Revisiting the Arthur Magazine Archives: A Classic West Coast Culture Rag Arrives on PDF

In 2002, a broadsheet magazine called Arthur started appearing at various locations around Los Angeles. Rich with interviews, features, comic art, and reviews, the publication focused on music, art, literature, esoterica, and politics with a uniquely Californian sensibility. Across the next half-decade, the free publication, founded by Jay Babcock, would become an essential bible of the Southern California underground music scene and feature writers including Erik Davis, Byron Coley and Thurston Moore (their music column Bull Tongue), V. Vale, Kristine McKenna, and Margaret Wappler.

Although hard copies are now impossible to track down, a lot of the stories are available on the Arthur site. Recently Babcock began digitizing the print versions and making them available for download and viewing. Although the process isn’t yet compete — a few PDFs only feature even-numbered pages, and a number of others have yet to be made available — the result is time capsule/tip-sheet/resource that carries readers to a turn-of-the-century moment when Built by Wendy and American Apparel were upending budget fashion, Aron’s Records reigned supreme, and a recent SF export, Amoeba Records, was setting up shop on Sunset. It’s also the moment when Napster was blowing up the music industry and bankrupting print advertising budgets.

Its early issues arrived not long after the Sept. 11 attacks, and as such are filled with righteous tirades against George W. Bush, the build-up to the Iraq War, and the military state. One issue was designed to be “a collective curse against the folly of empire, against those who advocate it and those who profit from it.” That same issue featured a brilliant interview with sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard.

The political writing is now an essential record of the time, but the music and literature writing within the available issues provide a wellspring of crate-digging tips from the early- and mid-aughts. The regular ‘Arthur Top 20’ recommended new LA-and-beyond underground music. Here’s what they were listening to 20 years ago: Yellow Swans, MF DOOM, Alice Coltrane, Dungen, the Cramps, and more.

Bull Tongue, the experimental music column written by longtime pals Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) and Byron Coley (co-founder of Forced Exposure), is particularly revelatory.

Arthur head honcho Babcock posted on the Arthur site that more issues would be arriving on PDF in early 2025, and they promise to further reveal historical nuggets from the recent past.

Browse the issues here.