Dying Scene Book Club – “AFI” by Andi Coulter

Love them or hate them, AFI has a presence in punk rock history. Davey Havok, Adam Carson, Jade Puget, and Hunter Bargan have been the driving force of the band since recording Black Sails in the Sunset in the late 1990s. Released through J-Card Press, Andi Coulter has written a book about their rise in the music scene and how it relates to their fandom.

Coulter starts by detailing the history of AFI and how the band formed in Ukiah, California. Davey Havok and Adam Carson essentially started a punk rock scene in a town without one. Havok and Carson were far from pioneers of punk rock in general but had a great resource in the legendary venue Gilman Street, where they would see and perform shows. AFI’s tongue-in-cheek hardcore punk rock solidified them as darlings of the scene, but as members dropped out, the lineup solidified with Jade and Hunter; their sound changed.

AFI’s albums through The Art of Drowning were definitely leaned more into punk rock, but Sing the Sorrow was the entry point for many of the band’s biggest fans. AFI’s sound was continuously evolving throughout the five albums leading up to its release. Upon retrospect, The Art of Drowning has fingerprints of its successor all over it.

Andi Coulter’s assessment of AFI’s music is pretty spot on. I wish that there was a little bit more analysis on the early albums like Answer That and Stay Fashionable and Very Proud of Ya, but those albums cover the first five to eight years of the band, only about a quarter of their existence. The book spends most of its pages discussing Sing the Sorrow, as it was definitely a turning point for them musically. There’s an interesting section about how AFI doesn’t really get remembered for selling out for money as much as their sound.

The book details a lot of the innovative ways the band and their management went about how they transitioned to a major label from Dexter Holland’s Nitro Records. Capitalizing on the rising popularity of Hot Topic’s customer base by doing things such as releasing store exclusives appealed to a new fanbase that more than made up for the punk rockers that left them behind.

Was it right to turn away from them? Probably not. As I have grown older and gotten less butt-hurt about music, the idea of bands or people trying other sounds isn’t a new concept or as devastating as we made it out to be. Was it disappointing? At the time, it was. Yet, as their fandom grew, it was apparent that the gamble paid off for AFI in the long run. Given that no other album released before Sing the Sorrow has had an anniversary show, it’s safe to say this is the band they will continue to be.

This was the first non-fiction book that made me feel old. The book was written mostly chronologically and weaves the band’s history with how AFI and other bands interacted with their fans. It was weird reading about the era of MySpace and MTV (when they played music) and how long it’s been since either of those things were still relevant. While Coulter’s book goes over the changes AFI made, it spends an equal amount of time on the changes in the scene itself from a generation that started using guides like “Book Your Own Fucking Life” to book shows to how it’s changed in the digital age.

The evolution of how bands in the punk scene went from meeting people in person and posting flyers everywhere to networking through social media and connecting with the fans directly online is documented, as well. Coulter cites AFI’s own message board, the Despair Faction, as one of the first ways a band created hype and mystery around their projects. Vaguebooking before it was even a thing, AFI would put together images and short films to garner interest in albums, creating a mythology without much context and leaving the dangling strings for their fans to interpret.

Even with its low page count and pocket-sized limits, there is a lot of information packed between the covers. Reading stories about people setting up their scenes and starting bands still fires me up at forty-two years old. Andi Coulter’s AFI book is a great example of just that. Similar to the books in the 33⅓ series, but this series focuses on a band rather than just an album they had released. Coulter’s writing is clean and precise and gives the perfect amount of details to get her point across. It was an interesting read, but it does move fast. Pick up Andi Coulter’s AFI book here.