In this presentation, two musician-educators present a collaboratively curated duoethnographic account of their collective and respective creative processes producing DIY reggae/ska/punk EP, Road Rage and associated music videos before discussing implications of this project for their day jobs as an elementary school teacher in Canada and a music education professor in the United States. The Toronto, Canada-based bandleader, songwriter and “skalar”, invited the Boston, US-based “punkademic” drummer to record drums for an EP of five songs that explore quotidien and personally meaningful topics that include abandonment, revenge, police encounters, and authentic expression through music recording and performance. Complementing and contrasting the songs’ lyrics, the music videos prioritize silliness and fun, underscoring the value of playfulness in navigating complex human lives.Following commonplace DIY musicking practices of multilocated recording and file-sharing (Smith & Gillett 2015), this duo sidestepped commercial imperatives to adopt instead the DIY ethos of making music and video based on their aesthetic preferences (Bennett & Guerra 2023) and artistic integrity (Levellers 1991; Smith 2017). In centering non-commercial, DIY music and film making, this presentation builds on recent scholarship that illustrates the potential of both a duoethnographic research approach and DIY media making practice for modeling and inspiring among elementary- and tertiary-level students, arts praxis that centers collective humanity and joyful effervescence. This focus contrasts energetically with contemporary Western / global Northern society’s pervasive hegemonic ideology of competitive hyper-individualism (Giroux 2020; Lee 2025; Lee & Smith 2023; Quigley & Smith 2022). The two presenters barely knew one another before embarking on this project, and now they share a friendship through artmaking.The EP’s lyrics model for students, emotional expression and processing in song and video, issues and concerns they may find challenging to articulate or work through in other contexts (Hess, 2023), thereby potentially rendering schooling and lifewide music learning (Jones 2009) healthier experiences that center connection, friendship and fulfilment and artistic citizenship (Boyce-Tillman 2020; Silverman 2020; Smith & Lee 2025). The presenters encourage fellow educators to trouble the notion of “popular music” as implicitly commercially orientated, emphasizing instead the empowering DIY ethos of self-expression in and through making music that might actually be thoroughly unpopular. The presentation features audio and video excerpts from the independently released Road Rage EP.