#garage punk

In Issue #17, our Associate Editor Jaclyn Jermyn sat down with PWR BTTM to discuss gender, inclusion, and how to navigate queer identity.

July 9th, 2016: the Bottom Lounge, Chicago

“A handful of queers from Massachusetts walk into the green room of a venue named the Bottom Lounge—stop me if you’ve heard this one before. While this joke might essentially write itself, the punch line is a little harder to pin down. The punch line is PWR BTTM.

The ambiguous genre-shifting duo, comprised of Ben Hopkins and Liv Bruce—they/them pronouns please—met while attending Bard College. PWR BTTM have often been labeled queer punk by media outlets, and while certainly queer, the punk tagline is something they sometimes shrug their shoulders at. “But what is punk, you know?” says Hopkins. One could offer a Wikipedia definition, but it boils down to an example of counter-culture. Just like the house shows that the three of us spent our formative years hanging out at, PWR BTTM shows are bursting at the seams with symbols of what our society has deemed as a rejection of social normativity.

Their influences are all over the map because as they note, everything is a little bit of a performance and performance makes for great inspiration. Bruce takes cues from their dance background and loves choreographers that put a raw, bleeding edge into their work. Hopkins has a list of influential drag queens a mile long—they both admit to listening to RuPaul’s Drag Race in the car while they drive from venue to venue on tour.”

Read the whole spread in Issue #17 here: https://issuu.com/hooliganmag/docs/issue17