Punk paradox A memoir

Review by Booklist Review

Graffin, lead singer of the influential punk band Bad Religion, begins his life story in a household with two professional academics as parents in the Milwaukee suburbs that he affectionately dubs Graffin U. As his enthusiasm for music takes hold, the homestead is split by divorce and a move to Los Angeles. In the drab San Fernando Valley, Graffin finds creative openness and talented cohorts within in the burgeoning punk scene of the early 1980s. With equally musically inclined friends and a poorly ventilated garage, Bad Religion is formed. Straddling a drive for academic research in evolutionary biology and being the front man for his new and steadily more influential band is the crux of this thoughtful, deeply personal memoir. His descriptions of the natural world in relation to his emotional growth is as compelling as it is astute, and Graffin is passionate in his reminiscences of a time when punk rock was not distorted with the often deserved stereotype of violence and anger. Readers will discover a trove of insights into the music industry and living creatively.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Graffin (Population Wars), singer of the punk group Bad Religion, explores the underside of punk rock's chaotic surface in this scattershot memoir. He recounts a wholesome Wisconsin boyhood followed by an anxious California adolescence spent in the L.A. punk scene of the early 1980s; the band's success as a venerable touring group; and the development of his side gig teaching evolutionary biology, first at UCLA and then Cornell. Graffin's narrative is not the typical punk confessional. He laments the "nihilistic, ugly and artless" culture of brawling and drug abuse, celebrates Bad Religion's maturation into a well-oiled business, and wonders where he fits in with his contemporaries. But Graffin's long-winded ruminations on punk humanism can be stilted: "The humanity in our lyrics found resonance with the embodiment of the enlightenment quest that seems to be in the DNA of all Europeans, but particularly those who call themselves punks," for instance. And his prose comes alive only when describing the very excesses he deplores. ("Nearly every slam pit had devolved into a disjointed jumble of drunk or speeded-out former jocks randomly bumping into or tackling one another.") This account of punk's evolution mutes the sound and fury of the scene. Agent: Matthew Elblonk, DeFiore & Co. (Nov.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Graffin recalls his nearly singular double life as a singer/songwriter and an academic. The son of two university-level educators, he begins with his childhood and emphasizes the disturbing, confusing, and wrenching effects of his parents' divorce on him. The author moves to the early 1980s in Southern California, where he and his teenage friends formed the hardcore punk band, Bad Religion, which grafted Graffin's socially conscious lyrics onto the buzz-saw attack of L.A. punk. Eschewing the violent, drug-filled punk lifestyle, Graffin both persisted with Bad Religion amid changing personnel and an increasingly poppy, harmony-heavy sound and forged ahead with his academic pursuits. By the '90s, Graffin temporarily quit graduate school and went through a painful divorce, when he encountered the nonstop, crushing commitments of commercial success with Bad Religion, which signed to a major label and climbed the charts alongside such power-pop punkers as Green Day and Blink-182. He concludes with his continued role as a singer/lyricist in the long-lasting Bad Religion and his university-level teaching after earning a PhD in zoology. VERDICT The hard-driven Gaffin compellingly and eloquently describes the rewards and pitfalls of a career as successful musician and academic that will fascinate general readers.--Dr. Dave Szatmary

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The songwriter, lead singer, and sole constant member of the iconic punk band Bad Religion delivers a well-crafted memoir and manifesto. "Formidable we were not," writes Graffin. "But something was shared among all punk rockers outside of Hollywood: we were hated." That hatred bonded those late-1970s--era kids in a torn-jeans, leather-jacketed united front against the yuppies, surf Nazis, and police officers who hunted for them. It also provided Graffin with both material and inspiration that informed Bad Religion, which he formed in 1980. The author was no ordinary punker, however: He took time off from the band to go to college and graduate school, though he did delay his doctorate in paleontology by going out on tour. Now a professor of evolution at Cornell as well as a working musician and author of Population Wars and Anarchy Evolution, Graffin takes a decidedly Darwinian view about business. "Never reveal to your competition what your true talent is," he writes, "until that moment when you really need it to prove your superiority and leave the others dumbfounded and defeated, realizing that they had been victims of their own hubris, that you had been toying with them all along." That ethos served him well when he took his young band out on the road, learning along the way that punk rockers created punk rock more than the other way around and that the genre was a wonderful expression of angst and discontentment channeled into something better than drugs or alcohol. Unusually, Graffin expresses solidarity with the hippies who preceded (and were reviled by) the punks, and he even has sympathetic words for the hair metal bands of Sunset Strip, who never got beaten up by the LAPD as much as the punks did. An entertaining, memorable look at "the most intractable paradox of all: punk as a positive force in society." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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