Stay in this Chorus Forever: Against Me! is Reinventing Axl Rose at 20

Claire Fredriksson

Most of the best punk bands get it perfectly right from the start - it’s impossible to imagine Ramones as anything but the fully formed icons on ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, for instance. A generation after the first waves of punk washed across both sides of the Atlantic, and twenty years ago today, a quartet of scrappy young anarcho-punks from Florida put their own name down on that list. Against Me!, a band that’s been led since inception by Laura Jane Grace, released their debut full length Reinventing Axl Rose on March 5, 2002, and have spent the decades since swinging between pissing off small groups and winning the hearts of large ones. While every era of the band has its admirers and some who would call it the best - the loud, raucous queer anthems on Transgender Dysphoria Blues, the shined-up hooks on the ironically-named New Wave,^[1] even the sprawling concept pieces of Searching for a Former Clarity and the early acoustic albums for hipsters who think Grace sold out as soon as she turned an amplifier on - history and the fanbase will remember them for their debut more than anything else.

It’s a perfectly formed record, drawing in pieces from most of the records Grace listened to through her youth - choruses as strong and anthemic as anything Green Day ever wrote, scrappy folk rock chord progressions, biting anarchist politics taking after Crass and a life as a lower-class military brat that kept getting into fights with cops. Even if you've had the most sheltered and secure life possible, the conviction and power on the album means that almost anyone can find something to relate to with it.

Axl Rose is an album that speaks to people. The youthful verve and energy running through it (in the album’s original form, all of the songs were played faster; after listening back they decided to re-record it that afternoon - only ‘Walking is Still Honest’ survived from the first version), choruses and hooks to scream along with to yourself or with hundreds of others in a basement somewhere, but most importantly - what has always been the band’s biggest strength, and the talent Grace will hopefully be most remembered for - lyrics. The collection of lyrics on the album are some of the best ever put on a punk rock album; dense, poetic, and filled with fiery conviction, it’s a feat made even better when you realise Grace was twenty-one years old in 2002.^[2]

At the same time, it’s impossible to imagine some of these lyrics being written by anyone older. The closing lyrics to ‘Scream It Until You’re Coughing Up Blood’ speak to anyone convinced they’ve had it fucked for them before they even got the chance to unfuck it - “This ship has sprung a leak / And I'll be damned if I'm going down with it / Still breathing at any cost”. Another closing line, this time to the album’s title track ‘Reinventing Axl Rose’ - “we all are stronger / than everything they taught us that we should fear” - is the line of someone who believes that her generation can push through, change things from the ground up and rebuild things to a utopia. But, in a common theme throughout Against Me!’s work and Grace’s best ability as a songwriter, the song is a blend of the wide-reaching political and the intimate personal. The song’s wish for mutual support and solidarity, being able to live off nothing but the support of your own community, is coupled with a daydream fantasy of being in a band, every teenager’s dream - and a dream that follows most of them into adulthood. Between the recording and release of the album, Against Me! embarked on their first proper tour, playing twenty-two shows in as many nights across the eastern United States in February 2002. Grace had made it, made something that people wanted to hear - and still do twenty years and seven albums later.

As clever and detailed as the lyrics are, they all seem to boil down into one of two themes: songs about anarchism and songs about gender, with a lot of effort taken to blur the two of them together. No doubt part of it is based around being transfem myself, and trying to find any possible lyrical connection to identity and self-perception,^[3] but there are some lyrics on Axl Rose that so blatantly scream “I want to be a woman” that it seems impossible to imagine anyone reading them as anything else. “There are things I never wanted to be” from ‘Scream It…’, “She’d never let go and you’d stay forever” from ‘Eight Full Hours of Sleep’, the entire a capella opening of ‘Jordan’s First Choice’; all speak to the impossibility of trying to square what you feel you are with what you think you have to be.^[4] Through the vague nature of the writing, though, and the lack of mainstream awareness (or even punk awareness) of gender variance,^[5] most of the audience wasn’t able to pick up on it - even as Grace got more overt with it, singing about “compulsions of dressing up in women’s clothes” on Searching for a Former Clarity and very literally confessing to wishing she was born female on New Wave. But it’s there, an undercurrent through the entire record, and something Grace even admits to being something that could be more open - on ‘I Still Love You Julie’, she fantasises about “the songs I never had the courage to write”.

Fortunately for the world, she did write the songs, and thousands of people across the world have found an icon within these songs. One of them was January Hunt, a now-30-something Against Me! fan who was mentioned in a (somewhat poorly written and deadnamey) Rolling Stone article^[6] as an inspiration for Grace herself to come out. Another one is this author, who was born a week before Axl Rose’s release - encountering worry about my own gender for the first time at sixteen, searching for music to relate to the issue as I had done with bisexuality a few years earlier, happening upon Against Me! by chance, instantly falling in love. Struggling to find where I stood with gender and politics, somewhere in the discography there was a song to relate to. Opinions were formed,^[7] CDs were bought, bootlegs were tracked down, Twitter pages were avidly followed in the hope of announcements (and on one memorable day, a comment was replied to).^[8] When choosing a middle name, there was one that came to mind very easily.^[9]

Everyone has bands that speak to them, most of us have several. There would be few bands, though, that have the power to inspire people like Against Me! do. For teenagers across the globe - Gainesville, Glasgow, Geelong - trying to make sense of feelings they have about themselves, about the world, it’s all too easy to feel like the world is against you. Albums like Axl Rose can be a lifesaver, sung by the people who felt the same as you and are now able to make the totems of support you have with you. Twenty years worth of riotous joy has come from this record; long may it continue to do the same.