Why Fish Piss Matters: On the Last Authentic Bohemia

by Andy Brown

Called Canada’s most influential zine, Fish Piss ran for 11 issues, from 1996 to 2006. It began as a bilingual mash-up of the Montreal anglophone spoken word scene and the comics scene. Edited by Montrealer Louis Rastelli, and rooted in the DIY punk ethos, Fish Piss was a contact zone of literary material, comics, essays, interviews, politics, and music. Eventually the publication went from a scrappy photocopied zine to a 160-page publication with advertising and worldwide distribution through Tower Records. By the time it folded, Fish Piss was a calling card to a true bohemian community, and, due to timing, post-Referendum and pre-social media, perhaps the last of its kind.

In Why Piss Piss Matters, Andy Brown does a deep dive into the zine, highlighting the unique way it bridged its French and English influences, creating an exciting space for creative exchange. Some of its early contributors who went on to illustrious careers include Kid Koala, Genevieve Castrée, Catherine Kidd, Heather O’Neill, and Jonathan Goldstein. Brown, who lived in Montreal during this period, offers an insider’s reflection on the cultural significance of the zine and its lasting legacy. He explores the history of various bohemian communities over the past 200 years, and Fish Piss’s singular role in that history.

180 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2025

Reviews

[Laika · Rating 2 out of 5]

The independent, alternative, vaguely punk-aligned artistic and music scenes of the late 20th century have been mythologized while everyone involved is basically still around like nothing else I have ever encountered. This book is a proud addition to that effort, a hagiography of the zine Fish Piss and the scene in the downtown Montreal of the ‘90s and 2000s that it rose out of, written by someone who was intimately involved on the ground as it happened. It was a Christmas gift, and not something I’d have picked up otherwise, but an interesting enough little read. Though I’m not sure whether it’s better to describe it as a fascinating emic account of a specific cultural moment undercut by pretensions to profound social import, or as a slim book of pop-sociological theory drowning in a 40-something guy with the three kids and a house in the country reminiscing about how cool and punk rock he used to be.

The book is in equal parts an exploration of the idea of ‘Bohemia’ (in the Rent sense, not the medieval Prague sense), an examination of why Montreal (and specifically the Mile End neighbourhood thereof) was such a productive example of one in the ‘90s and 2000s, and a history and recounting of the ‘zine Fish Piss and its particular influence. It does, I think, decent-to-good job at the first two and a curiously terrible one at the last. (Curious because the book is written by a man who was intimately involved in the thing’s production and has made a career out of preserving artifacts of the scene it emerged out of).

‘Bohemian’ is one of those terms that gets used a lot as a vague, vibes-based description, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it considered or defined with any sort of rigour before. The book’s effort is a bit drawn out (especially given how short a volume it’s taking up space in), but is both interesting and (it seems to me) useful. After exploring a few different agreed-upon historical examples and delving into the etymology of the term, Brown defines it with something like sociological rigour. A Bohemia, to him, is a neighbourhood or locality in a larger city, defined by a constellation of cultural and artistic venues and populated by an artistically productive but economically marginal subculture of (predominantly) the downwardly mobile scions of the middle and upper classes. Such circumstances never last for long, but the density of connections between people genuinely dedicating the majority of their waking hours towards the production of art for its own sake and for the appreciation of their peers is often explosively productive.

I appreciate this definition a great deal, in large part because (despite Brown’s clear sympathies and inclinations) it resists the urge to make Bohemia a purely ‘good’ thing. A Bohemia is necessarily not any sort of real mass movement, nor something of real political power or relevance (except in mythologized retrospect). It’s to some degree necessarily elitist, a subculture centred around the over-educated and under-employed (even if they are often dying from drinking bad water in their 30s with the best of them) and only peripherally involving those without access to some sort of cultural capital. The book never really explicitly reckons with this, but insofar as ‘gentrification’ is a specific coherent and bad thing (which the book clearly agrees that it is), it’s also impossible to read it without coming away understanding that somewhere becoming Bohemia is a guaranteed way to start the process. It is always – for me, anyway – much easier to take the analysis of something by an author who clearly loves it seriously when they do reckon with the negatives.

More controversially – and I’m undecided how much of this is just an old man yelling at clouds – Brown argues that no true Bohemia will ever appear again. The internet ruined it – social media and cultural globalization make the development of the kind of close-knit and isolated scene where artists grow together in tightly-nested and overlapping petri dishes impossible to sustain for long enough for anything interesting to happen. Bohemias are necessarily physical locations. Venues where the same people trade off being performers, audience and critiques and come into organic contact with wholly different projects which end up influencing each other. Which I can see if I squint, but I really can’t help but wonder if Brown’s problem is just that he’s incapable of finding the scenes online where similar processes occur – if he could find them, that would just be proof positive that they’re not hidden enough to avoid the social media flattening he complains about).

All that said, the most interesting part of the book to read for me (and not by any close margin) was the series of chapters exploring the Mile End scene, its history, and why it developed. This may be because I personally find Québécois language politics (that the scene was largely anglophone in a city and province consciously dedicated to promoting the French language was not incidental), late 20th century urban decay and redevelopment, and cute little cultural anecdotes all fascinating reading, but still. I don’t really have anything to say about it but part is just straightforwardly good.

It’s when the book shifts from talking about the scene at large to talking about Fish Piss in particular that it runs into really major problems. The author was, as mentioned, personally involved with the ‘zine’s production and the people behind it – even if it weren’t stated, this would be painfully obvious. The book is a hagiography in the worst possible way, refusing to even obliquely discuss flaws of or arguments between figures the author clearly thinks highly of, and not having much of interest to replace them with. The result is the dullest recitation of names, dates and titles I can imagine. No amount of generously heaped superlatives used to describe the art included in the ‘zine can really stop the book’s descriptions of it sounding like particularly bad plaques at a mediocre art gallery (though the reprinted cover art in the middle of the book is appreciated). The major changes and events across the ‘zine’s run (the shift in who was printed, the deemphasis of prose and fiction for more music coverage, the distribution deal at Tower Records, the end of the ‘zine) are relayed exclusively in passive voice, with no interest in mining them for drama or explaining the decisions behind them. The chapter titled ‘The Death of Bohemia’ has all the vigour and passion of a Wikipedia article.

The book’s other main stumbling block – not a small one – is politics. Which is to say – the Mile End scene and Fish Piss in particularly clearly had about the kind of not-especially-coherent, deeply felt anti-globalization, anti-consumerism anarcho-socialist punk politics you’d expect of the place Godspeed You! Black Emperor emerged from. For all his enthusiastic singing of their praises, Andy Brown does not seem to share these convictions (or, at least, finds them embarrassing). The book seems to view any sort of mass movement or organized politics with distaste, instead defaulting to a sort of ‘Keep Montreal Weird!’ commonsense where the most pressing civic issue is setting aside zones of urban blight for starving artists to settle in. The dissonance is sharpest in how Brown keeps insistently referring to the (protests against the) 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City as a disillusioning moment for much of the scene and frames it as almost a beginning of the end – but basically every direct quote included about the event is an impassioned account of radicalization. It’s a bit odd for the book to conclude that Fish Piss’s main political message was the DIY ethos embodied in its very production so soon after the reprinted anti-Iraq War cover art of an American Flag made of missiles and erect penises.

Brown is very passionate and effusive about that DIY ethos and the importance of outsider art, but also painfully insecure about it. The title of the book invites you to ask why you should care about any of this. The resounding answer it, somewhat accidentally, gives is that you should care about this sort of Bohemia because they eventually produce art that gets mainstream acclaim and recognition. Mile End was important because it gave you Godspeed and (later) Arcade Fire. Fish Piss Matters because a half-dozen different award winning authors practiced and tried things out in it before making it big. The alternative scene deserves support because it’s the disgusting compost that the occasional actually good artist will grow out of. Now to be clear I’m certain this isn’t what Brown is actually trying to say, but it is still what comes across.

All told, this was an afternoon’s read that I got as a Christmas gift. So certainly worth the price of admission. An interesting read, provided you have a high tolerance for rolling your eyes.

[Tessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book! At certain points it got a little too descriptive into aspects that didn’t seem necessary but were interested nonetheless.