Alex Chambers:  This is Inner States, I'm Alex Chambers. And 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. 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.

Alex Chambers:  Been thinking about it, because a couple of weeks ago I talked with someone who is definitely cool. I talked with her, because I wanted to understand how punk scenes in the Midwest are distinct from coastal cities. There's some pretty cool theories, but the conversation went beyond geography. So let me introduce you to Raechel Anne Jolie.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  I saw a full punk show for the first time in at least 15 years. It's so funny, because they all like crust punk kids and like vegan punk kids and anarchist punks. They just dress exactly the same and it's, there's something so deeply comforting about it. It's the tight dirty black jeans. The Spiady T shirt. They smell the same. I mean, [LAUGHS] it's just, it was very comforting.

Alex Chambers:  Raechel came up in punk scenes around Cleveland in the 90s and early 2000s and unlike your host Raechel figured out cool and still has it.

Alex Chambers:  Is it weird for me to do an image search of them? Raechel uses both she and they pronouns by the way. So I image searched Raechel and the images I found are published so it feels okay to talk about them. Here's one from their bio page at the Loft Literary center. Their bun's in a loose bun just back from the top of their head. Their straight cut bangs frame a confident, but also warm half-smile that brings out their dark full lipstick. Their shirt is cut just below the shoulders so you can see a tattoo peeking out the left. It's a rose with heads of wheat knotting around it. In another image their hair is down. It's long and black and they're wearing a black leather jacket over the top. Almost impossible not to look cool in a leather jacket, but Raechel looks like they were born in it. Throughout Raechel's got style I'll never have, but I'm not trying to rank different looks, having spoken with Raechel I feel comfortable saying a big part of their style is about resisting bourgeois norms. Not fitting into mainstream society.

Alex Chambers:  Which yes is pretty much the definition of cool, but let's not forget that bucking the norms comes with it's own challenges. Or maybe even comes from having lived with certain challenges. From facing the fact that you're different from what society would really like you to be. Fitting in is easy, coolness is harder. Raechel Anne Jolie doesn't just wear cool clothes on the Internet. She's also a writer, scholar, teacher and a queer fem 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 of 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.

Alex Chambers:  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. That's all coming up after this..

Alex Chambers:  Let's set the scene for Raechel's entrée into punk. There's a major accident when she's four years old. Her dad was taking out the trash, and a drunk driver hit him. He was debilitated. And from then on, Raechel and her mom were on their own. They lived in various parts of the outskirts of Cleveland, which are also various outskirts of mainstream society. Her first home was in a rural-ish area - the kind of place that does nothing to challenge stereotypes of the working-class Midwest.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  Broken-down cars on front lawns; barns that were falling apart; men in plaid flannel shirts; women in cut-off denim shorts with big hair; lots of beer cans on front stoops.

Alex Chambers:  They lost the house after her dad's accident, got another one in a place where the neighbors mow their lawns.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  Which we didn't get around to doing very often, so we were definitely the black-sheep neighbors.

Alex Chambers:  Then they lost that house, and ended up in an apartment complex in Parma, Ohio.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  Which has a reputation for being... trashy, and poor.

Alex Chambers:  I don't know if you can hear, but they were saying that in scare quotes. They learned a lot of values there that still matter to them - and it wasn't just the values.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  As a queer femme person, I'm okay with claiming some trashiness, I suppose.

Alex Chambers:  Raechel didn't know it yet, but it's also where they were starting to learn style - specifically, working-class femme style, where...

Raechel Anne Jolie:  "Femme-ness" is not always, but often expressed in a slightly more excessive or hyperbolic sense of femininity. I'm waving around super-long acrylic nails right now in front of the camera! So that excessiveness was so familiar, because I grew up around straight-identified women who had big hair, big nails, tattoos, tight clothes, and they were able to do that because they were not going to corporate office jobs where they had to look professional and polite and buttoned-up.

Alex Chambers:  The women she learned femininity from were defying bourgeois decorum. Mostly. There's also her grandmother.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  She would take her evening shower, and then open her closet, and then put on these dramatic outfits, to just go have dinner - sometimes at the dining-room table, but also just on the couch - and she would have these gold lame pants, and sparkly little tank-tops. In through her sixties and seventies, she was just wearing these little outfits.

Alex Chambers:  So these ideas about femininity were seeping into Raechel's consciousness. Before we're teenagers, we're mostly not aware of our feelings about style. Not that we don't have feelings, but they're less on the surface. Then, of course, adolescence hits, and [VROOM] being aware of how we're coming across is pretty much the whole experience. That, and music.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  This feels especially emotional, because really the person I have to give the most credit to - or the origin credit to - actually just passed away. It was my best friend's older sister.

Alex Chambers:  She worked at Arabica Coffee House. She hung out with a college boy who made her mix-tapes, and she drove Raechel and her friend to school. Raechel remembers the day it happened.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  It was like, dark in the morning, in her Oldsmobile, maybe? Everybody had used cars. Sitting in the back seat, there was this just gritty sound, that I had never heard. Thanks to alternative radio stations, I had learned about grunge and alternative, and it made me realize there's something different than pop music that I'm really feeling drawn to - but this was like, "Oh my gosh, this sounds even weirder than that stuff!" and my body is just totally electrified by it.

Alex Chambers:  Sitting there, in the back seat, Raechel realized...

Raechel Anne Jolie:  Something had changed.

Alex Chambers:  They'd had a feeling, and they wanted to have it again. But how to find it? This music was on a mix-tape in her friend's sister's car. Raechel was able to access more music through cars, because she had someone willing to drive.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  My mom was amazing, and would drive us to shows all the time. Even before I discovered punk, emo, and hardcore, she would drive us to see some more mainstream alternative bands.

Alex Chambers:  There's a limit to what you can hear at proper venues. Luckily for Raechel, there had been a recent technological development that would fundamentally change how we relate to each other, as well as our politics, retail stores, music, and podcasts. It also allowed Raechel to create her own algorithm.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  I would go on AOL profiles and type in bands that I knew, and then look at the other bands that people who mentioned that band in their profile talked about, and then I would go on the record website. I would go on Vagrant Records, and Equal Vision Records, and started learning more about punk and hardcore through exploring websites. So the Internet was part of it, but it was very, very early Internet.

Alex Chambers:  But there was still something missing. It's one thing to be a fan at home. It's another to be a part of something. Raechel knew where they wanted to fit in, but they still had to figure out how. That's after the break.

Alex Chambers:  At this point Raechel's listening to punk, and she wants to be living it, breathing it, but--

Raechel Anne Jolie:  At that point, I still didn't know real, actual punks. I knew the music. I graduated from school with 62 kids, and there was one punk-rock girl who would go to the Warped Tour, who was two years older, but she was so mean, and so intimidating, so I couldn't be friends with her. So it was me and my best friend whose older sister first introduced us to that music on the mix-tape,. There were three sisters: my best friend, the oldest sister who just passed away, and then the middle sister, who worked at Starbucks, and in my junior year, right after 9/11, I was learning radical politics on the spot. My family was very liberal, but I was like developing critical thinking skills as the US was beating this patriotic war-machine drum, and starting to say this stuff out loud.

 My friend Amanda was working with this super-radical punk-rock barista, and she said, "You guys sound just like each other. You should talk," and I was shaking in my Converse sneakers, so excited to talk to this cute boy who had way smarter things to say, and was ultimately too old for me. But he was really my pathway. I'll give him a shout-out. He was kind of a jerky 20-year-old guy back then, but he really opened the door, because he was part of actual punk scenes in Lakewood, Ohio, which had tons of house venues - there was a DIY space called Speak In Tongues that he went to all the time. We started talking about the war, and then that led to talking about music, and then we half-dated for a little bit, but really what he gave me was the gift of so many more bands, and took me to some of these venues - another house called Fort Totally Awesome; The Tower was a space that existed right before I left for college. So my last two years of high school, I became part of subculture.

Alex Chambers:  Do you remember your first house show?

Raechel Anne Jolie:  It was probably a super-loud, scary hardcore band in the basement of Fort Totally Awesome. I'm guessing a lot of folks know the band Against Me, who became very popular, and were already becoming bigger, so this old Midwest house in Lakewood, Ohio had never had that many people in the space, and the floor started to cave in, and people had to leave because there were so many people there. So I got to see Against Me play in a living room, which was pretty cool.

Alex Chambers:  Success! If only it were so simple. At first, Raechel wasn't thinking too hard about how white the scene was, or how macho.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  I was a punk before I was a feminist, so I had to learn all that in reverse. There were a lot of girlfriends of the boys who would go to those spaces because of their boyfriends, and I think many of us were also equally obsessed with the music, and wanted to be there. But looking back, sometimes I think that it's it's a bummer that that was often the ticket in.

Alex Chambers:  The spaces were complex. People were playing with gender.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  The punk-rock barista boyfriend who introduced me to all of punk, he worked at The Gap, and he would buy women's jeans, because they were tight, and that was very much the style. Tight, black jeans, or tight dark blue jeans. He did not come around often because he was, again, too old for me, and he came to one school concert, and it was basically the beginning of our break-up, because I was still in high school and he shouldn't have been there. But he showed up, and I went to school with football players, and I just got teased all the time, because my boyfriend wore "girl jeans", but I told them that, "You have no idea how he is so cool in my punk scenes."

Alex Chambers:  But it didn't mean they were feminists, either.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  Just 'cause they dressed in girls' pants doesn't mean they couldn't still be jerks. Just to make that clear.

Alex Chambers:  If being someone's girlfriend was the ticket in, it was also a sign the space wasn't as safe as it should have been.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  I think I'm also realizing how I witnessed very early stages of, what I would not call "call-out culture," but the militant feminist gossip networks of "stay away from that guy." I would give a lot of credit to feminist punks because they were trying to keep people safe.

Alex Chambers:  This was all happening at places like The Tower and Fort Totally Awesome. These were not official venues, they were DIY, house venues, and in case it didn't already matter that this was in the Midwest, although it did, because of all the driving, listening to mix-tapes, sharing music with friends during all that car-time, the Midwest matters in relation to houses, too. Those house venues were not in Cleveland proper. They were in the suburb of Lakewood. There were other ways, too, but Lakewood was not Cleveland proper.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  It was the "gayborhood". It was called the Gayborhood when I was growing up, so there was already a little bit of that alternative culture, because being gay in the nineties was very alternative, not corporate target Pride merch.

Alex Chambers:  Lakewood was residential, and also edgy. Gay bars, witchy stores with crystals and incense.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  Vintage stores. I remember seeing a store with big goth boots. I started to understand, realizing, "Oh, wait. Hot Topic might be for posers."

Alex Chambers:  And, Lakewood was affordable. Houses in Lakewood were affordable, even for people in their late teens and early twenties, and that made the experience of going to punk shows different in cities.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  The scene that I was a part of was largely people in their late teens and early twenties who weren't in college, and it was not a super-collegy scene, so it was a pretty working-class punk scene.

Alex Chambers:  It wasn't just about the houses. There's a lot more space in the Midwest. A lot more space to roll around in, wondering what to do. Space to make something happen, and the motivation.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  On the coasts, there's this semblance that you have so many options of places to go and things to do, whereas in the Midwest, in these smaller cities and smaller towns and communities, we have no choices; we have to build this, and it has to be really awesome. I think that's real. I think I felt that, having lived mostly in Midwest cities, but then also a little bit on the east coast, and just knowing what I know from California, how far away everything is. I do think about the geography, the closeness, the smallness, and the feeling of desperation, because we don't have a lot of cool stuff to do, that allows some of that to flourish.

Alex Chambers:  It's so interesting, because when I think of the stereotypical Midwest teenager experience, and the small-town thing, I think of driving around and hanging out in a Walmart parking lot, or something like that. I hadn't really thought about how it also can create this DIY house scene, which is actually really cool.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  Well, yeah for sure, but it's also both. Those scenes are not so separate. Literally I went to Walmart after a show once. No, it wasn't Walmart, because we were really on our high horses about not going to Walmart, because of the politics of it all. It was K-Mart, which was so much better! We'd buy Dickies pants, because he thought they were really cool, and told me you can get them really cheap at the K-Mart. I remember we went there super-late at night. I also remember that the punks loved Taco Bell, and there's still this Taco Bell in Cleveland that does punk shows in the parking lot sometimes. There's still the same imagery that you have of the Walmarts and the chain fast-food restaurants, like that was also part of it.

Alex Chambers:  I think Taco Bell was the one fast-food place where you could get something vegan.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  Vegan. Exactly. That's what it was.

Alex Chambers:  I'm thinking too, with K-Mart, it was okay because it was already on the decline, so there was this nostalgia thing for it already, I'm sure.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  Totally.

Alex Chambers:  Did the fact that it was a house scene shape the ways that people interacted with the space - in the house, with each other?

Raechel Anne Jolie:  Definitely. I don't want to romanticize it too much, because those spaces were intimidating, especially for me, being a girl at the time, going there when I was 17. They were very intimidating spaces, and so I don't want to romanticize this, but what I gathered from the people who looked more comfortable there is that being able to just sit around, and eat, and talk, it expanded the DIY-ness of it all. We brought our own food and beer - there wasn't money. I really don't remember ever paying for a show; I think the bands would just pass a hat for travel. That made a difference, when you're not getting your hand stamped, or getting charged. Those formalities removed some of that intimacy, inevitably, even at super-small venues, and so to just walk into somebody's house, and go to the kitchen and get some food, there’s real intimacy in that.

Alex Chambers:  But finding your place, whether it's in the K-Mart parking lot or the Taco Bell, or the combination, it's not just about the location. It can be hard to see the comforts of middle-class life in the world around you, or the ease of fitting in as a man or woman without having to think about it, and not want a subculture. It can be hard, but if you're lucky, you do find that culture. You do find a place and people that see you, that accept all the prickly and uncomfortable ways you don't fit in with how the world says you're supposed to be. As much as punk looks and sounds cool, what Raechel knew, I think from the beginning, was that it was a lot deeper than the clothes.

Raechel Anne Jolie:  When you don't fit in to mainstream society, there's so much community to find on the outskirts of it.

Alex Chambers:  That's what punk gave them. Raechel, and the kids she hung out with, and the crust punk kids today, too. So yes, punk is cool, but not just bad-ass cool. Also, for the people who find it, it's just kind of a cool place to be.

Alex Chambers:  And that's our show. We'd love to hear what it made you think about. Send us an email or a voice memo through the Contact tab on our website, wfiu.org/innerstates, or get in touch on Facebook or Instagram.

Alex Chambers:  Alright, we're at the moment where I've been asking you to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast app. Honestly, I don't know how much that really helps, but what's probably more effective, if you like the show, is telling a friend about it. Maybe you could tell them when something important is going on, so they'll remember later - like that time your Golden Retriever ran out the dog door in a panic during a thunderstorm, but instead of just hiding under the trampoline in terror, then bouncing back in, tail happily wagging because he did once again survive, he didn't come back until the next morning - tail wagging, of course, because of who he is. And then the next night, he ran out again, and didn't come back til morning, and it became a pattern.

 So one night you and your good friend sat by the window to watch where we went, and this young woman in ripped jeans was at the end of the sidewalk, luring him out with a treat, and the two of you ran out, but she was already gone with the dog, so you waited, and waited, dozing off until your friend heard a car door open, and she managed to get out there just in time to wedge her foot in the door after your dog jumped out, and she said, "What are you doing? Why do you keep kidnapping my friend's dog?" And the young woman looked a little sad, and apologized, and said--

Raechel Anne Jolie:  You guys have no idea how he is so cool in my punk scenes.

Alex Chambers:  And that sounded like something you'd heard on your favorite podcast, so you told your friend to give it a listen, like that.

Alex Chambers:  Okay, we've got your quick moment of slow radio coming up, but first, the credits. Thanks as always to the Inner States brain trust for crucial editorial guidance. That's Jillian Blackburn, Dom Heyob, and Natalie Ingalls. 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, and we have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

Alex Chambers:  Alright, time for some found sounds.

Alex Chambers:  That was the Toden Arakawa Line in Tokyo, recorded by Carl Pearson. Thanks, Carl. Until next week, I'm Alex Chambers. Thanks for listening.