Tag Archives: Punk

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) set to introduce its latest product at the special event Sites + Sounds + Scenes

Mark your calendars! On May 27, 2025, at 4:30 pm, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) will unveil its latest product, the RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines (RAPMM), at a special launch event titled Sites + Sounds + Scenes.

The RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines (RAPMM) is a continuously expanding digital collection that currently includes over 125 independently published popular music magazines and fanzines from the late 1960s to the present. This internationally scoped archive covers a diverse range of popular music genres, from punk and rock to indie, hip hop, and country, serving as a multilingual and interdisciplinary resource for music research. By preserving rare and historically significant publications, RAPMM safeguards essential elements of cultural heritage.

In line with RILM’s global mission the content of RAPMM spans multiple languages and countries–currently from Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The zines in RAPMM cover a wide range of popular music genres, including punk, rock, indie music, post-punk, grunge, hip hop, women’s music, world music, psychedelia, noise, alternative music, jazz, and country music. There are articles on the history of musical movements and their relation to politics, society and social movements, underground and subcultures, stylistic shifts, and feminism; interviews with widely recognized and unknown artists at different stages of their careers; band profiles; and album reviews and history of record labels.

Accessible through RILM’s Egret platform, RAPMM offers advanced browsing, searching, and translation features across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. Additionally, the platform provides a networked research experience, linking directly to other scholarly resources such as RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and external services like the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). RAPMM underscores RILM’s broader mission as an NGO accredited to provide advisory service to UNESCO’s Committee of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Speaking on the project’s significance, RILM Executive Director, Dr. Tina Frühauf, states:

“In alignment with UNESCO’s initiatives to protect cultural diversity, RAPMM represents a vital node in an international effort to safeguard and preserve information about the sonic history of our times. It fosters community-centered archiving practices that foreground the lived experiences and material traces of popular music magazines. By bridging the analog and the digital, the local and the global, RAPMM not only preserves endangered media artifacts but also reimagines archives as dynamic spaces of cultural memory, equity, and engagement.”

The launch event, hosted by The Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation and RILM, is cosponsored by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning. In addition to unveiling RAPMM, the event will also celebrate the release of two groundbreaking publications: Inside the Studio Spaces of Electronic Music Production: Berlin/Cairo by Dr. Matthias Pasdzierny and Gero Cacciatore, and Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies by Dr. Eliot Bates and Dr. Samantha Bennett.

Held in the William P. Kelly Skylight Room on the 9th floor of the CUNY Graduate Center, the event will feature discussions with key contributors, moderated by Finn Cohen (The Sun). A reception will follow.

Admission is free. Please RSVP to cmrd@gc.cuny.edu. The event will be live-streamed by the CUNY Graduate Center.

For more information, please visit https://brookcenter.gc.cuny.edu/event/sites-sounds-scenes/.

Watch the RAPMM trailer:

Contact:
Michael Lupo (he/him/his), Marketing & Media
RILM International Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 3108  •  New York, NY 10016-4309
Michael Lupo  •  Phone 1 212 817 8601  •  www.rilm.org

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Filed under Popular music, RILM, RILM news

Laura Jane Grace sings the gender dysphoria blues

Photo: Mat Stokes

It has been noted that the durability of punk has been driven by a communal ethos that embodies inclusivity, resistance, challenge, and transformation. First wave punk represented this ethos, and it remains evident in punk’s ongoing engagement with queer politics and gender fluidity. In recent decades, articulations of transgender punk have centered on Laura Jane Grace, lead singer of the U.S. anarcho-punk band Against Me!, who came out as transgender five albums deep into her public life as an established musician. Against Me! began as Grace’s adolescent DIY solo project, through which she crafted a series of lo-fi and limited releases on local labels, including Misanthrope Records, Crasshole Records, and Plan-It-X Records, resulting in the eventual release of the band’s well-received debut LP, Reinventing Axl Rose in 2002.

From 2002 to 2009, Grace and Against Me! released five albums that saw the band emerge from DIY basement shows and self-reliance to playing stadiums and being labeled as “industry sellouts”, drawing sharp criticism from the anarcho-punk community. It was after this period that Grace chose to openly discuss her struggles with gender dysphoria and growing up closeted in her first interview with Rolling Stone in 2012. As Grace explained,

“You know, one of the very appealing things to me about the punk rock world when I was 15, 16, especially stumbling onto anarchist punk rock and activist punk rock. And a scene that was really strongly feminist and anti-racist and anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, all about body liberation, all about . . . just being yourself.”

Laura Jane Grace (center) performing with Miley Cyrus (left) and Joan Jett.

A literary analysis of Grace’s early song lyrics, composed before she came out publicly in 2012, stands out for its emotional complexity and unique insight into the mind of someone, who for many years, had wrestled with their gender identity. The purity and conviction of punk initially offered Grace a platform to counteract the turmoil of growing up experiencing gender dysphoria. However, she describes becoming frustrated and disappointed with punk’s rigidity and found herself impeded by its codes of masculinity that, in many ways, reinforced gender norms and her own gender insecurity. Facing criticism from the scene she once called home, Grace turned inward, often within the spatial confines of her own songs. On the final track from the album Searching for a former clarity, Grace writes,

No the doctors didn’t tell you that you were dying.
They just collected their money,
And send you on your way.
But you knew all along.
Went on pretending nothing was wrong.
You said I will keep my focus,
Till the end.
And in the journal you kept,
By the side of your bed.
You wrote nightly an aspiration,
Of developing as an author.
Confessing childhood secrets,
Of dressing up in women’s clothes.
Compulsions you never knew the reasons to.
Will everyone,
You ever meet or love,
Be just a relationship based,
On a false presumption.

Read more in “Tonight we’re gonna give it 35%: Expressions of transgender identity in the early work of Laura Jane Grace” by Kristen Carella and Kathryn Wymer (Journal of gender studies 29/3 [2020] 257–268), and ““Delicate, petite, & other things I’ll never be”: Trans-punk anthems and love songs” by Gareth Schott (European journal of English studies 24/1 [2020] 37–51). Find both articles in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature.

Listen to the track Searching for a former clarity below.

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Filed under Gender and sexuality, Performers, Popular music

Shane MacGowan, the last of the spailpíns

The Pogues’ pugnacious punk frontman may well be the last inheritor of the wayward spailpín singers. Throughout its history, Ireland has found figures to express its dreams and torments, or at least its boisterous fighting spirits. Mid-19th-century Ireland found such figure in James Clarence Mangan. Mid-20th century Ireland discovered a few such figures in Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, and Luke Kelly. In Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan, a native of Puckane, a village in County Tipperary, Ireland found a late 20th-century inheritor to this wayward legacy.

Ever since planter colonialism beat down the haughty, aristocratic-minded bards, Ireland has maintained a consistent subaltern tradition of poets and singers. The tributaries that fed into this tradition, which for lack of a better term, might be called a spailpín culture, ranged from sean nós and folk ballads to music hall and dancehall fare. Songs of hard labor and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment, and loss emerged from this culture, nurtured by two languages to form part of the musical repertoire.

The Pogues in 1990.

Shane MacGowan came of age in 1970s England when the rock world, no stranger to its own forms of dissolution, was being convulsed by punk, a raucous, aggressively atonal anti-musical genre that gave the finger not just to the soppy pop of the mainstream culture industry but to all bombastic stadium rock. Out of the merging of these two unlikely patrimonies was born the legend of The Pogues. If Riverdance announced the birth of a slick and synchronized new 21st-century neoliberal, post-nationalist Ireland, was it the fate of The Pogues, and specifically MacGowan, to be the last of the spailpíns, the tail-end of a tradition stretching back to Eoghan Rua and Cathal Buí?

Read on in the article “Shane MacGowan: The tail-end of a great Irish tradition?” by Joe Cleary (The Irish times [13 January 2017]). Find it in RILM Abstracts.

Below, MacGowan and The Pogues perform with The Dubliners an epic version of The Irish rover.

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Filed under Europe, Performers, Popular music

Punk & post-punk

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In 2012 Intellect launched Punk & post-punk (ISSN 2044-1983; EISSN 2044-3706), a journal for academics, artists, journalists, and the wider cultural industries.

Placing punk and its progeny at the heart of interdisciplinary investigation, it is the first forum of its kind to explore this rich and influential topic in both historical and critical theoretical terms. The journal is edited by Philip Kiszely and Alex Ogg.

More articles about punk rock are here.

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Filed under New periodicals, Popular music