Punk and Academia’s Infinite Playlist

A. J. Urquidi asks Marcus Clayton about Prince, the woke mind virus, and his new book “¡PÓNK!”

By A. J. UrquidiFebruary 18, 2025

• Music

• Fiction

• Memoir & Essay

WHEN HE’S NOT BUSY teaching undergrads or polishing his dissertation, Marcus Clayton is probably crafting new guitar riffs for his bombastic band as they rehearse for an upcoming show in a backyard near you. The punk-pilled PhD candidate just put the finishing touches on his hybrid prose collection ¡PÓNK! (Nightboat, 2025), which blends several genres of writing into a personal account of the racial, social, and emotional injustices plaguing our culture. Wherever academics and artists work to dismantle the lasting effects of colonization, Marcus can be found nearby, plugging in his guitar and a massive Vox amp adorned with the Costa Rican flag as he prepares to melt the faces of posers and neo-Nazis alike.

¡PÓNK! primarily follows the exploits and misadventures of Moose—an unsuccessful musician in a local punk band, a postgraduate professor viewing the world through various anguish-stirring academic frameworks, a proud but confused Afrolatino son steering interpersonal relationships through seas of stinging prejudice that threaten to sink everyone around him. Many of these traits equally apply to Marcus, though he reassures me that the book is ultimately a work of fiction, a cautionary tale meant to keep him from sliding into the most exaggerated version of the-Marcus-that-should-not-be. I met him over Zoom, where he took me from mic check to reality check faster than you can say “hey ho, let’s go!”

¤

A. J. URQUIDI: I know you originally as a poet from our program together in the mid-2010s at Cal State Long Beach. Back then, you dabbled in prose in our novel-writing workshop, and you were always playing in bands—serving as guitarist for Long Beach band Struckout before starting tudors as a songwriter with our writing-tutor buddies who get figuratively represented in the book. From what I can tell, ¡PÓNK! incorporates elements of all those formats—prose, poetry, lyrics—alongside its primary focus on auto-fiction. What made you decide to throw it all in to create the storyworld for ¡PÓNK! rather than choosing one format over another?

MARCUS CLAYTON: I just couldn’t decide which one to do. For example, there’s a Struckout story in the middle of the book where all the names are different, and some narrative beats are super embellished for narrative purposes, but there are many events are that are basically exactly the same as their real-life counterparts. And that comes from the perspective of being in a nonfiction program—like, I’m trying my best to adhere to as much memoiristic/personal essay/research-based prose-writing as possible, but I also started the program with a bunch of fiction writers as my immediate friends and peers. So I ended up in fiction workshops a lot, and I wasn’t good at—or I actively don’t like—fantasy stuff or anything overtly fiction.

Oh yeah, we used to tear into the genre writers.

[Laughs.] And in a separate nonfiction workshop, I was trying to focus on a narrative about the worst tudors show I played, which was at the Prospector [bar in Long Beach] … I’m not sure if you were there or not.

I think I went to all the Prospector shows.

In that case, this is the one where we played alongside a friend’s band, and no one came to the show. First, we asked a bunch of people to play with us, and then they all either ghosted us or turned it down or just weren’t responsive. And so, our friend’s band plays, and then he just goes and stays outside the venue the whole time we’re playing. No one else is in there with us; the silence was deafening between songs. Chris [tudors’ drummer] filmed that show too. You could see me being a brat onstage.

I remember being excited for you guys being the headliners and then finding out that that meant something very different for a bar show.

Yeah, no, you don’t wanna be the last band in any local shows—people get tired and start heading out by then. So we play, and I’m all pissy about it. Afterward, outside, tudors just have a small chat and then me, Chris, and [tudors’ bassist] David hug and then that’s the end of it. When I went home, I talked to my partner for like two hours and just ranted about the show. I was like, “Fucking no one was there …”

And I wanted to write about that, but then the actual beats of that narrative weren’t interesting to me. Professors would tell us, “When you’re writing fiction, it’s okay for your characters to go through intensely bad things and to take the worst route to where they need to go because that’s what makes the narrative interesting.” I thought back to when we played: when I was having a tiff with myself, I genuinely felt like, I want to break my shit right now. I want to destroy this guitar and break my amp and just throw shit at people because I’m just so angry that no one is here. A lot of work got put into that show. So when I was trying to come up with a nonfiction narrative, I was just unhappy with those beats, but then I thought, Well, what if this person actually did break the guitar?

I wrote that ending first, of this person playing a really shitty show, and then he just destroys his gear, which ends up hurting people in the audience, but people are excited about it. Which is the antithesis of what they want to happen at the shows: destruction or whatever. That ended up being one of my favorite things I’d written. And I just kind of built from there.

I asked myself what else I was planning to be nonfiction that would work better as fiction. And how fictional could I make it? What doesn’t need to change that much? In all honesty, that’s what led to some issues with marketing this book. It doesn’t say “A Novel” or “Stories” or “Essays” under the title. It just says ¡PÓNK! It’s officially fiction for marketing purposes, but even then, there are some entire pieces in there that are nonfiction essays. There’s a play in there that’s an essay. Nothing has changed about it for fictional purposes versus other stories in which I manipulated one or two things to make it fictional. The overall goal of that was just to make it good or interesting, make it compelling to get from point A to point B. Sometimes it’s fiction, sometimes it’s nonfiction, but overall, it’s just the story that needs to happen, that needs to come out of me. So I was far more concerned about, like, is this good?

While we’re thinking about formatting, I want to point to some visual elements I noticed: some things visually break up the prosiness of the paragraphs, like when song lyrics appear as their own vignette all in italics, or when bullet point lists of rules for backyard concerts appear. There’s poetry using white space, and there’s a refrain of “real punk motherfuckers” that returns multiple times throughout the book. The first time I noticed it was at the end of the intro section as a ring of text. It looks like those words are skanking in a circle of death. Was there an inspiration here from the collaged nature of DIY punk zines, where things like instructions are just pasted together on the page?

Yeah, that’s a huge influence on a lot of the writing. The first stages of this book came together around 2019, when tudors played more shows, when we played PunkCon and were more aware of what was going on in the music scene. We’re always privy to, you know, “here are the typical rules of playing punk shows, being in a punk scene,” and they all aligned with making sure that everyone stayed safe and had a good time. These are spaces for people of color and queer folk, so the main idea was to think about how one can destroy gatekeeping rules while adhering to a set of inclusive rules.

We saw Limp Wrist at the Regent that same year. Martin Sorrondeguy, their singer, was a 52-year-old man who wore, like, leather daddy stuff, right? A codpiece, a hat, bare-chested and whatnot. His ass all out. The audience was almost entirely Brown folk, but also, obviously, queer folk. People were twerking on the walls and shit. And it was the most chaotic but the most safe I had been at a punk show. After one song, he stops, and he says, “If you’re here and you’re straight, the most punk thing you can do to be an ally is to go suck a dick. And if you do that, then you’ll be real punk motherfuckers.” The idea of real punk motherfuckers wasn’t a mohawk, leather jacket, plaid pants; it was disassociating from social norms, from patriarchal expectations. So that stuck with me.

That introductory chapter, “The Ally,” was a giant essay at first, but then I didn’t like it. I just started cutting things out, and I was like, you know what? I did poetry once! So I just did the white space stuff you and I and David used to do. It started to look better. When you are embracing how to go about rules of a punk show, there’s no charter for it. You’re kind of learning by doing and you’re in the pit yourself, like physically feeling what needs to be felt in those spaces. So opening with that, and making the words dance together, was for me the best way to prime the reader for the suggestion that there’s ways to go about reading this book, but also there’s no way to go about reading this book.

Often in ¡PÓNK! I recognize characters from my experiences, and events that I’ve witnessed myself in the scene, like the Jawbreaker reunion show we attended together. As a reader who knows your life, it creates this cognitive schism, this parallel version of events in my head that I know, but now I’m reliving them through various subjective points of view. But even for readers who don’t enter with that same burden of knowledge, I feel like they’d still relate to the hyperspecific locality of the characters’ ecosystems—the teaching world, the music world, the world of la familia. They’d be able to tell there’s a realness behind these descriptions you’ve placed a mask on top of. As the god of these characters, you get to control what they see and how they feel about it. And then other characters, whom you’ve created, remix or complicate what happened in the previous chapters by revealing their view.

So as someone who personally recognizes elements of our shared reality, it feels like I’m spying on your cartoonish dreams, David Lynch–style, as you dream about your life and past, and one friend gets fused into a stand-in for another, with a Dutch tilt between shots to reveal something unsettling is happening: everyone is laughing at or judging everyone else, like a Soundgarden music video or something. And maybe there’s just as much Deleuze and Fanon behind it as there is the music video camera. I wonder if you felt this dreamworld tone coming out as you were creating the world, and why you think these disparate subjectivities in the book share almost the same unhinged lens at times.

There’s a later story where a racist Mexican dude gets his dick stabbed off—it’s literally a stand-in for one person in particular, but also for the racist environment I was in, like the hyperviolence of how you feel when you’re being subjected to prejudice. I felt like the best way to convey that wasn’t a conversation like “You hurt my feelings” or whatever, but instead, “What’s the worst thing you want to happen? What’s the worst thing you don’t want to happen?” And those make the more compelling narratives.

So there are things that happen in the book just because I think they’re more interesting, but also, while fictionalized, they speak more toward the reality that I had experienced, which is how it’s coming from a nonfictional place. This is gonna sound delusional. It was my way of creating what felt more real to my experience with either the punk scenes or being a teacher or just the past 10–15 years. The cartoon stuff—did you ever watch Angela Anaconda?

Oh man, I haven’t thought about it in 20 years.

It’s this cartoon that’s semi-stop-motion. The characters are cutouts of real people against an animated backdrop, right? That’s how I imagined this book, like these characters are based on real people, but I am creating the worlds around them. So no matter how real the people are, it’s all a creation. It’s all just, for lack of a better term, the “vibes” of the ideas coming across. Like in the same story where the guy gets his dick stabbed off, everyone’s singing “Volver, Volver” just nonstop at a bar for hours, which isn’t a thing that happens, but it was like the most realistic way to portray that feeling in that moment. In the narrative behind it, that felt like when you have an argument with somebody and you go home and think, “Oh, I should have said this.” The more interesting thing is actually saying that: maybe some shit will go down and it’ll be hectic and weird, but it makes for good storytelling.

Let’s talk about identity and authenticity, key points in the book. The protagonist Moose sees himself and everyone around him with unshakable lenses of ethnic identity, class, intersectional feminism, LGBT+ rights. But he’s also hypocritically hard on others like his oblivious biracial student who fails upward in the music world without putting in the work Moose had to, while Moose’s band Pipebomb! still hasn’t found success. So we see Moose’s jealousy and animosity even after the book opened with a section outlining the gatekeeping that happens in punk. We see Moose is guided by various forms of gatekeeping all the time, and he sometimes grows aware and catches himself self-deprecatingly, resents himself for mirroring the gatekeeping that has been weaponized against him at times. Turtledove, his romantic partner, is also a punk professor, as are Moose’s bandmates; all their concerns with being the authentic white ally or authentic punk or authentic Chicana embroil them in tensions with others.

In a way, academia seems to poison their worldview because, while they enjoy steering their own successes as college faculty and trying to do right by underserved students, they’re also at war with academia, feeling like token hires, or acting too intellectual after a concert to other attendees. Do you think this constant identity tension gets in the way of the characters fully realizing their potential? Is their reliance on discerning authenticity kneecapping them from having a good time? Or are these just side effects of being academics in a punk world, like Pandora’s box has been opened by them learning too much about the world?

Yes and yes. It’s fictionalized, but a lot of what you’re asking about comes from very real places, theoretically speaking. A lot of the research I have done for my dissertation so far revolves around the fact that I am in an academic setting, and especially if you are someone who studies anything related to ethnic studies at all, or even nonwhite literature, the idea is that you’re doing your research and you’re writing and teaching based off of what the voices within those walls have to say, or how they would say it, despite the fact that the story is about, I don’t know, my illiterate grandmother, or my immigrant mother. That tension of having so much freedom and love in punk scenes while also being in an academic space is such an oxymoron that so many people I know are in, that it’s so easy to get lost in that judgmental space of “oh, I’m a punk and I know how things work. So, you know, I am a perfect person,” or whatever the fuck it is.

And I’m somebody who thinks way too much all the time—like, that I’m often uncomfortable being at a private school such as USC, but I also worked hard to apply to the program and I study what I study because it interests me. But who’s gonna read this writing except for White Guy #7 in the academy? And does knowing these traumatic histories of marginalized people help folks who are not in academia, who would benefit from knowing this?

My first semester teaching, fall 2015, I remember I taught some 9:30 a.m. basic skills class. I had a bunch of old folk in that class, like over-fifties, going to community college, which is nice. And there was one old Black lady who, when we were going over “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, answered a question by saying “colored people.” The second thing I thought was Oh yeah, you’re absolutely correct about the thing you just said. But my first thought was Oh, ma’am: “people of color.” And that moment haunted me, because I’d stopped and wanted to correct a Black woman, in her sixties—who had way closer proximity to the Civil Rights Movement than I would ever have—because of these rules meant to correct the histories of queer folk or people of color, but the messaging gets lost in the sea of academia. I think about those moments a lot, especially when I scroll on social media and see things like, “All this is problematic. You can’t say this anymore.” And people who are against things being “canceled,” who think people are against using whatever words, are in the mindset of “I can say whatever I want.” Then the nuance of why we are not saying these things in the first place just gets lost, and it turns into Twitter fodder or whatever.

So, I’m always in that mindset that everyone’s wrong, all the time. People who think they’re the most right are the most wrong. Moose is emblematic of that; his learning clearly doesn’t save anyone. I’m a skeptical person when it comes to stuff like that: there’s a later chapter about folks doing land acknowledgments and then immediately just going back to the thing that they were doing, as if no land actually was acknowledged, like, “We dedicate this to the Tongva people who this land rightfully belongs to. Anyway, so this celebration of Christopher Columbus …” It always comes off as performative and knowing the correct things but never putting it to action.

By contrast, I found your vignettes about family really wholesome. We see Moose’s working-class dad, who goes by Pops, seemingly signaling Blackness in comparison with his Costa Rican mom being referenced as Mamá, in Spanish. Pops is trying to connect with Moose on the level of music, and buys him a used guitar like Prince’s, who Pops adores. Moose prefers heavier music, though, so Moose initially views Prince as not very punk. Then one day, Pops invites him into the bedroom to watch flamboyant, sexual Prince hammering out a godlike guitar solo on TV with Tom Petty and George Harrison’s son backing on rhythm guitar, both of them totally wowed by the rock star at center stage. And it all clicks for Moose in that moment. You write, “Pops tells Moose to keep watching Prince, to look at his techniques, his fashion. ‘This is how a Black man performs,’ he says, all eyes on his hands.”

This was powerful for me, because Moose has been such a hard-ass thus far, but this disarms him. It’s an incredibly deep moment where a Black man is trying to pass on a concept of Black masculinity to his half-Black son in this endearing way, through this visual and sonic cultural demonstration of admiration. With all the identity and authenticity themes in the book and the masks people wear to survive our corrupt, violent society, the idea of a Black man “performing” is so loaded with meanings here that I was kind of floored by everything it could represent. I’m curious whether you saw this as a crucial moment for Moose’s development and how he approaches his gift or curse of being a “performing” Black man from that point forward.

It’s funny: that particular section is one section that’s entirely nonfiction. It was in ’04, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and my dad called me into his room to watch what he was watching; he was like, “Ahhh, look at this!” And I tried to be “too cool for this,” but it was really important for me because—I’m speaking as me, not as Moose—like you mentioned, it was this dissection of expectation, right? Like here’s Prince playing a cover of the whitest band in existence [the Beatles]. And he’s the most “big dick energy” person onstage, playing a guitar solo in the most flamboyant outfit. I didn’t even know Prince played guitar before that moment. Honestly, I knew his songs, but I had no idea he could play, let alone that well. And because that was such a glass-shattering identity discovery moment, I had to put it in the book somewhere. Since the whole book revolves around punk being not “violent white guy music” but self-discovery without boundaries, me being like, “Oh, damn, Prince fucks,” felt necessary.

Prince is hybridity; hybridity is the celebration of queering. The idea of queering something in our line of work, in literature, for the people that we know, is so important to progressing the arts and identity and culture. Regardless of sexual orientation, Prince’s art queered that stage, made it less mainstream and more punk rock, to the point where my dad and I, through this music, were able to understand each other better. No matter how little the characters in the book communicate verbally, I still needed to show that the manipulation of mainstream music is what helps Black or Brown people ingest entertainment without necessitating white normality.

Because the book incorporates so much music, from Prince to Vicente Fernández to Bad Brains, potential playlists were yanking at my mind as I read. So I eventually jumped to the acknowledgements section. (Full disclosure: I caught my name back there too.) There you’d outlined key songs to guide one’s reading, including tracks from bands in which you were or are an active member. But it feels like much more might have been left out. I want five bonus tracks that you wish you’d added in there, so that LARB has something exclusive to offer.

This is one of those … whatchamacallits? Buzzfeed-type questions. I can probably tell you a few off the top of my head, because I had to cut some things.

Selena’s “Dreaming of You.” Even though it was her going mainstream, singing in English, the idea of breaking out of a certain stereotype you’ve been given—like the stereotype of performing in Spanish, or of performing just toward your expectation as a performer—is punk in its own way.

“Want Us Dead” by Limp Wrist. As the title infers, a song about being wanted dead by folks who feel you’re not adhering to the status quo.

A super-duper deep cut, a friend deep cut, “Common Thieves” by We Should Join Forces. After a run of being in and out of bands that didn’t fit his aesthetic, my friend wrote and recorded a couple of songs for himself. I thought it was really cool. Like he was returning to himself as a musician.

Is it on Spotify?

Bandcamp!

Last two: “Napoleon Solo” by At the Drive-In. I cut an essay about a friend of mine who passed by suicide. It was his favorite song, and the way the song and his life mirrored each other scared me.

Finally—simply because it’s my favorite song—despite all the harsh, fast, and loud shit I listen to, Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” is my favorite ever fucking song.

All right, final question. In your book, I came across the phrase “punk precum.” Care to comment?

No.

¤

Marcus Clayton is a multigenre Afrolatino writer from South Gate, California, with an MFA in poetry from CSU Long Beach. Currently, he pursues a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California and has published with the likes of Joyland Magazine, Indiana Review, Passages North, Black Punk Now (2023), and The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock (2024). His book of mixed-genre prose titled ¡PÓNK! is out from Nightboat Books in 2025.

¤

Featured image by Marlén Ríos-Hernández, courtesy of Marcus Clayton.