Alternative Press

Alternative Press

Notwithstanding legitimate rivals for the title, most Americans hearing the words "Alternative Press" would probably think of the brash, crude, anti-establishment periodicals of the Vietnam Era (1963-1975). Most often tabloid in format, printed on the cheapest stock available, written with intent to maim, edited like frontline dispatches, and illustrated with "psychedelic," provocative graphics, these "underground" newspapers and magazines offered themselves as the organs of the national and regional "counter-culture" for which the period is famous—and, by and large, the counter-culture accepted the offer. The epithet "underground," however, was largely self-assumed and unmerited, since use of the police power of the state to suppress their publication was seldom if ever threatened, let alone exerted. By the time the Viet Cong forces took possession of Saigon (April 30, 1975), the great majority of the underground papers had either ceased publication or transformed themselves—like Rolling Stone—into the raffish fringe of the Establishment: the subject matter had not changed, but they had shed the guerilla style of their youth and moved, like their readers, above ground.

Since one of the overreaching goals of the 1960s counter-culture was to cancel all debts to the past, the insider histories of the Alternative Press—most of which appeared in the early 1970s—make no mention of any predecessors older than the end of World War II.

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