Not long after, Jawbreaker would sign a nearly million-dollar record deal with the label Geffen.Īnd they weren't the only ones. 'The smart money stays on an independent, and actually gets richer. This, he said on stage, isn't an empty play to the crowd, but rather good business advice. H.S.'It's actually scientifically proven you'll make more money on an independent label if you're a not-so-great punk band like us,' Jawbreaker singer and guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach once told an audience in 1993. While there are just as many tales of implosion here as triumph, Sellout is ultimately an inspiring read, a monument to a time when punk and its various offshoots still felt like folk music, sparking fierce loyalty and even fiercer debate. But, as he lays out across 11 chapters, each chronicling the major-label debut of a prominent underground band - from Green Day and My Chemical Romance to At the Drive-In and the Donnas - in the Nineties and early 2000s, the question of “to sign or not to sign” once felt like a battle for the soul of American culture. Scruffy punks being wined and dined by big-spending label execs, self-righteous zines exiling bands who even entertained the idea of jumping from an indie to a major, frenzied bidding wars, sudden breakups - the events former Noisey editor Dan Ozzi chronicles in Sellout seem like scenes from some distant, mythical rock past.

Daphne Brooks, ‘Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound’.

It’s a masterful work of criticism that uses Outkast’s music as “a point of departure,” Bradley writes, “for understanding how post-civil rights Southerners excavate spaces of imagination, possibility, and cultural influences as they fold onto each other in a complex present.” - J.B. to the groundbreaking Mississippi novels of Jesmyn Ward and Kiese Laymon to the soundtrack to Django Unchained.

Bradley uses the conceptual framework established by the music of Outkast (“the founding theoreticians of the hip-hop South,” as she writes) as a way of discussing everything from the trap grief of fellow Atlanta rapper T.I. Bradley is a revelatory collection of essays - part literary criticism, part sonic analysis, part personal memoir - that serves as an overdue and thrilling intervention on the NYC/L.A.-centric canon of hip-hop criticism.

This treatise from leading Southern hip-hop scholar Regina N.

Sellout punk book