Roots Punk

Abstract

As punk music splintered into “hardcore”—a harsher, stripped down, and more belligerent variant—it also mutated into roots-punk, too. This book explores how this “cow-punk” genre, whether sarcastic or sincere, revealed and reveled in an underbelly lined with blues records, country a.m. stations, and hillbilly romp. It highlights how ‘backing into roots music’ should be understood as a longing for gritty authenticity in a time of conformity and commercialization during the 1980s. Roots-punk revitalized spirits and energies by infusing the cutting-edge music with a wide array of vintage source material that seemed more aligned with bolo ties and Stetsons than Doc Martens and safety pins. Though punk often showcased anarchic political convictions and subversive lifestyle choices, its supposedly “future-now” music sometimes yielded one foot in the past, whether honky-tonk, rockabilly, doo-wop, reggae and ska, jazz, folk, jump blues, dust bowl and labor ballads, and more. This book explores such aesthetics and themes plus contextualizes, clarifies, maps, and probes beyond lyrical flourishes, incessant musical reinvention, and genre purity tests. It paints a broad, nuanced, and well-documented picture of the genre that gave rise to alternative country. In doing so, it also highlights the participation of women, Latinos, indigenous, African Americans, and LGBTQ+ rockers who yielded boundary-crossing sensibilities and styles. To do so, the text forms a kind of folksonomy of the movement, a people’s oral history captured in years-worth of nuanced interviews that discuss history, storytelling, music, social issues, spirituality, gender, politics, subcultures, and much more.