Born in Manchester and raised east of London, Iain Ellis spent his formative years playing, performing, and consuming a heavy diet of punk rock music and football. In 1986, the young man went west to find his dreams in Bowling Green, Ohio. Instead, he picked up a PhD in American Culture Studies, writing his dissertation on 1980s American Punk Culture. In 2000, he traveled further west, settling in Lawrence, Kansas, where he currently teaches English and Youth Culture Studies at the University of Kansas. You may also enjoy his book, Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists.
Features
Sunday, January 11 2009
Rebels Wit Attitude: Nirvana
In this excerpt from PopMatters' new book Rebels Wit Attitude, Iain Ellis discusses how Nirvana were a rocking perfect storm of punk’s attitude, metal’s riffs, and pop hooks.
Sunday, December 14 2008
Rebels Wit Attitude: Beastie Boys
In this excerpt of PopMatters' new book Rebels Wit Attitude, Ellis discusses how Beastie Boys were not afraid to play the enemy within, often mocking the macho strutting of harder rappers.
Sunday, December 7 2008
Rebels Wit Attitude: Talking Heads
In this excerpt from PopMatters' new book Rebels Wit Attitude, Ellis looks at the Talking Heads' art school intellectualism, pop melodies, funk rhythms, and the abstract humor that made them outsiders.
Columns
Friday, January 20 2012
Stand-Up! America’s Dissenting Tradition Part One: Trailblazers Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce
Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce were more than just maverick dissenters; they were the founding fathers of what would later coalesce under the umbrella of the “counter-culture”.
Tuesday, November 8 2011
Humor vs. Religion: An Unholy War. Part Two: Dispatches from the Front Lines
For comedians like Ricky Gervais, Bill Maher and others, the non-rational beliefs and behaviors that religion fosters are, from a “material” perspective, manna from heaven.
Friday, September 2 2011
Humor vs. Religion: An Unholy War, Part One
Even within the US, where democracy and political openness have fostered a rich tradition of rebellious humor, stains still linger from those periods when “God-is-on-our-side” attitudes swept the nation into a mass hysteria of obedience and fear.
Wednesday, June 22 2011
Football Humor, Like the Game Itself, Is about Attack, Defense, and then Counter-Attack
No city in England “enjoys” such an entrenched, venomous, and savage sports rivalry as Manchester does with City and United. It's no wonder that a recent survey found Manchester to be the “rudest city in the world”.
Monday, March 21 2011
Banksy's Bare Wit-ness
Like Aristophanes in Ancient Greece, Mark Twain in 19th century America, or Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes, Banksy’s visual humor chastises power in its multiple manifestations by hauling it before the court of public opinion for a well-deserved flogging.
