BOOK: Coloring Outside The Lines
A Punk Rock Memoir
Written by Aimee Cooper
Published by Rowdy's Press
Reviewed by Erick Mertz

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Punk rock is arguably the most written about musical phenomenon of this time or any other by sheer numbers. Presses, both underground and over, churn out countless magazines, catalogs and zines, from the local scene specific to those uniting global networks, and have since the movement's inception. Part of what has enabled the music to fuse itself so seamlessly with protest culture is its ability and seeming need to communicate within itself.

Aimee Cooper's Coloring Outside the Lines is the memoir of a young woman at the Black Flag - Germs zenith of Los Angeles punk. Working at Slash magazine, the author touches on times before the look and overall DIY zeitgeist had been co-opted by an image hungry media. The days described inside were those when black leather and piercings could get a girl arrested. Cooper's stories are interesting: from the rise and fall of a flop house to her getting her "Germs Burn" to the precocious search for an appropriate nickname. While Coloring Outside The Lines isn't informative about any specific band or scene enough to be considered a resource, it goes somewhere few punk writings do: the overtly personal.

© 2002 - Erick Mertz