¹ Having grown up in Cleveland, I laughed out loud when I read Justin Eckberg's assessment in the Cincinnati Enquirer that WOXY's leftist politics makes it a better fit for “one of the coasts, New York, L.A. or Cleveland” (49). Far from a joke, Cleveland residents understand themselves as culturally removed from both Columbus and Cincinnati, for differing reasons—a kind of insider detail that helps this book ring true.

² Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

³ Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

⁴ This happens on page 14, in one of many wonderful pop-out blocks that add detail to the narrative: “Modern rock,” James writes, “is a radio format [that] features punk, post-punk, and the genres that grew out of them; because post-punk drew on everything from reggae and hip-hop to disco and early electronic dance music (EDM), modern rock can be equally omnivorous with respect to genre.”

⁵ E.g., although work from Matthew Bannister and others has shown the regressive limitations of “alternative masculinities” in indie rock, scholars like Alyx Vesey and Morgan Bimm have also shown how fan communities have agency in shaping how music figures in their lives. Following the affective resonance between girls and indie culture—whether in 1980s indie pop or early 2000s movie soundtracks—their work suggests that the diverse and active listenerships hailed by indie music prevent that genre from being wholly reducible to a re-entrenchment of white-male masculinity or bourgeois gentrification. See Matthew Bannister, White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock (London: Routledge, 2006); Morgan Bimm, “Girl Music of the Indie Rock Persuasion: Amplifying Indie Through 2000s Girl Culture” (PhD diss., York University, 2022); Alyx Vesey, “Selling Sonic Girlhood: Feminizing Indie Rock through Music Supervision on MTV's Awkward,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 5 (2021): 217–42.

⁶ Andrew Bottomley, Sound Streams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020).