“The Gories just eliminated all of the crust from the intervening years and went back to the first sources and said, ‘Well, we’re gonna start here.’” –Mick Collins
“The Gories just eliminated all of the crust from the intervening years and went back to the first sources and said, ‘Well, we’re gonna start here.’” –Mick Collins
Punk rock and drag share an anti-authority spirit and similar counterculture roots, but few make the connection as explicitly obvious and entertaining as Chicago’s Bev Rage And The Drinks. They combine the charisma, nerve, and pageantry of drag with driving garage punk.
Video artist Joe Rees, along with some friends and artists, formed Target Video in the early ’70s. Among many video projects, the group documented bands during the early years of the rise of punk, including many you had little chance of seeing in other contexts, like Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, and The Minutemen. But no […]
Subterranea begins with a (gas)masked narrator surveying and commenting on a post-apocalyptic landscape. The monologue delivered—about consumerism and its impact—is appropriately creepy, with jump cuts to scenes of carnage and infernos. The whole thing has a Clockwork Orange vibe, and its gritty immediacy reminded me of the great film Series 7: The Contenders. The way […]
This is the third book in the series of “Demons” comics by Hyena Hell. The first one, No Romance in Hell, I reviewed for Razorcake back in 2020. It’s about a gooney demon named Bug who is fed up with the romance with the assholes in hell and she decides to check out what kind […]
For those unfamiliar with the author (and Razorcake contributor) Keith Rosson, the best way to describe his writing is it’s what would happen if Stephen King and Philip K. Dick had a baby that grew up to have exceptional writing talent influenced by his fathers. Rosson’s latest, Fever House, is his fifth and heftiest novel. The book begins with […]
Your housemates can either become your best friends, your worst enemies, or your best friends who you end up despising fifty percent of the time. You typically avoid them at home while you try to live your own life. Until one of them interrupts your day-to-day life by having their multiple boyfriends on the floor […]
When I was growing up outside of pre-internet Boston, I heard about SS Decontrol through fanzines (mostly Al Quint’s Suburban Voice). They were the first hardcore band from Boston, heavy into straightedge. All these rumors swirled around the band: they travelled in a windowless van from city to city, playing shows, smacking drinks out of […]
This is a striking account of grassroots and uncompromising antiracist activism, mostly in Portland, Ore. from the 1980s and ’90s. Made up largely of interview material with the participants, it’s a whirlwind of different perspectives, with decades of hindsight. As someone who grew up involved with hardcore, punk, and metal scenes in and around Cleveland, […]
This smaller-than-digest-sized book collects nearly a decade’s worth of Billy McCall’s zine recounting his adventures as a casino employee. It’s fun to see how the writing improved over time, with the earlier issues in the collection focusing on fun but fairly shallow observations about casino life, such as frustration over having to wear dress shoes […]
In 2004, Robert Newman published the U.S. edition of his novel The Fountain at the Center of the World, a political book, by an unmistakably radical writer, about climate change and the global economy (among other things), but first and foremost: a novel—I remember the two main characters as clearly as if I’d read it […]
When I was a kid, the only access I had to new underground music was from the “import” section of the music store in the shopping mall. I scored plenty of great stuff there: MDC, the Subhumans (U.K.), and Minor Threat, as well as stuff like the Meatmen and the Butthole Surfers. One day, my […]