I don’t remember the first time I heard a racist joke at a punk rock show. Rather, I don’t remember the first time I was grabbed into a sweaty half-hug by one of the laughing white members of my Midwest punk scene and told don’t worry about it. We don’t think of you that way. I don’t remember the first time I saw a teenage girl shoved out of the way so that a teenage boy her size, or greater, could have a better view of a stage. I don’t remember the first time that I made an excuse for being a silent witness.
I don’t remember the first time I noticed the small group in the back corner of a punk show at the Newport Music Hall (one of the many venues that I fell in and out of love with in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio), all of them, in some way, pushed out of the frenzied circle of bodies below, and the alleged loving violence that comes with it. I do remember the first time I became one of the members of that group in the back corner of shows. At 18, I hung in the back corner of the Newport and watched NOFX with the rest of the kids who didn’t quite fit, or at least became tired of attempting to fit. I looked around and saw every version of other, as I knew it. The black kids, the girls my age and younger, the kids most fighting with the complexities of identity. We sat back and watched while NOFX tore through an exceptionally loud version of “Don’t Call Me White,” and watched below, as a monochromatic sea crashed against itself.
There is nothing simple about this. What we’re sold about punk rock is that anyone can pick up an instrument and go, something that we’ve seen proven time and time again by a wide number of awful bands. But even in a genre that prides itself on simplicity, the complexities of erasure and invisibility in punk rock go deep. It is hard to hear the word “brotherhood” without also thinking of the weight behind what it carries with it in this country, and beyond. When I still hear and read the punk rock scene referred to as a “brotherhood,” I think about what it takes to build a brotherhood in any space. Who sits at the outskirts, or who sits at the bottom while the brotherhood dances oblivious and heavy at the top. In the punk landscape, we are often given imagery that reflects the most real truths of this scene: the exclusion of people of color, of women, of the queer community, and that exclusion being sometimes explicit, sometimes violent, but almost always in direct conflict with the idea of punk rock as a place for rebellion against (among other things) identity.
A friend recently posed a question to me, similar to one that Lester Bangs wrote about being posed to him (in 1979’s “The White Noise Supremacists”):
Well, what makes you think the attitudes of racism and exclusion in the punk scene are any different from that of the rest of the world?
The answer, of course, is that they aren’t. Or at least it is all born out of the same system. In the ’70s, the answer was perhaps easier to digest. That punk rock, born in part out of a need for white escape, just wasn’t prepared to consider a revolution that involved color, or involved women as anything that the scene deemed useful. That, of course, also being a reflection of the time. Today, we sit back and watch seemingly evolved artists talk about tearing down these large political structures and uniting the masses, and making safe spaces for everyone who wants to come out and enjoy music, but the actual efforts to build and create these spaces fall extremely short, as evidenced (in one example) by Jake McElfresh being allowed to play Warped Tour. McElfresh has a now admitted history of preying on underage girls, a demographic that the touring music showcase predominantly caters toward.
It is a luxury to romanticize blood, especially your own. It is a luxury to be able to fetishize violence, especially the violence that you inflict upon others. To use it as a bond, or to call it church, or to build an identity around it while knowing that everyone you can send home bloody will not come back for revenge. To walk home bloody. To walk home at night. At the time of writing this, a video is circulating of a black man being killed by police, on camera. Before this, there was another black man. And a black boy. And black women vanishing in jail. And black trans women vanishing into the night. I do not blame punk rock for this.
I instead ask to consider the impact of continuing to glorify a very specific type of white violence and invisibility of all others in an era where there is a very real and very violent erasure of the bodies most frequently excluded from the language, culture, and visuals of punk rock. I ask myself who it serves when I see countless images showing examples of why “punk rock is a family,” images with only white men. It does no good to point at a neighborhood of burning houses while also standing in a house on fire. It is true, now, the flames in the house of punk may climb up the walls more slowly than, say, the flames in the Fox News building. But the house is still on fire. Too often, the choice in punk rock and D.I.Y. spaces for non-white men is a choice between being tokenized, or being invisible. Having experienced both, I chose the latter, and then chose to stop going to as many shows altogether. Which isn’t mentioned in sadness. To watch the casual packaging of a violence that impacts and affects bodies that look like yours, and to watch that violence knowing that you have no place in it, other than to take it in, feels similar to being black every other place in America.
After reading a few poems about being black at punk rock shows in Boston a few months ago, a black woman came up to me. We talked about our experiences in our respective scenes, how we eventually got less excited about them, and gravitated toward the Afropunk festival. Where the music may not be rooted in the short/fast/loud assault of sound that permeated my Midwest upbringing, the dreamt-of ethos of punk is there. The idea of finding your own tribe, and keeping the circle open. An idea that I think many traditional punk scenes struggle toward, or have forgotten about, in part because when you create the tribe, the concept of opening a circle to those who seem different never crosses your mind.
When I left the last Afropunk festival I went to, I remembered that I wasn’t alone. Afropunk by itself isn’t going to save us, or dismantle a racist world, but if punk rock was born, in part, out of the need for white escape, Afropunk signals something provided for black escape from what the actions of white escape breeds. The fantasies that it, often violently, provides its young men with, and the people who suffer beneath those fantasies, vanishing. Like all dismantling of supremacy, punk, D.I.Y., and likeminded scenes have to cut to the core, and rewire the whole operation. There has to be an urgency to this; the world demands it. There is no war, but for the one that is claiming actual casualties. It is outside. And the bodies all look the same. There is no option now but to be honest about that.
Last year, I was at a Brand New show. One where, in typical Brand New fashion, they charged through half of their set and dragged through the back half. It was a hot night, and even hotter in the venue, a closed-in brick space with few windows. I stood upstairs, looking down. Halfway through “Sic Transit Gloria… Glory Fades,” I noticed the only black kid in the pit had passed out. Likely due to heat, or the physical nature of the pit. As a few of us above pointed, to try and draw attention, I watched his peers step over him; some kicked him, in the pursuit to keep dancing. To maybe touch the edge of the stage that their heroes graced.
The prone body of this black boy, unnoticed and consumed by noise, and moving feet. Already forgotten.
It was jarring. Another example of how expendable the black body can be when in the way of needs that are greater than it, the range of those needs changing by the hour, or second. It was another image of black fragility and dismissal, of course not as harsh as videos of guns firing into black men, or the force feeding of mugshots we get when a dead victim is black. But it was a reminder that choosing invisibility means giving yourself over to what so many systems in this country already deem you. Punk rock, as it stands now, being no different.
Eventually, as the song winded down (ironically with the line “die young and save yourself,” a line that I used to have scrawled on a notebook before I got older and started to quite enjoy living, or at least stopped finding death romantic), I watched the boy sit up, shake his head, and gingerly stand up. He looked around, and slowly made his way to the back of the venue. Like I did when I was his age. After the show, I aimed to find him, to at least make eye contact. There is something powerful in someone who looks like you actually seeing you. I never caught up to him, and I don’t know what I would have said if I did. I don’t know how to be honest enough to say that there isn’t a place for kids like us, so we need to make our own, and nothing is more punk rock than that. Nothing is more punk rock than surviving in a hungry sea of white noise.