A love letter to punks of color

Bianca Xunise’s graphic novel debut Punk Rock Karaoke is a love letter to the south side and punks of color everywhere. In 248 rapid-paced pages, Xunise tells a coming-of-age story centered on Ariel Grace Jones, an 18-year-old punk who spends the summer coming to terms with their ambition, changing friendships, and what it means to be part of a community.

The book is packed with visual and written footnotes about Blackness, rock ’n’ roll, and south-side punk that provide endless cultural rabbit holes for burgeoning rockers. Simultaneously, the text is grounded in Chicago’s unique alt subculture history, celebrating everything from nights at Nocturna to passing down the folklore of Resurrection Mary. It’s a meticulously rendered and richly rewarding YA novel sure to resonate with readers of all ages.

Punk Rock Karaoke by Bianca Xunise
Viking Books for Young Readers, hardcover, 256 pp., $24.99, penguinrandomhouse.com/books/688096/punk-rock-karaoke-by-bianca-xunise

Bianca Xunise in conversation with Jessica Hopper
Sat 4/27, 3:30 PM, Quimby’s, 1854 W. North, quimbys.com/blog/store-news/bianca-xunise-celebrates-punk-rock-karaoke, free

Jones lives in a neighborhood populated with quinceañera dress shops, Italian beef stands, and advertisements for buying gold and flipping houses. By day, they work at a hip coffee shop, and by night, they hit shows and practice with their band, Baby Hares. Their room is a shrine to cultural figures like Tina Turner, David Bowie, and the Slits, where they daydream and write rock songs. Music is their life—so much so that they’ve been accepted to Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music. It’s something they feel conflicted about: Many of their friends are working multiple jobs to help support their families or are struggling to scrape together tuition for community college. When tensions mount within their social group, Jones finds support in a breakout scene icon who’s laying low in Chicago for the summer. What they hope could be a mentorship turns into a romance that proves more than Jones can handle—but they get by with a little help from their friends.

Continuing the comics storytelling traditions of people like James Spooner and the Hernandez brothers, Xunise builds a singular universe teeming with studded belts, faulty amps, black lipstick, and attitude from the perspective of a punk of color. Each page explodes with odes to Black cultural icons, from the wisdom of Maya Angelou (“When someone tells you who they are, believe them”) to the bold style of singer Betty Davis. But Punk Rock Karaoke is also a mixtape all its own, introducing each scene with a song to play—or imagine playing—while reading the passage. Cue up Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” when Jones first encounters their hometown hero. Switch on Siouxsie and the Banshees’s “Happy House” as Jones’s bestie Michele enjoys time alone in her bedroom. By attaching a song to each scene, Xunise makes the book feel like both a movie and a syllabus.

A portrait of the author standing beside a pool table, holding a cue upright. Xunise wears round sunglasses, tiger-striped pants and a black leather jacket. Their hair is dark and short and they are smiling at the camera. Behind them is a wall illustration framed by Christmas lights. — Author Bianca Xunise
Credit: Dani Torta Bones Fuentes

The book is also inescapably Chicago. There are endless rat references, but there are also explicit and implicit mentions of local cultural touchstones. One character wears a Canal Irreal backpatch, a nod to the postpunk project featuring multiple staples of the south-side hardcore scene, most notably Martin Sorrendeguy of Los Crudos and Limp Wrist. After a night dancing at a large all-night goth party—what is unmistakably Nocturna at Metro—Jones and their friends head to Punks’n’Donuts, a nostalgic nod to the Dunkin’ Donuts nicknamed Punkin’ Donuts that helped sustain the scene for over a decade. At one point, Jones makes a joke about Resurrection Mary, the wandering spirit of a dancer who haunts Archer Avenue. (She’s arguably Chicago’s most famous ghost, but the tale is such a south-side punk legend, it even served as inspiration for one of the scares at the annual haunted house held at the late Rancho Huevos.)

While the story is aimed at audiences 14 and up, it’s a satisfyingly encyclopedic work drawn with a sophisticated sense of passion and chaos. Newer punks will find themselves rewarded by googling the names hidden on T-shirts, posters, and CDs, while scene veterans will recognize things like Soo Catwoman’s makeup and haircut and an X-Ray Spex poster. The book presents punk as something with multiple access points that doesn’t start or end at a specified age; it can be an evolving, lifetime journey with innumerable joys, disappointments, and surprises.

Some may be put off by aspects of the narrative’s wish fulfillment—overworked parents who know the most thoughtful and sympathetic things to say, interpersonal frustrations like flakiness that can be neatly excused by understandable life stressors, endlessly emotionally patient friends. But part of believing another world is possible (a tenet to many punks) is having some idea of what it could be. Drawing on Xunise’s own life growing up a Chicago punk, they fuse experience and fantasy for an original, optimistic read that invites as much cultural curiosity as it does pride in who you are and where you came from. South-side punks to the front!