punk

The lead singer of Against Me! came out as transgender in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, which hits newsstands on Friday.  While some of the comments on Rolling Stone's online article are predictably disgusting, commentators on the official Against Me! message board have been overwhelmingly supportive.

After all, any diehard fan knows it's the music that matters.  And if transfolks are the ones making it, well, that should come as no surprise.

Vi Subversa took late '70s British punk idealism and held it up to its own values. She challenged the seas of angry, violent young men that crowded British clubs and opened punk up for personal expression. With her band the Poison Girls, she forged a path of punk rock that examined the politics of everyday life. And, who else can say they released their first single when they were a 44-year-old mother of two?

"I consider myself a self-proclaimed feminist but not in the same way that other people would think of a feminist. I’m not a man-hater." Yes! Wait, what? Teri Gender Bender bites off a lot more than most people could chew with her roving gang of Butcherettes—including the drug wars in Mexico, being ostracized in both of her homes on either side of the Mexico-US border, and the stupidity of gender oppression. But she's totally not like all those other feminists, right?

For all of its progressive-leaning, status-quo-breaking, norm-shattering tendencies, punk rock still looks like a white boy's club. Even after all of these years, the largest punk record of the year (Fucked Up's David Comes to Life) was played by a band with one woman! There are also five other white dudes in that band! So let's go back and look through the punk canon, find the overlooked bands and remind everyone that you don't need to be white or a male to be punk.

Punk Start My Heart began as a punk booking agency run by Sheana Corbridge and Marlena Chavez dedicated to promoting musicians of color and queer artists for shows around Portland, Oregon. Inundated with requests from superb bands on the Internet, they came up with a DIY innovation: Not Enough!, a festival designed for queer artists to get together, collaborate, and come up with new art and music projects. Now they're taking things a step further and starting a record label for some of the acts they've booked and worked with in Not Enough!—some bands you've even heard on Bitchtapes and B-Sides past. To get their record label off the ground they've made a Kickstarter video (Flash video below, download video description in .doc form here):

If you haven't heard of Portland, Oregon's Autry!, be prepared for a pleasantly rude awakening as the goofpunk pioneer and internet darling prepares to release her debut album A.U.T.R.Y.! on July 29th

Poly Styrene, the lead singer of the pioneering punk band X-Ray Spex, died on Monday after a battle with cancer. She was 53.

Styrene’s glass-shattering vocals made the band’s 1978 album Germ Free Adolescents a punk masterpiece, and the song "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" in particular stands out as one of punk feminism’s original eff yous to the sexism and prejudice that existed not only in mainstream society, but in the burgeoning punk community as well.

(Lyrics here)

In the world of rock'n'roll, there are stars and there are poets, virtuosos and punks, heroes and losers and fallen idols. And then there is Patti Smith.

That VOICE.

By the end (I'm hoping not for good, but for now, anyway) of Sleater-Kinney Corin Tucker's voice was a finely honed weapon, full of deep, slow, sexy soul and capable of an earsplitting wail, a bonechilling snarl, a rock'n'roll howl that didn't so much as defy gender as rip the guts straight out of it.

Her new record, 1,000 Years puts that voice front and center, without the thrash that made The Woods so threatening at the time.

                                                            

The first line of Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory (written originally in French as King Kong Theorie and then translated into English) is:

"I am writing as an ugly one for the ugly ones: the old hags, the dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckables, the neurotics, the psychos, for all those girls that don’t get a look-in in the universal market of the consumable chick."

Hooked yet?