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Color Me Obsessed: A Film About The Replacements (2011) | Directed by

A documentary about The Replacements that takes the risk of telling the entire history of the Minneapolis band without using their music or archival footage. The film shows how the cult is built around an erratic and self-destructive group through the passionate anecdotes of contemporary musicians, critics, and fans. (TRAILER)

Revolution, Riot Grrrl Style (2014) | Directed by Sonia Gonzalez

In this documentary produced for French television, the director explores the emergence of the riot grrrl movement in the independent scene of the nineties in Olympia, Washington. Through archival material and interviews, she revisits the stage breakthrough of groups like Bikini Kill or Bratmobile and the importance of fanzines and community feeling. (TRAILER)

The Go-Go’s (2020) | Directed by Alison Ellwood

The film traces the group’s origins in the Los Angeles punk and new wave circuit in the late seventies. It shows how they built their career by independently composing their own material, dismantling the myth of being a prefabricated product in a music industry dominated by men. (TRAILER)

Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story (2024) | Directed by Andrew Reich

The trajectory of Jeff and Steven McDonald, two brothers who formed their band when they were just kids in the Los Angeles punk circuit. Reich documents how Redd Kross maintained their own musical path, crossing the independent sound with pop culture over more than four decades. (TRAILER)

Jurassic Punk (2022) | Directed by Scott Leberecht

The story of Steve “Spaz” Williams, an animator with a rebellious attitude, fundamental in the creation of modern CGI, whose work turned Jurassic Park into a technical innovation. The documentary focuses on the incompatibility between his anarchic work ethic and the rigid system of the major Hollywood studios. (TRAILER)

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I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food (2025) | Directed by Walter Santucci

“Human” is a former rock musician who lives isolated in an abandoned church where he debates about God and the meaning of existence with his two puppet friends. Mixing animation and puppets, the film features the voice work of figures like Jack Grisham, Keith Morris, and Kristina Wong. (Trailer)

Acid Test (2022) | Directed by Jenny Waldo

Set in the Texas suburbs in 1992, Jenny Waldo’s debut film tells us the story of a teenager raised under strict family rules while she discovers the Riot Grrrl music scene and LSD, which leads her to defy her parents’ expectations and seek her identity on her own. (Trailer)

Wrong Reasons (2022) | Directed by Josh Roush

A punk rock singer is captured by a masked man, but the forced coexistence quickly blurs the roles of victim and captor while they watch the media circus that broke out on television. The film features special appearances by figures like Donita Sparks and Kevin Smith. (Trailer)

What About Me (1993) | Directed by Rachel Amodeo

Rachel Amodeo stars in and directs this film shot in raw black and white that follows the life of Lisa, a young woman who, after losing her apartment, has to learn to survive on the streets of the Lower East Side of New York. With appearances by figures like Dee Dee Ramone, Richard Hell, and Johnny Thunders. (Movie)

Linda Linda Linda (2005) | Directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita A few days before performing at the school festival, a teenage band is left without their singer. To save the concert, they recruit a Korean exchange student who barely understands Japanese and they have three days to prepare their performance. (Trailer)

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Clockwork Orange County (2012) | Directed by Jonathan W.C. Mills

A retrospective on The Cuckoo’s Nest, the Costa Mesa venue that functioned as the epicenter of the punk scene in Southern California in the late 70s and early 80s. The documentary directed by Jonathan W.C. Mills contextualizes how this small space housed bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks or the Dead Kennedys. At the same time, it details the strange neighborhood dynamic and the constant clashes with Zubie’s, the cowboy-aesthetic bar that was right next door. It is a great look at the origins of a counterculture trying to make its way amidst a conservative environment.

Open Your Mouth and Say... Mr. Chi Pig (2010) | Directed by Sean Patrick Shaul

Ken Chinn, known as Mr. Chi Pig, was one of the most magnetic and eccentric figures of Canadian punk as the leader of SNFU. This documentary by Sean Patrick Shaul reviews his legacy in hardcore and skate punk, but it is also a human portrait of his later life. Through interviews and archival footage, the film contextualizes Chinn’s impact on independent music, while frankly documenting his life on the streets, his health problems and daily survival.

UK/DK: A Film About Punks and Skinheads (1983) | Directed by Christopher Collins

Originally released in the early 80s, this medium-length film is an essential document to understand the transition of British punk towards its second wave (known as UK82) and the Oi! circuit. Far from the initial explosion of ‘77, UK/DK places the camera in the underground circuit of the Margaret Thatcher years. Interspersing live shows of bands like The Exploited or Vice Squad with interviews with fans on the streets, the film crudely captures the fashion, the sense of belonging and the disenchantment of the working-class youth of the time.

X: The Unheard Music (1986) | Directed by W.T. Morgan

A film about the peak of X, the band led by John Doe and Exene Cervenka that redefined Los Angeles punk by incorporating rockabilly and country roots. Directed by W.T. Morgan, the film moves away from the typical “behind the scenes” structure to become an audiovisual collage that reflects the creativity of the group. Combining live performances with surrealist music videos and interviews, it is a great overview of how the Californian scene and the independent music circuit operated in the mid-eighties.

Punk in London (1977) | Directed by Wolfgang Büld

The German film student Wolfgang Büld traveled to England in 1977, right at the exact moment when London punk was exploding. The result is a historical document without filters. The film captures it and places us in real time, getting into the clubs and studios to record shows and speak directly with pioneer bands like The Clash and X-Ray Spex. It is a pure archive that contextualizes the attitude and the immediacy of the foundational scene of European punk.

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Over the Edge (1979) | Directed by Jonathan Kaplan

Jonathan Kaplan uses the planned community of New Granada as an example of how suburban isolation breeds its own destruction. Beyond the acts of vandalism of its juvenile protagonists, with Carl (Michael Eric Kramer) and Richie (Matt Dillon) at the helm, the film underlines institutional negligence and cultural emptiness as inescapable triggers. Kaplan’s analysis is neither moralistic nor cautionary, but rather exposes how the lack of spaces of their own, the short-sightedness of the adult world, and police harassment molded a violent rebellion that, in its chaos, reveals the fissures of the American middle-class life project.

Tank Girl (1995) | Directed by Rachel Talalay

Rachel Talalay’s adaptation of the iconic British comic by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett, narrates to us a dystopian future marked by water scarcity where the confrontation between Rebecca Buck (Lori Petty) and the monopolistic corporation Water & Power in scenes that mix the aesthetics of cyberpunk with the spirit of the underground comic and fanzine culture. It is a satirical and deliberately untidy action comedy, about the privatization of basic resources and corporate profit in the face of ecological collapse.

Kids (1995) | Directed by Larry Clark

With Larry Clark directing and Harmony Korine on the script, together they capture the pulse of New York youth in the mid-nineties through a quasi-documentary gaze that dispenses with any moral judgment. The film accompanies Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) and Casper (Justin Pierce) in their wandering through a city where the absolute absence of authority figures creates a perfect scenario for unbridled sexual exploration. Clark’s camera coldly observes the interactions, the codes of the skater subculture, and the emotional disconnection of a generation. It is a barren portrait that turns adolescent hedonism into a direct symptom of a fractured social fabric.

The Edukators (2004) | Directed by Hans Weingartner

Hans Weingartner sets his characters as a mirror of European anti-capitalist militancy at the beginning of the century, addressing the tension between youthful idealism and the comfort of embourgeoisement. Through the actions of Jan (Daniel Brühl), Jule (Julia Jentsch) and Peter (Stipe Erceg), who break into mansions to mess up the furniture and leave warning messages, the work questions the performative and invasive forms of protest and how personal interests clash with the collective. When the accidental kidnapping of a businessman exposes the protagonists to a direct dialogue with the power they intend to destabilize, the film intertwines the ideologies outside the anonymity and human distances of both positions.

All Over Me (1997) | Directed by Alex Sichel

Right in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood during the nineties, the underground musical subculture serves as a backdrop for this teen drama. The story follows Claude (Alison Folland), a young woman dealing with the unrequited infatuation for her best friend, Ellen (Tara Subkoff). The bond breaks definitively when the latter begins to date Mark, a homophobic boy allegedly implicated in the murder of a gay neighbor. Under the direction of Alex Sichel, the film documents how Claude finds a channel of expression by distancing herself from that toxic environment, clinging to her guitar and getting involved in the feminist music scene of New York.

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Sink or Burn by

(100 Block by Row House, 2026)

As a lover of sci-fi novels, comic books, and punk rock, when a story like this is recommended to me, I’m already inside the book before the recommendation is even over. Cristy Road Carrera, an illustrator, novelist, and punk musician, throws us straight into a ruined America, where the air requires gas masks and the East is nothing but the rubble of old empires. In the midst of this desolation enters Cheap Glitter, a queer resistance band that crosses the continent in an armored van to fund the insurgency and attempt to overthrow a totalitarian regime. The inspiration is clearly drawn from today’s headlines and her experiences with her own bands, The Homewreckers and Choked Up, but the true heart of Sink or Burn isn’t the hatred toward post-apocalyptic fascism; it’s how Carrera captures the pure essence of being a marginalized person in your own land: the loners, the resilience, and, above all, the unbreakable brotherhood of those who have nowhere else to go. It’s a reminder of why underground music, our beloved punk rock, always was and always will be an indispensable lifeline for the dispossessed. Carrera perfectly documents that fierce loyalty born among pariahs covered in neon makeup and studs, achieving a flawless portrait of marginalization. It is a loud, vital tribute that proves that when the world collapses, the punk rock will always be our only refuge.

You can buy it here.

You can listen to Choked Up here.

And listen to The Homewreckers here.

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From Seattle to the System: Grunge as Political Expression by

(Independently published, 2025)

Sometimes it takes someone with academic credentials to tell us that our ragged teenage clothes actually mattered. In this exhaustive essay, researcher Sintija Brence (Author and PhD Researcher of American Protest Music and Sociomusicology) gives us a true master class on the subject. It’s quite easy to dismiss grunge as just a bunch of sad white kids playing muddy riffs, but Brence convincingly argues that it was, in reality, a political movement deeply rooted in the working class of the Pacific Northwest. The author strips the genre of the prefabricated narratives pushed by TV networks and exposes its anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, and fiercely anti-Republican mindset during the Reagan and Bush era. The book’s academic tone makes Sintija sound like the cool history teacher; she talks about the path that 80s hardcore and alternative music took to culminate in the Seattle sound, and how the hegemonic industry systematically co-opted this dissent. She details how the act of shopping at thrift stores, which began as a genuine symbolic protest against rampant consumerism and a sense of belonging to the working class, ended up being packaged and sold in fashion magazines and mall windows. It is an impeccable historical dissection that restores ideological dignity to Generation X, making sure not to detach grunge from the evolutionary path that punk rock took over the years. Oh, and yes, she also leaves us with homework, because all her sources are anchored so we can keep expanding our reading backlog.

You can buy it here.

You can read an excerpt here.

You can follow her Substack here.

Fenway Punk: Fenway Punk: How a Boston Indie Label Scored Big on Baseball’s Greatest Rivalry by Chris Wrenn

(Running Press, 2026)

I really enjoy reading biographies about musicians, bands, or musical movements, but I have a special interest in the people on the other side of the scene: the founders of record labels. But I’m not talking about the major labels, I mean the independents—the ones who, armed with just an idea and sheer bravado, can build something massive where you can feel the genuine passion for the scene. In Fenway Punk, Chris Wrenn tells us how he created one of the best indie labels in Boston’s gritty scene. His epiphany came when he noticed thousands of Red Sox fans yelling “Yankees Suck” in the stadium, yet no official store sold merchandise with that insult. So, he printed his own t-shirts and took over the sidewalks. What’s fascinating about the book is seeing how he defends that idea tooth and nail: dodging cops, getting into fistfights for control of street corners, and enduring the pavement just to keep his project alive. With that money, earned with blood and sweat through street vending, Wrenn built Bridge Nine Records, a home that gave a platform to several influential hardcore punk bands and which has earned respect both on the streets and in the boardrooms today, without ever forgetting where its passion was born.

You can buy it here.

and visit the Bridge Nine website here

It Starts With Anger by

(Pantheon Books, 2026)

We often fool ourselves into thinking that alternative subcultures are an oasis of tolerance where all misfits are equally welcomed. In It Starts With Anger, James Spooner gives us a much-needed reality check. The author, weaving in photographs and the magnificent illustrations we already saw in his graphic novel The High Desert: Black. Punk. Nowhere, plunges us into 1991 New York, following a biracial teenager with a mohawk seeking refuge in punk clubs, only to crash into an unbearable echo chamber of white exclusion. Spooner narrates with raw honesty the exhaustion of having to validate his existence to purists who sang against racism but practiced it on the dance floor. But beware, this is not a book about defeat; it is an action manual. Faced with alienation, Spooner grabbed paper and scissors, made zines, organized parties, and documented the scene to build his own space and tell the stories of thousands of kids going through the exact same thing. That drive birthed the acclaimed documentary Afro-Punk and later led him to co-found the renowned festival of the same name. However, the book isn’t an absolute glorification of his career; the masterstroke is his self-criticism: the bitter and lucid frustration of asking himself how that genuinely underground effort ended up chewed up by the system until it became a multimillion-dollar corporation. Spooner invites us to a vital read about the thin line between building a community and feeding the commercial monster.

Pre-order here

You can follow his Substack here

Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ‘90s Rock Memoir by

(Da Capo, 2026)

We all remember our first love. That moment you saw her for the first time and everything around you started moving in slow motion, that instant of revelation when you first heard her voice and, above all, that mysterious desire to peek, at least for a little while, into her intimate diary. Finally, decades later, that lovestruck teenager gets that privilege. In Even the Good Girls Will Cry, Melissa Auf der Maur showcases her observational maturity both in the glare of the stage and MTV videos, as well as in the darker facets of the music business. Instead of the umpteenth recount of excesses, she offers us the sharp and compassionate gaze of someone who was right in the engine room of the alternative movement. The book chronicles her transition from Montreal’s bohemian scene to her sudden joining of Hole in 1994, coinciding with a time of extreme mourning following the tragic deaths of Kurt Cobain and Kristen Pfaff. Auf der Maur describes the experience as walking into the very eye of a hurricane, finding herself forced to take on the role of a stabilizing force against the deafening grief and absolute chaos surrounding Courtney Love. But the true edge of the book doesn’t lie in backstage gossip, but rather in her fierce indictment of the corporate machine. All of this is narrated with an unbreakable instinct for self-preservation and a profound feminist perspective, highly aware that the female historians of the future would be watching how these young women took ownership of the stage.

You can buy it here.

Pre-order her new book ‘Melissa Auf der Maur: My ’90s Rock Photographs’ here

You can follow her Substack here.

Thanks for reading!

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Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution (2017) | Directed by Yony Leyser

Yony Leyser traces the origins of the queercore movement in the mid-1980s, born as a direct response to the growing homophobia within the hardcore scene. The story centers on Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones, who began publishing fanzines and shooting independent films in Toronto, fabricating the existence of a network of LGBTQ+ punk bands that initially did not exist. The documentary shows how this campaign of self-management and media sabotage ended up materializing into a real scene, establishing a space of its own for sexual dissidence within the musical counterculture.

L7: Pretend We’re Dead (2016) | Directed by Sarah Price

More than one hundred hours of VHS recordings captured by the members of L7 themselves during their tours in the 1990s are the primary raw material with which Sarah Price builds this story. The film documents the quartet’s formation in Los Angeles, their signing to the Sub Pop label, and the commercial success of the album Bricks Are Heavy, relying exclusively on the archive of the musicians themselves to detail tour logistics, financial troubles, and physical exhaustion, showing firsthand the media treatment and the demands of the record industry that the band faced until their hiatus in 2001.

Pick It Up - Ska In The 90s (2019) | Directed by Taylor Morden

While the music industry was turning toward grunge, a network of independent bands in California reclaimed Jamaican rhythms and the two-tone aesthetic, blending them with the speed of punk. Taylor Morden documents the rise and fall of the so-called third-wave ska during the 1990s, detailing how groups like No Doubt, Reel Big Fish, and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, among others, went from playing basements to leading MTV rotation and radio charts. Through testimonies from the musicians involved, the film recounts the rapid commercial saturation of the genre and its subsequent collapse when record labels decided to look for the next trend.

Finding Joseph I (2016) | Directed by James Lathos

Vocalist and founding member of Bad Brains, Paul “H.R.” Hudson is the center of a film that interlaces archival footage of the band’s early live performances in Washington D.C.—pioneering the creation of hardcore punk—with current footage of the musician drifting aimlessly. James Lathos builds the narrative from interviews with bandmates, managers, and peers, who detail H.R.’s episodes of erratic behavior over the decades and a deterioration that for years had no clear explanation.

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten (2007) | Directed by Julien Temple

Told around a campfire by the people who surrounded Joe Strummer and by artists who felt his influence, this documentary by Julien Temple chooses a choral homage over a conventional biography. The narrative follows the path of John Mellor, a diplomat’s son who went through hippie squatting before becoming the frontman of The Clash, exposing the contradictions between his political discourse and his personal and professional decisions. What remains is the portrait of someone devoured by his own myth, who spent his final years exploring new sounds and searching for redemption.

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Lords of Dogtown (2005) Directed by Catherine Hardwicke

Written by Stacy Peralta, the film portrays the birth of modern skateboarding in 1970s California through the true story of the Z-Boys, a group of teenagers from broken homes who transferred the aggressiveness of surfing to the neighborhood’s empty swimming pools. The movie perfectly balances the adrenaline of street tricks with a subtle critique of how the corporate industry devoured the authenticity of a subculture to turn it into a million-dollar sport. By moving away from cheap glorification, the film nostalgically captures the pain of the end of innocence and the fraying of childhood friendships in the face of sudden fame.

Kelly & Cal (2014) | Directed by Jen McGowan

Kelly has just become a mother and is living the kind of life she once swore she would never have: a house in the suburbs, a husband with a good job, days measured by the baby’s naps. Almost nothing remains of her phase as a member of a punk band, save for the feeling that at some point she lost her way. The routine breaks when she meets Cal, the teenager next door, who was left in a wheelchair after an accident and faces this new life with a sharp humor and quite a bit of built-up resentment. The closeness between the two grows quickly and in a way that discomforts both Kelly and those around her: it is neither a romance nor a conventional friendship, but something in between that reactivates questions in her about who she was before becoming a wife and mother.

Straight to Hell (1987) Directed by Alex Cox

Willy, Simms, and Norwood are a trio of outlaws who fall asleep the morning of an important job and ruin it completely. To make matters worse, that very night they rob a bank in a hurry, partly to escape their boss’s fury, and end up stranded in the desert when the car runs out of gas. There they discover a ghost town taken over by a family of cowboys with a very strange addiction to coffee. Alex Cox filmed all of this in Almería in just three weeks, with a script written in three days and a cast assembled almost by chance: Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, The Pogues, and Circle Jerks. It shows in every scene that there wasn’t much of a plan behind it; what remains is a gathering of friends playing at making a western, rather than a film with structure, and that lack of control ends up being what gives the movie its special touch.

The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980) | Directed by Julien Temple

Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, puts together a farce tailored entirely to his own measure here: a film that tells, with total cynicism, how he manufactured and sold the most famous punk band in the world. Temple mixes animation, live concerts, and a frayed narrative of the group’s breakup; though it purports to be a documentary, it is nothing more than a bizarre comedy from a chaotic era. The Pistols do not appear as lucid rock stars but as puppets in a publicity stunt that works out perfectly for McLaren. It is a film that is intentionally messy and made with the exact same logic of the scam it portrays.

The Basketball Diaries (1995) | Directed by Scott Kalvert

Based on the memoirs of Jim Carroll, a poet and musician who as a kid was a high school basketball prospect in New York before falling into heroin. Kalvert films that descent without pulling punches: the court, which should be the way out, ends up being merely the starting point of the street. The film is sustained above all by the rawness of its atmosphere and by a still very young Leonardo DiCaprio who goes all out in the role.

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(Artículo en español aquí)

If you’ve spent half your life following a band or a football club, you know that deep down there’s no difference between the liturgy of the terraces and the liturgy of the pogo. In both, the crowd compresses, the smell of smoke and sweat envelops everything, and the collective roar swallows you whole. The players and the musicians are only our representatives; the real joy or the real tragedy belongs to us, the ones at the bottom, the ones who’ve been investing time, money, and ulcers for decades. Die Toten Hosen, those five lanky German punks, understood this dynamic better than anyone else in their country. And their relationship with Fortuna Düsseldorf, their hometown club, is the definitive testament to how irrational loyalty shapes a fan’s identity.

In the late seventies and early eighties, the streets of Düsseldorf were not a friendly place for a kid with dyed hair, a leather jacket, and safety pins. Campino, Andi, Breiti, and Kuddel, before they were Die Toten Hosen, were the outcasts of their own city. Back then, punk culture and football culture collided like two tectonic plates. On weekends, when Fortuna fans got off the trains from the suburbs of Mettmann or Velbert, the tactical order for any punk was simple: run. Campino remembers being chased through the city, scissors in hand, by fans who had no idea what this new British fashion was about and just wanted to cut off their mohawks and colored hair, or simply bash their heads in. The punks would dig in at bars like Domino, on Bolkerstraße, waiting for the wave of hooligans to pass.

Back then, Campino kept local football at arm’s length. Being half English on his mother’s side, he spent his summers in Cornwall and had given his soul to Liverpool FC ever since a match against Borussia Mönchengladbach in 1978. For him, serious football happened at Anfield, not at the Rheinstadion. Besides, how the hell were you supposed to back a team whose fans wanted to beat the shit out of you every Saturday?

Fate, however, with its perverse sense of humor, began weaving a truce. By 1984, the Die Toten Hosen had already released their first record, Opel-Gang, and were starting to gain some recognition. Campino was walking near Düsseldorf’s central station when he ran straight into a group of six Fortuna fans. Survival instinct screamed at him to turn around and run for his life, but suddenly he heard the guys were singing. And they weren’t singing a war chant; they were singing “Eisgekühlter Bommerlunder,” the alcohol-soaked, destructive anthem the Hosen themselves had released a year earlier. Campino froze, the guys laughed and greeted him: “Hey, Campino!”

That was the epiphany. Suddenly, the barrier between the punk and the working-class fan dissolved. Both groups were the same disgrace to the city. Both shared the same rejection of bourgeois German society, the postwar petty bourgeoisie that demanded tidy gardens, silence, and obedience. The kid who cut his own skin with a razor blade in some dark dive and the steelworker who got drunk in the stands to forget that his life was misery from Monday to Friday belonged to the same tribe: the “Armee der Verlierer” (the Army of Losers), as one of the band’s earliest songs puts it. From that moment on, the band accepted its geographic destiny. A sign in a London punk dive summed it up perfectly: “Support your local hero.” Campino understood that cheering for the team from your neighborhood didn’t betray his love for Liverpool; it was a matter of belonging.

And boy, did Fortuna Düsseldorf need support. If there’s one thing that defines a true fan, it’s the capacity to embrace failure. Fortuna had touched the sky, winning the German Cup in 1979 and 1980, and had even reached the final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup against Barcelona. But by the late eighties, the glory had faded to a sepia photograph, and the team had gone down, dropping to the Second Division in 1987.

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On October 3, 1987, Die Toten Hosen were driving to Berlin when they heard on the radio that Fortuna had lost at home to Union Solingen. It was the last straw. “We couldn’t be a band from a Second Division city!” the band’s internal mythology recounts. So they did what any sick fan with a microphone would do: they decided to buy a player. During their 1988 and 1989 tour, the band introduced the “Eine Mark für Fortuna” (One mark for Fortuna). For every ticket sold across their 37 shows, one German mark went into a fund for the club. Every night, Campino grabbed the mic and thanked the crowd for helping fund the Düsseldorf team. In Cologne, Düsseldorf’s historic rivals, the band got booed and cursed out on a biblical scale. It was a beautiful act of provocation.

They raised 150,000 marks. By the time they were done, Fortuna had already gone back up on their own merits, but the money helped buy Oliver Gensch and, above all, the Ghanaian midfielder Anthony Baffoe. Baffoe understood the poetry of the gesture perfectly and declared: “My right leg belongs to the Toten Hosen.” Imagine the madness: you’re in the stands, you watch your midfielder send in a cross with his right foot, and you know that muscle, that tendon, was financed with the money you and your friends raised by playing distorted chords and spitting beer. It’s the climax of civic participation.

But football is cruel. As the melancholic’s handbook puts it, joy lasts as long as a sigh, and suffering is the fan’s natural condition. By the late nineties, Fortuna had become an “elevator club,” going up and down between divisions, until the cable snapped entirely. By 2001, the club was sunk in the Fourth Division (the Regionalliga), on the verge of total bankruptcy and at risk of losing its license. Nobody wanted to put up a dime. The city was turning its back on this comatose giant.

It’s in moments of absolute misery that true loyalty is measured. Die Toten Hosen, who by then were already Germany’s biggest rock band, millionaires, owners of their own record label (JKP) and of their own destiny, decided to sink into the mud alongside their club. For two seasons, from 2001 to 2003, the Hosen became the team’s main sponsor. The skull and star, the band’s logo, gleamed on the chest of Fortuna’s jersey. To fund this romantic delirium, the band, which had historically refused corporate sponsorship on their tours, made a pact with the devil: they let the Diebels brewery sponsor their tour, pocketed a million marks (or euros, depending on how you reckon the conversion for that era), and injected that money straight into the veins of the dying club. “Egal ob dritte oder vierte Liga - Fortuna gehört zu Düsseldorf wie Altbier oder der Rhein” (No matter if it’s the Third or Fourth Division, Fortuna belongs to Düsseldorf like Altbier or the Rhine), Campino declared.

This is where the fan becomes immortal. They saved the club. Not with a blank check from a Qatari sheikh, but with the sweat of punk rock. This injection of capital allowed the team to get its finances in order, and in 2004 it began its long, slow, agonizing climb back to professional life. Today, that Fortuna jersey with the Die Toten Hosen skull is the Holy Grail for football jersey collectors.

Now, to understand what you’re made of, you need to know not only who you love, but who you hate. The yin and yang of football. And if you’re a Fortuna fan, a fan of small clubs, of the mud and of defeat, your natural, genetic, and moral enemy is FC Bayern Munich. Bayern represents everything punk despises: predictable success, institutional arrogance, the cold and calculating corporation where winning isn’t a joy but a contractual and financial obligation.

In December 1999, wielding the sharp pen of singer-songwriter Funny van Dannen, Die Toten Hosen released “Bayern.” The song is a manifesto of proletarian contempt for the Bavarian giant: “Es kann so viel passieren / Es kann so viel geschehen / Nur eins weiß ich hundertprozentig / Nie im Leben würde ich zu Bayern gehen” — four lines that boil down to one flat, lifelong vow: whatever else might happen, signing with Bayern is simply never going to happen. The lyrics mock the club’s arrogance and the moral low point that a contract with them would represent.

The establishment’s response wasn’t long in coming. Uli Hoeneß, Bayern’s all-powerful, perpetually furious manager, exploded in front of the microphones: “Die Toten Hosen! That’s the trash our society is going to choke on someday.” In Munich, some players were filmed throwing the band’s records in the trash. Radio stations across southern Germany blacklisted the band, and sales in the region plummeted. And what did the Hosen do? They laughed their asses off. Campino went so far as to declare, with his finest cynicism, that he and Hoeneß had a lot in common, since neither of them would ever forget the penalty Hoeneß missed in 1976. It was the revenge of the kid from the back of the classroom against the unbearable star pupil. In 2000, when Bayern was about to lose the title on the final matchday against Leverkusen, the band rented a small plane to fly over the Munich stadium with a banner reading: “Die Toten Hosen congratulate FC Bayern.” In the end, Bayern won the title by some miracle, with Leverkusen choking, but the Hosen let the banner fly anyway. They weren’t about to let reality ruin a good joke.

But the stadium is also the site of unspeakable pain. Stadiums have always been the Die Toten Hosen’s “living room.” And on June 28, 1997, the Rheinstadion, Fortuna’s home, was the stage for the greatest tragedy in the band’s history. That day they were playing their 1000th show. 60,000 people celebrating the pinnacle of the career of the friends from Flingern. During the show, the crush of the crowd on the field became unbearable, and a young Dutch woman, Rieke Lax, died of suffocation. The band, informed of the horror backstage during a break, was forced by security officials to keep playing, pretending nothing had happened, to avoid a mass panic that could leave more people dead. They had to go back out and sing their party anthems while their blood ran cold in their veins. It was “the end of innocence” for the band. The stadium gives you everything, but it also brutally reminds you of the fragility of life. It reminds you that the pogo, just like a crush in the stands, walks the razor’s edge between ecstasy and death.

If you survive those traumas, your bond with the place becomes eternal. Let’s jump ahead to 2012. Fortuna, after decades of eating shit, had reached the relegation playoff against Hertha BSC, with a chance to finally return to the coveted Bundesliga first division. The club’s masseur, Bernd Restle, called Campino. The night before the second leg in Düsseldorf, the entire band sneaked into the team’s hotel. In a dull conference room, surrounded by bottles of mineral water, the five punks pulled out their instruments and told the players they weren’t alone, that the whole city was breathing for them. They played “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and their brand-new mass anthem “Tage wie diese“ (Days Like These). The next day, in a chaotic match full of flares and a pitch invasion, Fortuna drew 2-2 and sealed their promotion. That night, the players sang the Hosen’s song until dawn. That same year, the club made the band members honorary members. The circle closed. The outcasts, the Opel-Gang kids who’d had to run from hooligans in 1980, were now the institution’s spiritual soul.

This is the final thesis on what it means to be a fan. You win nothing tangible. Victory brushes past you for a second, and failure is your bedmate. In 2019, to celebrate that unconditional love, the club and the band released a special jersey, “Alles aus Liebe” (All for Love), which Fortuna wore in an official match. The opponent, of course, was Bayern Munich. The result? Fortuna lost 4-0. It’s pure poetry. You can put your rock band’s crest on your chest, you can sell out every jersey in record time, you can sing until you lose your voice, but the crushing logic of capitalist football dictates that the millionaire is going to run you over on the pitch.

And you know what? It doesn’t matter. None of it matters at all. Real fans don’t care about the quality of the product. The consumption of suffering is everything. What matters is the train ride, the cold in your feet, the cheap beer, and the camaraderie of knowing that the guy standing next to you chose to ruin his weekend for the same colors as you. Fortuna can get relegated a hundred more times. Die Toten Hosen can keep playing “Hier kommt Alex” until they’re eighty, with arthritis and knee problems (Campino already has his doctor operating on him regularly). But the organic connection is already made. Football, like punk, is the last great analog, collective ritual we have left to keep from going crazy with loneliness in front of a screen.

Look, at the end of the day, the colors of the club and the riffs serve the same sacred function. They transform you. You leave work, the office, a job interview that didn’t go well, you put on the cap with your team’s colors, and for a couple of hours, you stop being just one more person and become part of something immense, a tribal chorus that defies silence and death. Die Toten Hosen saved Fortuna Düsseldorf with money, yes, but they also saved it with something far more valuable: they reminded an entire city that defeats are sung at the top of your lungs, arm in arm with the person next to you, and that, if things go wrong, whether on the terraces or in the pogo, the only unforgivable thing is half-heartedness. If we’re going down, let it be on our own terms, singing until the bitter end.

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(Artículo en español aquí)

I tell this story because I need you to understand where I am coming from when I say, with all the seriousness I am capable of maintaining, that Tom Waits and the Ramones are essentially the same thing. Not technically, nor aesthetically—not in any sense that you could successfully explain to someone at a dinner party without them giving you that “oof, here he goes again” look while pulling the wine bottle away from you. Both—and I am getting serious here—are music for people who don’t fit in, made by people who didn’t fit in, about an America that never existed for them, and so they invented it in their own way and by their own rules. The Ramones were children of the sidewalks and glue-sniffing of Queens, and Waits came from Pomona, California, more or less, and both grew up looking at the American dream from the outside with their noses pressed against the glass, watching how others lived their lives inside the box. Waits processed it with greasy pizza and cheap cigarettes and a voice that sounded like a city wolf howling at the moon while gargling with bourbon. The Ramones processed it with speed and three chords and a guitar that sounded like a chainsaw with missing parts, and they made technical limitations their safe place. But the feeling beneath all of that, the feeling that is the true raw material of everything they do, was the same in both worlds. It was the same suburban portrait, the same misshapen characters, the same philosophy of life: surviving your own way, with whatever is there.

The Ramones were incredibly weird. A strangeness that goes far beyond long hair and leather clothes. Four kids from Queens who decided to take the same last name as if they were a chosen family, dress identically forever as if the uniform were the only honest way to tell the world who you are, and play two-minute songs because two minutes was all the time the world deserved from them. They didn’t make long songs because long songs imply that you have time, that you can relax. The Ramones knew that wasn’t the case—that the world didn’t deserve that condescension—and therefore speed was not a technique but a moral stance (well, a bit of laziness too). Waits, on the other hand, took all the time in the world, and his songs sometimes seem to last until you can hear the broom sweeping and the chairs being placed on top of the tables, with a piano hitting the keys like someone exhausted from being so angry, where the instrument is the only thing listening and responding to him. Yet beneath all that slowness, beneath all that accumulation of filth and time, there is exactly the same anxiety as in the Ramones—the same feeling that, if the music stops, something breaks and there is no other place left in the world to inhabit.

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But there is a specific moment where all of this stops being a theory I tell myself and becomes something irrefutable, something that can be proven with two songs, with two versions, with two worlds recognizing each other in the mirror. The first is what happens when the Ramones grab Waits’s I Don’t Wanna Grow Up, a song that in the original sounds like a waltz a drunk stumbled over and tumbled down the stairs—melancholic in a way, but physically heavy, the voice of a man looking at adulthood from the outside and deciding no, thanks, that growing up means becoming someone who lies out of habit and makes the decisions that lead the world to be the way it is. And then the Ramones re-record it, speeding it up until you can barely recognize the melody underneath, and to everyone’s surprise, the lyrics didn’t need to be modified; it was so punk rock, so Joey, that your bohemian friend had to remind you it was a cover. It didn’t clash in the slightest with the band’s aesthetic and idiosyncrasy. To top it off, there was the music video, where you watched the band move within the graphic universe of Daniel Clowes, a cartoonist whose works also portray the same worlds as Waits and the Ramones with a more pop but no less underground gaze.

The second is the movement in the opposite direction. And here is where practically everything turns into characters from a vaudeville of different generations and styles. In 2003, Johnny Ramone was offered the chance to produce We’re a Happy Family: A Tribute to Ramones (2003). His condition? To have absolute control, as was to be expected. So he brought in Rob Zombie. Obviously, the result was strange, strange good and strange bad, there was no intention of pleasing fans or attracting new ones, it was about locking all the monsters they knew how to create with their influence into the same room. But let’s get back to the point. When Waits takes The Return of Jackie & Judy from the album End of the Century (1980)—a song that in the Ramones‘ original has a strange, accelerated joy but at the same time connected narratively with Judy Is a Punk from the debut album, with the two title characters returning to the neighborhood and someone glad to see them—when Waits brings it to his planet, it seems that same drunk also threw the song down the stairs along with a toolbox. Tom converts the punk joy into bluesy tenderness perfect for dancing in a bar lost on the highway. When he sings about Jackie and Judy, about these two characters from Queens, he treats them exactly as he treats all his characters: as real people with real stories, glorified through that lysergic, rusty filter through which Waits looks at the world.

What happens when a barroom poet sings the punks is that he finds the soul they themselves sometimes pretended not to have. He takes those songs from among the scrap metal and tells them: look, there’s something beautiful here. He blows the dust off them, wipes them with his shirt, and places them as a centerpiece. And the result is that the two movements together—the punk that speeds up the poet and the poet who elevates the punk—become something more than a curiosity or a gesture of mutual appreciation: they become proof that they were always talking about the exact same subject from the very beginning. Waits populated his world with philosopher drunks and late-night people who talk to ghosts in bars run by cockroaches. The Ramones populated theirs with street-corner kids who found their tribe in punk.

During that same college era, I also bought two books on Tom Waits. One was a compilation of interviews and journalistic articles about him. Waits used to clarify that not everything he says in interviews is true, that sometimes he can end up pulling the journalists’ legs. The other book was garbage: a compilation of quotes pulled from the internet without any sources, printed on cheap paper with a shoddy design. But I liked it. And I remember there was a loose sentence that said something like this: Punk rock? I prefer that to all those dull groups like Crosby, Steals, the Cash and Young. I’d rather see a kid in leather and safety pins screaming about eating his mother than some of that stuff.

I loved that phrase. It was ridiculous and bizarre. On certain bohemian nights at college, while we chatted about aesthetic movements throughout history and the importance of cultural products in modern societies, I would rasp my voice a little, look at my glass, and paraphrase that quote. I would cover it in my own way of seeing the world.

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P-Rock: The Doc | Directed by Alex Shipman

P-Rock was a satellite television channel founded by two South London kids with no background in television that, in the early 2000s, broadcast non-stop punk, ska, alternative rock, and even hip hop, giving airtime to British bands that the major channels ignored and placing them on the same grid alongside established acts. It lasted less than a year before the industry heavyweights won the tug-of-war, but it left an indelible mark on those who watched and lived it. Shipman reconstructs that history through interviews with bands and fans, complementing it with cut-and-paste style animation faithful to the channel’s punk spirit. A documentary made from the inside, with the same DIY DNA of what it portrays and so wrapped in nostalgia that it is only available on DVD and VHS. (Trailer) (Buy)

Punk Rock Lottery | Directed by Jacob Miguel

The event that gives the documentary its name gathers more than forty musicians in Austin each year, who are randomly assigned to newly formed bands and must compose original music and perform live under pressure and in record time. Miguel starts out wanting to document the growth of this event and ends up participating himself, transforming the film into an immersive journey through history and the creative process. Beyond the music resulting from the draw, the film functions as a tender homage to the camaraderie of the scene and the power of improvising when the sole objective is to have fun and test the limits of creativity. (Watch)

Punk Rock Vegan Movie | Directed by Moby

Moby has been a vegan and an activist for nearly 40 years, and he grew up playing guitar in hardcore bands in Connecticut and New York. From that dual perspective, he directs this documentary that traces a parallel history of punk rock as a breeding ground for animal rights activism. Written, directed, shot, and scored by himself, and far from the solemnity of other ecological documentaries, the musician utilizes a homemade tone to remind us that figures like Ian MacKaye, HR, Theo Kogan, Ray Cappo, and Captain Sensible were already speaking of veganism as an extension of rejecting the system. (Watch)

Punk’s Not Dead | Directed by Susan Dynner

Dynner grew up in Washington DC and saw her first Minor Threat show at fifteen. From that privileged vantage point within the scene, she interviewed dozens of bands, promoters, and critics over the course of three years. The result tracks the evolution of punk from its anarchic roots to its adoption as a corporate marketing tool and its reinvention in the contemporary underground scene, featuring bands like Black Flag, Bad Religion, The Damned, NOFX, Rancid, and The Ramones, among many others. Questions such as what makes punk punk, why so many bands have been together for more than twenty years, and how the pioneers react to the massive pop punk of the ‘90s and ‘00s are the driving force of a documentary that hovers between faith and nostalgia. (Where to watch)

The Other F Word | Directed by Andrea Blaugrund

With Jim Lindberg’s book Punk Rock Dad acting as a trigger, Blaugrund decides to explore the world of punk musicians who become fathers and torn between their anti-authoritarian lifestyle and the responsibilities of fatherhood—the other F-word of the title. The documentary analyzes with immense humanity the clash between maintaining a rebellious aesthetic and having to change diapers, pay for schools, and set boundaries for their children, turning into an essay on maturity and fatherhood that offers a sincere portrait of a group of broken men trying not to repeat with their children the abandonment they suffered in their youth. (Where to watch)

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Ex Drummer (2007) | Directed by Koen Mortier

Mortier adapts the novel by Belgian writer Herman Brusselmans about three disabled men who form a punk rock band and hire Dries, a famous writer with no musical talent, to play the drums and attempt a single performance for a battle of the bands. What follows is a spiral of degradation, violence, and sarcasm filmed in such a fast-paced and visually sharp manner that it delivers a dark and completely incorrect comedy. A metaphor for power, humiliation, and class contempt disguised as salvation and fun.

24 Hour Party People (2002) | Directed by Michael Winterbottom

The story of Tony Wilson, co-founder of Factory Records, who launched Joy Division and New Order, among others. Winterbottom turns the Manchester scene into an absurdist comedy where greatness and failure go hand in hand. With a magnetic Steve Coogan who transmits love and hate like any music entrepreneur, the film breaks the fourth wall, plays fast and loose with the facts, and invents over a true story that was already chaotic and improvised in its own right.

What to Do in Case of Fire? (2002) | Directed by Gregor Schnitzler

In the Berlin of the late ‘80s, a group of anarchists plants a homemade bomb made with a pressure cooker and chemicals. The explosive fails, but twelve years later it finally detonates and the police begin the hunt for those responsible. The film attempts to draw a generational balance sheet on the betrayal of ideals, the price of comfort, and memory as guilt, bringing back together a group of adults who took different paths to destroy the past they once believed in.

Dogs in Space (1986) | Directed by Richard Lowenstein

The film follows the day-to-day life of Sam (played by Michael Hutchence) and his band as they coexist with drug dealers, university students, and the unemployed in a chaotic Melbourne squat during the late ‘70s. Inspired by the director’s youth, with a leading role written specifically for the INXS frontman, the movie portrays from the inside the famous Australian ‘Little Band Scene’, where post-punk, experimentation, and a sense of community laid the musical foundations of the ‘80s.

Class of 1984 (1982) | Directed by Mark L. Lester

A music teacher arrives at a high school in an American city and encounters a climate of terror spearheaded by a young psychopath. The director takes the conservative fear of youth from the eighties and brings it down to pure exploitation cinema, with the school as a battlefield, the adult as an intruder, and punk as a threat. A cult movie that possesses the best of B-movie cinema and the worst of a violent decade.

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The new lineup has much to do with that leap. Singer and songwriter Matt Henson—the group’s founder and soul—has put down the bass to focus exclusively on vocals, where he sounds looser and more confident than in any previous recording. Guitarists Justin Miller and Kenny Dirkes return, having not recorded together with the band since the Rising Tide EP, joined by bassist Aaron Williams and drummer Mike Parker as a brand-new rhythm section.

Coffee, the couch, and while the needle does its work on the vinyl, I review Noi!se’s Fate of the Union track by track:

Vast Contrast opens the album by taking aim at polarization as a tool of control—the manufactured division from above that settles between people who ought to have more in common than they believe. The lyrics don’t look for the culprit in any specific camp but in the mechanism itself; Matt understands that the gap that separates us is pre-designed and operates on learned hatreds that people mistake for their own convictions.

You Versus You abandons the analysis of the political landscape to go inward. It is a song about self-destruction as a habit, about cycles of escapism that resolve nothing but instead flatten the will until there is no energy left to try again. Bit by bit, one begins to identify with their own disaster. Yet, by the end, Henson attempts to uphold hope.

Mindful Confinement delves into the same territory but from a darker angle. If You Versus You speaks of the cycle, this song speaks of total imprisonment: the mental jail built brick by brick by oneself, where progress becomes threatening and the brave face one shows the world starts losing to sadness. It is the lyrically densest song on the album, and one of the most honest about what it means to be unable to escape one’s own head.

Fate of the Union, the title track, returns to the collective but intertwines it with the mental state brought on by the day-to-day news. Misinformation, institutional hypocrisy, and civic exhaustion converge in lyrics that don’t seek analysis but catharsis—the outcry of someone who can no longer pretend that the state of affairs is accidental.

Ever Afraid portrays someone who built their identity upon a facade and can no longer recognize what lies beneath. Greed as the engine, self-deception as the method, and the progressive loss of self as the inevitable result. The final question—”have you forgotten just where you’ve come from?”—is not rhetorical: it is the heart of the song. In a way, it continues to speak of mental health and internal struggles and their consequences on the human group surrounding you.

This Isn’t Home is perhaps the most collective in its grief. The eroded promise, the place that no longer exists or has ceased to mean what it once represented. Henson works with the idea that we remain clung to structures that have already collapsed, and that progress sometimes catches a glimpse of its own shadow and retreats.

Media Alchemy is the coldest analysis on the record. The lyrics dismantle the ecosystem of misinformation from the inside and return to the theme of polarity as a social construct—and how algorithms feed the taking of a definitive side, and once anchored in that place, it is nearly impossible for the human mind to find its way out: “Who needs facts when we have the ‘Truth’?”

Strength in Numbers is the only moment where Fate of the Union breathes forward. Unity as the answer, the bond that strengthens when everything denounced throughout the album brings us to a breaking point and it becomes necessary to start trusting one another to initiate the right fight against the right enemies. But communal strength only works if the narrative that separated them is undone first.

Blinded by Hatred brings the album’s argument to its boiling point. The culture war, the ghosts of the past re-exhumed to keep conflict alive, the intangible threats that serve to sustain fear. It basically summarizes the album and its intention, finally wrapping it in the lyrical coherence that Matt and company managed to maintain.

Idle Action closes the record and does so with the oldest Noi!se song, first recorded in 2012 and re-recorded for Fate of the Union; it is undoubtedly my favorite. Putting this new version alongside the one found on Pushing On evidences the band’s musical and technical evolution. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence they saved it for this moment. The lyrics attack the hypocrisy of performative activism: the kind that preaches without acting, that fights the system from a place of comfort, and that confuses social media outrage with real commitment. In 2012, it was a critique. In 2026, with fourteen additional years of accumulated evidence, it is a verdict.

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In twenty years, when someone wants to understand what it felt like to live in this moment—the polarization, the exhaustion, misinformation as a permanent climate and of course, the individual and collective mental state of this time—Fate of the Union will be as valid a source as any journalistic article.

It is Noi!se’s most complete album in every sense. Technically, the production ensures the record sounds clean without losing the grit of the genre. But if there is one thing that scares me today about Fate of the Union, it is that we are currently returning to the records that marked us decades ago only to tell ourselves, “Those lyrics are still so relevant today…” and I only hope that is not the ultimate fate of our union.

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Something Better Change (2024) | Directed by Scott Crawford

Scott Crawford, who previously documented the Washington D.C. scene in Salad Days, now portrays the legendary Joe Keithley, founder of D.O.A. and a fundamental influence on the 80s scene. The documentary alternates between the band’s archives—four decades of anti-Reagan songs and grueling tours—and Keithley’s 2022 campaign for Green Party councilor in Burnaby, British Columbia. Crawford doesn’t establish a break between the two periods: the editing deliberately interweaves them to show that the man who now addresses neighborhood complaints, with his successes and failures, is the same man who in the eighties tried to educate a generation that they could do something productive with their anger. Jello Biafra, Dave Grohl, Ian MacKaye, and Duff McKagan, among others, appear to trace that line of continuity between the rigor of hardcore and the commitment of public service. (Where to watch)

Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026) | Directed by Ilya Chaiken

The Lunachicks were formed in the late 80s in the East Village by school friends who didn’t know how to play very well but knew exactly where they wanted to go. Ilya Chaiken constructs the documentary from the inside: their childhoods in a still-dangerous New York, their first gigs in clubs they hoped would flop, a sound that blended punk with grunge, grotesque humor, and an aesthetic that owed as much to John Waters as to the East Village of the 1980s. The documentary traces how the industry ignored them while more docile bands advanced, the internal frictions, the separation in 2000 until their reunion. With extensive archival footage and unfiltered interviews, the film reveals their real impact, even though it unfolded on the fringes of the scene. (Apple TV, Amazon and Fandango at Home)

Héroxs del 88 (2019) | Directed by Luis Hitoshi Díaz

In 1988, in the midst of Argentina’s hyperinflation, Sergio Fasanelli and Walter Kolm—24 and 20 years old, respectively, founders of the Radio Trípoli label—released Invasión 88: the first compilation of Argentine punk and hardcore, featuring Attaque 77, Flema, Comando Suicida, Los Baraja, and several others. discovered that album at sixteen, and it changed his life. Thirty years later, he revisits it with a camera, tracing the musicians who moved away, went into exile, or simply changed their lifestyles. The documentary explores those memories while reconstructing the social context, the recording, and the post-production of a national cult classic, one that, unintentionally, would end up serving as a breeding ground for the countercultural expression of the 90s and 2000s. (Watch Here)

Espíritu del 98 (2018) | Directed by Ramón Villacreses Produced by Enrico Martin

In the late nineties, in Guayaquil, a handful of teenage bands from different social strata began to come together out of necessity: there was nowhere to play, no infrastructure, no one to help them. Thus, Unión Punk was born, a collective that, under the influence of skate punk, formed bands, organized concerts, and invented its own internal language. For a decade, it became one of the most active independent production companies in Ecuador, bringing bands like NOFX and The Misfits to Guayaquil—movements that would culturally mark a generation but lose almost all their money in the process. Villacreses—bassist and vocalist of G.O.E., part of that story from the beginning—directs and narrates from the inside, without journalistic detachment. The documentary unfolds chronologically, with period footage and interviews with members of Sk-van, Agente 86, REK, 69 Segundos, among others, managing to celebrate what was built and laugh with the same honesty at the failures that brought it down. (Watch Here)

Botinada: Origins of Brazilian Punk (2006) | Directed by Gastão Moreira

Gastão Moreira spent four years interviewing 77 people and reviewing over 200 hours of archival footage to reconstruct the formative years of punk in Brazil. The story unfolds between 1976 and 1984, when the movement began to take shape on the outskirts of São Paulo under the watchful eye of the military dictatorship. The film follows the bands that were there from the very beginning, drawing on previously unseen material and the testimonies of figures like Clemente (Inocentes), João Gordo (Ratos de Porão), and the unforgettable Kid Vinil. Moreira manages to capture the fury of a youth that found in punk a proletarian identity in the face of oppression. Four decades after those first concerts that often ended in pitched battles, this remains the definitive reference for understanding how one of the rawest scenes in South America was forged. (Watch here)

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What We Do Is Secret (2007) | Directed by Rodger Grossman

Grossman portrays the story of Darby Crash and The Germs without attempting to explain or absolve him. Crash built his public persona on instability, substance abuse, and a theatricality that functioned as much as a statement of principles as a symptom of impending collapse, and he died at twenty-two with the sinister coherence of someone who always knew where he was going. A biography that portrays the cost of turning one’s own disintegration into a form of communication.

The Runaways (2010) | Directed by Floria Sigismondi

Sigismondi reconstructs the rise of one of the first all-female rock bands in mid-seventies Los Angeles, without romanticizing either the chaos or the epic nature of their ascent. Joan Jett and Cherie Currie embody the tension between an industry that needed them young, beautiful, and malleable, and their genuine desire to occupy spaces that no one was reserving for them. The film examines how the very system that launched them was designed to exhaust them, turning every artistic decision into a negotiation about the limits of their own bodies.

CBGB (2013) | Directed by Randall Miller

Miller narrates how a perpetually struggling club, with an eccentric owner and deplorable facilities, ended up being the place where Television, Blondie, and The Ramones found a home before the world knew they were waiting for them. The film is uneven in its construction and sometimes succumbs to the temptation of easy homage, but it retains something valuable: the idea that cultural ecosystems that bring about change don’t arise from planning or capital, but from the accumulation of decisions made without a safety net and with whatever resources are available.

Good Vibrations (2012) | Directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa & Glenn Leyburn

In 1970s Belfast, a city divided by sectarian conflict and with violence a constant presence in daily life, Terri Hooley opened a record shop and decided to champion a music scene that transcended religious and political boundaries with an indifference that was itself a stance. Barros D’Sa and Leyburn portray a character who defies all heroic molds: he is stubborn, a poor manager, someone who makes decisions with his heart rather than his head, and who, precisely for that reason, ends up building something that no rational calculation could have produced.

Rude Boy (1980) | Directed by Jack Hazan & David Mingay

Hazan and Mingay have crafted an unclassifiable piece that blends documentary footage with fictional sequences to capture The Clash at the height of their career, as Britain grappled with the first tremors of Thatcherism. Through Ray Gange, a young man with no prospects who becomes the band’s roadie, the film uncomfortably exposes the gap between the band’s political discourse and the concrete reality of those who follow them from below, without glamour and without a clear path forward.

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All Good Cretins Go to Heaven, written by Jenn L. Beckwith with research by Gary Lynn Clevenger, is technically a fan retrospective for the Ramones‘ fiftieth anniversary. But calling it a “retrospective“ does it about as much justice as calling The Who’s Tommy “an album about a deaf boy.“ What Beckwith has achieved here is something far more valuable: she has captured exactly why certain music turns you into a different person, and why that conversion is never fully reversed. And she has done so from a position that is neither that of the critic nor the historian, but that of the fan who one day stood against the wooden barrier of a concert in a university parking lot and looked up to see Joey Ramone’s filthy sneakers.

Because that is what Beckwith was. Literally. In 1993, she saw her only Ramones show at Southern Connecticut State University; she elbowed her way to the front barrier, and from there—with bruises on her calves that took a week to disappear—she contemplated them with that same mixture of terror and ecstasy felt when you are standing at the exact point where life marks a “before and after.” The anecdote is told with a disarming honesty. There is no glamour, no manufactured nostalgia. There is a parking lot, a generator truck, a Ford Econoline van with New York license plates, and the certainty that some things are never forgotten.

The book’s premise is simple yet moving. Beckwith, a children’s librarian by day and a community radio DJ on weekends, responded to a Facebook post where someone asked if anyone was writing a book about the Ramones for the fiftieth anniversary. From that algorithmic spark, this was born. And it works because the book does not pretend to be something it is not. It does not attempt to rival the great authorized biographies or the academic essays that explain why “Blitzkrieg Bop” is actually a deconstruction of post-war American pop. What Beckwith does is compile testimonies from people who love this band and explain, in the most direct way possible, why that matters and why 50 years later we continue to celebrate them.

There is a chapter that reviews the year 1974—the year the Ramones began—with all the precision of an encyclopedia: Nixon resigns, the oil embargo, the average price of a gallon of gas at 43 cents. It is the kind of context that normally makes me yawn in rock books, that rush to situate the music within Great History as if the musicians had been watching the news before plugging in their amplifiers. But here it works, because Beckwith uses it to remind us of something fundamental: Forest Hills, Queens, in 1974 was a specific, concrete place without glamour. New York was on the brink of bankruptcy, Times Square was a den of squalor and porn, and four weird kids from a broken neighborhood changed the way people absorb music.

Individual biographies of each Ramone perfectly explain why all four stories are important to understanding their legacy. Joey’s story—tall, thin, with OCD, having spent a month in a hospital psychiatric unit before becoming one of the most recognizable voices of the 20th century—is one of those that sticks with you. He died on April 15, 2001, listening to a U2 song, less than a month away from turning fifty. His mother and his brother Mickey, faithful to their promise, organized the birthday party anyway. It is one of the anecdotes that moves me most every time I read it.

And then there is Dee Dee, which is perhaps the rawest story on one hand and the most “Argentine“ on the other, without anyone having planned it that way. Dee Dee Ramone—Douglas Colvin, to the bureaucracy—ended up married to Barbara Zampini, a young Argentine fan he met in the nineties. Barbara was not only his companion until his death in 2002, but she also played bass with him in The Ramainz, the band they formed with Marky and CJ after the Ramones disbanded. There is something in that image—a woman from here who crossed the Atlantic of fandom and ended up on stage alongside the musicians she adored—that strangely condenses everything this book wants to say about the power of this band.

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And they reached further than one might imagine. Jari-Pekka Laitio-Ramone, a Finnish fan born on the same day as Joey Ramone who created one of the band’s most comprehensive websites in 1995, details in the book the countries that most frequently visit his page. He also recounts how that archive helped him with his own books and relates the honor of his work leading him to contact his idols—meeting, for example, Richie Ramone at his shows in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and having Marky show a willingness to write the opening texts for one of his books.

Then there are the fan stories proper. And here, honestly, I expected things to slip through my fingers. Fans talking about how much they love their favorite band is normally the book equivalent of other people’s vacation photos: perfectly legitimate for the participants, slow as molasses for anyone else. But Beckwith selects well. There is a woman named Shirah who saw the Ramones‘ first show at CBGB in August 1974 as a teenager escaping a violent home, and who ended up having long conversations with Joey after he saw her crying in the front row and approached her to ask if she was okay. There is a Russian fan who traveled from Moscow to Saint Petersburg—600 kilometers—to see Marky Ramone because he won tickets in a T-shirt contest. But what matters is that in the book, the stories of the band members and those of their fans coexist perfectly; there is no moral or emotional distance, no cultural or class difference. There is only a musical cloak that unites them in brotherhood. And that is where you find the justification for every thesis in every book and every paper that attempts to explain why the Ramones mean so much to so many people.

I think of this and I think of the usual debate: whether people don’t become a certain way because of the music they listen to, but rather listen to certain music because they are already that way. There might be some truth to that. But this book silently argues the opposite case: that music can find you before you know who you are, and give you a vocabulary for that person you haven’t met yet. And that is as true in Forest Hills as it is in Buenos Aires, as true in 1976 as it is today.

Beckwith didn’t arrive at this book because she is an academic or because she is well-paid. She arrived because one night in 1993 she stood in a New Haven parking lot with bruises on her legs and the certainty of having witnessed something that was not going to be repeated. She is right on both counts.

1-2-3-4. That’s all it takes.

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NOFX: 40 Years of Fuckin’ Up (2024) | Directed by James Buddy Day

The farewell tour serves as a framework to reconstruct four decades of self-management, from the precarious rehearsals of the eighties to the consolidation of an independent empire. The footage reveals how sustained drug use, financial control, and the egos of its members—primarily between Fat Mike and guitarist Eric Melvin—eroded the band’s internal structure. As logistical preparations for the final show progress, the testimonies expose a fragmentation where business and personal burnout ultimately dissolved one of the most influential institutions in global punk. (TICKETS)

Afropunk (2003) | Directed by James Spooner

Spooner’s work records a breaking point in the identity of Black youth within predominantly white spaces. The documentary analyzes the conflict of inhabiting a movement that preaches freedom but maintains invisible barriers for minorities. Being questioned by their own environment and segregated by the alternative scene, the protagonists use music as a tool for personal reaffirmation. The film is a testimony to social fragmentation and the need to build an original aesthetic that does not depend on external validation.

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché (2021) | Directed by Celeste Bell & Paul Sng

The film is based on the book Day Glo: The Poly Styrene Story by Zoë Howe and Celeste Bell, who also handled the screenplay to reconstruct the psyche of the voice of X-Ray Spex. Her daughter’s direction allows for unprecedented access to private archives, exposing how industry pressure and racism in 1970s London fractured the artist’s mental health. The narrative explores the depersonalization of a woman who challenged aesthetic standards, transforming media success into an emotional burden difficult to sustain.

Dropkick Murphys: This Machine Rising (2024) | Directed by Dave Stauble & Shawn Howard

The acoustic tour recorded in this documentary connects Celtic punk with the unpublished archive of Nora Guthrie, Woody’s sister, who curated the lyrics that bring the project to life. The narrative exposes the generational transmission of the labor struggle and how the message of the American working class adapts to new sonic languages without losing its political weight. By stripping away the electric volume, the band highlights the importance of the word as a tool for organization. (Watch here)

Bad Brains: A Band in DC (2012) | Directed by Ben Logan & Mandy Stein

Four Black musicians transformed the speed of Washington D.C. through a technical precision that humiliated the standards of conventional punk. The narrative exposes the constant friction between their Rastafarian devotion and the aggressiveness of hardcore, compounded by the harassment of segregated clubs that attempted to stifle their rise. The film documents interpretative excellence as a shock tactic and how spiritual conviction allowed the band to sustain itself in a hostile ecosystem.

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Violentas Mariposas (Violent Butterflies) (2026) | Directed by Adolfo Dávila

In a Mexico consumed by institutional violence, censorship, and repression, Viktor, a graffiti artist seeking answers following the murder of his journalist father, and Eva, a law student and singer in a punk rock band, experience the beginning of a romantic relationship through intense discussions regarding their political stances and justice. However, this bond is paralyzed after suffering a traumatic and destructive event. The film analyzes how grief transforms into revenge when laws only serve to protect power structures.

Rodrigo D: No Futuro (1990) | Directed by Víctor Gaviria

Gaviria utilizes neorealism to capture 1980s Medellín, where punk coexists with the violence of drug trafficking. Rodrigo, a young man who only wants to play the drums, faces a reality where death is the only certainty. The film represents social exclusion and the lack of horizons, turning the noise of rehearsals into a form of resistance against an environment that devours youth before their time.

Out of the Blue (1980) | Directed by Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper directs this tale of family disintegration and the end of childhood. Cebe is a teenager attempting to reconstruct her identity while dealing with her father’s return from prison and her mother’s instability. The film analyzes generational trauma and the use of the punk subculture as a refuge from emotional abandonment. It is a visual exercise on loneliness and the latent violence on the margins of society.

This is England (2006) | Directed by Shane Meadows

Shaun, a twelve-year-old boy in the England of 1983, finds refuge in a gang of skinheads, facing the ideological fracture generated by systemic racism. Meadows analyzes how a subculture based on ska and brotherhood is fractured by Combo’s toxic nationalism. The film explores the search for belonging and how youthful vulnerability is capitalized upon by hate speech in a context of economic crisis and unemployment.

Control (2007) | Directed by Anton Corbijn

Directed by the renowned Anton Corbijn, it is a biographical film that portrays the life of Ian Curtis, lead vocalist of Joy Division, in a stifling industrial England. Corbijn dramatizes the disconnect between artistic success and the emotional collapse of a young man trapped between his responsibilities and his epilepsy. Through a monochromatic aesthetic, the narrative exposes how existential emptiness and a lack of psychological support transform talent into an unbearable burden.

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If the punk identity is only defined in hardcore punk terms, grunge, especially Nirvana does not fit into the punk categorization and marks an evolution from it. Krist Novoselic explains: “that was the thing with Kurt. He wasn’t a doctrinaire punk rock disciple. He had an open mind about things’’ (Hughes and Larson, 2008, pp.33-34). He explains that, in grunge, “he new guard held the sceptical sensibilities of the subculture along with the inherent rebellion of it all…no longer was punk to be despised-it had landed in the mainstream, albeit neutralised by a clever use of semantics’’(Novoselic, 2004, p.21). Novoselic suggests that grunge was intentionally crafted and meaningful. He explains that grunge was a form of rebellion and more inclusive, and open minded than punk.

The same can be observed in The Replacements who had often been categorized in the alternative category despite their punk background in the Minneapolis scene. The Replacements – a band which incorporated more classic rock’n’roll elements and were heavily influenced by Alex Chilton, and The Box Tops, were marginalised by the hardcore punk scene. Despite having the punk-distorted sound on their first two albums which resembled the work of Hüsker Dü. Also, they had an anti-conservative attitude. For example, songs such as Androgynous (1984) (later covered by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts) addressed homosexuality, yet the band have been neglected from the 1980s punk scene.

Bastards Of Young (1985)

The Replacements got signed by Warner Bros owned -Sire Records in 1985 before Hüsker Dü, making them the first punk band to be signed by a major label. Bob Mould from Hüsker Dü, referring to the outsider status of The Replacements, concludes that: “maybe the overlords of the existing hardcore scene saw them as poseurs. But those people didn`t know shit anyways’’(Mehr, 2016,p. 101). Frontman Paul Westerberg believes that: “[They] didn’t see us as a punk band, but we embodied more of what a punk was than they did” (Mehr, 2016,p. 101). Bob Mehr notes that Westerberg was also dubious of the po-faced herd mentality that quickly overtook American hardcore audiences in the early 1980s. “They used to all show up in the same uniform,’’ he recalled: ‘’And it became political and it became serious and it became deathly…it was not the way we wanted to go’’ (Mehr, 2016,p. 101). The Replacements didn’t join the aggressive attacks on Reagan and Westerberg was a cynic about politics, he made it known that: “there’s nothing that bores me more than a hardcore band that says, ‘Reagan sucks,’ he said. ‘that’s about as overused and easy and silly as ‘Let’s make love tonight, baby’. I mean, yeah, Reagan sucks-so?’ (Mehr, 2016, p. 101). However, this does not mean that the band neglected commenting on the issues caused by the Reagan administration, as songs such as
Bastards of Young (1985) reveal :

“Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled
It beats pickin’ cotton and waitin’ to be forgotten….
Clean your baby womb, trash that baby boom
Elvis in the ground, no way he’ll be here tonight
Income tax deduction, what a hell of a function
It beats pickin’ cotton or waitin’ to be forgotten’’ (Westerberg, 1985)

Westerberg comments pessimistically on the baby boom generation and tax deduction, just as the hardcore scene in California had. Such pessimism reflects the 1980s Savings and Loans Crisis. This was a moment when “the deregulation policy implemented between 1980 and 1982, was supposed to bring a solution to losses via the increase in interest rates caps. However, it made the situation even worse’’(Ureche-Rangau and Burietz, 2010). The crisis led to bankruptcy of half the savings and loan banks. David R. Francis further observed that: “the rich did get a tax break in the 1980s in the United States. The working poor did not’’(Francis, 1992). Reaganomics resulted in the largest tax cut in American history in 1981 and it is important to note that youth rebellion in the form of grunge was a reaction not only to the politics and rhetoric of Ronald Reagan but also to such conservative ideologies.

As conservatives constructed a new right wing (with evangelical Christians forming the base), the left wanted to alienate itself from socialists. Reagan supported employers who desired to destroy labour activism. Similarly, he fired “more than 10,000 federal air traffic controllers who were part of a union that was striking for a pay increase. Reagan replaced these workers with military personnel on active-duty orders, a move that quickly destroyed the strike and the union’’ (Saylor Academy, 2012). Furthermore, Reagan slashed tax rates by 50 percent for top American earners by 1986 but neglected to offer lower income citizens a similar cut.

Justifying that high tax rates prevented the progression of talent across different fields, “Reagan argued that the best way to encourage job creation was to reduce the taxes for high-income Americans because these elites had demonstrated a talent for creating wealth’’ (Saylor Academy, 2012). This resulted in the Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981) to increase the bottom tax rate from 11% to 15%, whilst top tax was lowered from 70% to 50%. For the first time, the United States lowered and increased tax at the same time. Alongside the act, to increase a household’s tax deduction, the social security numbers for each dependent child needed to be provided. This led to ‘’the disappearance of 7 million “children’’ on April 15, 1987” (“Reaganomics” and its Critics, n.d.). This indicates desperation and a lack of financial support as well as an increase in financially unstable households.

Due to such an environment, Generation X “would be the first generation to experience a lower standard of living than their parents and had developed an ironic style of consuming popular culture as a consequence of prolonged exposure to media and advertising” (Moore,2010, p.118). Reagan marginalised the lower classes and this resulted in the underground, also the Seattle scene, to adopt an outsider mentality (not fitting or conforming to the dominating ideology). The fact that such an outsider mentality became popularised in the mainstream and gained momentum indicates the large volume of Americans affected by such marginalisation.

Professor John Komlos notes that the troubling characterisation of the generation was due to Reagan’s Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981). He concludes that the act had created seven deadly consequences that are still felt in the contemporary:

“The rise in inequality increased the frustration of the less skilled and less educated because they were experiencing downward social mobility; hence, relative incomes mattered in generating frustration; desperate people are easier to manipulate and will do desperate things including voting for an unqualified presidential candidate who promises to end their misery; this is linked to the phenomena of deaths of despair documented by Case and Deaton (2017)’’ (Reilly, 2019).

The phenomena of deaths of despair relate to drug, alcohol abuse or suicide deaths. Related to the lack of opportunities, inequalities and a bleak social, and economic outlook as Dr Jennifer Dixon indicates (Dixon, 2021). As drug abuse was a national issue before the popularisation of grunge, the fact that it had become a popular aesthetic in the 1990s reveals a problematic society. The media and fashion glamorisation of heroin and diet culture presented self-destruction as fashionable.

In 1986, former First Lady Nancy Reagan addressed Americans on CNN about the drug epidemic with her ‘Just Say No’ campaign. The same video as front man Scott Weiland from Stone Temple Pilots remembers he was made to “watch for an hour in the evenings, Nancy Reagan looked into the camera and told us, ‘Just Say No’” (Weiland, 2011, p.45). Drug abuse is often associated with weaker economic households. This illustrates that the problem was a national concern. Soundgarden’s guitarist Ben Shepherd remembers that:

“[The] generation was completely different, and I don’t understand it. This is going to sound square coming out of my mouth, but right when Hüsker Dü got signed, it seemed the generation of indulgent, bloated rock stars was over and the new kind of rock stars coming out were normal Joe blow kids that knew better than to do coke every ten minutes. But now, once again, the heroin thing - it never goes away. It’s all media crap to think it actually comes and goes -it’s been there the whole time’’ (Blush, 1996).

‘’Can’t Wait To Sell Out’’: Hüsker Dü

In regards to the punk identity, bands such as The Replacements, who took on a less radical display of their protest and focused on an introspective approach, highlight the limitations of the genre. Just like The Replacements, grunge musicians were signed on major labels, and bands such as Pearl Jam were never signed on an independent label at all. They lacked the DIY approach which contradicts the scene’s professed style. Often the 1980s hardcore scene criticized the 1970s punk artists due to their frequent drug use and lack of political involvement. In this sense, the Minneapolis punk scene followed the introspective behaviour of the New York scene. The Replacements were more in favour of the scene, especially, Johnny Thunders. The Minneapolis alternative scene would also spark rivalry between the artists, especially between The Replacements and Hüsker Dü. This limited identity in the punk scene and political expectations is one of the reasons why the Seattle scene became a world-wide phenomenon as the identity and expectations were not as limiting. Grunge is closer to the Minneapolis alternative scene as both did not take on the straightedge mentality of the 1980s hardcore punks.

Journalist and pop culture critic Martin Keller asserts that “their impact on rock music was huge. I don’t think there would’ve been the Seattle scene without them and the Hüskers” (Collins, 2017, p 321). Hüsker Dü had paved the way for what the grunge scene in the 1990s would popularize for the mainstream. Originating from the Minneapolis scene- a musical scene which would culminate in attention from major labels and the discovery and success of Hüsker Dü in 1986.

Karl Mueller from Soul Asylum explains that “that whole grunge thing started supposedly in Seattle- I mean, think back, the Hüskers were grunge before anybody else was” (McMurray, 2011,p.75). Hüsker Dü infused pop melodies with hardcore elements (like Nirvana) and influenced the next generation of musicians including Soundgarden. Ben Shepherd from Soundgarden recalls that the first show he ever saw was Dead Kennedys with Hüsker Dü and “Hüsker Dü were just totally mind blowing. I went back to school the next day and told everyone” (McMurray, 201, p.83). The element of selling out was embraced by Hüsker Dü, as Mike Madden recalls the frontman Bob Mould saying that he “can’t wait to sell out” (Collins, 217, p.278), challenging the anti-corporatism energy in punk despite having history with the hardcore punk label SST. Bob Mould explains that “the only way modern politics keeps forging ahead is by groups threatening the established order” (Hurchalla, 2016,p.302) Therefore, criticising hardcore punk scenes necessity for political protests.

Hüsker Dü embraced the idea of selling out, something that hardcore punk did not accept and wanted to avoid. Selling out for hardcore punk was a sign of falsity, materialism, and capitalism. Hardcore punk did not accept this and marginalised any musicians who were suspected of such. Hüsker Dü and The Replacements, from a hardcore punk perspective, were bands who could not be credited as punk. This singular factor overpowers their music. Hüsker Dü themselves wanted to be alienated from the punk identity, wanting to be known instead as rock’n’roll band. Singer Bob Mould recalls that there was pressure and demand from punk fanzines to conform to a set identity. They would ask:

“Are you into anarchy? What`s your politics? Who did you vote for? Did you register for the draft? Do you have a job? Oh, four out of five right-you passed-you passed the punk test-you’re punk’’. All the questions would be the same for every band, and if you say ‘’no, I don’t think war is a bad idea at all, then fuck, you’re fucked. It’s a party line. It happens that I`m not into anarchy at all, I think it’s a foolish idea’’ (Hurchalla, 2016, p.297).

This clarified that there was pressure to be like other hardcore punk bands and that punk was about conformity to a set of ideals. Krist Novoselic admitted this issue and explained that “if punk was about freedom, why conform to some kind of moulded identity? If I wanted to wear a uniform, I’d join the military’’ (Novoselic, 2004, p.24). Mould states that Hüsker Dü aims to talk to “everybody: we’re not talking Straight Edge; we’re not talking hardcore; we’re talking to everybody” (Hurchalla,2016, p.302). Indicating that Hüsker Dü did not agree with the hardcore punk mentality and paved the way for grunge.

is an author and PhD Researcher in American Protest Music and Sociomusicology. Subscribe to on Substack.

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5 works that use technology not only as a setting, but as a battlefield. From the desert anarchy of Tank Girl to the radical feminist manifesto of Bitch Planet, these five titles are tools for social dissection. They are stories that remind us that resistance is not just an aesthetic stance, but an act of survival in a world that tries to process us as mere data.

Let’s get to the recommendations!

Tokyo Ghost (2015) | Rick Remender & Sean Murphy

Remender and Murphy present a dystopia where technology is not a tool, but a narcotic. The story of Debbie and Led is an emotional journey through a society that prefers digital oblivion over facing the reality of ecological collapse. While Led is submerged in his data feed, Debbie fights to keep a real human connection alive. The work harshly analyzes how corporations use entertainment as a mechanism of social control, making disconnection the most radical act of rebellion possible.

Bitch Planet (2014) | Kelly Sue DeConnick & Valentine De Landro

A fierce feminist dystopia that functions as a battle cry. In a future where “non-compliant” women are sent to a prison planet, this work uses the aesthetics of exploitation cinema to denounce patriarchal control and systemic oppression. It is pure punk: raw, radical, and absolutely necessary for questioning current power structures.

The Private Eye (2013) | Brian K. Vaughan, Marcos Martín & Muntsa Vicente

Set in a 2076 where the internet is a myth of the past following a data catastrophe, Vaughan and Martín propose a fascinating scenario: a society obsessed with anonymity. Here, journalists are the new private eyes and truth is a dangerous commodity. The comic analyzes our current relationship with surveillance and poses an uncomfortable question: would we be safer or freer if everything we ever posted online were erased forever? A stylistic exercise that redefines the detective genre through a post-digital lens.

The Weatherman (2018) | Jody LeHeup & Nathan Fox

This work is an explosion of energy that blends space sci-fi with visceral cyberpunk. Through Nathan Bright—a man living a celebrity life unaware that he carries the guilt of a genocide he cannot remember—the comic dissects cancel culture and media lynching. In a future saturated with information and stimuli, truth is secondary to the spectacle of punishment. It is a frenetic analysis of identity, redemption, and how power structures manufacture villains to hide their own cracks.

Tank Girl (1988) | Jamie Hewlett & Alan Martin

Born in the pages of Deadline in the late ‘80s, this work is the epitome of punk aesthetics applied to comics. Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin created a post-apocalyptic world where order does not exist and survival depends on wit and a lack of scruples. Through a fragmented visual style loaded with pop references, the story follows a protagonist who doesn’t seek to save the world, but to live in it under her own rules. It is a reminder that true resistance begins by refusing to fit into any prefabricated mold.

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(Artículo en español aquí)

To an outside observer, especially one raised in British phlegm or New York’s cool indifference, the romance between Argentina and the Ramones makes no logical sense. It’s not just about music; it’s about a cultural transmutation where four guys from Queens, who in their own country struggled to fill mid-sized clubs, ended up becoming the patron saints of the Buenos Aires slums. In that farewell, that devotion reached its boiling point—first in a pitched battle over some Coca-Cola bottle caps that promised heaven and ended up delivering tear gas, and later in one of the most remembered concerts in the history of the country.

By the mid-nineties, the Ramones were exhausted. After twenty-two years of touring, more than 2,200 concerts, and fifteen albums that never reached the mass charts in the United States, the band had decided it was time to hang up the leather jackets. Joey Ramone, a man battling a lymphoma that would end his life a few years later, wanted to reclaim his existence outside the suffocating cycle of tours and recordings. Johnny, the architect of the group’s almost military discipline, preferred to retire before the quality of the show declined, avoiding the fate of bands like the Rolling Stones, whom they saw as caricatures of their own past.

The band’s final stretch, marked by the album ¡Adios Amigos! (1995), was a global farewell tour that found in South America its warmest and, paradoxically, its most lucrative port. While in North America punk had been absorbed by the machinery of grunge and the pop-punk of Green Day, in Argentina the Ramones remained the vanguard of a youth that had nothing to lose. The band chose Argentina for their big goodbye because the local fervor was unmatched. Johnny Ramone went so far as to say that Argentine fans were the closest thing to Beatlemania they had ever experienced. It was a reciprocal relationship.

To understand why thousands of young people were willing to tear apart downtown Buenos Aires for a ticket, one must understand what the Ramones meant to the average teenager in 1996. Argentina was going through the height of Menemismo, an era of savage neoliberalism, privatizations, and an economic opening that created a mirage of prosperity while destroying the productive and social fabric. In this context, rock barrial (neighborhood rock) was born—a genre that replaced artistic sophistication with soccer liturgy and neighborhood belonging.

The Ramones fit perfectly into this narrative. They weren’t virtuosos, they weren’t pretty, and they dressed like any kid on a street corner in Buenos Aires or Córdoba: worn-out jeans, dirty sneakers, and an attitude of brutal honesty. They were geeks who included everyone who felt outside the system. Punk in Argentina wasn’t about safety pins or baggy shorts, but an identity of resistance against marginalization and unemployment, while the supposed progress of a nation that wasn’t reaching the streets was celebrated and toasted with pizza and champagne on television.

The concept of “aguante“—a mixture of unconditional loyalty, physical endurance, and collective militancy—was the fuel for the relationship with the band. Going to see the Ramones at Estadio Obras, nicknamed “the temple of rock,” was an initiation rite where the mosh pit was a form of violent yet sacred communion. The band performed 26 times in the country between 1987 and 1996, building a family of followers who saw them not as rock stars, but as older brothers or father figures who validated their existence.

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In this climate of religious fervor, and in the midst of a brand war, the Argentine branch of Coca-Cola decided to launch a promotion that, in theory, seemed like a brilliant idea to connect with the young audience. The proposal was simple: exchange 10 bottle caps of the soda for two tickets to the farewell show at River Plate Stadium.

The marketing department of one of the world’s largest corporations miscommunicated the strategy and committed the sin of underestimation. They calculated demand based on traditional metrics, thinking there would be a manageable line of a few hundred people and that the ticket stock would last several days. They didn’t understand that in a country where access to an international show was a prohibitive luxury, the possibility of getting a “free” ticket in exchange for recyclable trash would trigger an uncontrollable fever. The “Ramoneros“ didn’t just collect bottle caps; they razed them.

On March 13, 1996, the official exchange point was established at a shop located on the iconic corner of Florida and Lavalle, the heart of downtown Buenos Aires. Since dawn, thousands of young people began to congregate, forming lines that wound through the pedestrian streets. As the sun rose, the crowd grew exponentially, reaching estimated figures of more than 3,000 people in a small and poorly organized space.

At 10:00 AM, the disaster became official. A manager came out to inform them that the tickets were sold out. The announcement was like throwing a match into a powder keg. The youths, many of whom had slept in the street and consumed liters of soda to get their caps, felt swindled by the multinational. The punk fury, held back by the hope of seeing their idols, exploded with devastating violence.

What followed was a two-hour pitched battle that transformed the city center into a war zone. Lacking an initial police presence, a group of protesters began throwing stones and projectiles at the windows of nearby businesses. Looting, attacks on the press, generalized vandalism, and stadium chants underscored the strange amalgam of violence and musical passion.

Finally, the Infantry Guard arrived on the scene with 80 officers to disperse the crowd and make arrests. The toll was 14 detainees and property damage valued at approximately 50,000 dollars at the time. Coca-Cola, in a desperate attempt to contain the PR disaster, agreed to take responsibility for the damages and moved the exchange to a more secure location at 14 Herrera Street, where fans had to run under police custody to obtain their tickets.

Three days after the chaos downtown, River Plate Stadium became the stage for the largest and most emotional farewell in the history of the Ramones. Between 45,000 and 50,000 people filled the Monumental for what was billed as the last concert outside the United States. It was, in the words of the protagonists and witnesses, something close to a religious experience.

The festival lineup was a perfect tribute to the band’s influence. It began with local acts Superuva and 2 Minutos, followed by Attaque 77. Mariano Martinez, Attaque’s guitarist, would later recall how one of the most memorable moments of his life was standing next to Joey at the side of the stage as they enjoyed Iggy Pop’s show, while an incognito Eddie Vedder filmed everything from behind with his handheld camera.

Then came the turn of the Germans, Die Toten Hosen, who already had a close relationship with the Argentine public. Bassist Andi remembered that, due to the local custom of spitting at musicians as a sign of punk approval, the Ramones installed giant industrial fans under the stage that blew the saliva directly back at the audience. Iggy Pop, the godfather of the genre, acted as the luxury opening act, also later acknowledging that the Ramones were in Argentina what the Beatles were in the rest of the world.

When the Ennio Morricone introduction (”The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”) played, the stadium exploded in a unison roar. The band took the stage and, true to their style, chained 34 songs at breakneck speed, with almost no pauses. Joey Ramone, despite his health problems and the physical difficulty of holding the microphone, gave his all that night. The stage design was austere as ever. In a moment of absolute connection with the crowd, Joey exclaimed: “Don’t cry for me Argentina, the party starts now!”.

The closing was a mixture of euphoria and deep sadness. They ended with a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Have You Ever Seen The Rain?, a choice loaded with symbolism for a band that always loved classic sixties rock melodies. Before stepping off the stage, Joey said goodbye with a simple “Thank you Argentina, adiós amigos,” leaving an immeasurable void in thousands of hearts that felt a part of their lives was closing forever.

Although it had initially been announced as the band’s last show, the Ramones fulfilled their subsequent contractual commitments, including a final stint on the Lollapalooza festival and their final performance at The Palace in Los Angeles on August 6, 1996; yet the River Plate concert remained etched as their true spiritual funeral. Johnny Ramone always maintained that Argentina was their best audience in the world. And Dee Dee, although no longer part of the group, was living in Buenos Aires at the time, like a punk ghost walking among his own legend.

The Coca-Cola bottle cap incident remains in the collective memory as a reminder of the gap between corporate calculations and the cultural reality of the street. Brands can try to buy punk, but they cannot predict what happens when the heart of a generation that no longer has faith in institutions is broken. The Ramones didn’t change the world with a complex political message; they did it by offering a three-chord refuge where anyone could be a Ramone.

As Marky Ramone says on his frequent returns to the country, the band’s legacy lives on in neighborhood graffiti, in the style of new bands, and in that strange melancholy that invades the “Ramoneros“ every March. In the end, the Ramones were the most Argentine international band in history—not by birth, but by adoption forged in the fire of a passionate mosh pit and the chaos of soda caps that never reached their destination.

Today, that episode lives on in half-told stories and yellowed clippings. “I was there”; “My brother fought with the police”; “I traded my lunch money for caps”; “I was one of those who ended up arrested, but it was worth it.” But if you lived it, you remember it. The weight of the caps in your pocket, the pressure in your chest when the mass pushed, the certainty that this wasn’t just for a concert. It was participating in a piece of universal punk rock history. Or, like that 9-year-old child watching the news confused and scared, without knowing it, he began to walk differently and observe the world with other eyes.

And that is why it is a memory that marks you. Because in the end, punk wasn’t about rules. And in March of ‘96, for a brief and violent instant, rage took control of Buenos Aires. With caps in hand and the Ramones in the air, the kids took the street.

No gods.

No masters.

No algorithms.

Just punk. Loud, clumsy, sacred punk.

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