The Nail That Sticks Up Gets Hammered Down

Sam McPheeters' latest book Mutations: The Many Strange Faces Of Hardcore Punk (Rare Bird Books), is a memoir, of sorts, of a life informed by music as both a participant and most of all, a rabid fan. It's a beautifully crafted book, imbued with passion (sans nostalgia), humor, and refreshing unvarnished honesty. It is also incredibly biting at times, but thankfully lacks the vitriol McPheeters once trafficked in through his music and fanzine writing.

Among the superb band "profiles," record reviews, essays, memoir fragments, and the must-read endnotes (as Tobi Vail states in her foreword, you would do well by reading them first), one quote jumped out to me and hit home hard: "We begin our lives struggling to grasp the mysteries of adulthood, then spend the rest of our lives struggling to access those raw emotions of childhood." This is what makes the book burn bright: reflections on a youthful existence mapped by music and rebellion (real or preceived), and how one carries that forth into adulthood.

A highly recommended read, whether or not you're a fan of McPheeters' bands (Born Against, Men's Recovery Project, Wrangler Brutes), fanzines (Plain Truth, Dear Jesus), or even hardcore. As with the best memoirs, it's a total page-turner and McPheeters manages the rare feat of pulling off an emotional portrait of the artist as an angry young man growing up in public, filled with epic stories and revelatory self-reflection. He throws the traditional constraints of memoir writing out the window, and never loses sight of his love of music, and its potential to transform, inform, and destroy.

Review by Lee Greenfeld © 2020