The Bee's Knees #12 CONTACT: Mike Turner P.O. Box 1035 Panama City, FL 32402 beesknees7@aol.com Available at Insound, PAL Mailorder and others...

Content is important. That's why a crappy-looking TV show fan-site made by a seventeen year-old can rack up hundreds of thousands of hits, while the show's flashy "official" corporate site scores only nominal traffic. If you've got content people want -- be it the latest X-Files spoilers, the newest warez and MP3s or the best selection of fake Sophie Aldred nude pictures -- ephemeral elements like style, design, grammar and spelling won't matter to them.

If you've read The Bee's Knees before, you can probably see where this is going. The Bee's Knees is very much an "old school" zine -- no desktop publishing here. The uncorrected text (more on that later) is laid out by hand, in pleasingly haphazard fashion, over background art that you'll probably recognize if the bands covered in this issue appeal to you. Because the zine is professionally printed on relatively decent stock, it looks pretty good; most of the photos suffer, but some pages look surprisingly good.

This is definitely a packed issue, boasting a bunch of reviews, a few concert write-ups and interviews with Kingsauce, Olivia Tremor Control, 50 Tons of Black Terror, Of Montreal, Dressy Bessy, Elf Power and The Minders. If this gives you the impression that publisher/primary writer Mike Turner has something of an Elephant 6 fixation, well...yes, obviously. The interviews appear to have been transcribed verbatim; the charm of Turner's unaffected style is that his unfiltered comments and earnest conversational approach make it easier to identify with him. It's nice to read interviews done by someone who isn't trying to impress a band with his encyclopedic knowledge of them, their work and their genre. The reviews, while occasionally generic, hide their share of gems, too -- such as Mike's admission that he fell asleep while listening to Labradford's E Luxo So.

Warning: Rant Ahead.

However, for a Spelling, Grammar and Usage Nazi like me, Bee's Knees has some drawbacks. The writing is awkward. The usual zine problems abound: your/you're and their/they're/there issues, run-together words, comma splices, sentence fragments and the weird indie kid inability to understand that the possessive forms of words like people, brother and album require an apostrophe before the "s". With all due respect, this sort of stuff makes my skin crawl -- I swear, I think we'll all be communicating with a combination of grunts and a twelve-letter alphabet before I die. As an editor, and someone who actually dropped a fair bit of money on an English degree, this stuff bugs the crap out of me...but I realize that most readers aren't bothered by it (at least not as much as I am). What's harder to take is the sheer number of spelling and typing errors that litter the text. These could've been fixed by spell-check in a matter of seconds, Mike -- give the readers a break!

Ultimately, the quality of the content makes these issues tolerable, though I still have to take a mild sedative and grit my teeth when reading The Bee's Knees. Good thing I like the articles...and the CD.

The biggest selling point for Bee's Knees #12, of course, is the CD that accompanies this 4th Anniversary issue. The disc is a veritable who's who of the zine's preferred segment of indie rock (E6, Kindercore, etc.), and features Big Soap, Elf Power, the Rosenbergs, Kingsauce, Of Montreal, Masters of Hemisphere, Birddog, Regia, Marshmallow Coast, the Mendoza Line, Great Lakes, the Teacups, the Minders, Vince Mole and His Calcium Orchestra and the Kiss-Offs. This is simply one of the best zine compilations I've ever heard, and establishes a very high standard for Mike's Happy Happy Birthday To Me label. Hell, his mom even sewed the CD's cloth slip-cover. How can you live without something like that? I'd even buy Hit it or Quit It to get a copy of this disc.

The verdict for Bee's Knees #12? Damned hard to read, but absolutely essential to own.

Reviewed by George Zahora