Kembrew McLeod’s Prairie Pop column has covered the culture of flyover country since 2001

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When I wrote about Awful Purdies’ 20th anniversary for last month’s column, Kate Rowe joked that the band was her longest-running relationship. “It’s actually been part of my entire adult life,” she said. “I was one year out of college when I joined this band.” Rowe’s quip struck a chord because it made me realize that Prairie Pop, this column, predates my relationship with my wife Lynne Nugent by a couple years.

When I was approached to write for Little Village in 2001, it never occurred to me that I’d be at it a quarter century later. The publication is part of the fabric of my life, which has been spent in the independent media ecosystem since before I was an adult. My DIY publishing career started back during the mid-1980s when I donated some of my demented comics to a friend’s photocopied punk rock zine in Virginia Beach.

I had no intention of ever moving to the Midwest until I interviewed for my current job at the University of Iowa’s Communication Studies department and fell in love with Iowa City. During my visit in the spring of 2000, the head of the search committee took me to see David Zollo at the Green Room, and Dave gave me a copy of his most recent CD after the show. I wound up liking Uneasy Street so much that I reviewed it for The Valley Advocate, and after one of Dave’s relatives who lived in the area sent him a copy, it sparked an email conversation.

Dave connected me with the folks at Icon, which led to me writing a bi-weekly column starting the week I arrived in Iowa City. I couldn’t have been more fortunate moving to a new town and immediately being plugged into local culture via this alt-weekly. It’s how I grew roots. When Icon folded a year later, a few core staffers were in the planning stages of launching Little Village when they asked me to be a founding columnist.

Fun fact: This column’s name was coined in an outdoor hot tub with a half dozen friends on a cold spring evening. My pal Shari created a fizzy citrusy cocktail that she called “Prairie Pop,” and a few drinks in, we all agreed that this should definitely be the name of my column.

When I started writing Prairie Pop in 2001, I wanted to create a forum to showcase cultural outsiders. These intellectual preoccupations permeate much of my work, which has explored the links between alternative media, the spaces that cultivate oppositional social practices and the people who populate these communities. As I learned from living in Iowa City, the cultural peripheries in so-called “flyover country” can also incubate the same sorts of oppositional practices that happen in coastal cities.

One notable IC creative I profiled is Nicholas Johnson, who was the Federal Communications Commission’s “house hippie” and the only commissioner (and most likely, Iowa Citian) to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone, in 1971. When he was a schoolboy in the mid-1940s, Johnson built a short-lived pirate radio station that wound up drowning out the local station WSUI. This irreverent act anticipated his rabble-rousing career in the 1960s and ’70s steering media policy. During his time at the FCC, he successfully advocated for community media (like public access television) before returning to his hometown to teach law.

Prairie Pop has also spotlighted another UI professor who made an unlikely contribution to popular culture: the laser light show. Lowell Cross refined this new media art form in Iowa City beginning in the early 1970s, where he blew people’s minds at Hancher and other venues with his Argon laser necromancy. Before he arrived in town, Cross was tapped by experimental composer John Cage to build an electronic chessboard that could trigger sounds during a game he played with Dadaist Marcel Duchamp. Hands-down, he has a much cooler CV than yours truly.

Over the years, I have featured current and former Iowa City residents who were part of the national and international zine scene, such as the writer Andrea Lawlor, who created an irreverent fanzine (Judy!) that was dedicated to Judith Butler when she was an undergraduate at UI. Another important figure in this underworld was Lloyd Dunn, a member of the sound collage group the Tape-beatles and the publisher of PhotoStatic Magazine.

Another favorite interviewee was Dan Perkins, a.k.a. Tom Tomorrow, who launched the long-running strip This Modern World while working at a local copy shop. My Prairie Pop column also covered a documentary about The Storm Lake Times, a family-run community newspaper in northern Iowa that is run by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Art Cullen (his family comprises half of the small staff). It was an honor to talk to Cullen for my story about family, community and fact-based journalism. 

The most fun column to research was about Gabe’s Oasis, a venerable Iowa City music venue with a half-century musical history. It hosted cosmic cowboy country acts in the 1970s, touring SST punk acts during the 1980s and a pre-fame Nirvana in the early 1990s, while also becoming a key site for the Midwest’s techno music scene.

One of thousands of acts that performed at Gabe’s is Rehtek, a metal band founded by three members of the Meskwaki Nation tribe who weave Indigenous cultural references into their music and lyrics. As Native Americans who are working within a white-dominated musical genre, they exist in the margins. The same can be said of the hip-hop artists I profiled in my pieces on the Des Moines battle rap scene and the capital city’s graffiti art underground.

In addition to covering local and regional artists, I’ve been privileged to be able to talk to several paradigm-shifting musicians and artists: Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Shabazz Palaces, Richard Hell, Paul Reubens, John Waters and Public Enemy’s Chuck D, which barely scratches the surface of the dozens of iconoclasts who appeared in Prairie Pop.

One of my favorite interviews was with Laurie Anderson, who answered questions posed by my then-2-year-old son Alasdair, because he was obsessed with watching her videos on YouTube at the time. “Yaaaaaay! A 2-year-old fan,” Anderson said. “I love it. I am so happy to hear that, I tell you.” I concluded the interview by asking her what advice she had for an aspiring toddler performance artist.

“Be as playful as possible. Most of the things that I’ve made, I’ve made in the spirit of goofing around with stuff. Goofing around. Be playful. Have a really good time and you’ll find some interesting things, but kids don’t need to be told to play. They just want to play, you know? So I really respect that about kids.”

Words to live by.

This article was originally published in Little Village’s July 2026 issue.