“Tomorrow’s pop is being realized today on small decentralized record labels that are interested in taking risks, not making money.” It’s a wonderfully prophetic excerpt from Pavitt’s underground manifesto, eight years before he founded Sub Pop Records and transformed the scope of pop by heading the early-90s Seattle grunge scene. This anthology collects Pavitt’s Subterranean Pop zines, in which he aimed to promote geographically specific pop music. It includes essays from Pavitt and collaborators about their efforts to revolutionize the music scene, and also features reviews of bands like Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, and the Butthole Surfers before their names were on the lips of every self-respecting rock fan in the late 80’s. In an era where music (and everything else) can be co-created by people living on opposite ends of the world, Sub Pop USA serves as a radical historical document that demonstrates how, once upon a time, cultural uprisings could only be created by people living in immediate physical proximity to one another.
