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Crammed in the back corner booth of a Lower East Side bar, one of the ones that’s been around long enough to see the LES through multiple eras, I asked Iggy (we’re on a first-name basis) how his show was. Was he wearing glitter? Little else. He said he’d fallen nine feet from the stage. Was he okay? Sure, but there’d been broken glass all over the floor, which sort of blew. Why wasn’t he all cut up, then, or, you know, in the hospital? I didn’t ask; in our years of friendship I’ve learned that the vincibility gene skipped this man over. At least, he said, he didn’t throw up on anyone this time. Go on, I say. The bar around us fades and it’s just the two of us, slouching into the cracked leather, my eyes as wide as his if never as severe. I know I’m about to get the best story of my life.
Right. So I’ve never met Iggy Pop (we’re certainly not on a first-name basis, so I’ll drop that ruse). We did both live in Ann Arbor, Michigan for a period of time, but any shared squares of pavement we trod were his decades before they were mine. I feel like I’ve been in this bar with him though, getting a possibly hyperbolized rundown of shows, feuds, addiction, his first take on the Velvet Underground—“Fucking disgusting hippie vermin! Fucking beatniks, I wanna kill them all! This just sounds like trash!” (lack of all caps mine)—and his second take on the Velvet Underground—“Oh my god! Wow! This is just a fucking great record!” Also gathered in the corner booth are the likes of Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, Joey Ramone, the list goes on. This bar is apocryphal, these meetings a fantasy, but this is what it feels like to open Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, which Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain pulled together and published in 1996, and the dilapidated copy of which I finally stole from my dad’s bookshelf this year.
McNeil and McCain conducted hundreds of interviews for Please Kill Me, and the first three quarters or so of the book detail punk music’s origins and rise to prominence, from the Velvet Underground and MC5 to the New York Dolls, David Bowie, the Stooges, and Patti Smith—told straight from the architects of this cultural scene. The book’s final quarter features a less fun and more feeling-like-I’ve-been-hit-by-a-bus series of deaths via drug overdoses and murder.
I followed this book with Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution, another oral history, this one edited by Liam Warfield, Walter Crasshole, and Yony Leyser, published in 2021 from PM Press, which details the intersection of punk and queer culture in the later twentieth century. Familiar characters like Penny Arcade and Jayne County return, joined by new faces like Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Lynn Breedlove of Tribe 8. It’s a subsection of the culture constructed by and for people who felt out of place even on the fringe. Jena von Brucker, who helped edit the Toronto-based zine Double Bill, which critiqued the iconic gay counterculture author William S. Burroughs, describes being able to make extreme, controversial statements in the zine because “the group of us working on Double Bill felt extremely alienated, even from the subculture that we existed in.” The queer punk scene existed because people needed it to.
While these oral histories drew me in with the irresistible allure of an outrageous story with a nonchalant delivery (and maybe a little because I kept walking past the Chelsea Hotel on my way to the doctor and wanted to know), they possess a value beyond that, a certain cultural and political potency, because of their genre.
In oral history, anything can be invented. The editors relay their interviewees’ versions of events with little to no interference. When Penny Arcade described, in Please Kill Me, being in an elevator on the verge of passing out and meeting Patti Smith, who kept asking if she looked like Keith Richards, I wondered Is that really true? Then I realized I wanted to believe that was what and how things happened, so I brushed aside the possibility that it wasn’t.
Now stay with me when I ask you to consider: Objectivity is not the end all be all of nonfiction. I know this may freak you out, depending on how deep you are in the journalism world.
It’s hard to stop holding objectivity up in your arms as the pure, glowing bar against which to measure nonfiction. I worked on a newspaper, so trust me, I know. But this is false—or, at least, overemphasized. The oral history doesn’t allow for objectivity because people don’t all remember and experience events in the same way. They contradict each other, and they embellish and editorialize and sometimes outright lie. In a book built from interviews but written by a single author, a more intense fact-checking process might be employed to iron out some of the inconsistencies, the falsehoods. This might be done with fear—what if something was missed? What if a lie remained in the book to be unturned years later and ruin the writer’s credibility? An oral history is a unique form of nonfiction where, from the beginning, we are given no promise of truth and the editors make no claims toward a clear, ideologically-specific thesis about their subjects.
In Queercore especially, the pages are littered with disagreements. Poet, novelist, and conduit between queercore artists and broader society Dennis Cooper claims there was an “intense” zine-related feud between Johnny Noxzema (coeditor of Bimbox and Double Bill) and Bruce LaBruce (band member of Fifth Column and coeditor of J.D.s). But Noxzema says, “Me? Bruce? No, no, no.” He admits they had their “issues” but won’t disclose any details. LaBruce, on the other hand, shows up like your favorite malicious-but-probably-justified gossip to admit he called Bimbox’s other editor Rex Boy and Noxzema “Pegleg and Demented Chicken, because Noxzema had a rooster-like haircut. They were actually quite wealthy, and they were kind of posing as queer punks.” He calls Double Bill, whose own creators described it as something important and culturally impactful mere pages before, an “anti-Burroughs fanzine.” Queercore’s editors take no stance on this feud, and it was initially off-putting to not know how I was supposed to feel about Double Bill (and whether I was allowed to think someone with a name as cool as Johnny Noxzema was actually cool)—I wanted to know the “truth” of the situation. They told me No. But!—In exchange for my discomfort, I would get a real understanding of the tensions that existed within the queer punk subculture. By bringing together so many unedited voices, the editors refuse to pretend that the movement was all cohesive, everyone involved on the same page, a monolith of identical opinions on what was important, who was doing helpful work for the community, what its goals should be, and where the line lay between the acceptably transgressive and the taboo. This contradiction soup, while perhaps less satisfying, is truer than being told the “right way” to read the movement. Double Bill meant something to its creators and readers, but to others it was poser garbage. So it goes. The nature of the medium is: If you want to form your own opinion about it, that’s your prerogative, but the editors aren’t here to tell you what that opinion should be.
In the introduction to Queercore, Warfield notes that oral history “can be an especially messy mode of storytelling: the narrators may not always be reliable, they may embellish, gloss over, half-remember, or contradict. But history is messy, and punk is messy; and I’d like to hope that the multitude of voices in this book, brought into cacophonous discourse, are able to animate their subject in ways that a tidier telling might not.” When it comes to understanding not a single person or event but a cultural movement, “cacophonous discourse” might be the only way to present something true, even if that requires we accept a more collective definition of truth.
Punk lends itself well to oral history, perhaps why there are so many oral histories on its subsections, because the purpose of the movement itself was to break rules and push back against societal norms. Lying your way to the reality you want is also at the movement’s heart. In Queercore, Tom Jennings, to copublisher of the zine Homocore, describes the creation of the San Francisco queer punk scene, which he said “did not exist. That was the point. It really did not exist. People started reading Homocore, and, I think, perceiving that there was a queer punk subculture in San Francisco when it was really just Deke [Nihilson] and me.” In Toronto, the creators of J.D.s started a queer punk scene via fabrication. Their motivation, according to G.B. Jones, was part vengeance against a homophobic band they included in the zine: “What better way to get revenge on them than to claim that they’re part of a movement of queers in punk music? So Bruce and I kind of put across the idea that this was a huge international movement. And people believed it! That was the shocking part…people just thought, Oh, this is really happening. And lo and behold, the next thing we knew there were all these bands.” If you’re building a scene, an attitude, a culture, who says a lie can’t be a solid foundation? These are things that rely first and foremost on mythmaking.
Oral histories are myths. The events of the punk and queer punk scenes of decades past are over. What remains, and what continues to impact and inspire people today is the outsized mythology of the cultures around these events. The permission these movements still give people to wear what they want, say what they want, love who they want, pull together a band without the backing of a record label, be as different from mainstream culture as they desire, persists regardless of whether Richard Lloyd of the band Television really slept for a week straight in the hospital before they gave him shock therapy or whether Iggy Pop really threw up on a fan when the crowd demanded it.
Just as punk and its mythos are inherently political, oral history as a form takes a political stance. How we study and create art in America reflects that neoliberal, capitalist society that surrounds it. We raise individual authors, artists, musicians above the rest of us, worshipping them as geniuses existing among but apart from the general public. This is so woven into our culture that it feels obvious, as if there aren’t other ways to create and appreciate art. Even in forms reliant on collective effort, like film, we select single voices to celebrate. We learn auteur theory, memorize the names of directors and study their styles, then leave theaters while a hundred other credits scroll quickly past, unimposing. It’s no wonder my film degree has led me to a poisonous, impossible fantasy of making a movie that no one else touches—I am star and director; the costumes are birthed from my brain and concretized with my needle and thread; I’m the only one in the editing room, reddening eyeballs reflected in the Premiere Pro timeline, working to make something perfect and, more importantly, individual; I even relearn to play the piano and write the score myself, at which point the fantasy usually falls apart. Neither is it a wonder that I have yet to make any sort of film and probably won’t until I stomp out this fantasy’s final embers.
This individualist ideal persists outside art, where corporate advertisements and media outlets alike tell us to take personal responsibility for the country’s—and world’s—problems. Did you know you could reverse global warming if you stopped buying coffee to-go? No wait, it’s my fault actually for not pestering the city of New York enough to get me a compost bin. Responsibility can keep us sane, like our actions aren’t meaningless, but let’s not kid ourselves that one person wields this kind of power. Emphasizing individualism, while it might seem glamorous—who doesn’t want to be better than everyone else?—is more often a way of discouraging collective action, a much more powerful catalyst of real change. Forget about organizing a mass protest, the corporations tell us, stifling nervous laughter. Buy a metal straw and those people you might have organized with will give you a pat on the back before they roll their eyes at you. And that just means they’re jealous and insecure. Sip more loudly through your straw to assert dominance and scare them off so you can never feel allied. Never.
The word “individualism” connotes standing out, being unique, but there’s nothing oppositional about following the mandates of those who created the existing status quo out of fear that people will call you a terrible person otherwise. The fact that it keeps you busy and content to believe you are doing something makes it all the more politically futile. Psychologist Erich Fromm writes, “Human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated with an act of obedience.” Despite how the word sounds, collectivism is less obedient—collective protests described in Queercore are what led certain members of the scene to take more extreme actions, pushing the left farther left and making less extreme ideas regarding the acceptance and rights of queer people more palatable to those outside the movement.
In the introduction to Queercore, Warfield quotes filmmaker Scott Treleavan: “Capitalism eventually digests everything.” In a later chapter, Treleavan says that the power of queercore, then, was that it was “basically indigestible. The last thing people wanted was a bunch of fags that only knew three chords—or less—banging on their guitars and singing about how great it is to fuck dudes or chicks chasing each other around with dildos, cutting them off with chainsaws and things like that—capitalism was not really prepared for that.” This description of the scene sounds a bit ridiculous, maybe uncomfortable, but the same over-the-topness that oral history as a genre allows is what gave the punk movement strength. Queer activist Sarah Schulman describes in the book how the general, centrist public will only accept the demands of the left if that left has an intimidating extreme end. Says Schulman, “At the time of the AIDS crisis, an idea like gay marriage was basically absurd…But when you have ACT UP going into St. Patrick’s Cathedral and disrupting mass, and people are realizing, Wow, these people are serious, and they’re going to violate all of these structure that we’ve created. Suddenly gay marriage looks great, because it’s assimilative…So you always have to have a left, or an extreme left, so that the center has some kind of credibility.”
Now just go with it while I bring film theory into the mix. This idea of a culture’s digestibility comes up in Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’s manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema,” when the authors describe neocolonialism’s “attempt to castrate, to digest, the cultural forms that arise beyond the bounds of its own aims.” Getino and Solanas wrote this manifesto to dissect a problem of the art made within an oppressive, colonialist society: It can either open-heartedly embrace and uphold the values of that society, or it can attempt to oppose that society but find itself defanged by the time it reaches an audience (“the distribution and exhibition channels were in the hands of the enemy”). A “third cinema,” then, is one created and disseminated entirely outside of the traditional production and distribution system. “Third” art is art that actually agitates audiences toward revolutionary action, rather than pacifying them or providing a theoretically critical but politically low-risk drama. I see parts of the punk movement, and certainly the queer punk movement, as “third.” Artists worked outside of large production companies; the zines they self-published and distributed did lead to the formation of political groups that successfully changed cultural attitudes with their protests, as well as the emergence of a new queer agenda focused less on assimilation with heterosexual culture. Oral history, too, may be the closest we can come to “third” storytelling in terms of form itself. Oral history so badly doesn’t want to defang its subject: Both the “uncensored” nature of Please Kill Me and the “very forward” introduction to Queercore tell me that much.
Objectivity can be a valiant goal, but it is also an individualistic goal. It easily aligns with neocolonial, capitalist values, which dilutes its cultural and political power. Books are mostly tied to single authors in the locked fortress of our current publishing landscape, and the perspectives from which stories are told is thereby severely limited. Giving up some objectivity not only allows for more voices (and less censorship) to find their way into readers’ hands, but it also allows nonfiction to favor storytelling. Objectivity and storytelling can work in tandem but often get in each other’s way. An occurrence destined to become myth, certainly, leads from storytelling, not objective reporting—otherwise the word “myth” wouldn’t imply that, you know, some of this might be made up. I’ll remind you the word also implies a widespread story with a large potential impact.
Collective storytelling can be subversive. This should be obvious, but history has often tried to pretend this type of storytelling doesn’t exist—which is just more proof of its radical potential. The oral storytelling tradition goes back at least to epic poetry, which has been forced into alignment with an individualist history. The most prominent example might be Homer, the single name given to the author of the Iliad and Odyssey when historians now agree it is more likely that many poets over many years made up these poems—and they were told long before they were written down. When psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon writes, in an essay on national consciousness, about the re-emergence of oral storytelling in Algeria in the mid-twentieth century, he mentions that “colonialism made no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers systematically.” This form serves, as well, as a reminder that stories are not just recorded; they are told. And telling a story allows it to remain agitative—history still in progress.
The way we look back on the punk movement today is, meaningfully, the truth of it—more so than what “really happened”—because that’s the history that continues to influence our present. The oral tradition opens the floor for stories that, regardless of contradictory details, hold broader cultural truths woven from the people—and it’s never just one—whose experiences and actions shaped the cultures they discuss. Truths guided by the sociopolitical interests of its subjects rather than the limiting ideal of a pure, unchanging objectivity.
If punk is about contradiction and democratization of art, then oral history is a comparatively democratizing form of storytelling, one that just might be capable of preserving some of the movement’s power on its way to an audience. Oral histories offer a less moderated, decentralized version of history. They show us that a movement can come into existence out of sheer need. That we don’t need to beg large institutions and mainstream society for power. We can find it among us. That there are not just individuals spearheading these cultural and political shifts, these attempts toward revolution, but groups.
There are 50 different punks, shaggy hair obscuring glitter eyeliner, in the LES bar with me now, and I won’t bother telling you all their names because yes they’re all icons, but that doesn’t matter right now. McNeil, McCain, Warfield, Crasshole, and Leyser escorted them in, but I’m not there to talk to the editors. I tell the group it feels hopeless. That it’s 2025 and the world doesn’t feel like possibility in the way it did for them. They shrug. Shove hands in pockets. A lot of their personality is about not giving a fuck, after all. But they do. Maybe, they say. But no one’s going to open the world for you. It’s a heavy door, I say. So get four other people, they say. Oh, and a lot more made up accomplices. And say whatever you have to. Make whatever it is you all need. It can be terrible or a little stupid. That’s fine. Next year, maybe those accomplices will be flesh and blood.
When they’re this close to me, I believe them.
Erin Evans, originated in Chicago, learned to write in Michigan, and now writes and edits from Brooklyn. Her recent work has appeared in Full Stop and Vestoj. She hopes to one day ban the word “utilize” from the English language.
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