Results by title

A twisting path through Austin’s underground music scene in the twentieth century’s last decade, narrated by the people who were there.

It’s 1990 in Austin, Texas. The next decade will be a tipping point in the city's metamorphosis from sleepy college town to major city. Beneath the increasingly slick exterior, though, a group of like-minded contrarians were reimagining an underground music scene. Embracing a do-it-yourself ethos, record labels emerged to release local music, zines cheered and jeered acts beneath the radar of mainstream media outlets, and upstart clubs provided a home venue for new bands to build their sound.

This vibrant scene valued expression over erudition, from the razor-sharp songcraft of Spoon to the fuzzed-out poptones of Sixteen Deluxe, and blurred the boundaries between observer and participant. Evolving in tandem with the city’s emergence on the national stage via the film Slacker and the SXSW conference and festivals, Austin’s musical underground became a spiritual crucible for the uneasy balance between commercial success and cultural authenticity, a tension that still resonates today.

The first book about Austin underground music in the ’90s, A Curious Mix of People is an oral history that tells the story of this transformative decade through the eyes of the musicians, writers, DJs, club owners, record-store employees, and other key figures who were there.

The U.S.-Mexico border has long been a home to artists, poets, emos, and punks. In the clandestine undergrounds of borderlands cultural production, there lies an impulse to live below and beyond border surveillance technologies. This book is about the utopic stories that narrate this impulse and the punk literary scenes that facilitate these fabulations.

Using an innovative methodology of “scene-work”—a blend of literary analysis, queer theory, critical regionalism, and auto-ethnography—Borderpunk identifies, aggregates, and outlines the emergent genre of borderpunk cultural productions. Beginning with the post-1960s through the present, author Sophia Martínez Abbud examines how music, playlists, literature, art, and performance borderpunk narratives teach us to elide, undermine, and work against the border’s presumed authority. Through these narratives, readers become attuned to the anarchic sense of abjection that permeates the border regions and the kinds of punk subjectivities emerging from these sites of re-mediation.

Borderpunk offers scenes that refuse notions of respectability at different time periods, geographies, and scales. Following the mechanics of other narrative punk genres, such as cyberpunk or solarpunk, it sketches out the uses of “punk” as a way of being in border spaces—where abjection, relajo, and illegibility become useful tools that encourage us to divest from the norm, participate in horizontal community building, and imagine borders in radical new ways. 

2025 Al Lowman Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association

An immersive study of the influential and predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene in El Paso, Texas.

Punk rock is known for its daring subversion, and so is the West Texas city of El Paso. In Chuco Punk, Tara López dives into the rebellious sonic history of the city, drawing on more than seventy interviews with punks, as well as unarchived flyers, photos, and other punk memorabilia. Connecting the scene to El Paso's own history as a borderland, a site of segregation, and a city with a long lineage of cultural and musical resistance, López throws readers into the heat of backyard punx shows, the chaos of riots in derelict mechanic shops, and the thrill of skateboarding on the roofs of local middle schools. She reveals how, in this predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene, women forged their own space, sound, and community. Covering the first roots of Chuco punk in the late 1970s through the early 2000s, López moves beyond the breakout bands to shed light on how the scene influenced not only the contours of sound and El Paso but the entire topography of punk rock.

For many, the word “emo” calls to mind angsty teenagers, shaggy black haircuts, and skinny jeans. A popular music phenomenon in the early 2000s, emo is short for “emotional hardcore,” and refers to both a music genre and a youth scene notable for its androgynous style. Judith May Fathallah pushes beyond the stereotypes and social stigma to explore how online fandom has shaped the definition of emo, with significant implications both for millennial constructs of gender and for contemporary fan studies.

First laying out the debate over what emo is, Fathallah walks superfans and newcomers through the culture surrounding thegenre’s major bands, including the emo holy trinity: My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At the Disco. Next she examines fans’ main mode of participation in the emo subculture—online communities such as LiveJournal, Tumblr, MySpace, and band websites. Taking a hard look at the gender politics that dominated those spaces, she unearths a subculture that simultaneously defines itself by its sensitivity and resistance to traditional forms of masculinity, yet ruthlessly enforces homophobic and sexist standards. Fathallah demonstrates fandom’s key role in defining emo as a concept and genre after 2001, with probing insight into its implications for gender constructions through popular music.

An inside look at a scene and a career, Play Like a Man is the evocative and humorous tale of one woman’s life in the trenches and online.

A fascinating analysis of a punk rock hotbed, Politics as Sound tells the story of how a generation created music that produced--and resisted--politics and power.

A raucous look at a small-city underground, Punks in Peoria takes readers off the beaten track to reveal the punk rock life as lived in Anytown, U.S.A.

As an industry insider and pioneering post-punk musician, Vivien Goldman’s perspective on music journalism is unusually well-rounded. In Revenge of the She-Punks, she probes four themes—identity, money, love, and protest—to explore what makes punk such a liberating art form for women.

With her visceral style, Goldman blends interviews, history, and her personal experience as one of Britain’s first female music writers in a book that reads like a vivid documentary of a genre defined by dismantling boundaries. A discussion of the Patti Smith song “Free Money,” for example, opens with Goldman on a shopping spree with Smith. Tamar-Kali, whose name pays homage to a Hindu goddess, describes the influence of her Gullah ancestors on her music, while the late Poly Styrene's daughter reflects on why her Somali-Scots-Irish mother wrote the 1978 punk anthem “Identity,” with the refrain “Identity is the crisis you can't see.” Other strands feature artists from farther afield (including in Colombia and Indonesia) and genre-busting revolutionaries such as Grace Jones, who wasn't exclusively punk but clearly influenced the movement while absorbing its liberating audacity. From punk's Euro origins to its international reach, this is an exhilarating world tour.

A deep dive into the early days of punk in Austin, Texas, this oral history immerses readers in a diverse and influential music scene.

Texas has always teemed with music and counterculture. When punk came to the state in 1978, it flourished in San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and, especially, Austin. Punk and post-punk musicians, including nationally acclaimed bands like the Butthole Surfers, the Big Boys, the Dicks, and Daniel Johnston influenced local culture before slashing into the American musical psyche. (See Kurt Cobain sporting Johnston’s “Hi, How are you?” T-shirt.) Someday All the Adults Will Die! is an oral history of punk in Texas, from its rise in the late 1970s, through its strong anti-racist, feminist, and queer peak, to its dissolution in the late 1980s.

Now a seasoned music journalist, Blashill experienced the zenith of Texas punk as a teenager, and he captures its intensity in words and pictures. Someday All the Adults Will Die! is rife with electrifying images and firsthand tales of what made this scene such a storm of pleasures and terrors, uncompromising artists, and wild performances. This dynamic portrait of an untamed, all-out musical era is a must-read for fans of punk music, counterculture, and live music.

Popular music in the US and UK during the late 1970s and early 1980s was wildly eclectic and experimental. “Post-punk,” as it was retroactively labeled, could include electro-pop melodies, distorted guitars, avant-garde industrial sounds, and reggae beats, and thus is not an easily definable musical category.

The central experience of the Ramones and their music is of being an outsider, an outcast, a person who’s somehow defective, and the revolt against shame and self-loathing. The fans, argues Donna Gaines, got it right away, from their own experience of alienation at home, at school, on the streets, and from themselves. This sense of estrangement and marginality permeates everything the Ramones still offer us as artists, and as people. Why the Ramones Matter compellingly makes the case that the Ramones gave us everything; they saved rock and roll, modeled DIY ethics, and addressed our deepest collective traumas, from the personal to the historical.