She dubbed her first tapes in her bedroom and printed the inserts at Kinko’s. It could tether maladapted kids to each other with electrified wire, and carry them forward through the days of a world that seemed to want them dead.Īgainst Me! coalesced around Grace when she was in her late teens. It could incubate politics more fervent and fertile than the adulation of the already wealthy. These DIY factions proved music could open up into a current that ran deeper than the glitz of MTV.
By 16, she’d dropped out of high school and discovered the Minneapolis-based anarcho-punk collective Profane Existence, which put out releases with high contrast, xeroxed covers from scrappy hardcore bands like State of Fear and Civil Disobedience. By 15 she’d been convicted of two felonies after a cop brutalized her for standing around on a boardwalk she spat in his face and he hog-tied her in the back of his car. She grew out her hair and went punk, spiking her mohawk with food-grade gelatin and stitching patches onto her jeans as armor. Grace bristled at her bleached, manicured surroundings.
Grace’s parents split while she was in middle school, and her mother moved the kids from Italy to Naples, Florida, a sleepy, wealthy enclave across the state from Miami where their grandmother lived. The shine of a music video no longer offered a portal to a better plane pop music lost its season, like tinsel spilling from a dumpster sometime in late February. In the years between her grade school adulation and the jaded frustrations of her early twenties, the cracks in the adult world yawned open for Grace. “In a way I’m pleading not so much for a new rock star, because a rock star is still a rock star, but for how music should be,” Grace said. The band’s name, Against Me!, slammed against the back of his head with the bluntness of a midcentury propaganda poster, and red stars rained down over his shoulders. The record’s cover featured a black and white stencil of the Guns N’ Roses singer with his arms flung wide, in seeming ecstasy before an adoring crowd. She was explaining the title of her band’s debut album, Reinventing Axl Rose, to a newspaper reporter. “It’s obvious Axl Rose is a jerk,” she said then.
0 kommentar(er)
