Especially when you’re young, pop music opens up a world where things really happen.Behind the fragile plastic of your jewelry case or the curved glass of your TV console, the shimmering reality is what life outside the walls of your parents’ house is like. I promise As the young Army brat flew between cities and continents, Laura Jane Grace clung to the image of Axl Rose that came to her through MTV.flash, bang, and squeaky guns and roses sparked her imagination. “I was fascinated by their music because I found it dangerous. I was afraid my parents would see the artwork on the liner notes,” she wrote in her 2016 memoir. . I often didn’t know if it was a girl or a girl, but I liked it.”
That was my third year. By age 21, Grace had changed his tune. “Clearly Axl Rose is an idiot,” she said. She was explaining the title of her band’s debut album. Reinventing Axl Rose, to a newspaper reporter. The record’s cover features a black-and-white stencil of the Guns N’ Roses singer, arms outstretched in ecstasy in front of an enthusiastic audience. band name, against me!, slammed into the back of his head with the dullness of a mid-century propaganda poster, red stars raining down his shoulders. “In a way, I’m not asking for new rock stars, because rock stars are still rock stars. But it’s about what music should be,” said Grace.
The cracks in the adult world yawned at Grace over the years from her grade school admiration to the exhausting frustration of her early twenties. Music Her video brilliance is no longer a gateway to a better dimension. Pop music lost its season like tinsel spilling out of a trash can in late February. Grace’s parents separated when Grace was in middle school and her mother moved her children from Italy to Naples, Florida. Naples is a sleepy, wealthy enclave of states away from Miami, where her grandmother lived. Grace stood on end in her bleached, manicured surroundings. By the age of 18, she had been convicted of two felonies after police brutalized her for standing on the boardwalk. She spits her in his face and he ties her up in the back of her car. By the age of 16, she had dropped out of high school and met her Minneapolis-based anarcho punk collective, Profane Existence. The collective has released Xerox covers with high her contrasts from her bands like State of Fear and Civil Disobedience. These DIY cliques proved that music can flow in deeper streams than MTV’s glitz. It can make politics hotter and more fertile than the admiration of the already wealthy. We were able to connect maladaptive children to each other with electrified wires and move forward through the days of a world that wanted them dead.