Youth music is the most creative and contested location on the cultural landscape. It is a vehicle for generational moods and aspirations, a public refuge for fantasies outlawed in daily life, a testing ground for technical ingenuity, an enormously profitable commercial channel for mainstream narratives of thought and behavior, and one of the corporate state's main theatres for national moral panic. Today's sounds, and the debates about their various forms, are inseparable from the social conditions of the last two decades: class polarization, racial marginalization, and economic violence enacted to a degree that has left youth, as a whole, with drastically reduced opportunities in life. Youth culture is still responding to these uneven developments with a passion that has been romanticized by some critics as a significant form of resistance, and denigrated by others as an avoidance of direct and political protest. Microphone Fiends, a collection of original essays andinterviews, brings together some of the best known scholars, critics, journalists and performers to focus on the contemporary scene. It includes theoretical discussions of musical history along with social commentaries about genres like disco, metal and rap music, and case histories of specific movements like the Riot Grrls, funk clubbing in Rio de Janeiro, and the British rave scene. The contents of the volume engage with the broad tradition of cultural studies and sociology of youth music and culture, but they are also designed to address audiences reached by mainstream music journalism and fans of any musical taste.