assuming it was me. It made sense. I was of similar age, fairly new on the scene, came armed with witty banter (so I thought!), and frequently landed up at the shows Sarah Duncan.
I feigned flattery—even going so far as to form a one-off Kinks cover band in 2003 called Cherry Coke to capitalize on the “fame”3. In my misguided youth, the logic was that leaning into it was better than constant denial. The reality was that the attention often felt like I was walking into any club with a target on my back. I was worried that someone might be mad at me for something I had no involvement in writing. As you can imagine, for a young woman, this was a horrible feeling to have, and low-grade anxiety I had over it bled into how I handled a variety of things (or didn’t).
Taking myself out of the equation, what’s so troubling to me about this publication boils down to a really simple thing: Tom Lax thought it was acceptable to portray himself as a young woman and use said fake persona to antagonize his peers.
Tom Lax is the proprietor of Siltbreeze Records, a long-running and respected indie label. While perhaps not as profitable or prominent as Drag City, Merge, or Matador, its role in introducing US folks to NZ psych and noise artists such as the Dead C, as well as American bands such as GBV and the ilk cannot be discounted. Also, why the hell am I explaining this guy to you? Y’all know who he is but this is the memory he wants to preserve.
If we think about the power dynamics in DIY circles, Tom is a dude with indie rock “cred” as it were. This was a guy who ran his label, worked at the Philadelphia Record Exchange, and was—and remains—a trusted colleague to many, perhaps to some of the very people in his community that he skewered. From my POV, he was a “cool” dude and I was absolutely fucking nobody.
I’m not going to sit here and armchair analyze why Tom did any of it and chose Sarah Duncan as his cover, but I can tell you what it communicated then—and still does now: That young women are easy targets of ridicule, and simple to personify. From this vantage point in 2024, days after the country re-elects a rapey fascist, this premise sounds incredibly, deeply misogynist and fucked up.
“Oh calm down, it was just a joke!” is what I can already hear from some of y’all. Poking fun of women and ridiculing your supposed community of peers is some troll-level behavior. CC had its forbears in take-the-piss acerbic guy music writing in the form of Chunklet, Answer Me!, and so on. And it moved from print culture to listservs and newsgroups to the early aughts messageboards (BCO, hollertronix, etc) to 4chan, Reddit and beyond, blackening with each shift.
Tom Lax waited over 20 years to claim responsibility for Cherry Coke. Do you know he has never reached out to anyone implicated with an apology?
You can say what you want about me but at least when I have something to say, I’ll be quite transparent about it, much to the consternation of everyone. Because of that, I have made my fair share of mistakes. But I know what they are, and hopefully, so do the other parties. Whatever target may be on my back, I put it there this time around. Incidents like CC influenced, whether I realized it or not at the time, how I chose to spend my time participating in the scene.
What I find odious is not only the lack of accountability or apology, but that it’s being monetized all these years later, not to mention that the people responsible for preserving and upholding this cultural artifact all appear to be white men. People have willingly paid actual money to have a replica of the thing because they think it’s a document of… exactly what? A time when people were simply meaner?
Perhaps, as well as the fact that there are not many artifacts of this particular point in time. A lot of the online markers culture—listservs, Livejournal, Diaryland.nu and the ilk—have been effectively wiped off the servers. The print stuff is just as hard to come by. So I think folks are just fascinated and willing to glom on to any ol’ thing without assessing it’s quality. The fact of the matter is that Cherry Coke isn’t very good. It reminds me of a thing I saw in passing the other day before I backed up my Twitter account for good:
Now, to anyone who has slept through their way through their seminar in Postmodernism 101 (👋🏻), this is not particularly news. And because the shitty, trollish prank of a white cis 30something man in the months right before 9/11 times is available and accessible, of course it’s gonna sound intruiging. I think that’s why this thing rears its head every now and then, but I have to say, there’s better material out there.
When you are looking at archival materials, you need to think about what’s not there in addition to the stories the source materials are attempting to tell. We need to realize CC is only one piece of the puzzle, a single lens to look through to understand Philly’s DIY scene operated at the turn of the century. It’s one where its author felt it was OK to remark upon a woman musician’s breasts, and to claim that the ass of a 40-year old woman as unattractive4. What’s missing are the countless zines made by contemporaries, not to mention oral histories, interviews, and other archival works of the same period.
Philly didn’t turn into this interesting city because of a few white guys—the work was made possible by a lot of folks (myself included but also a whole lotta queer, black, and brown folks) and if you really want to get a fuller sense of it, you have to invite us to the table to tell our stories5. They are far better than anything that a mediocre fake account which couldn’t last beyond 3 issues could ever conjure up, that’s for sure.
Meanwhile, if Tom Lax ever feels like having the decency to apologize to me, the line is open. But I’m also enough of an adult to know that sometimes the apologies never arrive. At least I got to say my peace and can let this go.
- Prior to the shutdown of Yahoo! Groups, I made a personal archive of the listserv. You know, punk archiving! Also worth mentioning while it is a complete archive of the listserv, it’s not totally complete. I believe the list owners has some takedown requests from users, so it is what is publicly available. ↩︎
- I don’t have a copy of this, and it’s only mentioned in passing in the DT archives. ↩︎
- One of my fatal flaws (or strengths) is my sense of self-deprecation. Laugh at yourself before others laugh at you. ↩︎
- I am 46 and, hey, my butt looks great. But also, has anyone looped back to the people mentioned to see how they felt at the time or are feeling now? ↩︎
- Which reminds me: Since Numero Group is making serious bank with all these 90s reissues, why do so few of them feature women? I am just saying: DO BETTER. TRY HARDER. ↩︎