National Post (National Edition)
HOW EXCLAIM! BECAME THE FIRST, AND LAST, CANADIAN MUSIC MAG.
THE STORY OF EXCLAIM! MAGAZINE IS A HISTORY OF FIRSTS. AFTER 25 YEARS IT’S ALSO THE LAST OF ITS KIND
“Just bend over and take it.”
The mantra, as spoken by Exclaim! magazine’s editor-inchief James Keast, has less to do with the last music magazine standing in Canada accepting the decline of the print and publishing world, and more to do with being a publication that has always been available to music fans at no charge from newsstands in record stores across the country. It’s an unlikely model for existence, let alone long-term success. Long-term, in this case, being a now legendary 25 years.
“I think why we’re still here – and SPIN isn’t and Maclean’s is becoming a monthly – is because the internet ushered in an era of free culture,” Keast suggests. “And we’ve always been free, so we didn’t have to change anything.”
As a monthly, the magazine has maintained a circulation of more than 105,000 in over 2,000 outlets across Canada and earned a reputation for bringing music to every pocket of the country. Exclaim! is available “everywhere,” whether in Halifax’s Obsolete Records or a downtown Toronto HMV.
The magazine itself was the lovechild of Ian Danzig, the founder and publisher, and a group of his college radio buddies. While working at IBM, Danzig was moonlighting as a host at Ryerson University’s CKLN FM where he found himself regularly arguing about the state of music. And so he came up with the idea for a local magazine as a place to voice those opinions while shining a spotlight (dimly lit and underground though it may have been at the time) on the lesser-known bands of the city – and soon, the country.
“I grew up a huge music fan, and as a record collector,” says Danzig. “I never thought I would be here, though. It started as a fun, part-time side project – a fanzine. It was about turning people onto music outside the mainstream.”
Although Exclaim! magazine’s band of outsiders had a strong idea of what it would represent from the beginning, translating that vision took time. At first, no one could decide on a name for the publication, it simply went by four symbols: an exclamation point, an asterisk, an apostrophe and a pound sign. The magazine was dubbed “!*’#” for nearly a year before Danzig realized he couldn’t answer business calls referring to the magazine as “f—k,” which is what early readers called it.
It wasn’t the last time Exclaim! would opt for an ill-suited name. Moving online before most in the mid’90s, the magazine operated under the distinctive though entirely unrelated URL “schmooze.net.” An overhauled website debuted in 2001, with their actual name. And for the first year of its run, if you picked up a copy in hopes of reading the cover story, there wasn’t one – the magazine would feature a musician on its cover with no accompanying story.
“It just didn’t occur to them,” says Keast, who was hired as its first editor in June 1995, armed with not much more than a threemonth Toronto Life internship, which was considered local magazine experience enough for him to help whip the publication into shape.
At the time of his hiring, Canada was experiencing a significant independent publishing boom, particularly in Toronto, that paved the way for zines. “The front hallway of the Horseshoe Tavern would have 25 or 40 zines,” recalls Keast. “There were new ones launched constantly. I used to joke at the time that anyone can make the first issue of a magazine, but very few can make a second and almost no one can make a third. I used to collect second issues, because they were so rare. And there was never a third. But then there was Exclaim!”
So while in the first few years of its inception, the mechanics of making a magazine didn’t come naturally to those who were busy establishing it, Exclaim! has since become a team of people just as confident and self-assured in their work, if not more so, than anyone else in the field. “It was an extension of us playing music on the radio for our friends; it was never about the platform,” Danzig says. “What the internet has done is allow the world to catch up to what we’ve always been doing.”
“People always find free ways to consume music,” Danzig continues. “Just like they do with journalism. Younger audiences can get whatever they want whenever they want. Digital content by its nature is free; trying to win the game and beat it is impossible.”
After a bit of prodding, however, Danzig does admit that keeping Exclaim! alive is an ongoing challenge. “That’s been a constant since day one,” he says. If you listen to Keast and Danzig describe how Exclaim! has found the key to thriving in an industry that is actively wilting, you’ll find yourself convinced it is possible – because, at least in their case, they’ve found a niche: covering the type of Canadian music that its readers would not hear about otherwise.
“We’ve always pitched ourselves as the alternative to a Rolling Stone or SPIN, but that style of mainstream music magazine has never existed in Canada for us to play against,” says Keast. “It’s not our goal or responsibility to serve the Canadian music industry, but I think that it suffers from a lack of mainstream music coverage in the general landscape.”
In fact, there is no publication in the country that has had Arcade Fire, The New Pornographers, F—ked Up and Caribou on its various covers long before the artists attained anything approaching mainstream success. In this sense, there’s a wonderful parallel to be drawn between the span of coverage that Exclaim! offers and the music it grants a spotlight. It lends a voice to the unheard, and in its efforts to place unequivocal emphasis on that work, both artist and the printed word take on a newfound prominence.
Right around the time Exclaim! hit its stride, featuring the likes of Broken Social Scene and Feist on its covers, the independent music scene in Canada began to erupt in popularity both at home and abroad. By the mid-2000s, Arcade Fire, Death from Above 1979, Tokyo Police Club and Metric introduced a new wave of alternative music, and Exclaim was among the first to take notice.
PEOPLE ALWAYS FIND FREE WAYS TO CONSUME MUSIC