I’m seeing a lot more than black leather there…
The earliest scenes were a real mix of styles, before it got boiled down to a post-punk hardcore uniform or post-sex pistols uniform.
[ETA] Jenny Lens work in the LA scene from 76 to the 80s are pretty interesting:
That’s not X-Ray Spex, who were British… that’s LA… I recognize Alice Bag (in orange) and Exene from X (in red brown and white, probably sitting on John Doe’s lap).
Do you know who that is besides X-Ray Spex?
Sounds like a description of the editorial board of Maximum RnR.
Danke.
If I had the technical chops I would totally automate this so none of the videos would get missed, but as it stands I’ll just link the ones I stumble across.
Yeah, but they gave plenty of different kinds of punks a voice to talk to each other and tell about their scenes, even if they had a political/cultural view point. The zine itself, especially scene reports, letters, and the classifieds were a pretty inclusive place for anyone identifying as punk.
Ah, I could have sworn Alice Bag was Poly Styrene! Of course, I was always terrible about paying attention to album cover art.
So was any other decade we just forget the dross except for the historians.
But in teh best of the worst while not the beginning it was the Golan Globus era of Cannon Films which gave us so so many so bad they are good films in the 80s,
ETA if you have not seen the documentary about them then you are missing out.
But also another good example of the diversity of style in early punk scenes! And that punk scenes were much more diverse early on, not just a bunch of pissed off white blokes!
Let’s not forget the slits!
Viv Albertine’s books are a must read, BTW!
And then we get told that we don’t know what we’re talking about, because what we’re saying doesn’t align with popular memory (or an individual’s subjective experiences of that time)! 
Your pic makes me feel better because I do see a resemblance. (I had thought “Poly” looked slimmer than I remembered.)
The Bags never got as much attention as X-Ray Spex…
[ETA] A classic!
And Alice Bag has been putting out music more recently, too!
Asshat. That shit was the shit.
Absolutely. But still, the microscopic focus on punk and punk only is still pretty damned puritanical, no way around it. And I love punk, but reading MRR back then, while I was simultaneously getting into jazz and hip hop, it always felt like Yohannon and co were looking down their noses at the rest of us.
I don’t know…put a different song behind it and it makes a pretty compelling case for the '80s being pretty f*cking awesome.
Alice Bag has been doing exercise videos during lockdown.
Heh. This entire thread is one big troll. Congratulations!
Sure, but there was plenty of interest to sustain that as a translocal identity via a shared mass media format like a zine. Their goal is pretty focused on that, it seems to me.
Or maybe they were just trying to serve a particular community? 
There are plenty of other magazines and zines that did just that for a variety of genres of music, not just MRR. Should a classical magazine include stories on punk or metal, so as to not “look down on others”? Or is it meant to be a means of exploring the genre for people interested in that?
Freaking LOVE Alice Bag! Chainsaw is the shit. (And we share a publisher!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR2FG741WE4
I didn’t see the following powerhouses of talent in the video clip, so I’ll share them here. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm BoingBoing welcome to Frank Stallone and Yahoo Serious.
Wait until they talk about the period from 2017 through 2020.
