Out of the Basement tells the story of underground music in post-industrial Rockford, Illinois. This is a bracing, candid, democratic and cutting edge portrayal of a rust belt city full of rebel kids making DIY music despite the odds. It combines oral history, brutally honest memoir, music history, and a sense of blunt poetics to capture the ethos of life in the 1970s-2000s, long before the Internet made punk accessible to small towners.