In Search of Cultural Politics in a Fall Fanzine

Shortly after the abstracts for the conference on which this book is based were posted on the web, I received an email from Ken Sproat, who had been a regular contributor to The Fall fanzine, The Biggest Library Yet. ¹ In my abstract I wrote that my paper would examine how Fall fans constructed ideology and cultural politics through the music of The Fall. Ken wrote that he was ‘amused at my subject matter’ and was ‘a bit alarmed that what were essentially “throwaway” articles are up for academic dissection’. He might be being modest: as we shall see later, in many instances Ken’s work is far from ‘throwaway’. Whether through Janice Radway’s pioneering work on readers of romance fiction ([1984] 1991) or Henry Jenkins’ explorations of fan culture (1992) (two key works on whose shoulders this essay stands, if only as inspiration), we have come to understand the importance of attending to people’s everyday experiences of popular culture, and in particular what they tell us about how people experience themselves, what Simon Frith has called ‘the experience of [the] self-in-process’ (2007, 294; original emphasis).