In Tattooed, Pierced, & Fucked-Up: A Scene Memoir 2004–2008, writer, musician, and visual artist Lauren Napier does something that would send many of us into an anxious meltdown: she publishes her diary entries from the 2000s.
To be fair, this is not the first time Napier has committed such an act of bravery; she actually self-published the first half of this book in 2008, when seemingly everyone around her in the DIY scene was releasing something. “Everybody had zines, or their burned CD record, or all these bootlegs,” Napier tells The Fringe. “It was very much, ‘Just get what you need to share out there.’” Now, that energy is on the rise again. As traditional media crumbles around us and algorithms attempt to dictate every aspect of our tastes, subcultures and independent artists are taking the spotlight — making this the perfect time for Napier to revisit (and update) her memoir.
The first-ever nonfiction release from Dirt Books, Tattooed, Pierced, & Fucked-Up, out this summer, takes readers inside the mid-2000s emo/pop punk scene, which Napier explored as a journalist, merch girl, and frontwoman in her own band. The book’s first half, labeled “Side A,” includes writings from back then — band interviews, essays, and diary entries — all with new commentary, as current-day Napier converses with her former self. Then, “Side B” switches into new material, including fresh, retrospective interviews with bands like The Matches, Bleed the Dream, and close friends from the scene.
Napier fell into the world of live music after moving from a Navajo reservation in Arizona to Las Vegas during high school, and it didn’t take long before she made the transition from fan to journalist. She started writing for a glossy-covered high school publication and, a semester later, started writing for the local zine Smash, which welcomed stories about smaller acts — Napier’s true passion. “I realized that there were these stories of the smaller bands that needed to be told,” she says. “The headliners, I mean, sure. I’d heard about them before. They get lots of coverage. But what about the other guys?”
Speaking with The Fringe, Napier unpacked the inspiration behind the book, why smaller bands matter just as much as those who fill big arenas, and what we lose when nostalgia boils our memory of musical movements down to an aesthetic. Preorders of Tattooed, Pierced, & Fucked-Up are available now, and you can read an excerpt here.
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Cover of ‘Tattooed, Pierced, & Fucked-Up.’ Courtesy of Dirt Books.
How has the way you have personally related to this scene changed through the years?
Well, it’s interesting, because with the release of this book, my algorithm is serving me very different things than it used to on social media. And last night, it seemed to want to give me a bunch of cosplay. That’s not just the word I’m attaching; some of it had it in their bios of scene kid personas, complete with raccoon stripes — just everything, right?
Yeah.
It was fascinating to me, but I realized how when we’re nostalgic, sometimes we listen with our eyes. It becomes this aesthetic, when really, there was also an ethos in what I was interested in. Yes, Warped Tour has had a resurgence, and it exists, still, as a beautiful community for people to gather who might think slightly outside of the box. But I do think that the ethos of punk, or maybe having a little more depth other than just aesthetic, has faded in terms of that scene, but not necessarily in myself. I’ve had to find it in other places. Listening to what people who were vital to the scene in the early early 2000s are putting out now continues that thread as well — people like Brendan of Circa Survive, who has a project called HyperViolets.
We see that tension throughout the book, between the ethos and the fashion. In the first chapter, for example, you touch on this idea of being surrounded by people who seem to be wearing a uniform they’ve been told to adopt. What role do you think this plays in the broader commodification of this scene and genre?
I think it’s not just in the genre. I think it’s in the act of being human. The way that we are commodified these days and objectified to drive purchases just through our appearance or what we’re served on social media, it’s overwhelming. The disconnect between what we look like through filters on our phone and what we look like in real life, or what outfit we’re willing to do a fit check with and which outfit we’re willing to actually go outside in, I think that the greater population that’s consuming social media has lost sight of what's important, largely, beyond aesthetics. And I don’t think that that's just a scene thing.
Photo of a The Matches sticker. Courtesy of Dirt Books.
People get very wistful about the days of “Myspace music,” and discovering small bands and micro-scenes. But then, when we’re actually talking about this scene in nostalgic terms, it’s usually about the bigger bands that are still very much around. What do smaller bands’ trajectories teach us about this scene that gets lost when we focus on larger bands?
