Fugazi Saved My Life: How Punk Made Me Less of an Asshole, the second zine in a series about the positive impacts of punk music and culture is about to be released, and it will be making its way from Microcosm Publishing to book, zine, record and comic shops in your neighbourhood. The connecting theme in the issue is a life changing gig that Fugazi played at Peter Clark Hall at the University of Guelph in 1993.

Throughout 2025 positive reviews of the first issue, Yeastie Girlz Saved My Life: How Punk Made Me Less of an Asshole, have been popping up on zine review websites and blogs. It’s great to see there are still people publishing, reviewing and promoting zines in the internet age. Here’s what reviewers have had to say about the first issue. Please support people who support independent publishers and zine editors.

Razorcake has been supporting non-profit punk rock bands labels, authors, artists and zines for a many years now and here’s what they said about Yeastie Girlz Saved My Life: How Punk Made Me Less of an Asshole in issue 148.

“I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard the Yeastie Girlz, but I’m at least aware of any band whose image appeared on those paper sleeves that came with all the old Lookout! LPs. The question I asked myself thirty-plus years ago, “I wonder what’s up with the Yeastie Girlz?” has finally been answered. Colin describes them as, “vaginacore acapella rap,” and then elaborates on that by adding, “One hundred percent ideas, zero music.” He also points out that they hold the unique distinction of being the only completely acapella group to have a release on Lookout! Records (probably the only vaginacore rap band on there too). This zine describes Colin’s experience as a young teen from a religious background in rural Ontario discovering said vaginacore acapella rap, and how it kind of shattered his universe. He breaks down five Yeastie Girlz songs and draws them into the broader scope of social issues that they helped him to evolve his outlook on. It’s a thoughtful work, and cool to read how a sheltered religious person’s brain might digest descriptive pro-masturbation lyrics. On a surface level, Yeastie Girlz lyrics are vulgar and overtly sexual, and I’m sure they’ve been taken as a novelty act by many. However, vulgarity of all sorts is often the result of something else that’s being suppressed or ignored. Sometimes you just need to be a little colorful for someone to pay attention to it.”

A brilliant review that inspired the reviewer to stop reading and track down the Yeastie Girlz “Ovary Action” 7” and before writing about the zine appeared on the DIY Conspiracy website. DIY Conspiracy is a global web journal that sees DIY punk as an autonomous, ever-evolving-in-its-anti-oppression-ideals, genuine community, which lets punks live their lives to the fullest of possibilities.

“Yeastie Girlz Saved My Life is a pocket-sized zine written by Canadian journalist, podcaster, and antifascist Colin Burrowes. Published in April 2025 by the long-running Portland-based Microcosm Publishing, it’s part of their How Punk Made Me Less of an Asshole zine series. Each edition in the series recounts real-life moments where an intelligent punk song or band—at least anything smarter than GG Allin or the Sex Pistols—shakes you from your social conditioning, offering a glimpse of a better, less-asshole version of yourself.

This particular issue is dedicated to Ovary Action, the 1988 EP from California’s Yeastie Girlz, released by none other than Lookout! Records. I’ve never been particularly drawn to Lookout!’s back catalog, and this zine was my first encounter with Yeastie Girlz. Formed in 1987 at the Gilman Street Project in Berkeley by all singers Cammie Toloui, Jane Guskin, Joyce Jimenez, and Kate Rosenberger, Yeastie Girlz created their own lane with a style they dubbed “vaginacore a cappella rap”. The band says their formation was a “response to our male-dominated punk scene and the misogyny that we found everywhere in the culture and popular music,” and their music was an a cappella blend of punk, rap, and razor-sharp feminist lyrics, packed with sex-positive and pro-queer messages. And, worth noting, they were doing this before the Riot Grrrl movement even existed, predating the Olympia, WA scene of the early ’90s.

A few pages in, I was already intrigued. I closed the zine, searched out the record online, and ordered an old original copy. About a week later, the 7-inch landed in my mailbox. I gave it a few spins on my record player before picking the zine back up. Colin mentions he had the chance to interview the Yeastie Girlz in June 2023 for the Woodstein Media Podcast, marking 35 years since Ovary Action was recorded. This zine reads like a continuation of that conversation, with Colin tying it all back to his own discovery of the band as a rural, white, Canadian cis-boy. Someone who grew up with the usual hetero expectations but found himself slowly unlearning that toxic masculinity script, thanks in no small part to bands like Buzzcocks, Pansy Division, and the Yeastie Girlz.

As Colin puts it, Ovary Action was “100% ideas, zero music,” but it flipped his entire understanding of sexuality, pleasure, and feminism. The main part of the zine digs into the lyrics and the radical intent behind the tracks on this long-time overlooked 7-inch record from a well-known punk label. But don’t expect some overcooked lyrical dissection. Colin keeps it personal, grounding the songs in his own memories of small-town Listowel, Ontario, while also linking them to the broader struggles for queer liberation, gender equality, and resistance to far-right narratives that we keep fighting today.

In closing, Colin circles back to the core of the Microcosm series; that we’re all assholes from time to time, especially as cis-men raised with privilege, but that DIY punk continues to offer tools, voices, and models that push us to do better. Those, like Yeastie Girlz, who, through their music and message, help the rest of us suck a little bit less.

The zine is available from Microcosm Publishing, along with other titles by Colin Burrowes. The Yeastie Girlz now have an amazing website that collects their origin stories, music, photos, videos, interviews, gig fliers, and even some new band merch.”

And then at the beginning of December, Nyx posted this review on the Sea Green Zines blog.

“Yeastie Girlz Saved My Life: How Punk Made Me Less Of An Asshole is a ~10.5cm x ~18cm, black and white perzine about how the punk group Yeastie Girlz had a huge impact on Colin’s life and “made a kid from a small, southern Ontario town think deeply about racism, homosexuality, feminism… [and] anthems that have set the tone for the choices I have made since.”

Yeastie Girlz opens with Microcosm Publishing details for learning more about the publisher of this zine. From there, we get into the zine of the zine, and how could we not start with lyrics?

“So you’d better not listen to us if you’re a prude

‘Cause we’re gonna get dirty, and we’re gonna get rude”

– Yeastie Girlz, “Talkin’ Shit”

Talk about setting a tone! But where opening with those lyrics definitely caught my attention, Colin then introduces Yeastie Girlz a bit, and I read these three words put together for the first time: vaginacore acapella rap. Three words, and I was beyond intrigued.

Colin writes about having the opportunity to interview Yeastie Girlz in 2023, and how that interview lead to this zine:

“I was ready to ask the questions, but when Toloui turned the question around on me, I was taken off guard. I was not satisfied with my answer and so this zine is the reply I wish I had given.”

What a beautiful reason to make a zine.

Colin goes on to write about the impact of punk music and how there is more to it than people often think. (I feel the same about metal.) Colin then gets more firmly into perzine territory by writing about early life in a small, agricultural community always behind in the times. From the eye-opening impact from ‘Ovary Action’ to the seriousness of HIV/AIDS awareness that fed into ‘Put A Lid on It’.

The layering of the lyrics within the perzine is excellent. Everything feels smooth from writing, to lyrics, and back to Colin’s writing again. Yeastie Girlz explores topics of sexuality within relationships as well as self-exploration set against the contrasting backgrounds of punk music and small town religion.

As someone who has also grown up with music that impacted me deeply and songs that act like time machines to certain points in my life, I didn’t need to know the specific songs to enjoy this zine. (If anything, discovering new-to-me music makes it all the more fun.) There’s even a small reference section, which I always appreciate.

All up, Yeastie Girlz Saved My Life: How Punk Made Me Less of An Asshole was a very interesting read. The fact that I also grew up in a fairly small agricultural place with plenty of churches around made the comparisons and contrasts all the more interesting for me. I almost feel like this zine could be a ‘taster’ and there’s even more to explore.

But, of course, I’ll leave that up to Colin.”

Yes Nyx, there is more to explore when it comes to the positive influence of punk culture and the next zine in the series, Fugazi Saved My Life: How Punk Made Me Less of an Asshole, which takes readers to a life changing concert experience in September 1993 is being printed as this update is being typed. It may already be in stores by the time you read this.

And the 2025 finished off with a review published on the Personal Punk blog.

“Based in Portland, Oregon, Microcosm Publishing (Est. 1996) are an independent publisher and distributor of print media firmly rooted in the DIY punk ethic. That the company named “2022-2024’s fastest growing publisher by Publishers Weekly” still put out wonderful little zines like this is nothing short of life-affirming. The latest in Colin Burrowes’ series on bands that changed his life tells the tale of how an all-girl ‘vaginacore acapella rap’ group challenged the values of his community and upbringing. A cautionary tale of generational toxic traditions, it also serves as a sobering reminder of how so many never escape its grasp.

Growing up in a Christian Conservative-dominated rural community in the 80s (“there was one set of traffic lights in town, but it was serviced by 20 churches”), a hunger for learning that didn’t fit the strictures of formal education led Colin on hitch-hikes and bus rides to libraries, book shops and record stores. It was here he discovered punk rock, Lookout! Records, Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll and, in 1988, YEASTIE GIRLZ. For a young man squished through the meat grinder of male-dominated Christian Conservatism, the impact was seismic. The band’s music-free, punk-spirited raps on censorship, sex and feminism not only opened his eyes as a young’ un but also equipped him with the tools to move forward in life as a decent man. Using the topics covered on the bands’ Ovary Action EP as springboards, Colin waxes lyrical on sex, pornography, masturbation, religious hypocrisy, toxic masculinity and family, spinning his refreshingly open-hearted tale with concise, engaging prose.

Back in those pre-internet days, YEASTIE GIRLZ never reached these ears, though I’d clocked them in the zines. Listening now, the acapella-rap aspect is something of a shock so I can only imagine the impact on Colin in the context of the hardcore punk scene of the time. The lack of music, sure, but the forthright feminism of the lyrics clearly landed at just the right time to challenge the patriarchal toxicity of his surroundings – and that’s really something, when you stop to think about it. Those happy accidents, the ‘sliding doors’ moments that take us down different paths are at once almost beyond comprehension, yet magical in their sublimity. Oozing compassion, empathy and a thoughtful intelligence, everything the anti-woke brigade envies, this little ‘zine brings a sprinkle of that magic into the world. Feed your head!”

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