Greg Graffin’s memoir, Punk Paradox (Hachette Books, 2022) is a bit of a companion book to Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion that the band wrote collectively with Jim Ruland (Hachette Books, 2020). The memoir zooms in on the life experiences and perspectives of Graffin, the longtime lead vocalist and songwriter for Bad Religion, one of the most significant punk bands in the history of the genre. He talks about growing up in Wisconsin as the son of parents who worked in the university system—his mother was an administrator and his father was an English professor—having to deal with divorce at a young age, moving with his mother and brother from Wisconsin to L.A., becoming punk and establishing Bad Religion with his songwriting partner Brett Gurewitz, going to college, and struggling to balance three aspects of his life: being a songwriter, pursuing an academic career, and being a husband and a father. He talks about going through divorce while simultaneously having to give up his academic career to write for Bad Religion as the primary songwriter in the nineties when the group collectively agreed to sign with a major label. He also talks about his satisfaction of finally being able to earn a PhD in Zoology from Cornell in the early 2000s and meeting, falling in love with, and marrying his second wife. The memoir gives a thorough account of how Graffin experienced the punk movement in the early eighties and how he struggled to connect with and fit into the punk movement of the nineties. Readers who are familiar with Bad Religion and Graffin’s status as a leader within the punk scene will find this memoir to be incredibly insightful. However, it is strongly recommended that readers should read Do What You Want prior to reading the memoir. This review will highlight key moments within the memoir that will hopefully help readers to get a fuller understanding of where Graffin was coming from in regards to some of his viewpoints in terms of the rock/punk music scene in the nineties as well as the experiences that caused him to lead a dual life as a punk rocker and an academic.

What readers will immediately notice about Punk Paradox is that Graffin’s life can easily be tracked by significant life shifts. The first one happened when his parents divorced while he was still a child living in Wisconsin. Although it was an amicable split, it affected him emotionally, precisely because it was an amicable split. There were never any clear-cut reasons why his parents no longer wanted to be married to each other, and this perplexed him. The next major shift in Graffin’s life was moving with his mother and brother to California, where she took an administrative position at UCLA (his father was an English professor at the University of Wisconsin—Parkside, where he was also the department chair). The next significant shift in Graffin’s life occurred when he became involved in the punk scene in the early eighties. He talks at length about the punk scene as being plagued by police brutality and drug use, and remembers a specific police raid that occurred in East Los Angeles on October 24, 1980: “Police showed up to Baces Hall in riot gear. With their shields set, jack boots cracking, they advanced on a crowd of mostly juvenile, taunting, silhouettes, darkened as much by their domestic disharmony as by the failing overhead streetlights in this part of the city. Assembled to raise hell inside, many of the punk rockers found themselves outside, prevented from entering the oversold Black Flag concert.” Graffin was fifteen at the time, and had just started Bad Religion with Gurewitz. He explains how there was no prescribed way to deal with police brutality due to the fact that the crowds were mostly made up of young kids who had no experience resisting law enforcement: “we found no precedents in the punk scenes of London, New York, Detroit, or anywhere else we read about in fanzines or music magazines. Therefore, the disunity of the scattering crowd was to be expected.” Graffin was non-aggressive by nature and did not participate in the rioting that erupted at concerts that were raided by police.

Around the same time Graffin became immersed in the punk scene, he witnessed his mother losing her job after the institution of Proposition 13. Graffin explains why his mother losing her job was especially brutal: “Mom reached her academic apex in the 1970s during an era when women were part of the landscape of the diversity initiatives spun off from the equality and civil rights movements of the 1960s. Universities were eager to recruit and hire women at top administrative positions.” His mother being hired by a university system was significant because it was in the spirit of advancing society. In addition to that, her specific job entailed running a department that “was meant to help disadvantaged students get better grades through training, tutoring, and counseling.” The funding for departments like this came from property taxes, and at that time, the property taxes in California were high, but it ensured that the state had an excellent education system. As Graffin notes, “All those property taxes covered the education system and plenty more was left over. California had a $5 billion surplus in 1977.” However, a Republican lobbyist, Howard Jarvis, pushed for Proposition 13 aggressively, which sought to put a cap on property taxes. As Graffin explains, “Despite property values in general rising by 15 to 25 percent annually at the time—resulting in huge tax windfalls for the state of California to be used for education programs—the Jarvis initiative limited tax payments by homeowners to no more than 1 percent annually. All sounds good for many sectors of the economy and society. But the shortsightedness becomes clearer when you consider education.” He also talks about the psychological impact it had on his mother: “Just looking at Howard Jarvis brought back haunting memories for Mom. ‘He looks just like those professors in Indiana who told me that women don’t belong in their classrooms.’” Jarvis described Proposition 13 as a “tax revolt” and the initiative passed 65-35.

However, the shortsightedness of Proposition 13 became apparent fairly quickly. As Graffin recalls, “after the passage of Proposition 13, huge holes formed in the state’s education budget. The proposition also mandated that the state legislature could not raise taxes for any reason without a two-thirds majority vote. This meant that not only schools, but health care, welfare, public works, and even fire departments were soon to be strapped for cash, basically eroding the foundational substrate of society for most California citizens.” Without proper funding, this meant that Graffin’s mother’s department would have to be shut down. Even the huge increase of tuition couldn’t cover the loss of funds that came from property taxes. According to Graffin, “With its dependency on state funding, the University of California’s budget was gutted in 1978….Mom’s staff had to be fired, and shortly thereafter, her position was terminated. Her career as an academic was over.” However, high property taxes weren’t the only reason why Proposition 13 was pushed so hard. Graffin elaborates on the true political aims of the Proposition:

In some ways, in hindsight, the termination of a department headed by a woman in 1979 was par for the course. She was clearly in the crosshairs of an all-too-eager conservative agenda whose misogynist and racist themes have recurred over and over again since the 1960s from the right-wing minority. Taxes are bad, women and minorities shouldn’t be in positions of power (they only got there because they have been unfairly favored), and kids don’t need expensive programs or community-based support or small classrooms for their education and social development. In short, the conservative agenda had been whispering in Mom’s ears all along: Ladies, you’re on your own! So if you want to get divorced, be the head of a household, you better be able to wear the pants because we ain’t going to help you. Don’t come asking your government for handouts to help you with your selfish agenda.

After that, Graffin watched his mother spend the next year writing her dissertation and attaining her PhD while relying on the assistance of a headhunter to help her find work, and she eventually settled into the private sector working as a corporate human resources director. Prior to that, Graffin talks at length about the relationship she had with a Black jazz musician named Chuck who she eventually had to break up with after a late-night argument resulted in him physically abusing her. What can be clearly seen is that early in Graffin’s life, violence—political, social, and personal—was an ever-present force.

Another shift in Graffin’s life is the most significant one because it is characterized by the formation of Bad Religion—a punk band that Graffin has been part of for well over forty years. Bad Religion was not seen as a landmark L.A. punk band in the early eighties for multiple reasons. They were based in the L.A. suburbs, they were younger than most of the other punk bands at the time, and they wrote songs that emphasized thoughtful lyrics instead of songs that appealed to those who were just seeking an adrenaline rush. As Graffin points out, “There is another kind of belligerence. The belligerence of the mind.” But more than anything else, their location is what hindered them the most. Graffin talks about Flipside fanzine writers Al and Michelle coming out to Canoga Park to interview the band and being disappointed by Michelle’s reaction to their neighborhood when she proclaimed, “This is so far away! What do you guys do around here?” Graffin gives a thorough explanation of why her response had no basis in logic:

Her question implied that the kids in their suburban wasteland, Fullerton, had more exciting prospects than we did here in Canoga Park. Anyone who has visited the Southland in California knows that the so-called communities, each a different pleasant-sounding name, are actually just street-bordered squares in a patchwork of unending quarter-acre lots with ranch houses, garages, and maybe some grass and a pool in the small backyards. Seemingly endless rows of houses stretch in every direction, creating unbroken stretches of neighborhoods that blend into one another imperceptibly. Cross a particular street and bam! You’re in a different zip code. But the suburban landscape remains the same for hundreds and hundreds of square miles. Southern California wrote the book on ‘urban sprawl.’ To suggest that one community was somehow ‘out in the boonies’ was absurd. Even as a teenager I saw through such a premise. The only place to be, as far as I was concerned, was in Hollywood or the neighborhoods near it, because that was where the concert venues, theaters, and clubs were that could make your band famous. The notion that suburban clusters of punk rockers had their own unique qualities that ranked as a ‘scene’ was ridiculous. All of the SoCal neighborhoods had more shared qualities than differences. Nonetheless, our San Fernando Valley community was stigmatized as being nowheresville.

It was this kind of uninformed, dismissive attitude toward Bad Religion that made it difficult for the punk group to carve out a significant space for itself within the punk scene in the early eighties. Graffin also points out that the band didn’t have a manager, which also contributed to their troubles when it came to establishing themselves. He talks about a band called Mad Society that was fronted by an eleven-year-old Vietnamese kid named Steven, and how Mad Society received tons of attention primarily due to the fact that they had a manager:

…in order to have a chance to be written about by important music critics at the time, you had to play at the Starwood, Whisky a Go Go, Palladium, or any number of multipurpose auditoriums within a stone’s throw of these Hollywood establishments. These were the places frequented by writers of the LA Times and the LA Weekly. Literate punk rockers everywhere recognized the quality of the reviews in those publications, and whether we were willing to admit it or not, we jealously watched as other bands were mentioned or reviewed in them and wished it had been us. One of these bands, Mad Society, from Hollywood, was fronted by an eleven-year-old with a mohawk named Steven. No one in the band was older than fifteen, save for Cathy, one of the musicians, who seemed like the band babysitter. They wrote songs about being ‘hit by napalm’ in Vietnam, which was believable because they were kids of immigrant parents….Despite not having particularly well-crafted songs, nor having much of a serious fan base, they had something we did not: a manager. Her name was Daphne, and she was older, maybe in her late twenties, and had been around the LA punk scene for a few years. She made sure that Mad Society played the important venues around Hollywood. She got them high-profile gigs that were covered by established music journalists. Her connections to these writers and other musicians helped her create an illusion, through cheerleading, that Mad Society was notable and deserved to be taken seriously. In reality, they were notable for really one thing only, being extreme; extremely young, extremely obnoxious onstage, and extremely stylized. His [Steven’s] look and punk attitude made headlines in a feature article for the Calendar section of the LA Times in 1981.

And yet, even with these disadvantages (location, lack of a manger) Graffin had the desire to achieve more with his lyrical pursuits: “Anyone can write a popular or catchy song. But that’s the beginning, not the end, of a legacy. To have a significant impact, I felt that an artist must embody a holistic, thoughtful profundity in their work that encapsulates their life journey so that they might bring their fans along with them in a communal experience.” This lyrical journey began with the 1982 release of How Can Hell Be Any Worse? which has since become one of the most important punk records in the genre.

Graffin also talks about how the band struggled when it came to touring, particularly in the late eighties and early nineties. Aside from the fact that the band took a DIY approach to everything they did (putting out albums, organizing tours, etc.), punk bands had developed a negative reputation for being unconcerned with the quality of their sound because many of the punk musicians were unsophisticated and uneducated when it came to their songs and their instruments. This caused promoters to not take the sound quality seriously for punk bands across the board, even when there were some punk bands who did care about how they sounded, like Bad Religion, whose strength lied in lyrics crafted by Graffin and Gurewitz and relied heavily on Graffin being able to vocally stimulate the audience. As he recounts, “At one of our shows in St. Louis, for instance, the bar ended at the stage. I could walk five feet and order a beer while performing! There was, however, no PA on site. When we asked how I could possibly be heard if there was no PA, the club owner claimed, ‘Look, all the bands do just fine here by using the house bass cabinet and turning around the stage monitors. We just had Gang Green in here last week, and they didn’t complain. What? Are you guys special or something?’ Punk audiences deserved just as good production quality as any form of music, but too often there was this attitude that ‘it’s JUST punk’; they don’t need any decent equipment.” Graffin also talks about the vast difference between touring in the United States versus touring in Europe. When it came to touring in the United States, the experience was rough and anxiety-inducing. Sound checks became an issue for the band because Graffin always had to make sure that his voice could be heard. This proved to be a problem because club managers were unconcerned about sound quality. As Graffin explains, “Sometimes, the club’s stage manager would greet us with a question: ‘You mean you guys don’t travel with your own PA?’ Having no manager, and no one to ‘advance’ the show (call ahead and go over technical details), we usually just used whatever the venue provided. Only rarely, at certain established music venues, did we arrive at a venue that had a ‘house sound tech’ who was on staff and willing to help us out.” He talks about how being an independent DIY band made it extremely difficult to navigate rock club politics which assumed that a band needed to pay for things that the club should’ve been providing, like a good sound system or lighting. As Graffin elaborates, “I often felt as if I was putting them out, disrupting their evening, or threatening their authority because I had the temerity to ask them if we could use the lighting system during our shows. It was not at all uncommon for them to ask us to pay them a fee if we wanted someone to work the lighting system. Since we couldn’t pay it, we played in the dark, with only a few overhead randomly colored lights.” He also points out that venues that had center spotlights refused to turn them on unless the band paid them a fee. However, the worst aspect to touring involved something called pay-to-play, which was prevalent throughout the United States in late eighties and nineties:

This kind of nickel-and-dime, grumpy mentality is a kind of uniquely American disease. It’s basically saying, ‘You’re nobody if you can’t pay for it.’ Or more analytically, ‘In order to be perceived as somebody important, you have to pay for it.’ This sickness devolved into another trend that I heard about in the late 1980s and all through the 1990s, although Bad Religion never participated in it: pay-to-play. Numerous acts were well funded by major record labels and used some of those deep pockets to pay club promoters or venue owners hefty fees in order to use their stages and productions for concerts. To them it was just dollars and cents—the staff needed to be paid. Never mind that the venues made money hand over fist from their alcohol sales alone, and even a modestly popular band could sell enough tickets to cover most of the evening’s operating costs. Pay-to-play put the venue in front of the band in order of importance. To me, this was a disrespectful treatment of artists and it shortchanged the patrons as well.

Graffin contrasts this with his experience of touring in Europe: “In Europe, a venue wouldn’t be considered valid if it didn’t have a good sound system. The audience was paying to hear a band, and therefore it simply would be unthinkable to call something a concert venue or club if it didn’t sound good inside.” Sound checks did not cause anxiety. The clubs had showers backstage and spaces allotted for eating, as well as English translators. As Graffin points out

In other words, the band was no more important in Europe than we were back home, but the venues made us feel as though we were. In reality, it reflected the attitude of the European mindset—that the guild of musical performers should always be placed above the venue in a hierarchy of importance. And that suited me just fine. In Europe, it didn’t matter if you were playing at a no-name club or at a legendary concert hall, you could expect that you would be treated the same as any musician. So long as you were contracted to play on a given night, you could expect good sound, good lights, some sort of catering backstage, and a decent place to clean up after the show. And we thrived in that environment because our intentions matched those of the venue. We both wanted the same thing. In Bad Religion, the vocals needed to be heard, and I felt that the venue cared about that and was willing to help me and the band achieve that.

Graffin also talks about an important shift in Bad Religion’s history: Suffer. It was the first of a trio of albums that redefined punk in the late eighties and was a massive influence on the nineties punk movement. Graffin explains what set Suffer apart from other punk records released at that time: “The lyrical concepts on the album were a true reflection of Brett’s and my take on a hodgepodge of philosophical topics from evolutionary biology, Marxist ideology, and capitalism to religious fanaticism.” These elements became the foundation for Bad Religion’s identity as a band centered on the pursuit of higher thought that initially started in the early eighties, but crumbled after Gurewitz left the band. However, he rejoined with a renewed sense of purpose for Bad Religion paired with a strong desire to develop his independent punk label Epitaph, and this gave Graffin a renewed sense of hope and motivation for Bad Religion as well. His friend Jerry created the album art for Suffer that—along with Gurewitz’s Crossbuster symbol—became a signature image for the band: “He rendered a sketch of a kid, no more than twelve years old, stamping his feet in protest and shoving his fists down to his sides as if there were a fierce wind trying to blow him over….A few days later, Jerry showed me the next rendering of the sketch. He had added a setting that resembled any of the thousands of nameless neighborhoods in the flat, inland basins of Southern California, just like ours in Canoga Park.” However, Jerry took the image to the next level when he “added a burning flame billowing from the kid’s head. It represented the suffering that links the notorious Buddhist monk self-immolation image (in protest to the Catholic-led repression of South Vietnamese Buddhists in 1963) with the current trend of skateboarding and punk rock protest against the complacency of life in the suburbs.” The image not only emphasized the band as being opposed to societal norms, which is a common theme in punk, but also being devoted to the pursuit of enlightenment, which was less common in punk. As Graffin noted, it let people know that “Bad Religion was more than an archetype of an outdated punk scene; we were continuing to pursue an enlightenment agenda as an alternative to traditional religious thinking.” The boy on the album cover came to be known as the “suffer-boy”—a defining symbol within the punk scene.

There is another shift in Graffin’s life that was slow going, but became pronounced in the late eighties and early nineties: his academic career. He talks about how being a punk rocker helped him deal with the frustrations that materialize when one wants to be taken seriously in academia:

Being punk trained me not to get disheartened by the lack of enthusiasm surrounding my work. There was, and still is, a quasi-mythological conviction in the paleontological community that vertebrate life must have originated in the ocean since all other animal life-forms originated there. This narrative colors all discoveries and is used as a starting point in the unraveling of any aquatic vertebrate fossil found. Challenging this notion was not popular and a sure path to ostracism within the field of paleontology. Even though there was a precedent—one of the most celebrated paleontologists of the twentieth century, A.S. Romer of Harvard, advocated a freshwater origin based on kidney physiology—my work became negatively scrutinized after it was published.

This bothered me little. In fact, lack of recognition can be a great motivator if you believe in the value of your work. I knew that the science was sound, and since all my advisers signed off on my thesis, my confidence in the conclusion was reinforced and remains strong to this day. The lack of recognition from other scientific peers seemed in concert with the lack of credit given to Bad Religion at that time.

The reasons why Bad Religion did not get recognition for their musical accomplishments in the early nineties was due to two factors: (1) they never got the recognition they should’ve received in the early eighties with the release of How Could Hell Be Any Worse? so they still weren’t regarded as a landmark punk band and (2) although Graffin doesn’t mention it in his memoir, the media’s emphasis of the artificially-created grunge genre overshadowed the punk band’s musical accomplishments. Suffer, No Control, and Against the Grain were all released between 1988 and 1990 under the radar (just before the “grunge” explosion) only to be noticed by young punk fans who were craving high-quality punk music to listen to. Bad Religion was the band they turned to in order to satisfy that craving. Graffin primarily talks about the success the punk band had in Europe at that time:

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. In fact, it is not rebellious in Europe to accept many of the tenets of humanistic enlightenment such as atheism, contraception, scientific naturalism, and egalitarianism. These liberal tendencies have become lifestyle norms for most of western Europe’s population since World War II. The fall of fascism, and, before that, the dissolution of monarchies and empires based on primogeniture—all of which cost Europe’s citizens great strife and spilled blood for generations—resulted in a more ‘open’ society where polite tolerance became normal.

Graffin is correct to point to history as a major reason why Bad Religion’s style of punk music resonated with a European crowd, where progressivism was the main priority due to centuries of monarchy and nationalism that fueled Nazism. The band experienced lots of success in Germany in particular, which Graffin talks about at length. The general attitude when it came to punk “to those in western Europe, was a freethinkers’ musical celebration, a place to clash with the stodgy norms of fashion while also feeling free to have a philosophy of one’s own. It was a tacit expectation that a punk should live his or her life in a way that was thoughtful, and with respect to bettering society for everyone, not just a privileged few.”

There is another shift that occurs in the memoir less intentionally by Graffin that is worth highlighting and it has to do with how disconnected he was to the punk movement in the nineties. When talking about the rock music scene in the nineties, Graffin explains how “An entire generation of music fans had missed out on Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, Fear, Misfits, and the like in the 1980s. None of these politically charged bands were making records anymore in 1993. Bad Religion had been there all along, releasing album after album.” This is a true statement. Graffin also talks about how, as a frontman, he had a hard time fitting in with the other frontmen who were still in the limelight in the early nineties: “Ian MacKaye had his five dollar ticket; Johnny Rotten had his diatribes against censorship, while his band PIL, was making pop music that contained nothing to censor; and Henry Rollins, like Glenn Danzig, both with new bands, had their overtly, aggressive, double-down-as-a-punk badass image with whom no one could fuck. All of these were newsworthy tidbits seized upon by the watchers of MTV. It was as if punk rock was finally getting recognized by major media as a genre with something important to say, but the spokespeople they chose to highlight only represented the most superficial qualities from the early punk scene.” Graffin’s assessment is not incorrect; punk was being recognized to some degree by the media, but it was still being represented in a very superficial, one-dimensional way: “The heightened publicity, more often than not, dealt with some inane accoutrement like ticket sale prices or costs involved in stage productions, or it was about aggression, that old, recurring stereotype, stemming from some loosely defined social ill.”  However, Graffin contradicts himself a bit when he makes the claim that “All the richness of the punk experience, stemming from the songbook of the early 1980s, seemed irrelevant to this new MTV generation.” Aside from blaming the MTV generation for not being interested in true punk values, Graffin is forgetting one of the most significant reasons Bad Religion formed in the first place: to deliver punk rock music with substance. The “richness of the punk experience” was lacking severely in the early eighties, as he commented on frequently in the beginning of his memoir, because it was dominated by drugs and violence. Right after that, he makes this claim:

Self-proclaimed ‘artists’ would go on record saying, ‘Rather than get too popular, we broke up the band.’ So, poof! No more Operation Ivy. Why? They would have been too good? Too widely appreciated? Was this some sort of radical new musical protest? ‘We broke up because it was clear that we were going to be too popular.’ No one with half a brain should ever accept such a low bar for protest. You cannot know how popular you ‘would have’ become if you didn’t stick around to experience it! The fans, nonetheless, seemed to accept it, and the music writers applauded and validated it as a legitimate strategy to maintain punk credibility.

Some serious clarification is needed here. It’s true that there was a prevalent attitude within both punk and indie circles that getting popular was a bad thing because it meant that the band could find itself quickly becoming mainstream, which was sacrilege to these particular scenes. In most cases, it was a convenient excuse for bands not to develop and to maintain a certain kind of credibility based on pretentious attitudes about being superior to bands who wished to be successful and well-known. However, Graffin uses a bad example. Operation Ivy was from Berkeley and had a huge cult following. It was fronted by Jesse Michaels, who went on to form Common Rider, and Tim Armstrong (then known as Lint) who went on to form Rancid, one of the most significant punk bands in the nineties that released albums through Epitaph (more on this later). The “self-proclaimed ‘artists’” of Operation Ivy released an album called Energy, which is a foundational album not just for punk rock, but for ska as well and is heavily respected by most punk and ska fans to this day. Graffin’s use of this bad example shows how little he knew about what was going on in the punk scene at the time. As he might also not be aware, Tim Armstrong suffered from alcohol and drug addiction and was homeless before Matt Freeman (the bass player for Operation Ivy) suggested that they form a new band. Armstrong was not some flash-in-the-pan artist and neither was Jesse Michaels, in all honesty. In their case, it was a good idea to break up; they made a sound decision that was best for the band and their audience.

Graffin also talks at length about how his particular brand of punk did not make him marketable and this was true to a certain extent. As he explains, “…if you define punk as living on the fringe of the mainstream, then as punk became mainstream, I still fit the definition. My atypical lifestyle suited me just fine because it satisfied my belief that punk was never supposed to be hemmed in by some litmus test for inclusion, but rather it was hallmarked by the idea that one cannot judge by appearances alone.” This is true. Punk was never about fitting in. However, he also makes this claim: “I was pretty sure that that dictum made me too cryptic for easy marketing, too elusive for music writers to use as a subject for a fluff piece, and too difficult for many punk fans to embrace as a messiah.” Here, Graffin’s perspective is a bit pretentious because what he’s essentially saying is that they were too stupid to know how to market me. It’s no surprise that the section after that is called Withdrawal and begins like this: “My desire to withdraw from punk’s growing publicity began to take hold around this time. I craved the solitude of nature, hiking trails, studying outcrops and ecosystems, taking notes and photographs without anyone around, just flooding my senses with the stimuli of the natural surroundings. Far from the bustle and dysfunction of the metropolis is where I increasingly found myself wanting to be.” For Graffin, escapism became the primary coping mechanism for being misunderstood by a punk scene that he had already consciously been defining himself against with his intellectually challenging lyrics. He contradicts himself again:

The punk stories that were coming out of the major press in the 1990s, reinforced on television shows that interviewed former punks were really no different than the stereotypes established in the middle to late 1980s. If you were streetwise, hard-edged, disadvantaged, lived in your car, drug addicted, mean-spirited—all things I was not—then you could be painted as a worthy poster boy for punk. Gone was the notion that musical ability or songwriting prowess might be a more worthy thing to publicize. It’s as if none of the music writers could appreciate the music, so they just wrote about the peripherals, the fashion, the politics, the stereotypes. I wasn’t going to be a public face for the genre, and that was okay by me. It meant two things: (1) I could focus more on the music and let it do all the talking for me; and (2) I could live a lifestyle that suited me, felt natural, and not constantly obsess over my public persona.

When Graffin says “Gone was the notion that musical ability or songwriting prowess might be a more worthy thing to publicize. It’s as if none of the music writers could appreciate the music, so they just wrote about the peripherals, the fashion, the politics, the stereotypes,” he forgets that the punk scene was always like that. That’s why Bad Religion formed, to rise above the superficialities of the punk movement. And when he says “I wasn’t going to be a public face for the genre, and that was okay by me. It meant two things: (1) I could focus more on the music and let it do all the talking for me; and (2) I could live a lifestyle that suited me, felt natural, and not constantly obsess over my public persona” that was already true: he wasn’t a spokesperson for the scene in the early eighties and he wasn’t a spokesperson for the scene when the band was putting out their signature records (Suffer, No Control, Against the Grain). His identity as an understated and smart punk rock vocalist within the punk genre should’ve already been understood by him in the nineties, but apparently it wasn’t.

Graffin also talks about the difficulties he experienced juggling a family along with a music and academic career and his criticisms of academia are absolutely rooted in truth:

I was starting to fear the worst of academia: work your ass off with your head in the books, digging for some lost nugget of overlooked truth to write up in some arcane journal, read only by a handful of similar sociopathic recluses who make up ‘the field,’ only to ascend a measly rung on the ladder of underappreciation in service to the university. You can come up for air occasionally to glad-hand all the senior faculty and administrators at their socially awkward gatherings and weekly committee meetings, ruffling no feathers as you modify your research interests to suit the administrative needs of the university—the tacit signal that you’re willing to ‘play ball’—and if you succeed at it long enough, fail upward high enough, they’ll name a building after you where your portrait may hang on the wall, ignored and dusty for generations until some renovation contractor takes notice and sticks you in the archive forever. All the while, you enjoy the privilege of being coddled financially with a just-sufficient, guaranteed paycheck, fighting for scraps of rewards, and receiving a nice pension, while saddled with society’s most derisive adjectives of modern life: ninny, book smart, liberal, teacher of useless information, ivory tower intellectual.

Unfortunately, Graffin’s candid description of academia still rings true in the contemporary moment. He also does an excellent job comparing it to the music industry:

The achievements in entertainment could be every bit as modest as those in academia. You could spend months, or years, obsessing over content and context for your next album, writing entire songs with melodies and chord progressions, playing it through hundreds of times, only to scrap the entire project to start again from scratch for no other reason than a self-loathing lack of confidence. You can do everything right with a new album: write excellent songs, make compelling and captivating sonic results in the studio, enjoy expert marketing and ‘placement’ of the ‘product,’ and go on successful world tours and still come home to modest sales, professional disappointments, and scrutiny of the marketplace and the critics.

It’s no surprise that Graffin experienced frustration in both worlds—the music world and the academic world—because both worlds are dominated by norms that place achievement over human development. Human development isn’t primarily about achieving. It’s not about selling millions of records or producing research that benefits academic departments. It’s about the act of discovery, about growing and learning and evolving as a human. Graffin was immersed in the pursuit of evolving as a punk rocker and an intellectual and in both cases, he met resistance because those systems are not set up to facilitate human evolution. Graffin also makes another excellent comparison between the music industry. In regards to the music industry, “It’s a spoken truth that in the music industry there are no guarantees. If you dedicate your life to music, the rewards can be astronomical—money, fame, respect—but only if you get lucky. So at least you know that you are gambling, and if you’re good, you can game the system and increase your chances of success by creating good work.” However, when it comes to academia, Graffin hits the bullseye: “…in academia, you experience dishonesty. It is all set up to give the illusion that there ARE guarantees. As long as you perfectly execute all the tasks, jump through the right hoops, you will graduate to some new level of expertise, respect, and modest monetary reward. But after graduate school, matriculation is much more sluggish. You can complete all those aforementioned prerequisites and still stagnate, never reaching the heights that formerly seemed like guarantees.” The reason academia is dishonest has to do with the fact that it should make human evolution its top priority, but it doesn’t. At the end of the day, the music industry is primarily about money, but academia is supposed to be about human development through intellectual studies. Unfortunately, it looks more like this: “If some vindictive colleague or adviser judges your work substandard, you will forever wallow in the basement of your chosen field, always hunting around for some better-paying lecturing gig or research lab.”

Aside from being disconnected from the punk scene in the nineties, Graffin also exposes his resentment toward other well-known musicians in the nineties who he felt were playing up the media’s ideas of how a frontman should look and behave:

The front man images of the new music at the time, the looks that got the most coverage, were either…youthful punk styles or the alternative look—the brooding, pensive, questionably deranged singer, hiding perhaps a serious mental condition, so seething with anger that he sings to you beneath a permanently furrowed brow. This type of front man was typified by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who claimed that year, ‘I’m a much happier person than a lot of people think I am.’ Rolling Stone featured him on the cover and spoke of how ‘the roots of his angst, public and personal, go much deeper.’ It was all there on the page written out before me, the music writer in tandem with the rock icon crystallizing a new narrative, new horizons for a singer’s appeal thanks to ‘Nirvana’s mass punk-wanna-be flock.’ Ian MacKaye of Fugazi also had this appeal, so perpetually displeased and disappointed in society that flashing a smile to the audience was as unlikely as seeing a colored lighting gel onstage at one of their shows. And then there was the style of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who was depicted on the cover of Alternative Press with the old punk words ‘Anger Is an Energy.’ Calm and ‘normal’ looking, but deeply mysterious, Reznor’s music was a psychological puzzle for the audience to figure out from whence came this psychic tempest.

Although Graffin does place blame in its appropriate place (the media), his resentment toward other musicians is glaringly obvious. He seems to forget that Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994 and was obviously struggling on multiples levels (partially due to the media’s obsession with his image). When he includes the quote that Nirvana fans were “punk-wanna-be[s],” he should’ve recognized that that’s an absurd claim. Nirvana fans were primarily mainstream rock music fans who heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio and became immersed in the “grunge” explosion. They were less likely to be listening to punk bands and more likely to be listening to bands like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. Few of them were probably even aware of Cobain’s punk rock roots. It’s interesting that Graffin’s resentments are also pointed toward Trent Reznor, who was more aligned with the industrial and metal genres than he was with punk rock, but could still rightfully embody the expression “Anger Is an Energy” because that concept was also embraced by musicians in those genres. And although Reznor experienced some mainstream success in the nineties, he primarily enjoyed a fanbase similar to Bad Religion’s, which was more underground and cultish. Same with Ian MacKaye. Here is what was really bothering Graffin: “Being ‘unique,’ a poor fit for the mainstream pegboard, wasn’t going to cut it in this world where the journalists, record companies, and media outlets were intent on bringing punk and its offspring out of the closet and illuminating it fully for mass consumption. Now they wanted psychic pain or anger or incessant irritation of society’s dumbness, or even more palatable, light-hearted, youthful pabulum as some kind of commentary on the blandness of consumer culture in the USA.” His real problem is with the media, and it would be safe to say that the musicians he criticized were in the same boat; the only difference is that they were willing to cooperate with the media to some degree. However, Graffin should’ve recognized (if not then, in retrospect) that those musicians’ images were being uplifted because they happened to coincide with the media and record companies’ true aims, which was to create a neoliberal style consumer culture that would purchase whatever they were selling.

However, Graffin didn’t just complain about Cobain, MacKaye, and Reznor. Prior to his criticisms of those musicians, he took a few swings closer to home: “Another [frontman] style was Bryan ‘Dexter’ Holland from the Offspring, and Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day. These guys both had the youth and charm of the teenage kid on your suburban block who skateboards on your driveway. You wanna be pissed at him, but he’s just too darn cute and innocent. So you let him skate and hope he finds greener pastures elsewhere.” Of the two singers, it might make more sense to classify Billie Joe Armstrong that way, but Dexter Holland was anything but “cute and innocent.” He was (and still is) a certified punk rocker through and through. In the music video for “Self-Esteem,” he can be seen wearing long braids as well as Sex Pistols, Germs, and The Vandals t-shirts and he was qualified to wear them, seeing as how the band formed in 1984, released its second and third albums off of Epitaph (a certified punk label), and Holland was also the founder of his own punk label called Nitro, which put out bands like AFI, the Damned, Guttermouth, The Vandals, and T.S.O.L. And as for Green Day, they originated in the same punk scene as Operation Ivy (Billie Joe Armstrong and Tim Armstrong were friends), and put their first two albums out on Lookout Records (a punk label). Both bands had already established their punk sounds well before signing to major labels, and their sounds didn’t change drastically. Graffin’s real issue with these particular frontmen seems to have more to do with the fact that he wasn’t them; his frustrations seem to stem from insecurity rather than any real substantial criticism of the bands and their music.

And yet, Graffin is absolutely right when he says that “Bad Religion’s music was not an exercise in anger or disaffection, as so many writers incorrectly assumed. It was a reflection of a belief system. A system in which truth can only be found in observations, explorations, and verifications.” But more clarification is needed. The first is that Graffin makes it sound as if he was the only punk rocker who experienced this kind of split identity of being an academic and a punk rocker. This is not the case. He shares that struggle with at least two other punk rock frontmen: Milo Auckerman and Dexter Holland. Milo Aukerman is the lead singer for the Descendents. In 1982, right alongside Bad Religion, the group released its debut album Milo Goes to College, but the band formed in 1977, and the drummer, Bill Stevenson, also played with Black Flag in the early eighties and recorded albums with them. The Descendents are classified as a melodic hardcore band, which is an accurate description. The lead singer, Milo Aukerman, left the group for a few years to pursue a career in academia and for most of his time in the band he bounced back and forth between being a punk vocalist and pursuing microbiology. He earned a PhD in biochemistry from UC San Diego and did postdoctoral work in microbiology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to their debut album, the Descendents released Everything Sucks in 1996 through Epitaph and Cool to Be You through Fat Wreck Chords in 2004, which are noteworthy albums in the punk genre. Bryan “Dexter” Holland, of the Offspring, who mostly goes by the name Dexter, picked up that nickname because he was the valedictorian of his high school class and was the captain of the math team. He has a B.S. in biology, an M.S. in molecular biology, and earned his PhD in molecular biology in 2017. When the Offspring became successful, he had to suspend his academic career to focus on songwriting, exactly like Graffin did in the mid-nineties when the band signed to a major label and his songwriting partner Gurewitz quit the band. Because Graffin does not appropriately locate himself within the context of the punk scene in the nineties, these facts are left out of the memoir entirely. If he saw himself as being at odds with Cobain, MacKaye, and Reznor, he was missing a more significant truth: he was actually in solidarity with Aukerman and Holland. The next clarification is that Bad Religion was not struggling because of how they chose to highlight intellectual thought rather than “anger or disaffection” in their lyrics. According to Graffin

The label [Epitaph] had grown steadily since 1991, when it first reached a notable milestone few other independent labels could boast: producing one hundred thousand ‘units,’ which means copies of an album. In that year, Bad Religion released Against the Grain and it shipped a hundred thousand units. The next year, we recorded Generator, which also shipped a hundred thousand units. By the time Recipe for Hate was released in 1993, Epitaph was busy releasing other successful bands that Brett had signed, such as NOFX, the Offspring, Rancid, and Pennywise. In fact, in 1993, the little operation that started out with us four band members stuffing three thousand Bad Religion records into sleeves with custom-made plastic coverings donated by PolyPac (Brett’s dad’s plastic company) now had grown into a serious label that shipped over one million units that year. Brett had captained a home-grown project into a serious indie powerhouse.

This is proof that Bad Religion had its own cult following, which helped to serve as a foundation for Epitaph, who was releasing albums for bands that also had their own cult followings. When it came to cultivating a fanbase, there was no struggle for Bad Religion, or any of the bands listed above. In fact, these bands created their own subculture within the punk scene, combined with the bands Fat Mike of NOFX was supporting on his label Fat Wreck Chords, along with other small independent labels who also fed into this subculture. It’s safe to say that Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords fueled the punk rock scene of the nineties. What Graffin seems to be upset about is the fact that his achievements were being overlooked by the mainstream media because he and his band weren’t “angry” enough, but neither were a lot of other punk bands putting music out at that time. Aesthetically, they were all doing similar things, but lyrically, Bad Religion was the exception, because they were writing from a place of intellectual exploration. However, NOFX was writing from a place of humor, Rancid was writing from a place of poverty and working-class struggle, and the Offspring were writing from a place of dark humor and political and personal frustration. None of these bands were “angry” in the way that the mainstream media was interested in interpreting that emotion. So, Graffin was not a lone wolf. He had a group of likeminded punk rockers all around him who had created their own subculture that served as a counterpoint to the mainstream narrative that assumed punk rock equals ambiguous anger. And he fails to mention this because on a personal level, he had nothing to do with that subculture.

However, Graffin talks about his insecurities around Gurewitz’s devotion to Epitaph: “I trusted that Brett was doing what was best for the band, but I also recognized that other bands that he signed were demanding more of his attention too. The only concern that wouldn’t go away was the notion that other bands on the label seemed to be attracting attention away from Bad Religion.” He was right to feel this type of concern because Epitaph was doing very well for an independent punk label. He goes further: “I knew that Brett had begun expanding his Epitaph Records empire, opened an office in Europe, and hired marketing, distribution, radio, and PR personnel for the label….But I also was skeptical of what might happen if another band that Brett signed became the dominant best seller of the label’s roster.” Graffin doesn’t mention it, but that concern became a reality when the Offspring released Smash off of Epitaph in 1994, the same year Bad Religion signed to Atlantic Records. To this day, Smash is still the highest selling record to be released by an independent label. It reached No. 4 on the US Billboard 200, sold eleven million copies worldwide, and was the first album on Epitaph to reach gold and platinum status. In fact, it has been certified six times platinum by the RIAA. What happened after the immense success of Smash? The Offspring signed with Columbia in 1996. They simply left Epitaph. And how did Graffin handle his insecurities about another band on Epitaph stealing the spotlight?: “I found it an alluring daydream to think that a major media company, such as Warner Brothers or RCA or Sony, might have such deep pockets that they could assign an almost unlimited supply of personnel exclusively to a new record by Bad Religion.” Graffin had similar aspirations as other bands like the Offspring and Green Day did (and bands that weren’t punk making music in the nineties)—to have unlimited funds and the full attention of a major record company. In fact, he talks candidly about his deep affection for Atlantic Records:

The greatest musical influences of my life before punk passed through these [Atlantic’s] hallways. The building blocks of my creative personality all revolved around music that was created and distributed from here. Atlantic bands such as Yes; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Genesis; and King Crimson all were on heavy rotation back in Jeff’s [a childhood friend] basement when we dreamed of being rock stars. I could sing every word on those albums. Furthermore, Mom’s endless playlist of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway made the divorce seem more palatable. All of it came from this label. The distinctive Atlantic Records logo on its bright red label spinning clockwise on the turntable while reassuring, familiar music filled the room was a mysterious, formative, deeply significant figment of my self-image, and there it was, etched into the glass doors of the elevator lobby in front of me.

It’s important for readers to understand Graffin’s thought process when it came to how he perceived success for himself and Bad Religion because it’s not all that different to how other bands felt during that time. However, it also shows how little he cared for the blossoming success of Epitaph—that would become fully-formed in 1994—and how uninterested he was in the punk subculture that had formed around him, which was in large part influenced by Bad Religion’s music and his songwriting partner Brett Gurewitz’s dedication to evolving Epitaph. Graffin talks about a moment during the recording of Stranger than Fiction (the band’s first Atlantic release) that involved Tim Armstrong (of Operation Ivy and Rancid): “Another guest was also ‘on hold’ that afternoon and was watching TV in the little room off the lounge. It was Lint from Operation Ivy. Bobby [Bad Religion’s drummer at the time] said, ‘Lint’s here,’ as he pointed me toward the mohawked singer. Lint, also known as Tim Armstrong, introduced himself to me in a very cordial manner and said out of the blue, ‘You’re my favorite singer.’ ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Thanks a lot.’ I didn’t confess it, but I had not heard him sing a word up to that point.” Armstrong sang a significant portion of the lyrics on the song titled “Television,” which was written by Gurewitz and it’s one of the better songs on the album. Aside from that, Graffin talks about Armstrong as if he was just some singer coming in to do a quick guest spot. He was far from that. Already achieving credible punk rock status from being in Operation Ivy, Rancid’s second album Let’s Go was released in 1994 on Epitaph—the same year as Stranger than Fiction. Let’s Go is not only a definitive Epitaph release, it’s one of the band’s most important albums, released right before their most well-known album …And Out Come the Wolves, which came out in 1995 (on Epitaph). Tim Armstrong was (and still is) a big deal in the punk rock world. And he was acknowledging Graffin’s influence on him by letting him know how much he admired his singing: “You’re my favorite singer.” The fact that Graffin did not highlight the importance of him and Armstrong crossing paths in that moment (1994) from a retrospective perspective is a bit disappointing. It shows that he did not have a clue what was happening in the punk scene and on Epitaph—the label Gurewitz created so they could put out Bad Religion’s music.

Graffin talks about how he had to balance a dying marriage with the high expectations that came along with becoming the principal songwriter for Bad Religion after Gurewitz quit the band. This struggle showed itself on the band’s second Atlantic release, The Gray Race (1996):

I began to write songs about my own struggles but decided to loosely camouflage them as social diatribes. ‘A Walk,’ ‘Parallel,’ and ‘Punk Rock Song’ were all about social ills that could just as easily have described my feelings of insecurity within the family. ‘Drunk Sincerity’ and ‘Them and Us’ depicted my disappointment in human relationships. A song called ‘The Gray Race’ described how the world requires ‘black and white’ decisions, but the human experience is not digital—it thrives in the shaded realm between polar opposites. So much in life, such as being either in or out of a relationship or marriage, is framed as an all-or-nothing affair, when in fact all commitments vacillate from time to time, resembling a bona fide ‘gray area’ of human emotion. The turning point in my new attitude, after I had concluded that my marriage was over (despite my continued weak efforts in marriage counseling), was summarized in ‘Cease,’ reflecting an oddly positive outlook from the recognition that relationships, like life itself, must end eventually.

The Gray Race (produced by Ric Ocasek of the Cars and an early influence of Graffin’s) was one of the better Atlantic albums that the band released, more than likely because of the personal and aesthetic tensions Graffin experienced during this time. However, aside from his psychological explanation of his personal situation, he contradicts himself again. He fails to see how his psychic turmoil mirrored that of the frontmen he criticized earlier, namely Cobain and Reznor. He admits that he used social criticism as a disguise for his personal struggles, much like Cobain and Reznor used the popular, media-approved trend of being dark, frustrated, and angry as a disguise for their personal pain, much like what Graffin described earlier: “the brooding, pensive, questionably deranged singer, hiding perhaps a serious mental condition, so seething with anger that he sings to you beneath a permanently furrowed brow.” The only difference between Graffin and other singers was that he wasn’t brooding. He was coming from a place of intellect and social critique, but his emotional struggles, as he openly admits, were hidden just under the surface too.

And yet, the most problematic aspect of the memoir—Graffin’s unresolved resentment in regards to being overlooked by the media in the nineties—doesn’t come into full focus until he brings in his disdain for what could be considered the most controversial punk band in the entire history of the genre: Blink-182:

One afternoon, in February 1998, I was taking a drive up to a furniture store in Syracuse to purchase a new Stickley bookshelf for my growing library. I turned on the radio to check in with the ‘latest sounds’ on Syracuse’s own modern rock station. I heard what seemed to be a new NOFX song. ‘Wow!’ I thought to myself, ‘Finally NOFX is on commercial radio.’ I thought this was good that the edgier element of punk was being popularized, since most of the punk on the radio was the softer, more emotional kind. Fat Mike’s voice sounded a bit smoother and had matured a bit, but I thought to myself, ‘Maybe that’s just the effect of FM radio on his voice. It sounds great!’….A single-note guitar line was the hook in the intro and between the verses. But the subject matter, something about ‘growing up,’ seemed thematically unusual for them. ‘I guess that’s what Mike had to do to get played on the radio,’ I said to myself, assuming that NOFX had chosen a sappy sentimental subject (breaking up with a girlfriend) in order to reach a wider audience.

It is surprising to this reviewer that Graffin would think that Fat Mike sounded anything like Mark Hoppus (their voices sound nothing alike). And it is also surprising that it would cross Graffin’s mind that NOFX would ever entertain the idea of being on the radio, much less refine their lyrical content to fit in with what was being played in the mainstream at that time. Anyone who is familiar with NOFX knows that they would never do such a thing. However, it is interesting that at first he thought the song sounded “great” when he assumed it was NOFX, a band that he at least recognized as being credible punk rockers. He continues:

I listened to the entire song, giving it the once-over, and found that it had no melody, but like so many NOFX songs, a memorable guitar riff and refrain: ‘I guess this is growing up.’ Then the DJ came on and said, ‘Hey, that was Blink-182 with ‘Dammit.’’ Huh? ‘So that’s how this thing is going now?’ I thought to myself. ‘Knockoffs of NOFX are getting the national spotlight now?’ And that’s just the way it was! I wasn’t upset or disturbed, I found it astonishing. It was telling that the new audience was so much younger than me that they didn’t care about musical origins—they just loved it. And that was a hopeful, rejuvenating sign that our music was still significant.

There are a few problematic things to point out in regards to this statement. The first is the fact that Graffin is convinced that Blink-182 ripped off NOFX’s sound. This is not true. The band formed in Poway, California in 1992 and their first album, Cheshire Cat (1995) was released on an independent punk label called Cargo Music. It was recorded at Westbeach Recorders—Brett Gurewitz’s record studio—where all the Epitaph bands recorded their albums, including Bad Religion. Dude Ranch, the group’s second album (which features “Dammit”) was released by both Cargo Music and MCA, who signed the band because they were doing well in Australia. Cargo Music never took Blink-182 seriously and so it made sense for them to sign with a label that would give them something similar to what Graffin wanted: unlimited funds and full attention. The other problematic aspect of Graffin’s statement is that he claims the song “had no melody.” That’s false. The song is incredibly melodic; in fact, in place of a guitar solo, the song contains a melodic interlude. Blink-182 is easily classified as a melodic punk band, and they consciously wrote songs that fit that genre. In all fairness to Graffin, though, Fat Mike made similar claims in a band autobiography NOFX wrote collectively with Jeff Alulis called NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories (2016). Here is what he had to say about the issue:

I never felt any significant pangs of envy or regret over our decision to remain independent—it’s probably the main reason we’re still standing after all these years. The only thing that hurt was watching the rise of Blink-182….Not because I have any problems with those guys (in fact we consider them bros), but because they were the only mainstream punk band that seemed like they were directly ripping us off. We were always the ‘joking’ band. Rancid, Green Day, and The Offspring all had their own personae. We cornered the market on lowbrow humor. The funny songs. The Mike/Hefe stage banter. I don’t know if it was a conscious plagiarism or just our influence on them, but watching Blink-182 copy our style and get hugely popular with it was the only thing I resented.

There is a lot of truth in Fat Mike’s comments in terms of how he felt personally when he saw Blink-182 achieve massive success from their aesthetic interpretation of humorous melodic punk. However, he makes himself very clear when he says that “they were the only mainstream punk band that seemed like they were directly ripping us off.” In truth, Blink-182 did have their own persona and it happened to be similar to NOFX’s because they were writing from the same place aesthetically. But again, Blink-182 did not rip NOFX off. In the music video for “Dammit,” Tom DeLonge plays a guitar with NOFX, Pennywise, and Strung Out stickers on it. They were clearly citing their influences in the music video and showing who they saw themselves to be aligned with. If they were trying to rip NOFX off, it wouldn’t make much sense to point to them in a music video. When Graffin says that “It was telling that the new audience was so much younger than me that they didn’t care about musical origins—they just loved it,” he doesn’t recognize that he is really talking about the (young) audience’s lack of understanding about how Blink-182 was interacting with the punk subculture of the time because it wasn’t being shown by the mainstream media. At the same time, it was clear that Blink-182 cared about origins because they displayed those unpublicized bands’ stickers all over their guitars. Fat Mike’s honesty is admirable because he openly admits that it was difficult to see a style of music that NOFX helped to refine become incredibly popular. But, in all honesty, there were other bands who were doing the same thing that were even less well-known than NOFX at that time, like Guttermouth and The Vandals. The Vandals had been writing lowbrow-style punk rock music since the early eighties and were about as noncommercial as a punk band could be and Guttermouth released Full Length LP in 1991, which predates NOFX’s White Trash, Two Heebs, and a Bean by a year and is the epitome of lowbrow humor in punk rock. In addition to that, Lagwagon (a staple Fat Wreck Band) put out their debut album Duh in 1992, which sounds dangerously close to NOFX’s sound and style. So, it’s safe to say that Graffin’s perspective about Blink-182 is way out of focus, but it has more to do with the fact that he had no idea what was going on in the punk scene in the nineties to be able to have an accurate perspective and because he failed to see that Blink-182—who achieved mainstream success early on in their musical careers—weren’t that different from him in terms of what they were seeking: wide-ranging success.

Another telling aspect of Graffin’s statement against Blink-182 is the fact that in 1998, Bad Religion was in a much different position than it was in 1994. The group had released two albums off of Atlantic and were about to release their third album, No Substance, in May of that year, which was not one of their better albums. Aesthetically, the band had gone in a different direction than their punk peers who were still making the kind of music that could be definitively classified as melodic punk. But, in criticizing Blink-182, Graffin exposes his own dishonesty about what he was doing creatively at that time. Fat Mike, in NOFX’s autobiography, talks about how the band was briefly courted by a major record label called Hollywood Records (who is owned by Disney) and how they tried to instill doubt within him to make him question how the band was handling its career:

I asked them what they could offer us that Epitaph couldn’t. They said more distribution. I said we were already in every record store I’d ever been to. They said they’d get our videos played on MTV. I said we weren’t making videos anymore. They said they could get us more press. I said we weren’t doing any more press. They didn’t understand why I didn’t want any of the things they were offering—the things that most bands would sell their souls to get. And I left the dinner questioning every decision I had ever made

The next day I couldn’t believe I questioned myself for a minute. The decisions we made got us to where we were, and we were happy where we were. They couldn’t offer us a single thing that would make our band bigger, let alone better. The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth, and I told my lawyer not to tell me about any more major-label offers.

There is a distinct difference in how Fat Mike was viewing success as opposed to Greg Graffin. For Fat Mike, and NOFX as a whole, they already had success. They were being distributed widely, which meant anyone who wanted to buy a NOFX record could walk into a store and buy one. They were satisfied with how Epitaph was handling their music. However, what Fat Mike doesn’t mention is the fact that the band was also, for the most part, satisfied with the subculture they had helped to build. Fat Wreck Chords was also putting out significant bands who were helping to fuel that subculture. NOFX didn’t need mainstream attention or the press because they already had what they needed, a likeminded group of musicians they could interact with and a loyal fanbase. Fat Mike also made the very astute comment that “I was self-aware enough to recognize I was no Billie Joe Armstrong.” NOFX wasn’t trying to chase the success of Green Day because they didn’t need to. They already had success within their subculture. This is significant because it seems that Graffin did not feel the same way. It is disheartening to read the memoir of an iconic punk rock vocalist like Graffin who decides it’s more worth his time to criticize Blink-182 who was much younger than Bad Religion was at that time without having the forethought to reflect and view it from a retrospective perspective. It’s as if he’s still bitter about Blink-182’s success. This seems to stem from a much deeper source, more than likely having to do with Graffin’s unexplored guilt about not being part of Epitaph or the punk rock subculture in the mid- to late-nineties, and instead, choosing to go the major label route and risk betraying his own fanbase and his own punk rock principles by putting out music that was not in touch with the pulse of the punk rock moment. Although he makes it clear on more than one occasion that the entire band wanted to sign to a major label, it seems that Graffin might have wanted it a little bit more than the other band members did. Gurewitz quit early on, and the other members, Jay Bentley, Bobby Shayer, Greg Hetson, and Brian Baker, weren’t big songwriters. They were musicians. Although Greg Hetson and Brian Baker did contribute lyrically to some capacity, they were really in the same boat as Bentley and Schayer. In all honesty, they were just along for the ride, and their main desire was just to be part of the band.

Graffin talks at length about his experience working with Todd Rundgren on the band’s eleventh and final record with Atlantic, The New America. Graffin chose Rundgren because he considered him to be a significant musical influence. He gives an account of what happened after he sent Rundgren the songs he’d been working on for the new album:

Todd called me a few weeks later and said the demos all sounded cool, but we might have to refine some of the lyrics a bit. He mentioned that it sounded like Bad Religion was moving into our ‘rubber soul’ period. I had no idea what he meant by this, so I asked him to elaborate. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Rubber Soul was the album when people began to see the Beatles as serious songwriters. These are serious songs you’ve given me, so they need to be refined a bit and then the songwriting quality will shine through.’ I wasn’t sure that Todd was aware of how many good songs Brett and I had written over the years. But none of that mattered. He didn’t have to know our history in order to produce this album. Punk was evolving. The original genre had dissipated. The styles were all over the place. But the one thing that I could do in the absence of Brett was write good songs, and I felt confident that Todd understood how to help me achieve that goal.

Other band members expressed concern about Rundgren and Graffin cites that it had to do with the fact that Rundgren was drinking a lot during that time. Graffin didn’t see that as a significant problem due to the fact that his bandmates were also drinking, and as long as it didn’t disrupt the professional atmosphere during the recording process, he saw no reason to seek out another producer. In a certain sense, that seems reasonable. However, Graffin should’ve detected the red flag that stood out pretty visibly when Rundgren made the claim that Bad Religion was going through its “rubber soul” phase. What that meant was that he did not consider the group’s trio of albums (Suffer, No Control, Against the Grain) as serious accomplishments—which they are, especially in the punk rock genre. When Graffin makes the claim “He didn’t have to know our history in order to produce this album,” he’s not entirely wrong. But, at the very least, Rundgren should’ve been able to recognize Bad Religion’s significance as a pioneering punk band, which he did not. The truth of the matter is that Graffin wanted to work with Rundgren so badly, and was incredibly desperate to write good songs, that he lowered his standards aesthetically. It’s also important to note that Graffin openly admits that Rundgren was an expensive producer to hire, and the record company was more than willing to pay him whatever was required. In addition to that, the band recorded the album in a barn in Hawaii, which further shows how far Bad Religion had strayed from its roots as a DIY punk band. To make matters worse, someone else had to be hired to mix the album because the record company was not satisfied with Rundgren’s mixing skills: “They played me Todd’s mixes and they weren’t very good. Todd wasn’t used to mixing this kind of fast-paced hyperdriven rock music and it showed. There is a skill to mixing punk music that differs from the techniques of mixing slower, more dynamic rock ‘n’ roll.” Graffin goes on to explain that even though Rundgren produced the New York Dolls’ debut album in 1973, punk music was a different beast in the nineties. In truth, Rundgren was not suited to handle Bad Religion’s music, and Graffin couldn’t seem to wrap his head around this, even though the proof was there.

Although it’s a little troubling that Graffin doesn’t appear regretful that he chose the wrong producer to work with on The New America, it’s even more disturbing that he makes a concerted attempt to defend not only his creative decisions at that time, but the legitimacy of the album itself:

While I might argue that the use of a renowned producer and mixer who refined their crafts on classic albums in the 1970s was a creative move, there are critics who might see it as an example of how far astray from its original DIY ethic punk had become by May 2000 (the month that The New America was released). With bloated budgets from major labels, commercial marketing, and corporate teams of personnel overseeing each punk album, the music was bound to suffer, or so the critics might contend. The critics were disgusted with the commercialization of the genre. The ‘punk police,’ those stalwarts of the ‘scene’ who thought they represented the central core of true believers, held tightly to the tenet that punk loses its power if too many people find it appealing. They were still reeling from the incredible popularity of punk. Just as we did with Into the Unknown back in 1983 when we released an album that pissed off the punk rock fan base, we were poised to do it again in 2000 with The New America. But now we had coconspirators: the multiplatinum-selling bands like Green Day, the Offspring, and Blink-182, all of which were way more popular and commercial than we were.

There is a lot to unpack from this statement. First and foremost, readers need to understand that Graffin views his decision to sign with a major label and work with a producer like Rundgren as a creative decision—his creative decision. Which means that his decision was conscientious and calculated. He wanted major label status for Bad Religion; he wanted renowned producers to help him create Bad Religion albums. Next, he openly admits that these creative decisions show how far the band had ventured away from its punk roots, which he saw as a genre-wide issue. And as a result, he makes the general claim that “the music was bound to suffer, or so the critics might contend.” Then, he proceeds to bring in something he calls the “punk police,” who he views as the main critics of the albums that were released under Atlantic, who were really just upset about the commercialization of punk rock in general. This isn’t entirely wrong. However, he’s specifically using the “punk police” as a way to deflect actual criticism of what Bad Religion was doing in the late nineties: selling out. The “punk police” is a blanket term that, although does apply to a collective of people who have prescribed ideas about what is punk rock and isn’t, and how punk rockers should live and not live, there is also a genuine truth he’s covering up by using the “punk police” as scapegoats: No Substance and The New America weren’t good albums. Then he makes this claim: “Just as we did with Into the Unknown back in 1983 when we released an album that pissed off the punk rock fan base, we were poised to do it again in 2000 with The New America.” Graffin actually has the nerve to compare a 1983 release he and Gurewitz wrote as adolescents who innocently made an album that was aesthetically misaligned with the style of punk music their fans had become familiar with from their debut release with an album the band released in 2000 on a major label using an expensive producer in order to achieve a certain level of creative brilliance that was not in alignment with who the band had evolved into in the late eighties—an iconic melodic punk band. And then he has the nerve to blame the fans for being pissed off about it like they were in 1983. He’s comparing two completely different situations in an attempt to blame critics and fans for not recognizing what he was trying to do creatively with Bad Religion in the late nineties. After that, he makes this claim: “But [as opposed to 1983] now we had coconspirators: the multiplatinum-selling bands like Green Day, the Offspring, and Blink-182, all of which were way more popular and commercial than we were.” Yes, it’s absolutely true that those band were more commercial than Bad Religion was. But, Graffin is fooling himself if he actually believes that he wasn’t trying to be just as successful as those bands were. He absolutely was. That’s why Bad Religion signed with Atlantic and that’s why he worked with producers like Ric Ocasek and Todd Rundgren. Those producers were mainstream rock musicians which suggests that Graffin was looking to create a mainstream rock sound. However, the one big difference between Bad Religion and Green Day, the Offspring, and Blink-182 is that those bands were giving their fans exactly what they wanted. They were delivering on a lyrical and musical level. Bad Religion was not giving their fans what they wanted musically. And Graffin does openly admit this: “…many older punk fans expected us to recenter the genre and recapture its essence like we did with Suffer in 1987.” But he takes it further: “The New America was an ironic commentary on the current punk genre itself.” In reality, The New America was an ironic commentary on Bad Religion in the late nineties. Bad Religion fans universally see The New America as the band’s worst album, but it’s clear that Graffin sees it differently, and rather just be honest about it, he takes the time in his memoir to blame the “punk police,” mainstream punk bands, and fans for not recognizing the “genius” of The New America.

Another problematic aspect of the memoir is how Graffin fails to capture the next major shift of his life in its fullest: Bad Religion’s second wind as a band. However, before this can be fully understood, it’s important to back up a bit. Graffin talks a little bit about an important punk rock music festival that toured extensively across the United States every summer between 1995 and 2019: The Vans Warped Tour. In fact, it was the largest and longest-running traveling music festival in the United States to date. Here is how he describes it:

Nightly barbeques were community affairs. A feeling of comradery and new collegiality was emerging at these gatherings. A new archetypal character was emerging right before our eyes: Southern California’s new breed of ruffian—the extreme sports personality who somehow avoided jail time in the ‘80s only to find that his sport of choice (skating, surfing, BMX bike riding, or motocross) was now a multimillion-dollar industry. The cookouts were always characterized by colorful guys and gals who drank too much, and the constant availability of recreational drugs. It was a nomadic music subculture reminiscent of the 1960s only now updated with elaborate tattoos, faster music, and different narcotics.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this description. Sports like skateboarding and surfing did achieve commercial attention between the mid-nineties and mid-2000s. He’s not wrong to compare punk rock culture during these years to 1960s counterculture. But he goes further:

Few and far between were the sensitive musicians, the closeted intellectuals, the readers and thinkers. These enlightened types, like the drug-addled partyers, can be insufferable too, but their scarcity was definitely noticeable. So, without much interest in the social milieu, and in order to preserve my singing voice, I decided to leave the festival site as often as possible. I began driving myself and staying in motels. Long hours of driving served me well. The meditative hum of the wheels and engine, often in complete radio silence, was a perfect accompaniment to deep thoughts.

It’s a little strange that Graffin would wonder where the “sensitive musicians, closeted intellectuals, the readers and thinkers” were because they certainly weren’t visible in the punk scene he grew up in during the early eighties. It also might seem confusing that Graffin would not want to participate in the punk culture that the Warped Tour helped to unify, but given the fact that Graffin had no interest in that punk scene prior to Warped Tour’s existence, it actually makes perfect sense. Of course he would want to isolate himself from an entire scene of punks he’d spent an entire decade (the nineties) disconnected from. At this point, the punk subculture Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords had helped to create was in full-swing, and Graffin stayed away from it because what he more than likely actually felt was a sense of alienation that he was not able to admit to in his memoir. However, what is problematic is the fact that he fails to recognize how significant Warped Tour was for the punk scene for almost twenty-five years. Early in the memoir, Graffin talks about his social position in the punk scene in L.A. in the early eighties, which was the person who administered the drugs:

My confident attitude and projected Midwestern values (I suppose) meant that they never asked me to take part in their drug use. Whenever they scored, they only garnered enough for themselves. My role, in our group—due to my steady hand and interest in biology—was to administer their drugs. They joked that I was ‘the doctor.’ These drugs scared me because I never wanted to put stuff in my body that altered my awareness. But I felt a sense of honor that they trusted me with a hypodermic needle, and I had no qualms at the time because I just felt like this is normal teenage behavior for street punks in Hollywood. If I could be the doctor, it would forever establish my role as someone who was not subject to peer pressure to consume drugs themselves. It was a way to be part of ‘the gang’ without getting high.

Not only did Graffin serve a specific function within the punk scene, he recognized how drug use was one of the main elements that unified punks. And he saw this as being negative:

I felt like I had a role to play in our crew and that somehow I was less of a delinquent than those who were taking the drugs, because I wasn’t altering my consciousness with chemicals. This was a juvenile illusion, but it kept me sober. Some went on to quickly develop addictions. Some of them lived only a few years longer….My only act of resistance was not getting high myself. If they would only follow my lead, I believed we could have a more meaningful relationship and it could keep them from potentially overdosing. I thought maybe we could develop a brotherhood around common interests—movies, sports, or science (just like my best friends back in Wisconsin). But we were SoCal punk rockers hanging out in Hollywood. Style way overshadowed substance when it came to friendships.

Graffin knew that drug use was a problem and he knew that much of punk rock at that time was centered around drugs and fashion. He resisted those toxic elements of punk and sought out other ways to generate connection: “movies, sports, or science.” This is how Bad Religion came to be; the band was not about drugs or fashion. It was about achieving intellectual enlightenment. And although Gurewitz struggled with drug addiction during this time (and in the nineties), he must have ultimately agreed with Graffin’s criticism of drugs and fashion in the punk scene because he helped to found Bad Religion and became Graffin’s long-time songwriting partner. Graffin and the rest of the members of the band were interested in what he already described as “The belligerence of the mind.” This was how Bad Religion set itself apart from other bands. How does this connect to Warped Tour and the punk subculture he struggled to connect with? Graffin also talks early on in the memoir about how punks struggled because they were the victims of social and political oppression and discrimination and how he was mostly safe from having to endure that struggle:

In my room, I knew that I was one of the fortunate ones. I had a home, a place to escape from the rioting, mean streets of Hollywood—somewhere to collect my thoughts and to process what happened last night. Many punkers were not so lucky. Some of my cohort were kicked out by their parents for not conforming to rigid family standards of decent dress and proper behavior and religious beliefs. More often, they were the kids who suffered the most from the police brutality, or violence from other factions. With nowhere to run, they faced the torment and recovered from their wounds in the urban alleyways and cultivated hedgerows of city parks. All my closest friends were safe and secure, but we hung out with many who were hungry and hurt, always using the nightlife comradery of punk to search for their next meal and a place to stay.

Graffin understood how punks suffered socially and politically; he recognized that he was part of a privileged few who didn’t have to worry about where he was going to sleep each night, how he was going to get food, or who was going to jump him unexpectedly for identifying as punk. However, fast-forward from the early eighties to the early 2000s. Graffin saw the Warped Tour as an obligation. It was a tour his band had to participate in because it was the only music festival that catered to punk rock music and it was popular. Graffin failed to see Warped Tour as a safe space for punk rockers to be punk rockers together (that didn’t exist in the early eighties) without fear of being raided by police, ripped off by scummy club owners, and if they were going to do drugs (and he made it clear that drug use was still happening in the punk scene during that time), it was safer than doing it on the streets. Instead, he chose to point to what he perceived the festival to be lacking (sensitive musicians and intellects), although it seems like in reality he had no idea who was really at the festival because he never truly interacted with any of the punk musicians or punk fans who played or attended it for over two decades (this reviewer attended Warped Tour in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2007 as a college student).

Even more disappointing is how Graffin did not see Warped Tour as being one of the main reasons Bad Religion experienced a resurgence of success in the 2000s. This is primarily because his memoir ends abruptly after 2002—the year The Process Belief came out, the album that did exactly what punk fans wanted Graffin to do with The New America. It recentered and re-energized the genre. Bad Religion left Atlantic, Gurewitz rejoined the band, they hired a new drummer, Brooks Wackerman, who was several years younger than the rest of the band and full of raw, percussive energy, rejoined Epitaph, and put out what most fans consider to be albums that are on par with the albums they put out in the late eighties and early nineties. In the final chapter, Graffin briefly talks about getting his doctorate in the early 2000s, and then it jumps to 2021 when he’s now married a second time and raising a young son. Graffin spent so much time rehashing the nineties in his memoir that it seems like he ran out of space to talk about the twenty-plus years of cult status and international success the band has enjoyed. He doesn’t cite another trio of important releases the band put out (The Process of Belief in 2002, The Empire Strikes First in 2004, and New Maps of Hell in 2007) and extensive touring as primary reasons why Bad Religion finally did achieve the recognition it deserved as a punk band, and how Greg Graffin has been widely seen as an incredibly important punk rock singer for many, many years now. This part of his life is missing in the memoir. It’s disappointing that he would choose to spend so much time complaining about the lack of recognition he and Bad Religion experienced in the nineties and then not spend any time at all discussing how well he and the band have fared since then. But, in the end, this ultimately isn’t surprising given the fact that Graffin stopped trying to connect with the punk scene in the early nineties. As a result, it makes sense that he would fail to see the success he experienced in the 2000s as significant because he isolated himself from the very critics, bands, and fans that helped fuel that success (this reviewer attended multiple Bad Religion concerts between 2002 and 2016 and purchased Bad Religion CDs, shirts, stickers, pins, an other fan paraphernalia).

As critical as this review has been in regards to Punk Paradox, it’s still a book that this reviewer would highly recommend for anyone who is a serious Bad Religion fan as well as anyone who identifies with the punk rock scene. Despite the lack of a retrospective perspective Graffin has about how he viewed himself in relation to the overall music scene in the nineties and his failure to acknowledge the wide-spread success he experienced in the 2000s, he is an important punk rock vocalist and lyricist. Bad Religion is an incredibly vital band to the punk rock genre because of how the group defined itself against the conventional punk rock scene of the early eighties. The band has existed for forty-plus years now and for the most part, has put out excellent punk rock music. It’s important for readers who are knowledgeable about Bad Religion and the punk scene to see through Graffin’s defense of subpar albums and his unspoken desire to be on the same level as other significant musicians/frontmen of the nineties as actually struggling to understand himself aesthetically. It’s no surprise that the best records the band put out include Gurewitz as a songwriting partner and Epitaph as the record label. That’s when Graffin himself was the most aligned with his true nature: writing authentic punk rock songs that encouraged critical thinking and higher understanding of the world in which punk rockers have to constantly question and resist. Bad Religion is this reviewer’s favorite punk band and will continue to be, even after reading Punk Paradox. This reviewer, although shocked and disheartened by Graffin’s lack of retrospective wisdom about the nineties, his unwillingness to connect to the punk subculture that helped fuel his success, and his dismissiveness of the fans he and the band accrued over the last twenty years, is still highly impacted and highly influenced by Graffin’s brilliance as a punk vocalist and songwriter. This reviewer recognizes that in Graffin’s attempt to achieve success in two worlds—the music world and the academic world—he failed to understand what was happening around him in the punk scene in the nineties and is still unable to come to terms with his own shortcomings when it comes to that particular time period. Hopefully, the experience of writing this memoir will help Graffin reach the conclusion that no one is perfect, including him, and that through his lyrical talents, he was fortunate to be able to connect with so many punk rockers over the many decades of Bad Religion’s existence, and that his music will more than likely continue to connect with many more punk rockers in the future.

September 25, 2023