What is RAPMM?

Welcome to the RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines (RAPMM), the digital collection of independently published popular music magazines and fanzines. RAPMM brings over 125 titles in one place, with front-to-back issues scanned from their sources and made available in digital form. The zines in RAPMM cover a wide array of popular music genres, highlighting the expansive punk world and its many subgenres, as well as other rock genres, indie, hip hop, and country. The collection explores the history of musical movements and their relation to politics, society, culture, underground scenes, stylistic shifts, and feminism. RAPMM titles include interviews with recognized and unknown artists, band profiles, album and live show reviews, and histories of record labels. Please be aware that RAPMM includes some explicit content that may be offensive or harmful to some users. This content is unredacted to ensure the completeness of the collection and remains unaltered to retain historical accuracy. It documents the issues and social context of specific times as well as the attitudes and opinions of the people who created the material.

Bad trip

Bad trip was an Atlanta-based punk, indie, and grunge zine active in the 1990s and early 2000s under the leadership of Bruce Ciero. The editor’s column in the first issue reads: "A lot of bands have more guts than 'talent'. This little rag is about those bands, the ones that have the nerve and lack of vision to think they can make a difference in an indifferent world". Combining passion for the music it covered with an iconoclastic attitude and edgy sense of humor, the zine also featured sex-industry advertisements and imagery that recalled the pin-up culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Bad trip is notable for its striking art, design, and illustrations, combining high contrast, black-and-white inked images with typewriter-produced text.