I GUESS WE’RE LIKE NHL DRAFT STRATEGISTS

Tom Cruise attends Exclaim’s second anniversary party. that opportunity at the magazine didn’t depend on race or gender. “Exclaim! helped give me a sense of legitimacy, both personally and with my peers, that isn’t very often available to young women in media.”

Warner, who last year published her first book, We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90s and Changed Canadian Music, credits the magazine for bringing a healthy community to her, as “the one consistent go-to source for all things music since I cared about music and journalism, so it helped shape my fandom and broadened my tastes.”

Both Danzig and Keast consider Exclaim! to be not just a crucial training ground in the early stages of a Canadian musician’s career, but in a music writer’s. “We want to support bands and be early champions, and with writers, artists and photographers, we like to do the same,” says Keast. “We can afford to give them their first free job. We just want music fans first and writers second.”

The more you learn about Exclaim!, the more you come to understand what makes it such a remarkable publication. It hasn’t just helped build a community of diverse music lovers in one area; it’s brought the intimacy of a local music scene to an entire country.

Just don’t refer to that community as music snobs, which, according to Keast, is a variation on the dreaded hipster: “I think snobs think they’ve already found the right thing, while nerds are always looking for the next thing. We have a former contributor who’s one of the foremost experts in the world on a very specific form of psychedelic garage rock, made between 1967 and 1969 in fewer than five cities and primarily located around two UK studios, but she knows that better than almost anyone in the world – she doesn’t know anything else about anything else. Those are our people.”

The same people who, a different scene; one year offered punk and metal on one floor, dub and hip-hop on another, and electronic on another.

“It always felt like New Year’s Eve,” says Danzig, and you’d never know who would show up. “Our second anniversary party was at a place on Church Street. Bruce LaBruce invited Gus Van Sant (who had been filming To Die For in the city at the time), Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise to the party and they all showed up!”

While even Exclaim! may not be able to bring Cruise and Kidman back together, its 25th anniversary will reunite many of its original readers. The magazine will be joining forces with concert promoter Dan Burke for five shows in January. Burke, the booker at Silver Dollar, has been working with Exclaim! for two decades, and is uniting with the magazine for his “Class of 2017” concert series.

“I guess we’re like NHL draft strategists choosing and hyping who should get picked in the first round,” Burke says, describing both the lineup of this year’s event and Exclaim’s history of spotlighting artists who go on to stardom. The “Class of 2017” will serve as a monthlong party, celebrating everything Exclaim! has come to be known for: preserving a love for the underground and the unrecognized.

Sitting in the Exclaim! offices, a cozy, three-floor space at Bloor and Ossington with more white on the walls than scattered artwork, Keast is surrounded by yellowed magazine clippings, remnants of the magazine’s history. He smiles, shrugs and seems to take stock of the publication he’s worked tirelessly on for more than two decades. “We are proud of being first,” he summarizes.

And while this is undoubtedly true, there’s something else he conveys without words: an unspoken pride in Exclaim! also being the last of its kind.