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The band felt the methodical process was smoothing the rough edges they wanted to maintain.
For the album’s cover, which featured a blaring speaker, the band hired artist Shepard Fairey, who would go on to design Barack Obama’s iconic HOPE campaign poster.
“The record came out and nothing fucking changed. Nothing felt different, the crowds didn’t get bigger, the records didn’t sell any more than Fat Wreck Chords would’ve sold.”
In a way, the band got the creative freedom they’d wished for while making Siren Song. No one at Geffen ever hovered over them in the studio or pushed them into directions that made them uncomfortable.
“We finished the record and delivered it. We never gave them demos,” says McIlrath. “I couldn’t tell if we had creative control or if no one gave a shit.”
But as 2004 came to a close and a new year began, Rise Against’s luck started to turn in their favor. Impressed by how much organic momentum the band was able to garner as touring workhorses, Geffen put more resources into pushing Siren Song’s singles.
Every time someone suggested they finally ditch the van, Rise Against countered that there was no book about Black Flag called Get on the Bus. The book was called Get in the Van, because punk bands toured in vans, not fancy buses.
Meatheads throwing up middle fingers were merely a by-product of Rise Against’s anti-war posturing, though. The band’s real aim was to reach the kid in the back who was attending their first concert, and to ignite their punk rock awakening.
It would be years before she learned the term “gender dysphoria” or heard a person described as a transsexual. All she knew was that she felt different from other kids, and punk rock, with all of its spikes and studs, became her armor to shield herself from the outside world.
Reinventing Axl Rose’s stripped-down take on punk rock made the genre accessible to a new generation, the way the Ramones’ three-chord approach had done in the seventies.
The band’s sound became so popular that the phrase “like Against Me!” turned into fanzine shorthand for any band that put hoarse singing over an acoustic guitar. Against Me! may not have invented folk-punk, but they definitely popularized it.
We were in a battle. We were fighting the headlining band,” she says. “The best way to get inside their heads and fuck with them is to break them down psychologically and make them seem uncool. So that’s what we did.”
Being the victors of daily games of psychological warfare only bolstered Against Me!’s confidence, which they channeled into their set every night. They played with bravado, like a band hell-bent on leaving a decimated stage in their wake.
A friend informed him that the burgeoning folk-punk movement was largely attributable to the rising popularity of a band from Florida called Against Me! Once Florio heard that, he knew he’d found his next target.
After making a few cracks about the band’s sound, likening it to “James Taylor with curses,” he derided them for doing package tours, like the one they’d done with Anti-Flag and Rise Against, and accused the setup of being a pay-to-play scheme that took opening slots away from local bands.
After the column ran, Against Me! started noticing Bill Florios cropping up in every town. Wherever they went, irate punks would be waiting to start trouble, confront them about their touring ethics, or vandalize their van.
Tons of bands they’d played with had made the jump over the previous couple of years and Against Me! believed themselves to be better than all of them.
For years, punk fans had heard lore about their favorite bands being picked apart by A&R vultures, but We’re Never Going Home was one of the first authentic peeks under the hood of the courting process.
Maybe it was the chip on their shoulder from all the major-label flattery, but Against Me!’s relationship with Fat Wreck Chords soured during the course of making Former Clarity.
With all of the talk of singles and the pressure to market their album properly, it felt as if they’d lost the freedoms that punk was supposed to afford them. It felt a lot like they’d signed to a major. So, since they were already making major-label concessions, they figured they might as well make major-label money.
There was a looming darkness waiting for her when she looked ahead. At twenty-five, she had all but accepted it as an inevitability that she would one day join the infamous list of famous rockers who’d perished by the age of twenty-seven.
It wasn’t until she met producer Butch Vig that she found someone worth listening to.
Punks, like anybody, are sometimes so narrow-minded and conservative in their viewpoint that they don’t want a band to grow at all, or be anything other than what they were when they initially discovered them.
The three months in the studio with a scrupulous producer like Vig exposed a weak spot in Against Me!’s operation. Oakes’s rough-and-tumble approach behind the kit had contributed to the band’s lovably sloppy charm at their live gigs, but under the unforgiving studio lights, it became clear that his skills were not up to snuff for a big-budget record.
Vig was struck by the peculiarity of one of its lyrics: “If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman / My mother once told me she would have named me Laura.”
Against Me! was a publicist’s dream—a fiery punk band with a rebellious streak and an outspoken but charismatic frontperson.
The filming of the music video for “Thrash Unreal,” however, pushed them to a breaking point. Grace was unable to sell the label on her treatment for the video, which leaned heavily on the idea of her cross-dressing.
Against Me! had been hit by a truck once before, and it turned out that promoting a major-label debut was like a slow, drawn-out version of that.
Over the course of two album releases, she felt she’d done everything Sire Records had asked of her. She’d answered days’ worth of interview questions, she’d filmed music videos she wasn’t crazy about, and she’d gritted her teeth through talks of radio singles and chart positions—none of which had made Against Me! the next Clash, like everyone had hoped.
The members of Against Me! regrouped in Florida and, although their future looked grim, Grace decided to hold the band together after all.
It wasn’t that she’d suddenly found a renewed sense of optimism; it was more that she was about to turn thirty and had devoted her entire life to the band since she was a teenager. She wasn’t sure what else to do.
Transgender Dysphoria Blues became a landmark album for punk rock, as its songs saw Grace openly and honestly addressing her gender dysphoria for the first time.
The gender-fluid newcomers weren’t strictly punk rockers, and they weren’t much concerned with the band’s history of “selling out.” They didn’t care if Against Me! was on a major label, or any label at all, in fact. All they knew was that when they looked up in awe at the band onstage, they saw Laura Jane Grace, a person they could aspire to.
AGAINST ME! MIGHT be the last punk band a major label ever cuts a check for a million dollars. In a way, their release from Sire Records marked the end of an era in the music industry.
As the digital revolution wreaked havoc on the business, fewer and fewer opportunities could be afforded to bands of their kind.
Eventually, though, the industry figured out how to make it work to its advantage and started to treat the internet less like a threat and more like an opportunity. Record labels and tech companies began working in tandem to capitalize on digital sales and streaming music, reversing a hemorrhaging business model.
In order to keep seeing as many zeroes on their advance checks as they did in the lucrative nineties, big-name artists became more amenable to signing 360 deals, which gave labels all-encompassing cuts of earnings, on everything from touring income to merch sales.
The role of A&R scouts changed as well. The ease of new music discovery on the internet relieved the burden—or perhaps the fun—of the job.
Scouts began trusting data over intuition, and analytics over gut feelings. Dedication to artistry was superseded by commitment to a brand.
As for the concept of “selling out,” the heated debate largely faded from punk circles. To sell out, there has to be someone looking to buy. And after 2012, major labels were less willing to spend money on bands in this vein.
The mainstream and the underground once again seemed incompatible. After the internet rebalanced the system, the industry looked more like it had before the nineties, when the two worlds were separate and the lines were drawn in black and white.
