Grunge 'Zine for Hip-Hop Cyberpunks
Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 4/8/1996
Curious about body piercings? Haven't a clue about Sean Landers's art? Can't remember who the Culture Babes are? Then alt.culture an a-to-z guide to the 90's--underground, on-line and over the counter by Steven Daly and Nathaniel Wice (HarperCollins, $17) is the book and the Web site for you. The book features short entries on '90s stuff and related Internet sites, but the newly launched Web site, in reality a giant database of alternative and popular culture, provides pictures, sound and video files and lucidly written, hyperlinked entries on more than 1,000 with-it topics from Jagermeister shots to Amy Fisher and Dan Clowes (the essay on alternative comics is the best survey on independent and mainstream comics publishing we've seen in print). The authors will constantly update all the URLs, FTP, gopher and e-mail addresses. Publicist Clio Manuelian of HarperCollins says it took some convincing to get the not-very '9Os HarperCollins brain trust to agree to put the entire book on the Web -- publishers still don't get it -- "but we convinced them it wouldn't hurt sales." Try the random link -- it calls up a different group of '9Os topics every time you reload the page. The URL is http://www.altculture.com.
