Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay (eds.)
Verso, New York. 2011, Paper 370 Pages
Reviewed by Benjamin
Shepard
Thursday, September
22, 2011, I headed out by bike to ride up to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where my
buddy Ron and I planned to attend the book party for Stephen Duncombe and Max
Tremblay’s new work, White Riot, a collection of first-person
writing, lyrics, letters to zines, and analyses of punk history on issues of
racial identity. Bringing together writing from leading music critics,
personal reflections from punk pioneers, scholarly essays from academics, and
reports on punk scenes from around the world, the book offers a new perspective
on a movement which many of us thought we already knew.
I have loved writing
about, as well as listening and performing the music since some time between
sixth and seventh grade, three decades ago. My love affair with this
music started the morning I walked downstairs for breakfast to witness my
mother crying as she watched the Today Show delivering the news that John
Lennon had been killed. Darby Crash of the Germs died the same week,
icons of flower power and punk tripping off into a whirlwind as violent and
colorful as the lives they long lived. I would not hear about Crash’s
suicide until reading about it in Belsito and Davis’sHardcore California,
a history of punk and new wave. And I was blown away by the coincidence.
There was something powerful in the synchronicity of this moment that
could not just be chance. Books such as this helped usher me into a world
outside of my own life in suburban Dallas, Texas. They brought me to new
ways of looking at the world, reading, points of departure for my bike trips
around the city, as well as new destinations. I would ride my bike to VVV
Records in Dallas’ gay ghetto of Cedar Springs. Along the way, they helped me
see the pearls in the seaweed, in between the cracks in abandoned vacant lots
where I had previously only seen weeds. They helped me see some of the
secret treasures. I rode to Greenville Ave to check out Metamorphosis
Records and to a thrift shop which sold Vivian Westwood designs. It was
owned by Peggy Sue Fender, the widow of James Honeyman-Scott, the base player
with the Pretenders who had died of a drug overdose the previous year. It
reminded me there was a power in rebuilding lives outside of what he previously
thought we had. These stores had flyers advertising shows, retro movies,
and late night screenings of the Rocky Horror Picture, which at the time had
been showing in Dallas for some seven years straight. What punk offered was a
whole other way of experiencing the city and the suburbs, of challenging the
injustice supporting silences, the blandification, the monoculture. Punk
reminded us there was always something below the surface of the pretty picture
of the suburbs, a dark underbelly with luscious blue velvet.
Psychoanalyst Carl
Jung would describe this underbelly as the shadow of this experience, the
unhappy doppelganger lurking in the periphery of our existence, yet all too
often ignored. There in Dallas, the shadow was what put the city on the map
three decades prior with the assassination of a young president. We’d
pass the Texas School Book Depository, where one of JFK’s assassins was thought
to shoot, each night we drove to see shows in Deep Ellum in Dallas. By
then, two decades after the assassination, a different kind of shadow extended
itself over the region, with a rash of teen suicides in the Dallas suburb of
Plano (28 in 1982), which drew national attention to the problem of teens who
felt isolated from the football-loving suburban culture. “Number of Teen-Age
Suicides Alarms Parents in Texas City,” declared The New York Times on
September 4, 1983. Everyone in Dallas could feel the tension between
those competing social forces that year, two decades after the president’s
assassination.
This feeling was
certainly on my mind when the iconic San Francisco punk band the Dead Kennedys
planned to play in Dallas that spring. One of my neighbors scolded me for
wearing my DK t-shirt a week before the show. Driving to the show with my
older brother, I felt butterflies. Entering the club, I felt like I was
part of a new world, which felt real and foreboding. It was a little scary to
watch people hurl themselves into each other, “slam dance” as they called it
back then. I watched in awe as person after person hurled his body off
the stage into the amoeba like scene of the crowd. Yet, they trusted the crowd,
which most of the time held them. It was a scene both tender and violent.
This was a space for difference, a space to express some of those
“burning ambitions” for something bigger, brighter, and more real. It was
something to really feel.
Much of this was on my
mind three decades later as I rode through the rain up to the release party for White
Riot, held in Death By Audio, a club on South 2nd Street in
Greenpoint/Williamsberg in North Brooklyn. Arriving, Ron was inside drinking a
beer. And Steve walked up and gave us a hug. We’d known Steve since
our days with the Lower East Side Collective and Reclaim the Streets back in
the late 1990′s. Duncombe had contributed to our anthology, From
ACT UP to the WTO, published the same year as his collected volume, Cultural
Resistance Reader. Since then, Duncombe published The Bobbed
Headed Bandit, with Andrew Mattson, and Dream, his work on
the politics of fantasy and creativity, inspired in part by those late 1990s
activist groups. White Riotclosely resembles Cultural
Resistance Reader. Both include eclectic collections of essays and
studies on the role of culture in social and political movements, with
extensive notes and introductions before each essay. The effect is
to connect the stories into a larger cultural study.
Duncombe and Tremblay
both read from their wonderful introduction, their words offering a homage to
punk and the politics of race in aesthetics, music, and the culture industry in
the U.S. I had never really thought much about punk and race until
Duncombe started reading about his memories of performing with his short lived
high school band, White Noise, sometimes with a Swastika on his shirt. “For us,
the swastika was nine parts shock value,” confessed Duncombe. “The 1970’s
marked the beginnings of the postmodern playhouse we live in today, where
seemingly anything can be appropriated, recouped, and made safe. In the
swastika we were looking for something that would resist appropriation and
commodification,” (p.5).
Listening to Duncombe
read I remembered that uncomfortable feeling of watching the bald headed white
men with shaved heads known as “skinheads” at that Dead Kennedy’s show back in
’83. What was it about those skinheads which bothered me? In later
years, I would learn more and more about the ways machismo worked as a cover
for an espousal of racial purity.
One of the fun things
about seeing the final product of a book such as this is to reflect on the ways
one has heard the authors discuss the inherent ideas represented in other
venues— walking the streets, at coffee sheets, etc. Earlier in the year,
Duncombe previewed his argument for White Riotas a group of us sat
at my house watching old movies, including Penelope Spheeris’s The
Decline of Western Civilization. I recall watching the black and
white previews of bodies lunging to and fro in the 1981 film in the Inwood
Theater in Dallas. Watching a vhs copy of the movie decades later with a
group of friends, Duncombe pointed out the second singer for Black Flag, Ron
Reyes, was from Puerto Rico. He railed against a “White Majority” and
eventually quit the group when the white Surf Punks started dominating their
shows, in a frenzy of violence. In the 1950′s, LA surfers had taken to horsing
around in Nazi uniforms their fathers had brought back from the war. Two
decades later, their sartorial gestures felt anything but frivolous. Watching
the film, one can see the multi-racial, multi-gender image of punk shows
overwhelmed with images of white bodies, as skinheads from Orange Country start
to dominate the scene, bringing racism, misogyny, and homophobia with them.
Darby Crash of the Germs is seen contending with objects hurled at him during
the shows. He would kill himself in a Bowie-inspired “Rock and Roll
Suicide” the week John Lennon died. He was gone by the time the film was
released in 1981. Along with him, the image of queer bodies would be obscured
from the scene, as images of AIDS and Reagan marked a new decade. The
Germs served as a bridge between the liberation politics of the genderfuck
Cockettes of the early 1970’s and the DIY world punk, activism, and Queercore
of the late 1970s and 80’s (see Shepard, 2010). Their dada like screams
an homage to cultural resistance which would become Duncombe’s long term
subject.
“This isn’t white
reggae,” Duncombe quoted Joe Strummer introducing the Clash’s anthem “Police
and Thieves.” “This is punk and reggae. There’s a difference
between a ripoff and bringing some of our culture to another culture” (p. 7).
For Duncombe, this meant “’Punk and reggae’ not one culture subsumed by
the other, but both standing side by side, shoulder to shoulder. Featured
on the band’s self-titled first album, “Police and Thieves” was my favorite
Clash song. I had stumbled across it on a trip to the record store to buy
“Cheap Trick Live at Budokan.” Along with the Ramones, their music
provided the emotional resonance for the 1979 teenage gang rebellion movie
“Over the Edge,” about biking together, hanging out, rioting, and building
community – instead of caving into the ennui of the suburbs like the Plano kids
had done that same year. With kids on bikes locking their parents in
school during a PTA meeting, they smashed cop cars and eventually burned down
their own recreation center. The film pointed to something exciting yet
ultimately nihilistic in the milieu of suburban life and resistance culture.
Watching the bike chase scenes through suburban California, this scene did not
feel that much different from the mall rat like existence I knew in Dallas.
While the adrenaline of those scenes and the music was tantalizing, there
had to be something more to this passion, which walked the line between
destructive and a creative forces. As Bakunin would famously describe:
“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”
Unable to put my
finger on the paradoxical nature of Bakunin’s sentiment, I was drawn back to
the Clash, which offered an outlet and direction for this passion. Part of what
drew people to the Clash was the intelligence they brought their passionate
music. Paul Simonon,
the band’s base player, was intimately aware of the racist subtext of a small
subculture of Nazi punks, the edge of which pushed Darby Crash to the brink and
drove Ron Reyes out of Black Flag. Some of these Nazi punks were even
drawn to the Clash, even as they flirted with the British National Front.
“[W]hen we play reggae, it’s sort of like turning them on to black music
– which helps lead them away from that racist feeling they might have,” noted
Simonon in a 1978 interview featured in the collection. “Which is like changing
them. Also from what we’ve done, it’s made loads of kids that would normally
go around wrecking up streets and fucking up cars, form groups. They’re
doing something creative, which I think is really important – and they’re doing
it and they’re enjoying it…” (p. 170).
Of course, this is the
point of DIY culture – to take what one has and build something with that,
regardless of the barriers. This is the spirit of both punk and hip-hop
(which feels strangely absent from the volume). It is also the bridge
between Duncombe’s work playing music, DIY culture, and his first book on
zines, Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of
Underground Culture. The year this book was published, 1997, Duncombe
helped form the Lower East Collective, an organizing collective which seemed to
embody this DIY ethos. “All of us with a relationship to the punk scene
brought something to it and took something from it,” note Duncombe and Tremblay
in their intro. “Punk mattered, and it still matters. There is something
to that, when it works, is incredibly effective. Take, for example, the
efforts of punk-influenced political gestures like Reclaim the Streets, Food
Not Bombs, and the Icarus Project or even the mass globalization
protests, which applied punk style, strategy and infrastructure to other
forms of organization,” (p. 17). It meant a lot for a lot of us.
I’ll never forget
buying that first Clash album. In an interview in the mid-1980’s Elton
John talked about how he used to ride his bike to the record store and buy the
new Beatles album whenever it came out. Looking at the cover to Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, he said he was blown away looking at
the cover, before even putting the album on the turntable. I felt the
same way when I bought that first Clash record. It was through the Clash
that I learned what Sandinista meant. It was through this music that I
learned that the irresistible creative force inside us can be channeled in a
positive direction. In listening to their music or watching films with their
members – such as the movies Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous
Stains or Suburbia– I felt like I was connected to a
larger narrative of resistance culture, yet this one could take us somewhere.
What were we resisting – monoculture, racism, misogyny, homophobia, capitalism
– all of these things, yet there was more to it.
Walking a fine line
between creativity and destruction, so many from the movement were consumed.
One of the last songs recorded by Joy Division before Ian Curtis killed
himself, was “She’s Lost
Control,” a song about a client Curtis had known when he was a social
worker. Like him, she suffered from epilepsy and finally died.
Curtis wrote the lyrics, which feel like they could have been about him:
And she showed up all
the errors and mistakes,
And said I’ve lost control again.
But she expressed herself in many different ways,
Until she lost control again.
And walked upon the edge of no escape,
And laughed I’ve lost control.
She’s lost control again.
She’s lost control.
She’s lost control again.
She’s lost control.
I could live a little
better with the myths and the lies,
When the darkness broke in, I just broke down and cried.
I could live a little in a wider line,
When the change is gone, when the urge is gone,
To lose control. When here we come.
The force to create is
the force to live, even when one is losing control.
Finishing their
reading, Duncombe and Tremblay passed the mike to journalist and music writer
Siddhartha Mitter, who read from his hilarious and potent essay on Taquacore, a
punk genre which builds on and rejects both Muslim tradition and white culture.
“If there was any music capacious enough for all of this, it to be punk –
with its embrace of contradiction and its zest for the absurd, the historic,
and cultural references making energy out of collision like bodies in the mosh
pit” (p. 235). This collision of bodies is part of what gives the
movement its democratic vitality, for at its core this clash between audience
and performer implies that neither can really create resistance culture absent
each other. ”We are all the show,” we declared at Occupy Broadway, a
24-hour performance in a privately owned public space a few weeks back, as a
new social movement took steam in the streets of a New York City neighborhood
where the Clash played for weeks. Everyone is the show. This
is part of the horizontalism that propels this movement, connecting 1968 with
1999 and 2011.
Watching the London
riots of Notting Hill in 1976 inspired Joe Strummer to write the song “White
Riot” from their first album. Before he died, Joe Strummer mused that he
really became who he was watching the events of 1968. The Clash seemed to
channel the fury of the MC5 performance during the Democratic National
Convention of that year. “The music is the source and the effect of our
spirit flesh,” MC5’s John Sinclair wrote in the liner notes for Kick Out the
Jams, featured in White Riot. “[J]ust as you are. Just as I
am. Just to hear the music and have it be ourselves, is what we want.
What we need. We are a lonely desperate people, pulled apart by the
killer forces of capitalism and competition, and we need the music to hold us
together. Separation is doom… [W]e demand a free music, a free high
energy source that will drive us wild into the streets of America yelling and
screaming and tearing down everything that would keep people slaves…. There
is no separation. Everything is everything. There is nothing
to fear. The music will make you strong, as it is strong, and there is no
way it can be stopped. All power to the people! … Go wild!
The world is yours! Take it now and be one with it! Kick out the
jams, motherfucker! And stay alive with the MC5!” (p. 29).
Rare does a reader
bring a new perspective on a genre of writing and cultural criticism that has
already produced so much over the last four decades. But this is what White
Riot does. It helps us see punk as a resistance narrative with
deep roots and burning ambitions still inspiring, chronicling, rioting,
grieving, fighting the power, and kicking out the jams! As the reading
ended on September 22, Max Tremblay’s band, the SLEEPiES, took over. It
was an apt ending for a night of reading, stories, rain, and homage to those
performing through the flames.
References
Joy Division. 1980. She’s Lost Control. Unknown Pleasures.
Shepard, B. (2010).
Play and World Making: From Gay Liberation to DIY Community Building. In Dan
Berger. The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (p.177-94).
Rutgers University Press.
