Robert Ford and Trent Adkins shaped the bold, subversive, gossipy, funny, deeply engaged voice of
Thing, felled by the AIDS pandemic in 1993.
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Thing published ten issues between November 1989 and summer 1993. Zine cofounder Trent Adkins appears on the cover of the third issue, pictured here at lower left.
Amber Huff
In February 2021, dance-music site Selector republished a list of 100 important house records taken from a 1992 issue of a short-lived Chicago zine called
Crossfade. "Chicago's House: A Checklist" originally ran in November of that year as part of a story package about house history, sandwiched between a brief but trenchant essay by copublisher and editor Terry Martin on the birth and evolution of Chicago's underground dance culture and a six-page interview Martin had conducted with the godfather of house, Frankie Knuckles. The cover of that issue—there were only three in total—featured a live shot of pioneering house DJ Ron Hardy, who'd died eight months before.