Content area
Full text
"There aren't any blacks."
—"Slam Dancing: Checking in With L.A. Punk." Woody Hochswender. 1981. Rolling Stone.
"A large number of hardcore people in New York are Hispanic, black, oriental, and Jewish.…"
—the editorial staff of Guillotine (#8), 1984.
"There is no hint of any derivation from Black music."
—"England's Screaming: The Music." Greg Shaw, Bomp, Nov 1977.
"Punk is white and suburban."
—Mykel Board, Maximumrocknroll. 1986.
For three decades, African Americans have often been depicted in mainstream and even independent media almost exclusively as embodying the living legacy of a hip hop nation, signified by such media as an urban, often misogynist and materialistic, "street level" musical genre and lifestyle. Such representation effectively diminishes, or even negates, through absence or scant coverage, their contemporary influence on rock 'n' roll and punk. In doing so, the media perpetuates hegemonic, master narrative notions of blacks as a homogeneous community, easily containable "others" without nuance and individuation. I seek to interrogate the common misconception of punk, essentially a Do-it-Yourself and participatory subculture, as a white (or Anglo) cultural phenomenon.
As Daniel Traber notes, the very nature of punk within the commodity market echoes black culture; punk established a permanent alternative to the corporate apparatus of the mainstream music industry by returning to a system of independent labels that resembled the distribution of post-World War II "race music" that influenced the white rockers of the 1950s (32). As punk writer Chris Salewicz posits, "more important is the way punk still is presented, which is through the rootsiest musical business set-up that exists outside of reggae." Members of the Bellrays—guitarist Tony Fate and singer Lisa Kekaula—suggest that punk's roots go as far back as 1918 and include Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, while Mike Watt, former bass player for the Minutemen, links his own tour circuit and DIY ethos back to vaudeville and burlesque (Testa). Bruce Davis attests that the Ramones were "like the jazz musicians of the 1950s and the blues players of the 1960s who would play in clubs to a relatively small devoted following, and then go to Europe where they'd be greeted as heroes" (10). Vic Bondi, singer for Articles of Faith (a 1980s Chicago band with a taste for reggae, funk, and...