Black Flag’s enduring influence across several facets of punk/hardcore are inestimable—from the way bands approach/attack performances, to the use of cryptic logos as iconography, to the DIY approach to releasing one’s own albums, to the very touring circuit that’s still in use by bands forty-plus years after Black Flag first set out on the road, […]
James Calvin Wilsey (Jimmy from here on out, as he was to his friends, family, and bandmates) had two important musical lives before finally succumbing to the heroin addiction he had fought on and off for decades. As the bassist for seminal San Francisco first generation punks The Avengers, he helped write the music for […]
Drummers are often characterized as “loose cannons” or “wild cards”—especially punk rock drummers. I’m not saying this is false, but the larger truth is that most drummers are oddly wired maniacs who view things differently than the average rocker. In Forbidden Beat: Perspectives on Punk Drumming, editor S.W. Lauden presents a collection of essays, interviews, […]
This full-color, glossy, and hardcover bound photobook documents a scene centered around a Chicago area bar, Liar’s Club, that has been hosting shows for over two decades. Originally put together as a one-off birthday present for the bar, this self-published book turned into something more along the way, resulting in this documented book of that […]
When it comes to books that are engaging, some people say, “I couldn’t put this book down!” And you know they probably don’t literally mean it, but you get the point. Well, in the case of Vicious Is My Middle Name, by Razorcake’s own Kevin Dunn, this is entirely true. I stayed up about two […]
If you’ve been to a show at the Echo, the music venue in Los Angeles’s Echo Park neighborhood, you may have noticed the cursively lettered sign “Nayarit” on the front of the building. The Nayarit was the Mexican restaurant in that space that Natalia Barraza ran from 1951 to 1976. Her granddaughter, University of Southern […]
As a lover of so-called outsider art, I was quite excited to check out Self Taught by Tim Kerr, whom many of you will know as the guitarist for the ’80s Texas band the Big Boys (although he has been in numerous other bands as well). The book contains photographs of (generally) large-scale outdoor artworks, […]
An autobiographical comic about a forty-something-year-old dad building a ramp in his backyard. Brett has stepped up from stealing from constructions sites and is now purchasing the wood. Throughout the comic, he reminisces skating on the ramp he built with his friends and hopes that one day his toddler son will want to skate. Instead […]
The literary landscape is littered with rock autobiographies. So many of them follow the same narrative, using same rags-to-riches-to-rags tropes that they tend to blend together, leaving programmatic readers like me (and perhaps like you) groping for the point. Any break from the tired formula is worth at least a cursory look. Imagine if—get this—a […]
I first heard the Descendents when I bought a tape entitled Enjoy! at Spec’s Music in Boca Raton’s Town Center mall. When I got it home and played it, I was baffled. Some of the songs didn’t even resemble music, hardcore or otherwise, and the ones that did were mostly sugary pop songs rather than […]
In college, my African-American Literature professor devoted his lessons to an overview of the corpus—we read and wrote about some novels, but the classes were mostly devoted to his summarizing and explaining the significance of works we hadn’t read and weren’t assigned. I questioned (silently) how worthwhile this was, but the dividends of cultural literacy […]
When I saw there was a person who endeavored to write about punk drumming, I’ll admit that (as a punk drummer myself) I was equal parts intrigued and skeptical. I wondered how it would hold my attention on a seemingly simple subject. Never have I been so pleased to be proven wrong. Not only did […]