Self-styled indie guru Hal Niedzviecki proselytizes to the fledgling creative masses with The Big Book of Pop Culture. Sticking close to his DIY cultural principles, Niedzviecki attempts to map out a route to the heart of indie culture by providing young artists with the tools and rules of self-expression.

The book’s early chapters read like an over-simplified cultural studies course with a healthy dose of self-help maxims thrown in for encouragement. In laying out his subject, Niedzviecki aims to empower, but his overeager, condescending tone misfires.

The second half of the guide explores DIY print media (zines, comics, and books), film projects, indie music, radio, TV, and the Internet as potential vehicles of artistic communication. It is peppered with brief interviews that Niedzviecki has conducted with indie celebrities. These interviews are the most interesting and instructive element of the book, and come closest to addressing an issue that’s mostly missing, the critical “why” that must come from within the would-be artists themselves. Some notably mature content slips into some of these interviews, particularly the one with filmmaker Paula Tiberius: “Lots of funny stuff happened, like the actors Sasha and Greg making their fake sex noises. In the film their two characters are supposed to be doing it wildly upstairs, and the other band-mates can hear them in the kitchen.”

Illustrated by Marc Ngui, a graphic novelist and a regular contributor to Broken Pencil (the quarterly zine culture magazine co-founded by Niedzviecki), The Big Book’s design sensibilities call to mind textbooks from the early 1990s. Many of the photos are low-res black-and-white non sequiturs that fail to illuminate the content or inspire the reader.

It is uncomfortably clear from the start that Niedzviecki doesn’t understand his intended readers – their unprecedented ability to network digitally, their mania for cultural earmarking, acquiring, and sharing. The idea of anyone endeavouring to explain the availability and utility of DIY pop culture to this emerging generation is misguided and superfluous. You don’t have to define and seek out what you’re already immersed in.