smashing your head on the punk rock

I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to ask me this question.

A couple weeks ago, my friend Sean Kyte asked for recommendations on books that exemplify punk mentality, even if not about punks per se. I replied, “I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to ask me this question.”

gender fucking bathroom at Le Voyeur, Olympia Washington, 2015

Even before that, I had been thinking about what punk is and what punk does, reading Jeff Miller’s new novel Temporary Palaces and going back to his old Ghost Pine zines. My friend Sean’s partner says, “All punk is about is just walking down the street with your mates.” Taking up space. I’m thinking of Viv Albertine’s memoir, the first time I understood that punks in England were actually violently harassed, because of the way they dressed. And Jeff Miller describes that, in nineties Ottawa, too.

How different it was in the Northwest, at the turn of the millennium. If the so-called “Seattle grunge” look came from shopping thrift store flannel castoff from local logging communities, and long dirty hair blended in with the hippies, there was nothing to target. Olympia always felt safe when I started going to shows as a teenager. My girlfriend and I could make out on the sidewalk and be ignored entirely. The Evergreen State College, “home of ecoterrorists and homos,” had made it so no one was bothered by anything they saw taking up space downtown.

Olympia punk music was punk in attitude, in seizing the means of production, yet could rarely, barely be called punk, in terms of a traditional punk sound. I just recorded a fake radio show on the theme Coming of Age and described it thusly:

Pacific Northwest queer youth at the turn of the millennium wanted strange music we could sink into and drift on, shimmering, off-kilter, haunted, made by girls.

I tried so hard to put the word “punk” in there but there was nothing even close to punk in the actual sounds of the 15 tracks. I tagged the genres indie rock, dream pop, post punk.

Jeff Miller’s zines, the sweetest relics from a bygone analog era where you could still hitchhike around Canada and meet friends by showing up where you thought they’d be, prove beyond a doubt that punk culture is all about love. Jeff and I are acquainted online, so I knew his debut novel was going to be published far in advance, and was hyped for it. It delivers with all the sweetness of his zines, swirled around the bitter conflict and tension necessary for a novel. Temporary Palaces elucidates the push-pull of activism and art that defines punk communities. These characters work hard (no slackers here), play hard (if they’re not in a band, they’re in the audience and collecting records), and love hard (it’s sexxxy). I recommend Temporary Palaces as a great starting place to read about punk subculture’s impact in a specific place, tracing the lives of those who answer its siren song and submit to its gravitational pull.

---

Here are my further recommendations to anyone who shares Sean’s question. If you, like me, have been waiting your whole life to answer this question, drop your recs in the comments baybeeeeeeeeee. My recs, like my fake radio show, skew PNW and feminine.

---

1. War Boy by Kief Hillsbery¹ is in my top 3 favorite novels, top 5 books of all time. My zine It’s All Right is essentially a War Boy fanzine.

2. When I asked Kaden this question, he said Cruddy by Lynda Barry, also in my top 3 favorite novels and top 5 books of all time, was pretty punk. I had to agree, although it isn’t what first came to mind. It takes place before punk occurred chronologically, but it’s unflinching, bordering on gruesome, and the sweetness and survival amid utter depravity in the old Pacific Northwest is very punk.

3. I’m currently reading Killed (of Kids) the scrambled oral history and collected zines of the three-years-only Brighton riot grrrl band Huggy Bear. We always read their name in the Kill Rock Stars catalog and their story, like their ramshackle chapter in Grrrls: Viva Rock Divas, is truly a delight to read in their own words. What they were trying to evade and what they were trying to run headlong into is told mostly by the charming and poetic Chris Rawley.

4. Nobody’s Empire by Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian is, technically, a novel and not a memoir. But Stuart Murdoch is a songwriter and meditation guide, not a novelist, which makes this book so fucking fresh to read, with its lists of bands and catalogs of the assemblages people wore to shows. The main character, like Murdoch, lives with ME/CFS, which necessarily impedes the traditional momentum of a novel, in a wonderful way.

5. Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. this memoir by Viv Albertine of the Slits was HOTT when it came out in 2014! Like I said: reading this book was the first time I understood that punks in England were actually violently harassed, because of the way they dressed.

6. The oral histories Everybody Loves Our Town and Girls to the Front, about grunge and riot grrrl, respectively, are essential reading for the history of punk in the Pacific Northwest.

7. But if you want to go to the source, read Loser by Clark Humphrey, “The Real Seattle Music Story,” with the receipts (teeny tiny reprints of show posters, some drawn by Lynda Barry!) to prove it.

8. Everything I know about punk/alternative/Olympia music I learned from Gina Arnold’s Route 666: The Route to Nirvana which I checked out from the library constantly as a kid.

9. Girl by Blake Nelson, come on this is a classic, the OG.

10. Just Kids by Patti Smith is a full immersion into the romance and the artistry and the poverty and the queerness of punk.

11. My favorite book I’ve read this year is Sara Jaffe’s Hurricane Envy. Jaffe is a musician who writes fiction about musicians exactly the way I want to read it. Every time I so much as think of the ending of “Arthur Why,” my heart plummets and expands and I’m breathless for a moment. Check out Hurricane Envy’s Book Notes Playlist and Earth to You: Guitar Players Respond to a Short Story About a Guitar Player.

12. My own linked short story collection, with several stories already published, revolves around a fictional band in Olympia. It’s all slam dancing and slam romancing.² Or, you can read my top 2 Substack posts which are, ostensibly, about punk rock. And, as always, love.

---

---

---

1. Technically, Hillsbery’s book What We Do Is Secret is more punk rock, but I like War Boy better.

2. Kaden and I can’t verify for sure whether this was Sifl or Olly’s personals ad, but we are pretty sure it was Olly. We are willing to be wrong, let us know if you remember.