I don’t know how to be cool. Which is fine. I’m cool with it, at this point. I feel like coolness is largely the arena of youth. In my case, I wasn’t cool then, either. Once, when I was 15, I was hanging out with some friends, and I don’t know what prompted it, but one of them told me I was already basically 30. She might have meant it as a dig, but I took it as an observation of basic fact. I took life pretty seriously. Good student, all that. I couldn’t figure out how to dress in interesting ways, which at the time I was disappointed by but also decided to refuse to care about. Jeans and blank t-shirts for me. I’ve been 30 ever since. Well, at least until I was 40. I think I caught up around then. Now I’m 45. Still don’t know how to be cool. But, as I said, I’m okay with that. Mostly.

I’ve been thinking about it because a couple weeks ago I talked with someone who is definitely cool. I talked to her because I wanted to understand how punk scenes in the suburban Midwest are distinct from coastal cities. There are some pretty cool theories. But the conversation went beyond geography.

Raechel Anne Jolie is a writer, scholar, teacher, and a queer femme who found her people at punk house shows as a teen in the early 2000s. Her memoir, Rust Belt Femme, came out in 2020, and was an NPR Favorite Book that year. She’s written academic articles and essays and reporting in magazines like Teen Vogue and The Baffler, about class, queerness, pop culture, radical social movements, and more.

We talked about how the built environment of the Midwest shaped the experience of punk music and house shows. We also talked about the general appeal, and complications, of coming of age in a punk scene in the early 2000s.

Credits

Thanks as always to the Inner States brain trust - Jillian Blackburn, Dom Heyob, and Natalie Ingalls - for crucial editorial guidance.

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producers are Dom Heyob and Karl Templeton. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.