SHOTGUN SEAMSTRESS

The complete run of a pioneering zine spotlighting Afro-punk and Black alternative culture.

Launched in 2006, Shotgun Seamstress echoed the brash voice, handmade look, and no-nonsense attitude of punk-rock zines like Maximumrocknroll. But Atoe was determined to elevate Black artists that the broader, mostly White punk culture tended to unjustly ignore. (As one contributor wrote, punk is “just black music played fast”). The author was inspired in part by the 2003 documentary Afro-Punk (she interviewed its director, James Spooner), and she spotlights a host of Black alternative pioneers: avant-garde jazz artist Sun Ra, rasta-punks Bad Brains, X-Ray Spex singer Poly Styrene, performance artist Vaginal Davis, art-punk band ESG, and more. As the zine took on a stronger political tone through its final issue in 2015, Atoe increasingly emphasized current artists and the need to create spaces for them to flourish. She describes how in Portland, Oregon, and New Orleans she booked concerts featuring LGBTQ+, female, and Black artists and organized workshops to teach those communities about art-making and the music business—and weathered accusations of being exclusionary for those efforts. In the later issues, Atoe expanded her lens further, writing about punk and punk-adjacent culture in her family’s native Nigeria and the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. As in other punk zines, Atoe honored the idea that punk was as much a community as a brand of music, and she’s infectiously enthusiastic about her favorite artists. The zine was just as fierce about calling out bigotry and ignorance in a scene in which Black fans and musicians often felt isolated and dismissed. “Punk is nothing without politics,” wrote Atoe, and the discussions of race, art, and inclusion that she stoked have moved into the mainstream.

A welcome reprint of an influential, perceptive, still-relevant zine.