Global Punk: Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday Life 9781628926057, 9781628926040, 9781501314636, 9781628926064

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE Punk Won:A Conversation with Ian MacKaye
CHAPTER ONE Punk Matters: DIY Punk and the Politics of Resistance
What is punk?
The politics of punk?
About the book
CHAPTER TWO You’re Not Punk and I’m Telling Everyone: Oppositional Identities and Disalienation
Nevermind the Bollocks, it’s Stevie Stiletto and the Switchblades
DIY Punk as an identity, identity as a process
Punk oppositional identities in practice
Disalienation and self-empowerment in DIY Punk
CHAPTER THREE Fuck Your Scene, Kid: The Power of Local Scenes10
Thinking about scenes
The local punk scene as a space for political engagement
Everyday politics of local DIY punk scenes
The fragility of scenes
CHAPTER FOUR Punk Goes the World: Global Networks, Counter-Hegemony, and the Contradictions of Globalization
Today your love, tomorrow the world:19 networked scenes and a global punk community
Do try this at home: the message is the medium, the medium is the message
Global punk: cultural imperialism or personal empowerment
CHAPTER FIVE If It Ain’t Cheap, It Ain’t Punk: Punk Record Labels and DIY as a (Anti-)Business Model
“When Hitsville hits the UK ”: a brief history of DIY record labels
Us versus Them: turning consumers into collaborators
“It was easy, it was cheap—go and do it!”: DIY punk in practice
Intentionally bad capitalists
CHAPTER SIX Satan Wears a Bra While Sniffin’ Glue and Eating Razorcake: Punk Zines and the Politics of DIY Self-publishing
Hidden in plain view: zines and DIY self-publishing
A short history of zines
Punk meets DIY self-publishing publishing, a love aff air ensues
Giving voice to the marginalized: the case of Riot Grrrl zines33
DIY punk zines and anti- status quo: more intentionally bad capitalists
Local zines, global form: zines and cultural transmissions
CHAPTER SEVEN Total Resistance to the Fucking System: Anarcho-punk and Resistancein Everyday Life
“Do they owe us a living? Of course they fucking do!”: a brief history of anarcho-punk
Conceiving anarchy
Practicing anarchy
Anarcho-punk as lifestyle anarchism?
Contradictions and shortcomings
POSTSCRIPT Punk Rock Won’t Change the World, It Already Has
NOTES
REFERENCES
INDEX

Citation preview

Global Punk

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Global Punk Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday Life KEVIN C. DUNN

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Kevin C. Dunn, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dunn, Kevin C., 1967– Title: Global punk : resistance and rebellion in everyday life / Kevin C. Dunn. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015038662| ISBN 9781628926057 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781628926040 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Punk rock music–Social aspects. | Punk rock music–Political aspects. | Punk culture. Classification: LCC ML3918.R63 D86 2015 | DDC 781.66–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038662 ISBN :

HB : PB : ePub : ePDF :

978-1-6289-2605-7 978-1-6289-2604-0 978-1-6289-2607-1 978-1-6289-2606-4

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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For Ray McKelvey aka Stevie Ray Stiletto (1956–2013) and Barrow and Strummer Dunn Riot Grrrls for the next generation

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments viii

Prologue. Punk Won: A Conversation with Ian MacKaye 1 1 Punk Matters: DIY Punk and the Politics of Resistance 9 2 You’re Not Punk and I’m Telling Everyone: Oppositional Identities and Disalienation 25 3 Fuck Your Scene, Kid: The Power of Local Scenes 61 4 Punk Goes the World: Global Networks, CounterHegemony, and the Contradictions of Globalization 97 5 If It Ain’t Cheap, It Ain’t Punk: Punk Record Labels and DIY as a (Anti-)Business Model 127 6 Satan Wears a Bra While Sniffin’ Glue and Eating Razorcake: Punk Zines and the Politics of DIY Selfpublishing 159 7 Total Resistance to the Fucking System: Anarcho-punk and Resistance in Everyday Life 197 Postscript. Punk Rock Won’t Change the World, It Already Has 225 Notes 229 References 235 Index 251

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I want to thank the hundreds of punks, musicians, fans, writers, artists, booking agents, and record label owners who have spent time talking and hanging out with me over the years. This book is for and about you, and I hope I have done you justice. Special thanks goes to Deek Allen, Danny Bailey, Mitch Clem, Todd Congelliere, Anugrah Esa, Teuku Fariza, Daryl Gussin, Amanda Kirk, Rachmat Maggot, Ian MacKaye, Alex Martinez, Chris Mason, Anna McCarthy, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Evan O’Connor, Mack Peterson, John Piche, Marty Ploy, Liz Prince, Davey Quinn, Adith Reesucknotoz, Indra Saefullah, Ben Snakepit, Graham Stakem, Stevie Tombstone, Jennifer Whiteford, and Noah Wolf. In the academic world, there are many debts of gratitude that I owe, but I am particularly grateful to have such good friends in Morten Bøås, Charlie Bertsch, Matt Davies, Marianne Franklin, Kyle Grayson, Aida Hozic, Naeem Inayatullah, Cedric Johnson, Iver Neumann, David Ost, Simon Philpott, Nic Sammond, Eric Selbin, Ian Taylor, and Cindy Weber. I am fortunate to work at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, with supportive colleagues and a generous administration that has provided research funds for this project. Their unwavering support of academic freedom is also greatly appreciated. Special thanks to all my family and friends in Geneva and beyond, especially Laurel Allen, TJ Boisseau, Rob Carson, Chuck Crews, Ashley Dunn, Bill and Diane Dunn, Ian Dunn, James Emery Elkin, Pablo Falbru, May Summer Farnsworth, Ben Frazier, Jody Gardner, Bethany Haswell, James Haswell, Alex Hayden, Kirk Hoppe, Brady Leo, Steve Mank, Lee Peters, Amy Phillips, Brandon Phillips, Doug Reilly, Jason Rogers, Nick Ruth, Richard Salter, Mike Schill, Mark Swift, Anny Thompson, Jack Vickrey, Chris Welch, and Matt Werts. I was very fortunate that Sean Carswell, Mike Faloon, Matthew Kopel, Todd Taylor, and ten anonymous reviewers read early drafts of the entire manuscript. Their feedback was extremely useful and I am grateful for the time and energy they gave to this project. Thanks to everyone at Bloomsbury, especially Matthew Kopel, AllyJane Grossan, and Michelle Chen. Finally, I am extremely grateful to Anna Creadick for her constant support, love, and friendship. This book, like so many other things in my life, could not have been accomplished without her.

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PROLOGUE

Punk Won: A Conversation with Ian MacKaye Kevin: The argument of the book is that DIY punk matters, it empowers individuals, it empowers local scenes and communities, and also at the global level, it challenges corporate-led globalization. Ian: Those tenets on why punk matters are so obvious to me that they don’t even need to be necessarily spoken. It’s like something we breathe. I agree that it’s like breathing, it’s so obvious. It seems so internalized. Can you reflect on how DIY punk has impacted your own development, your own identity over the years? I guess I can’t because I can’t parse them. I don’t see DIY or punk as something that I can slip on. When I got involved in punk, of course it was DIY, because who else was going to do it? It’s the art of necessity. It wasn’t as if I went to a store, looked at a shelf, and thought, “Well, I can do it the ‘major label’ way, or I can do it the ‘DIY way.’ ” There was no choice in the matter. If we wanted to be in a band, we had to write our own songs. If we were going to play, we had to set up our own shows. If we wanted records, we had to make our own. These were necessities. It’s completely part and parcel of my life. So when you ask me to reflect upon what the punk or DIY thing has brought to me, it’s very difficult. I can talk about my introduction to punk, which was a good exercise in stretching my understanding. An example I’ve often used is that if you grew up in a typical American family and every night you have dinner, let’s say 1

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you have a hamburger or a pork chop and some vegetable. That’s dinner. And then you find yourself in an Asian country, and what’s put in front of you bears no resemblance to a hamburger or a pork chop, you learn that dinner is not limited to that particular construct that’s foisted upon you by your environment, your surroundings. You also find out quite often that what does not appear to be dinner actually is dinner, and is better for you. The same could be said about music or self-presentation or attitude. I was raised at a time when youth rebellion was sort of in the air. I was born in 1962, so I was growing up at a time where the hippies really held sway in my world. In many ways it was as if I was raised by them. I think the world was staggered by the whole youth rebellion. They were challenging conventional ways of thinking, turning it on its head. Then the seventies came along, and as a young teenager, I thought there was a real stasis. I couldn’t figure out what happened to the people who were truly alternative, really using completely alternative ways of approaching life. And in my limited scope, which was living in Washington, DC and going to public high schools, the only forms of rebellion I was really seeing came limited by selfdestruction. How were kids in high school rebelling at that time? They were getting high, drinking, and that tended to be pretty much the only thing on offer, which seemed absurd to me. I would think anyone would agree if they were to stand back and think about it. If you’re trying to rebel against society, you don’t volunteer to check out, you step to it. My first introduction to punk was learning how to stretch my understanding of what art or culture could be. I came across it almost by accident, this community of people that referenced the idea of actually challenging conventional thinking. That was something I was really looking for. The Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Ramones, all these bands. What I was hearing from that, what I gleaned from it, was self-definition. They were doing something that was so completely radical. There was a sense that you could celebrate self-definition, you could do whatever you want to do. Later on, people would say, “Well, that’s weird that you like this band, they’re on a major label,” but it didn’t matter to us. What mattered was that they were saying you could do whatever you want, and so we did. We had come from Washington, DC . We’re not from London, not from New York, not from Los Angeles. Major labels just didn’t exist in our world. I think of and write about DIY punk as a way of being. Not as a lifestyle choice, but a way of inhabiting the world. What you’re saying resonates with me. You mentioned Washington there at the end, so I want to talk to you about local scenes as places for building communities and for nurturing the elements for self-empowerment. Can you reflect on that, in your own experience in Washington, as well as some scenes that you’ve just seen around the world, where DIY punks are engaging in this community building.

PROLOGUE

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For me, the idea is that people have an option to wake up with something to do that they want to do. That seems, to me, the ideal, no matter how much work it is. The problem in our society for many people, I think most people, is that they wake up everyday with something to do that they don’t want to do. If you made a decision to drop out of that world, or to try something differently, then you risk something. You might feel a little lonely, but I think ultimately you find other people who share this ideal. They tend to clump together in such a way that you may find out that you have your own, I guess, community, for lack of a better term. Having said that, I have been trying to avoid using the word “community” because it has been so abused by corporations and the media. I mean, who wants to be a part of the McDonald’s community?! I hear what you’re saying, but how would you then talk about what was and what has been achieved, say, in DC? Around Dischord Records, around bands, and zines to create something—again, I’m stumbling around the word “community.” It’s just semantics. At some point it occurred to me that we used the word community, and we used it a lot. But, I think, maybe there’s something even deeper. Maybe it’s just words, but “tribe” or “family.” I wanted a sense of connectivity, to feel like you’re connected to something that is important and it’s a connection. Not because the connection lifts you, necessarily, but rather because the connection grounds you. There’s a commitment, on some level. It’s really not lost on me. I’m fiftythree, and still the people who I’m always available to, not solely but largely, are people who are of that original punk scene, people who identified as punks at a time where I was also there. We just became connected. Getting involved with punk, I felt like the whole point was to self-define so you can just do what you want to do where you are. All I ever wanted to do was have something to do, and more importantly, to have some people to do it with. Which is, if you think about it, not a bad thing to desire in life. Growing up in Washington and getting involved with punk, I just felt like the whole point was to self-define so you can just do what you want to do where you are. All these things—creativity, construction, frustration, and boredom—are not geographical tenets. These are things that are real wherever you are. My circumstances were that I grew up here. I think a lot of us were marginalized for one reason or another. Quite often, people feel marginalized from their families. Or maybe they feel marginalized sexually, or they feel marginalized politically, or feel marginalized racially. I felt like a freak, certainly, as a kid, and when I got involved with punk I thought, “Oh, look, here’s all the freaks.” They all were punk freaks for different reasons, but I felt like here they are. I fit with these guys because we’re freaks.

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Then, I felt that within that liberation there was this sense of this ability to realize that there wasn’t anybody that was going to do it for you. You had to make it happen. It’s very hard for me to put it into scientific terms. It just grew very organically. The more I learned about punk, and I started learning; I was studying anything I could get my hands on. It was incredible to realize that there were all these other similar punk scenes springing up around the country. But then how the bands play or what they sound like or their attitudes—they still have a real regional flavor, a regional accent. Bands like the Big Boys in Austin, certainly peers of Minor Threat and Black Flag. It’s an interesting thing because on the one hand these bands were all inspired by the same outside sources, like the Sex Pistols and Ramones, but how the bands played or what they sounded like had a real regional flavor. We all were different because we were reflecting where we were coming from, the well that we drank from. I think early on I was keenly interested in fellow travelers. Meeting people like Kevin Seconds from Reno, or Al Barile from Boston, or Corey Rusk and Tesco Vee from the Midwest, and the Black Flag people. In the case of all these guys I still remember my first meeting with them. These are people who I generally would have spoke on the phone or written letters to and then finally getting to meet them for the first time was always significant for me. I just felt we were like kin, even though we never met. Maybe you want to use the word “community.” Me, I start to veer towards the word “tribe” because it had some deeper connection for me. I still feel that way. Although a lot of people are crazy, I still feel a tribal connection to Kevin, Al, or these people. Even though our lives are so different, I still have this sense of almost allegiance to them in a weird way. That might just be some old soldier shit [laughter]. You were veering away from the use of community because you were talking about how corporations have taken it over and employed it. We can see since you started out with Minor Threat or started Dischord Records, the ways in which corporate capitalism has moved into punk, how they have appropriated punk and have marketed it. How have you and especially Dischord Records navigated this increasingly capitalist, globalized world run by corporations? I think we just do the same that we’ve always done. What happened in the early 1990s was so insane. Everybody was suddenly selling thousands and thousands of records. It was this weird phenomenon. It was a little bit like a tidal wave. When a tidal wave comes, the water coming in can be tricky. It’s the water going out that kills people. You might get up on a tree when the water comes in and you can survive that, but it’s the water going back out that is carrying houses, cars, and every other fucking thing out to sea. That’s what kills you. You follow me?

PROLOGUE

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Yep. What happened during the 1990s, in part due to Nirvana’s success, was that there was so much money and it became flooded. A lot of people were able to navigate that part of it. When the money started going out it took out a lot of people. I think they thought, “Oh the water is just high now. We are going to make this money or sell this many records from now on. We bought a building and have hired forty people on our staff.” But here at Dischord, we never let our pants out. We stayed focused on going instead of growing. I am essentially doing the same thing I have always done. I don’t think my ways are antiquated; they’re just raw. I am essentially doing the same thing I have always done. For a lot of the young punk bands they just can’t get their minds around it. There are bands that I have talked to and they were like, “What do you do for us?” That language doesn’t really work around here. This is a punk label, we put out the records and the bands make music and put on shows. The music is supposed to be the point and then we document that. The record industry has largely inverted culture for the purpose of the marketplace. Early on with Dischord, the idea was that there was something significant happening to document. There was a scene happening and Dischord documented that. The label was created to release the Teen Idles’ record. The idea certainly wasn’t about promoting the band as we had broken up before the decision to release the record was made. The point was to document something that was significant to us. It did not occur to me that it was going to become an actual record label. I thought we would put out this one record. In the time it took to figure out just how to make and distribute a record, other bands in our scene started to form, including Minor Threat. To avoid any sense that we were trying profit from the Teen Idles’ record, we made it clear that any money that came in would go towards releasing records by other local bands. The Teen Idles never took any money over the year that we were playing shows. All the money we ever made, which is not a lot mind you, went into a cigar box. We would buy guitar strings or soda pop or some shit like that, but we never paid ourselves. Every dollar we made went into the band fund. That is the money that put out the first record. The idea was to document something that was not only extremely important to us, but also something that was actually happening. With a major record label, however, the idea is you put out a record to make something happen. It’s an inversion. It’s the same thing to when you do a tour. The music industry has people thinking that bands and musicians tour to promote a record. What the fuck is that about? Why is the record the point? Isn’t the show and the music the point? The record is the commodity.

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Fugazi had a mantra that was, “The record is the menu and the show is the meal.” That was our idea. I’m struck by some younger bands that identify as punk, and I’m not saying that they aren’t, who have spoken to me about working with Dischord. Quite often it seems that their greatest concern is how we will promote them, and I can imagine that should we work with them they might get frustrated by the fact that we don’t engage in what has become industry, major and “independent,” standard practices. The only answer I really have to the question, “how can we sell more records?” is to write better songs, or at least write songs that more people want to hear. All that really matters to me, in terms of the label, is to sell enough records so we aren’t losing money. At this point, I’m really thinking about the custodial responsibility I feel I have with Dischord. In December 2015 it’ll be thirty-five years we’ve had this record label. Over the thirty-five years I’ve lived a rather unusual life. I wake up every day with something to do that I want to do. I decide how I want to do it, or if I want to do it that day. My life is not like most people who live in Washington, DC , that’s for sure. I’m indebted to these 200 or so musicians who have entrusted me with their music, for decades now. Keep in mind that there was never a single contract ever. No contracts, no lawyers. Purely a trust arrangement. I have all the master tapes. I have put out their records. I’ve paid royalties every six months. I’ve been doing it, but they have entrusted me with this work. I feel like, now that things have gotten long in the tooth, I have a custodial responsibility to make those records available for as long as people want them. That’s part of the deal. I can’t put out records and lose money. That would hasten the end of the label. Do you follow me on this? Absolutely. It is an interesting time. There are some bands in DC that I like a lot, and I’m glad there is something cool going on here with the underground scene. But there is a weird thing. This is not specific, I’m not saying this specifically about the bands or the people, but there is an overall timidness, like a sort of, “Can we play now?” I find it puzzling. In my mind, part of the punk thing was, “We will play now.” Where do you think that is coming from, that timidness? I don’t know. I’ve thought about it, but I don’t know. Partially because the context is so different. But it is inevitable that somebody is going to come along and say, “We are playing now.” There is not going to be any question mark.

PROLOGUE

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I honestly think that in the seventies our society was stoned on drugs. Drugs that were these revolutionary type things in the sixties became the pablum of the seventies. I think in these years, our society is stoned on technology. The relationship people have with their devices is fucking psychotic. But with technology, it will get balanced out again. When it does, some kid somewhere is going to say, “All right, now we are going to speak.” Music was here first. It was here before technology. It was here before governments. It was a form of communication that pre-dates language. In terms of thinking about punk, in terms of its limitations or its failures, in your own experience, what have you seen are some of the limitations for punk? It depends on how you define punk. I define punk as a free space. It’s the place where new ideas can be presented, free of profit motive. That’s why it’s a free space. So, using that definition, there is no limitation whatsoever [laughter]. If you start to get into punk as a definition by the way things look or the way things sound, orthodoxy always has limitations. If you give people an easy handle, then they can pick you up and just carry you away. So I try to avoid handles [laughter]. Music is no fucking joke. It has always been a point of gathering. It’s always been the place where people meet. One of the things about music is that it is coded. It’s a secret language, and it’s a way you can connect with each other. Especially for young people. You use it as a way to identify yourself and others. Then within a scene, tribe, or community or whatever you want to call it, it becomes a currency. The longevity of the punk scene is so incredible. Minor Threat formed and did our first show in 1980. Think about thirty-five years before that, it was 1945. To think about a band playing in 1945, that they would still be on tour playing at clubs in 1980? It’s unimaginable. Punk won. That seems really clear to me. And there’s always more. That’s the way I think about life. There’s always more. It’s always good. The real discoveries are always in the soil. That’s the rawness. I am always interested in new ideas and people having a sense of hope. Even earlier on, seeing a band like the Bad Brains. I first saw them in June of 1979 and I don’t know who the Bad Brains thought they were, but I thought they were the greatest band in the world. At that moment, I just couldn’t believe how good they were. Maybe they were just thinking, “This might be a sound that could make us successful.” Who knows? I don’t know what the fuck was going on in their heads. But, that’s the new idea, and they’re always coming. I know people a lot of the time say that punk just doesn’t exist anymore. I just don’t accept that at all.

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There was a defining era of music, and it created something that is so malleable that it can be used by anybody. It can be used by a guitar player. It can be used by a professor. It can be used by an artist. It can be used for religious purposes or atheist purposes. It can be used by anybody. It’s in the soil. It’s in the petri dishes. It’s in the basements. It may be unrecognizable to those people who have a sense of orthodoxy or people who have created a harder construct. But it will never die. It may not be called punk. But it can never die. As long as there is a mainstream, there’s going to be an underground. I feel pretty good about that. There is always going to be a desire for selfdefinition.

CHAPTER ONE

Punk Matters: DIY Punk and the Politics of Resistance This is a book about punk rock, why it matters to so many people around the world, and why it should matter to you. While the scope of the book is broad—examining punks and punk scenes from across the globe and over the past four decades—the argument is quite straightforward: DIY punk provides individuals and local communities with resources for selfempowerment and political resistance. Over the last several decades, despite repeated claims that “punk is dead,” punk has become a global force that constructs oppositional identities, empowers local communities, and challenges corporate-led processes of globalization. Punk has changed the world and continues to do so, at the individual, local, and global levels.

What is punk? For anyone involved and interested in punk, just defining “punk” is to enter into a hotly contested debate. Where does one draw the lines? Is Green Day punk? What about Rancid or Blink-182? Get a dozen punks together in a room, ask them to define punk and you’ll get eighteen different answers. One of my favorite observations about defining punk was made by Michael Muhammed Knight in his novel Taqwacores, a fictional account of Muslim American punks that helped spawn the real-life Taqwacore scene. Early in the novel, Knight’s narrator muses: “Inevitably I reached the understanding that this word ‘punk’ does not mean anything tangible like ‘tree’ or ‘car.’ Rather, punk is like a flag; an open symbol, it only means what people 9

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believe it means” (Knight 2004: 7; italics in original).1 Punk, like a flag or any other open symbol, is something many people feel passionate about, but have a hard time agreeing on its shared meaning. The laziest scholarship on punk treats it as a unified, cohesive community. But those on the inside know how false such a claim can be. More nuanced scholars writing on punk begin with the observation that it is impossible to define punk, but then they inevitably start talking about punk as if they have a clear understanding of what it is. Even though scholars might agree that it is an open-ended concept, they attach their own meanings to it. I am no different. But I will try to make my distinctions and definitions clear throughout this book. When most people think about punk, they immediately think about music, and maybe clothes and hairstyles. After all, it was the music and the fashion that grabbed people’s attention back in 1976 and 1977, when punk first emerged as a cultural thing. While the average citizen of London might not have heard a punk song, it was hard to miss punks in public, as they tended to generate a great deal of attention while riding the Tube or walking down the street. While there was no common “uniform,” their shared rejection of accepted fashion norms meant that punks stood out in ways that might be hard to imagine today. At a time when clothes were mundane, punks were wearing layers of dayglo fabrics, jackets with slogans spray painted on the back, clothes ripped and safety-pinned back together, t-shirts with provocative images, patches with swastikas and/or the Union Jack, or any variety of styles mashed together. Hairstyles included Mohawks, shaved heads, dreadlocks, spikes, and dyed or disheveled hair. The overall result was a rejection of the status quo, and that often generated a violent response, such as when Ari Up, the lead singer of the all-female band the Slits, was stabbed in the buttocks by an angry passer-by. As the Slits’ bassist Tessa Pollitt recalls, “When we started dressing the way we did—just trying to be the rebelliousness generation, not even consciously—it was quite violent. Especially, even more so as women, because we were just like aliens to the rest of society” (interview with Tessa May 28, 2015). Likewise, the music was a dissonant assault on the established norms of rock’n’roll. In New York City, the Ramones’ two-minute pop songs were delivered at blistering speeds and volumes, while in London the Sex Pistols’ live shows were a display of intensity and aural chaos. The cultural grounding was almost always the music, but how can one characterize punk music? What similarities did early London punk bands like the Sex Pistols, Damned, Slits, Clash, X-Ray Spex, or Raincoats have in common? Aurally speaking, these bands were each quite distinct. For instance, the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK ” sounds like a traditional rock’n’roll song, while the Clash’s “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” has a strong ska vibe, and the Slits’ “Instant Hit” has more in common with reggae and jazz than rock. And as punk evolved, the music became even

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more diverse as punks took a Western rock core and (re)infused it with reggae, folk, blues, Brazilian salsa, techno, industrial, and just about every other musical style and genre you can think of. To define punk in musical terms is an impossible feat. Which isn’t to say that people don’t try. Or, more significantly, that major corporations haven’t constructed a “punk sound” that they can market. The mainstream media may sell the idea that playing brashy, loud three-chord pop songs with vocals sung in a fake British accent is “punk” and that leather jackets, pants with 950 zippers and safety pins, and a black t-shirt with a pink skull and crossbones on it is “punk.” But those are cartoon caricatures invented to sell a manufactured product. Unsurprisingly, the corporate music industry responded to the organic emergence of punk by trying to appropriate it and turn it into a musical “niche,” or more often, a marketing strategy. Bands sound “punk” if their songs are short, high-energy, and have few chord changes. So musical acts like Avril Lavigne and Blink-182 get marketed as “punk.” Bands can release their “punk” album if it fits into this category—supposedly U2’s “Achtung Baby” and Kanye West’s “Yeezus” are punk albums if their publicists are to be believed. But those publicists shouldn’t be. Early punk bands in the London and New York scenes were extremely diverse musically. There was no single “punk” sound then. Nor is there one today. Current bands like the Evens, Dott, or the God Damn Doo Wop Band don’t fit the corporate music industry’s definition of “punk music” because that definition is meaningless. I understand punk to be a social practice, or sets of social practices. What made those bands that I listed earlier—the Sex Pistols, Damned, Slits, Clash, X-Ray Spex, and Raincoats—punk was not so much how they sounded, but how they acted. Punks worked to imagine new ways of being. As they loudly proclaimed at the time, they were sick and tired of the crap that mainstream culture was shoving down their throats, whether it was music, art, literature, or fashion, and they decided to make their own cultural products. Punks did so by making their own music, being their own journalists and writers, making their own movies, designing their own clothes. It was a two-part process: a rejection of the status quo and an embrace of a do-it-yourself ethos. So when I talk about punk as a set of social activities, as opposed to a specific, fixed musical style or fashion of clothes, I am particularly focused on this notion of do-it-yourself. This book is on DIY punk, a term used by many to draw attention to the difference between the organic cultural products that emerge from a DIY punk community and those “commercial punk” products sold by major record labels and trendy mall stores such as Hot Topic. Of course, sometimes things cross that border. After all, a band like Green Day emerged from one of the quintessential DIY communities, the Gilman Street punk scene of the Bay Area in the early 1990s (Boulware and Tudor 2009). But as I will discuss later in the book, they crossed over from DIY punk to commercial punk. Thus, there is a huge difference

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between Green Day and, say, Crass or Fugazi, and those differences have more to do with social practices than with musical styles. DIY punk is politically significant in ways that commercial punk is not. In fact, the commodification and appropriation of punk has frequently undermined the effectiveness of DIY punk’s political and social relevance. That struggle is one of the primary themes underpinning this entire book. Ultimately, being a DIY punk has little to do with what you are wearing or listening to and everything with how you choose to interact with the world around you. The DIY aspect of punk was one of its core elements at the outset of its creation. Partly as a response to the bloated, alien popular cultural forms prevalent in the 1970s, punk emerged in the US and UK around an ethos of do-it-yourself. Before punk’s emergence, the dangerous aspects of rock’n’roll had been effectively appropriated and sanitized by the corporate music industry. Bands like Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and the Who had become “major rock acts,” signifying their transformation into corporate business entities, playing in huge arenas with expensive ticket prices. Music and musicians were increasingly disconnected from their audience. Rock musicians were elite millionaires living extravagant lifestyles with little in common, and little to say that was relevant, to fans who were now regarded primarily as consumers. This relationship was not just in music, but repeated across the spectrum of popular culture in film, television, books, and so forth. By the 1970s, corporate capitalism had reframed culture as products to be packaged, marketed, and sold to passive consumers. In large part, the emergence and success of punk was a response to this capitalist relationship to culture. At its core, punk was a dual rejection. On one level, punks were rejecting the banal cultural products that were being sold to them, from music to fashion. This is pretty well-worn territory, and most books and documentaries about the emergence of punk will juxtapose the stagnant behemoth “rock stars” of the early 1970s promoted by the corporate music industry (Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd, and so forth) with the three-chord misfits that became the punk vanguard, whether they be the Dictators, the Dickies, the Ramones, or the Undertones. Many of these bands explicitly stated their opposition to such bloated cultural icons, as the Clash proclaimed in their song “1977” that “Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones” would no longer be relevant that year. Other punk cultural producers similarly rejected the dominant corporate culture, because it said little about their lives. One can see this in the writings produced by punk zinesters (discussed in Chapter Six), in punk-influenced films and art (see Thompson 2004; Turcotte and Miller 1999; Bestley and Ogg 2012), and in fashion produced by the likes of Vivienne Westwood, who stated “I was messianic about punk, seeing if one could put a spoke in the system in some way” (Westwood 2002). Again, most histories of punk will note that punk was born as a reactionary or revolutionary response to the stagnancy of AngloAmerican 1970s culture, so I don’t want to belabor the point too much,

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though it is a highly important one because one must understand that punk, from its outset, was rebellious and fundamentally anti-status quo. On a more important level, punk involves a rejection of the passive role of consumer. By tearing down the artificial boundaries between performer and audience, punk proclaims that anyone can be a cultural producer. But more significantly, it states that everyone should be a cultural producer. The cultural forms generated by corporate capitalism are built upon the illusion of the professional: “Don’t try this at home, these are experts in their field, whether that field be making music, writing a book, making a movie, acting in a play, or what have you.” As explicitly as it can be, punk is a loud rejection of that mentality, proclaiming: “Fuck that, you should try this at home.” You might not be able to write or play as technically proficient as F. Scott Fitzgerald or Eric Clapton, but that doesn’t mean your voice and views aren’t as equally important. By championing the DIY ethos, punk is the intentional transformation of individuals from consumers of the mass media to agents of cultural production. It is a rejection of passivity and a championing of personal empowerment. Of course, punk was not the first cultural form to champion a DIY ethic. An active zine culture had been promoting self-publishing for several decades. Earlier in the twentieth century, the musical form of skiffle had become popular, championed by such artists as Lonnie Donegan. Blending folk music with jazz and blues influences, skiffle was regarded as a democratic form of music, employing home-made or improvised instruments. Washboards played with a thimble became a popular form of percussion, accompanied by a kazoo, jug, or comb and paper. The instruments were cheap and accessible, helping to foster a DIY approach to musical production that preceded and help shape the emergence of rock’n’roll in the 1950s. Many of the originators of the UK punk scene drew direct inspiration from these performers and their styles, whether skiffle, folk, or early rock’n’roll. Not necessarily claiming to have invented the wheel themselves, punks did breathe fresh life and an explicit political sensibility into DIY culture. As the writer Amy Spencer notes, “skiffle can be seen as optimistic and naïve, with its musicians singing about relations and everyday life, whereas punk was far angrier as dissatisfied youths sung caustic songs about their own lives” (2005: 195). The DIY ethos became one of the defining features of punk rock scenes as they emerged in the late 1970s. Writing in 1976 during the birth of the New York punk scene, John Holmstrom proclaimed in issue #3 of his co-edited low-budget, self-produced fanzine Punk: “Punk rock—any kid can pick up a guitar and become a rock’n’roll star, despite or because of his lack of ability, talent, intelligence, limitations and/or potential, and usually do so out of frustration, hostility, a lot of nerve and a need for ego fulfillment” (Holmstrom 1976: 2; also Holmstrom 1996: 50). As the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten once quipped, “anyone can become a Sex Pistol.”

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One of the best-known examples of punk’s DIY ethos was the widely circulated drawing of how to play three chords on a guitar, accompanied by the caption “Now Form a Band.” Early UK punk bands like the Buzzcocks and Scritti Politti printed instructions on how to make a record on the

FIGURE 1.1 “Now Form a Band” three-chord poster (originally printed in Sideburns zine, 1976, and widely copied and distributed).

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handmade covers of their own albums. Fanzines carried similar messages, informing readers how to play chords, make a record, distribute that record, and book their own shows. As Mark Perry wrote in his zine Sniffin’ Glue: “All you kids out there who read Sniffin’ Glue, don’t be satisfied with what we write. Go out and start your own fanzines” (1976: 2). For many, this dedication to DIY became, and remains, the defining feature of punk culture. As I noted earlier, some people draw a distinction between DIY and commercial punk. For many, if it isn’t DIY then it simply isn’t punk but a commercial product marketed as “punk.” Of course, there is a great deal of debate about how far one should take the dedication to DIY. In a song called “The Rules,” Ben Snakepit sarcastically sings: “If you don’t make your own gasoline, that’s not punk!” Suffice it to say that there is a general dedication to a DIY ethos within punk, even if there are debates about its specific implementations in daily life. Daniel Sinker, founder of the magazine Punk Planet, observed “Punk said that anyone could take part— in fact, anyone should take part” (2001: 9). Todd Taylor, co-founder and editor of the punk zine Razorcake, argues that DIY punk is about an ethical commitment to an anti-corporate stance. It is about putting personal integrity before profit maximization: “Because if we don’t keep our integrity, if we sell ourselves for promised short-term gain, we become, in all senses of the word, worthless” (Taylor 2009: 3). This do-it-yourself ethos is one of the core (if not the core) components of how these individuals understand their relationship to punk. For them, punk is not a narrow musical style or a particular fashion or hairstyle. Rather, it is a commitment to a DIY sensibility and, with that, a dedication to self-empowerment.

The politics of punk? Numerous scholars have sought to make connections between politics and music, but there are always challenges in doing so (see Eyerman and Jamison 1998; Mattern 1998; Moore 2009; Weissman 2010; Duncombe and Tremblay 2011; Hesmondhalgh 2013). Music has clearly played a role in various political movements, from the US civil rights movement to the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa. But to what extent did it animate those movements and to what extent was it merely a by-product? Or, to put it another way, did music “do” political work or was it just a soundtrack in the background? John Street’s Music and Politics (2012) explores the complicated relationships between music and politics, from government use of music as propaganda to attempts at censorship. Street examines the myriad (and sometimes contradictory) ways in which music functions as a form of communication and instrument for mobilization. Rather than treating music and politics as distinct spheres that occasionally collide (in censorship or

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protest songs), Street argues that music “embodies political values and experiences, and organizes our response to society as political thought and action” (2012: 1). As Street observes, this is not an original argument, just a neglected one. It was commonplace in Ancient Athens and Enlightenment Europe to recognize that music was a formidable form of political expression. Street’s book makes a sustained argument on the inseparability of politics and music across different genres and cultures. Global Punk is in keeping with Street’s project, but is a more focused intervention. Looking at punk across four decades in multiple continents, I argue that DIY punk creates the opportunity for political empowerment and resistance in people’s everyday lives. Of course, there have been many critiques of punk, inside and outside of scholarship, since it first emerged almost four decades ago. At its outset, punk seemed to possess political potential, with some even proclaiming its revolutionary potential. Admittedly, many of those latter claims were often hyperbole generated by participants (such as Johnny Rotten and his promise to destroy the music industry) and promoters (such as the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren and virtually any claim he made regarding the band). But even before punk’s emergence, naysayers questioned the political potential of any form of popular culture. Some scholars, such as Theodor Adorno (2006 [1941]), suggest that popular culture in general serves to distract people from the socio-economic realities of their lives. Viewed in this light, punk is an empty posture providing the allusion of rebellion. Others, such as Dick Hebdige (1979) or John Storey (1988), suggest that certain forms of popular culture have the potential for achieving political change, but they are severely limited by the process of appropriation and commodification that inevitably occurs within capitalism. I am certainly sensitive to these arguments and will engage them in greater detail throughout the book. More recently, John Roderick, a musician and writer from Seattle, gained notoriety when his essay for the Seattle Weekly, “Punk Rock is Bullshit” (2013), went viral. There were several glaring problems with Roderick’s essay, not the least of which was the huge net he cast to define punk—which seemed to include everything from Courtney Love, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wilco, and Radiohead. But the essay also articulated a number of common criticisms of punk. One of Roderick’s critiques is that punk ultimately fails to provide a political platform because it is a closed, exclusionary club protected by zealous gate-keepers. This view is at odds with the narrative of many participants who speak of finding DIY punk an inclusive, welcoming home for social outcasts and misfits. For example, writing in her graphic memoir Tomboy, cartoonist Liz Prince speaks about the experience of attending her first DIY punk concert after years of feeling like a social misfit: “I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at the time, but I now realize that I’d found a community” (2014: 249). I discuss the role of community building within DIY punk scenes in Chapter Three.

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FIGURE 1.2 Excerpt from Liz Prince’s Tomboy, 2014 (courtesy of Zest Books and Liz Prince; used with permission).

The criticism of punk being an exclusive club guarded by obnoxious gate-keepers is not without merit. Throughout my life and my travels I have come across many punk gate-keepers who spend massive amounts of time and energy trying to police the borders of what is and isn’t punk. Anybody familiar with punk—or, for that matter, any musical scene—knows what I am talking about. Of course, the most zealous protectors of the “in-crowd”

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often tend to be the most insecure in their own feelings of belonging. This is not unique to punk. But within punk this gate-keeping has been mocked in countless ways, such as in the song “The Rules” quoted above. Ben Snakepit, a well-known punk cartoonist and musician, wrote two versions of the song (one with Shanghai River, the other with Shit Creek) in which he makes fun of these debates with such lines as “If you bought it at a Wal-Mart, that’s not punk. If you downloaded it from iTunes, that’s not punk.” And while Ben should know that it isn’t punk to write the same song twice, he illustrates the great deal of energy that is spent on maintaining the boundary lines of punk. The chorus of the song goes: “These are the rules that I made for the punks. Do they piss you off? Well I kinda hope that they do, because it’s not punk to follow any rules.” This goes back to Knight’s framing of punk as an “open symbol” allowing for people to contest its meaning and contours. Certainly punk has its share of overly serious, self-righteous blow-hards. But such people exist across all of society, in any given context. I have personally witnessed the same behavior among jazz and blues fans, as well as sports fans (e.g., “She’s not a real Buffalo Bills fan”). To blame punk for making people into judgmental assholes seems a little simplistic. Another common criticism is that punk lacks a coherent governing political philosophy. Any attempt to force one upon punk gets messy real quick. Craig O’Hara’s book Punk Philosophy (1999) is a good example of the problem with forcing punk into a narrow box. O’Hara draws upon a wide-range of punk songs and zines to construct an image of punk as politically progressive, with a leftist/anarchist bent. But that only works if you ignore all the bands and punks that don’t fit that description. There are lots of punks that can be located across the wide-range spectrum of rightwing politics: Skrewdriver were outspoken Neo-Nazis, Anti-Seen were libertarian-leaning with rather complicated race politics,2 and there have been a number of outspoken conservatives, such as Johnny Ramone, Ben Weasel, and Michael Graves. While I suspect that the majority of the world’s punks are probably somewhere on the liberal/leftist end of the political spectrum, there are also a healthy percentage that are right-wing, fascist, racist, and/or neo-Nazis. It would be an easy solution to just say that those people aren’t “really punk” but that would be a mistake. If there is no universal political position within punk, how can one speak about the politics of global punk? One response is to recognize the plurality of political perspectives within the punk community, while another is to conceptualize politics broadly, beyond just which party one supports or voted for. When a critic such as Roderick poses the question “What has punk rock ever done for us?,” as he did in his 2013 essay, he is explicitly asking if it led to the electoral defeat of a heinous leader (such as Reagan, Thatcher, or George W. Bush, all targets of many punks’ wrath), ended the Cold War, or smashed the state. These are the wrong questions to be asking, because they reflect a very limited understanding of politics and the political realm.

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In Rebel Rock: The Politics of Popular Music, John Street observes: “Whether pop is banal or brilliant, it is political because it affects or reflects the way people behave. It may make little different to the way they vote, but votes make little difference to the way politicians behave. What it affects or reinforces are the politics of the everyday” (1986: 3). While this calls for focusing on the politics of the personal, in his later work on music and politics, Street (2012: 7) warns against treating all aspects of the personal as political for it dilutes any conceptual approach. Drawing on the work of Colin Hay (2007), Street argues that to count as “political,” a situation must exist where people have agency (that is, they are presented with a choice in which they can act upon) and it must be social, not personal (that is, people must be able to deliberate publicly with others and that the outcome must have an impact on others). As Tim Yohannan, the late founder of punk zine Maximumrocknroll, stated: “Everything we do is political when it interacts with others” (1990: 47). Decisions that are taken alone and only impact the individual are neither social nor political. Thus, musical pleasure and choice only become political when they spill over into the public sphere and into the exercise of power (Street 2012: 8). Listening to a Dopamines album alone in your basement might not be a political act, but organizing an allages show in that basement certainly is. This book will show how DIY punk is both a response and a corrective to limited understandings of what constitutes politics. So-called “high politics”—the realm of official state interaction and policy-making— presents itself as foreign and distant to the lived reality of citizens and subjects. This book explores the many ways in which DIY punk actually impacts the realm of high politics. In multiple ways, DIY punk both challenges and provides alternatives to global capitalism for people around the world. It exposes the myriad ways in which individuals and local communities are far from powerless within the processes of globalization. At the same, this book gives primacy to the politics of everyday life. That is, it focuses on the ways in which people occupy, construct, and negotiate the social, political, and economic contexts of their immediate surroundings (see Ginsborg 2005; Shotter 1993; Grossberg 1984). DIY punk provides the means by which alternative ways of being are imagined and realized at the individual and local levels, with profound implications for the lives of its participants (see Sofianos, Ryde, and Waterhouse 2014). Thus, the book provides many rich and nuanced answers to illustrate how punk matters.

About the book This book is about punk, but unlike similar books, it focuses neither on music nor youth. To be clear, a number of scholars have explored the ways in which music impacts youth. Some, such as Dick Hebdige (1979), tend to

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situate music within a system of signification that places youths in opposition to dominant social and cultural forms of the adults. Others, such as Dan Laughey in his Music and Youth Culture, challenge such structuralist accounts by examining the ways in which music is situated in “localized interactions that typify the ordinary, routine and mundane circumstances of young people’s everyday experiences” (2006: 3; see also Moore 2009; Bennett 2004; Frith 1981). While drawing upon a range of these scholars, I will resist both the all-encompassing claims of the structuralists as well as the move to reify such a problematic concept as “youth culture.” My fieldwork in punk scenes around the world quickly exploded any assumption that punk exists exclusively in the domain of the “youth.” As such, I will resist speaking about punk as a phenomenon belonging solely to any particular age group, rather I recognize that it does different “work” for different people by focusing on how it interacts with the divergent circumstances of people’s everyday experiences. This book is not a typical scholarly study of punk nor is it a personal memoir. I am a social scientist with a PhD in political science. I have also been active in various punk scenes since the early 1980s. I’ve played in bands, produced zines, booked shows, started a record label, and lots more since then. I say this not to enhance my street cred, but to be transparent about my own life trajectory and personal investments. For almost a decade, I have conducted fieldwork in punk scenes around the globe, engaging in hundreds, if not thousands, of formal and informal interviews. They provide much of the primary evidence in this book, though I also employ many other books and articles as secondary evidence. Scholars have spent a great deal of time thinking about a number of issues that are relevant to this book, and I will attempt to present their ideas in ways that make sense while minimizing academic jargon. Punk has been evolving since its inception, propelled both by innovation and internal squabbles. This book draws its examples across four decades of punk not to create a false sense of coherence, but to highlight both temporal variations and commonalities. I want to draw attention to the different ways individuals and groups have employed punk in different historical contexts. For example, I am interested in the ways in which the punkfeminist Riot Grrrls imagine the work they are doing in 2014 as different than the work other Riot Grrrls were doing in 1994. I want to draw out the similarities as well. The conclusion I have reached is that, over the last four decades, different people have employed punk for different reasons and towards different ends. But while the specifics vary, they are attracted to DIY punk because it provides opportunities for self-empowering and resistance. There is a common claim that punks are disaffected suburbanites: typically white, young, and male. Having hung out with punks around the globe, I know what a farcical claim that actually is. If this book achieves one goal, I

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hope it is to dispel the notion that punks are rich, bored white boys. To do so, I have taken a global focus. Of course, in doing so, I run some serious risks, not the least of which is conflating substantially different local scenes from around the world. I try very hard to resist such a move, being very aware that today’s DIY punk scenes in Oslo, Oklahoma City, and Okinawa, for example, are quite distinct. But, at the same time, there is much that unites them. Punk offers resources for agency and empowerment that individuals and communities around the world employ in their articulation of domestic needs and struggles. Local punks and punk scenes construct global networks in ways that create openings for political interventions. These alternative circuits disrupt the “naturalness” of the dominant circuits and practices of global capitalism, showing that alternatives to the status quo can be both imagined and realized. This book is certainly not a definitive study of the history of punk. Rather it is a sustained argument about why DIY punk is important; important to the lives of the people involved in the punk community, but also important to the world at large. The book is organized to address the question of DIY punk’s political relevance from multiple angles. The first three chapters seek to address the question directly, but from different levels. Chapter Two explores the work that DIY punk is doing at the level of the individual. Focusing on such examples of Riot Grrrl, queercore, and straight edge, the chapter illustrates how DIY punk provides individuals with the resources with which to construct oppositional identities. Drawing from a range of examples across the globe, the chapter argues that through its anti-status quo disposition and a dedication to DIY, punk provides individuals with the opportunity of self-empowerment and disalienation, that is, resisting the multiple forms of alienation prevalent in our modern society. For four decades, punk has offered individuals resources for participation and access in the face of the alienating process of specialization and professionalization. Individuals do not exist in vacuums, but are part of larger social groupings. Chapter Three shifts the focus to the level of community and explores the ways in which DIY punk has been politically relevant to local scenes. The chapter shows the ways in which local punk scenes have been overt sites for political resistance through a close examination of several scenes across the globe over the last four decades. The chapter also examines how local DIY punk scenes also function as more discreet spaces for political resistance in everyday life, from the suburbs of Long Island to the rural regions of South Africa. Chapter Four takes a more global perspective and considers the importance of DIY punk practices as acts of resistance within the processes of corporate-led globalization. The ways in which local punk scenes are networked together—through informal, independent, and decentralized flows—makes them politically significant in today’s globalized capitalist world. This chapter explores how individuals and scenes draw resources

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from the global culture while shaping and reconstituting that culture in a constant feedback loop. As a product of globalization, DIY punk offers an interesting vehicle to examine the processes involved in contemporary globalization, some of globalization’s contradictions, and the ways in which globalization is resisted and/or restructured. What emerges from this discussion is the existence of multiple, complex circuits and processes that together construct global punk. The following two chapters examine specific forms of DIY punk cultural practices: record labels and self-publishing. Chapter Five examines contemporary DIY punk record labels, regarding them as sites of political engagement at the intersection of cultural production and the global political economy. This chapter sketches out the development of the global DIY punk record industry over the past several decades. Paying particular attention to distinctions between DIY labels and major corporate record labels, the chapter illustrates some of the ways the former operate as examples of an anti-capitalist business model. Chapter Six examines the related phenomena of punk zines and DIY selfpublishing. The chapter explores the ways in which punks used the zine medium as a mechanism for disalienation. Punk zines also offer a powerful critique of the capitalist status quo. But more than just a forum for criticism, zines also provided concrete alternative practices and imaginaries. The chapter examines how the DIY punk zine is a transformative medium in its own right, illustrating the opportunity for political critique, empowerment, and resistance. Together, Chapters Five and Six construct the argument that DIY punk provides powerful alternatives and challenges to the corporate capitalism that dominates the globe today. Tying a number of these previous threads together, Chapter Seven focuses explicitly on the global anarcho-punk culture that fused punk’s do-ityourself ethos with anarchism’s perpetual struggle against hierarchies of all kind. The chapter explores the historical development of anarcho-punk, highlighting the development of specific scenes and transnational networks that have helped create a global anarcho-punk culture. Drawing upon extensive global research, the chapter argues that anarcho-punks have helped revive and sustain anarchism as a political approach, while exploring the various ways in which anarcho-punks practice anarchism and resistance in their everyday lives. I am perfectly aware of the many problems and contradictions within punk communities—from the petty squabbles, back-biting, and gate-keeping to the drug-abuse, alcoholism, sexism, and homophobia—and I will discuss them throughout the book. But I put greater emphasis on what I believe are the more positive and significant aspects of global punk. One could argue that most of the negative aspects are actually elements found in the broader society, which get reproduced within its smaller communities and cultures.

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That is to say, punk didn’t invent junkies, assholes, or sexism. While it is important not to deny their presence in punk, to say that they exist doesn’t actually tell us much about punk specifically. Many readers may be annoyed that the book doesn’t discuss their favorite punk band or their own hometown scene. That’s fair enough. Maybe this book will inspire you to write your own book or zine. Ultimately, this book is not a definitive history of punk. There are lots of such books out there, and a number of them are actually decent (see Cogan 2010; Hurchalla 2005). I find that the most engaging ones tend to focus on a specific geographic scene or specific moment in time. The ones that try to cover four decades of punk’s global history seem doomed to fail. I will try to avoid certain doom by eschewing comprehensive coverage. Despite the huge backdrop I am going to employ, this book actually has a rather narrow focus. And it is this: punk matters.

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CHAPTER TWO

You’re Not Punk and I’m Telling Everyone: Oppositional Identities and Disalienation In the summer of 2013, I spent several weeks in Indonesia with various punk communities. One of my favorite memories was driving to the beach at Banda Aceh in a borrowed police van with some local punks (it was actually a security van for the school where the driver’s mom works, but it sounds more impressive to call it a police van). There were about eight of us in the van and we were all singing along to NOFX in the tape deck. As we sang “Don’t Call Me White” and “Kill All the White Men,” the songs took on special meaning for me as the only white guy in the van. It also reminded me how ridiculous Western common stereotypes are about punks only being white suburban rich kids. Indonesia has the largest punk community in all of Asia, if not the world. I was hanging out with unemployed street kids, middle-class high school kids, homeless middle-age dudes, and college students—all of whom considered themselves punks. Different people are drawn to punk for many different reasons. In my formal interviews and informal conversations with hundreds, if not thousands, of people who identify themselves as punk, no clear personality profile emerges. They are not exclusively male, white, suburban, American youths, as one often hears from Western media and people unconnected to punk. They come from across class divisions. They are male, female, transgendered, gay, straight, working class, middle class, upper class, white, black, Hispanic, American, Scottish, Czech, South African, Bolivian, Japanese, Indonesian, and just about any other nationality you can think of. There is no one “type” you can point to. 25

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The punks in the van were just one group of punks I hung out with Banda Aceh. They were punks in their twenties who were taking classes or still in high school. Another group of punks in the city typically hung out on the steps of the Tsunami Museum most afternoons. There was an interesting— but not unique—split between these two groups. The first were rather dismissive of the “street punks” hanging out on the steps of the Tsunami Museum. In part, they claimed that the street punks weren’t “real punks,” just a bunch of juvenile delinquents wearing a punk uniform but not really understanding the politics and ethics of punk (which they themselves understood as involving independent DIY cultural production and resistance to the status quo). They thought the street punks had understandably gained a reputation as troublemakers for openly drinking alcohol, harassing passers-by, and fighting amongst themselves. For their part, the street punks claimed that they were the only “real punks” in Banda Aceh and all others were a bunch of “posers.” It sounded like your usual punk squabble, and at the time I couldn’t help but think about the “tru punx” from Mitch Clem’s Nothing Nice to Say (2008) comic—two cartoonish stick figures who are both a parody of such street punks and parody of these debates. In fact, the title of this chapter is taken from the Jawbreaker song “Boxcar,” which was reputedly written after the influential punk magazine Maximumrocknroll (MRR) declared that they would no longer be covering the band because they had deemed the band not to be “punk” enough. This illustrates the point that punk is a hotly contested “open symbol,” as I pointed out in Chapter One. Some people employ a handful of common visual markers of assumed punk fashion (e.g., spiky haircut, Ramones t-shirt) as the extent of their punk self-identification. Such people are often derisively labeled “fashion punks,” “parrot punks” or “mall punks” by others, based on the charge that they bought their “punk identity” at a mall outlet such as Hot Topic. Of course, these debates say more about the assumptions and politics of the people engaged in the conversation than about punk itself. I am less concerned with figuring out who is the “real” punk, than I am in investigating how identifying with punk produces political opportunities and empowerment for people. Riding in the van with my Indonesian punk hosts—almost four decades after the “birth” of punk and on the opposite side of the globe from its place of conception—underscored an important point for me: punk is alive, well, and truly global. There certainly is no glossy marketing campaign driving DIY punk, as there is for, say, Star Wars, Harry Potter or Miley Cyrus. The fact that it is so healthy, particularly given that it largely exists in the underground, suggests that punk is doing important work at the personal level. Why do people around the world embrace a cultural movement that is around forty years old and has been declared dead many times over? What is at stake for them? What is being gained by these individuals? The argument in this chapter is a simple but important one: DIY punk provides individuals

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with the opportunity for self-empowerment and disalienation. That first term may be clear, but it is worth taking some time to unpack exactly what I mean by “disalienation” and why it is such an important concept. Indeed, for me, it is at the root of DIY punk’s potential for political resistance. Political philosophers, from Hegel onwards, have noted that capitalism has an alienating effect on modern life. This alienation takes multiple forms, though Karl Marx’s observation about alienated labor is perhaps best known and quite relevant to our conversations here. Basically, Marx argued that workers under capitalism are alienated from the production process, the products, each other, and themselves. The products they produce are taken away from them, while work is an increasingly torturous, mindnumbing and soul-crushing experience (think of long shifts on the factory floor or in a cubicle). People are alienated from each other as relationships get defined in terms of relations of exchange (worker/consumer/owner/ seller) as opposed to belonging to a shared community based upon mutual need. Finally, people are alienated from themselves as they produce blindly for others instead of organically from their own interests and desires. This alienation is one of the defining aspects of our modern society, and as individuals we feel increasingly powerless. We are victims of social, economic, and political forces that appear to be beyond our control. Significantly, Marx noted in a short passage at the end of “Notes on James Mill” that non-alienated labor emphasizes the producer’s enjoyment of production in which her powers of production are confirmed while she also meets the needs of others, thus confirming for both parties our human essence as mutually dependent. That is to say, non-alienated labor is grounded in individual production and the active recognition of membership in a human community. This is a fairly good description of individuals in a DIY punk scene. Some scholars label our current era as “late capitalism,” to reflect how capitalism is ubiquitous but no longer tied strictly to industrialism. Punk originally sprang from a social context in which people in London, New York, and other Western cities struggled with feelings of alienation from the social, economic, and political forces around them. Punk gained fertile ground in other (post-)industrial cities, from Cleveland to Toronto. It also caught hold in what Dewar MacLeod calls “postsuburbia,” fueled by youth alienation and unemployment, social conservatism, changing information technologies, and the sparse landscape of suburban sprawl communities (2010: 87–100). One of the elements that made punk attractive was that it represented not just a form of musical expression but a social and political disruption. Punk offered—and continues to offer—a way to resist multiple forms of alienation encountered throughout daily life. Politics and economics appear as distant, uncontrolled, alien forces; constituted in everyday life by the separation of the specialized activities of professionals and intellectuals from the residue of everyday life in work,

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family, and leisure. Musically, for example, rock bands play in concert halls separated from the audience in ways that reinforce the “rock star” myth. For many, punk offers an attractive alternative. Reflecting on punk’s initial emergence, Matt Davies notes, “Punks strove to eliminate the distinctions between performers and audience, and did so by a radical form of egalitarianism: anyone could be a punk, and any punk could play in a band or, if they preferred, to publish a zine, to organize shows, or to produce or distribute records” (2005: 126). In his discussion of punk’s emergence in postsuburban Southern California, Dewar MacLeod writes, “The formation of alternative institutions such as dozens of record labels, zines, clubs, and communal youth organizations can be read as a modernist response to postmodern consumerism and fragmentation, an attempt to create some sense of reality, maybe even authenticity, certainly control over daily life and the future” (2010: 100). Or, in the words of Viv Albertine, the guitarist for the Slits, upon seeing one of the Sex Pistols’ very first performances: “At last I see not only that other universe I’ve always wanted to be part of, but the bridge to it” (2014: 86). Why does punk continue to remain so vibrant across the globe? Because, for four decades, punk has offered individuals resources for participation and access in the face of the alienating process of modern life. At its core, DIY punk provides the opportunity for disalienation and personal empowerment, and that is a deeply political act.

Nevermind the Bollocks, it’s Stevie Stiletto and the Switchblades It is typical to begin a conversation about punk by focusing on the Ramones, Sex Pistols, Clash, or other notable punk pioneers from the late 1970s New York or London scenes. But I want to tell the story of the band Stevie Stiletto, not so much because they became major players in the punk pantheon (sadly, they didn’t), but because there are elements of their story that will be drawn out throughout this chapter. The story is of ordinary people using DIY punk to empower themselves and engage in the world around them. In the story that follows, I draw attention to how an embrace of punk led individuals to become active cultural producers, the ways in which a process of disalienation occurred at the level of the individual, how they developed what I’ll refer to as oppositional identities, and how DIY punk was spread through personal connections and role-modeling. Also note the contradictions and tragic elements of the story. This story is also partly my story, so instead of erasing myself from the narrative, I’ll start it with me. Growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, a conservative town in the southern United States, my initial exposure to punk was rather limited. In the late

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1970s, when I was about twelve or thirteen years old, a friend turned me on to some albums he had picked up by seminal bands, as well as a few lesserknowns. At the time, I was listening to a range of musical genres—from heavy metal to reggae and the newly emerging hip-hop scene—but these punk bands spoke to me in ways that others did not. The bands displayed an anger, an urgency, a political sensibility, a critical self-awareness, and a hefty sense of humor that deeply appealed to me. A few of those bands had signed to major record labels, making it easier for me to find their albums in local record stores. A major development for me was when I happened to meet a girl from Nevada who, upon her return home, sent me tapes of bands on indie labels, as well as several local fanzines. The zines included advertisements by punk bands and small independent labels, and I ordered numerous tapes and LP s, ordering even more from the catalogs the indie labels sent me. This was in the early 1980s, before the advent of the internet. But for the most part, I felt like an outsider, far removed from the musical world I was interested in. It wasn’t until some older kids on my side of town formed a punk band, Stevie Stiletto and the Switchblades, that things began to change. And when I first saw the band live, my commitment to punk was secured. After long feeling like a social outcast, I suddenly encountered like-minded people with whom I felt part of a community. But on a more important level, I had a direct personal contact to cultural producers who became role models of a sort. In the 1970s, Ray McKelvey was a young teenage delinquent. Inspired by Iggy and the Stooges and Alice Cooper, McKelvey was drawn to the various musical forms that informed early American punk. Upon hearing the Ramones, McKelvey decided he too could find an outlet for his creative expression through punk rock. Teaming up with Michael Butler, Steve Gallagher (to be replaced later by Thommy Berlin), and Rob Akkk, they formed Jacksonville’s first punk band in 1982 calling themselves Stevie Stiletto and the Switchblades. Their early shows were tumultuous affairs, with the band thrashing out short songs of high intensity, while McKelvey (aka Stevie Ray Stiletto) emerged as a charismatic and captivating frontman. In a town characterized by a strong conservative Southern Baptist sensibility, combined with long-standing racial tensions, and a proud “Southern Rock” musical heritage (Jacksonville was home to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, Molly Hatchet, and .38 Special), punk was seen as anathema and the band met with disdain and outright hostility. Despite this, the band quickly gained a strong local following among Jacksonville youth who were attracted to their music and anti-status quo message, myself included.3 In typical punk fashion, the band recorded and released their own music, initially on cassettes. They sold these cassettes at their shows and a few local stores willing to stock the tapes. Their first release was sarcastically entitled 13 Greatest Hits (1985) and featured songs about contemporary politics, such as “Capital Punishment” (sample lyrics: “God Bless you Ronald

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Reagan/ What are you doing with the money that you’re making/ You take a life, you’re life will be taken/ Fuck you, Ronald Reagan!”), the shallowness of modern romance, as in “Girls Like You” (“All my life it’s always been arranged/ When it comes to girls, I get short-changed”), a mocking critique of gender norms in “I Wanna Be You” (“I like wearing your clothes when we go to the movies/ And I like wearing your clothes when we go to the show”), critiques of vapid popular culture, such as in “Love Boat” (“I wanna sink the Love Boat, with you on it”), and a scathing critique of life in Jacksonville in the brilliant “Nothing Ever Happens in This Town.” (“Another Saturday night, and everybody’s on the search/ The only thing that they’re gonna find is bingo after church/ Don’t like it, not a bit/ This town is shit.”). For listeners like myself, this last song was not just an amusing portrayal of the boredom of life in a stultifying southern US town, but lyrically and aurally a response to the dissatisfaction and alienation we felt every day. Inspired by Stevie Stiletto (they dropped the last part of the name because it was too long), a number of other local punk bands emerged—such as the Blaine Crews Band, Distrust, and the Red Army—to create a significant scene. The band began touring in the region, playing in small venues across

FIGURE 2.1 Publicity photo of Stevie Stiletto, 1983 (used with permission).

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the southeastern US . But in Jacksonville they found it difficult to find venues that would book them. Most places either disapproved of the musical style and/or feared the mayhem that might erupt at a concert. The band responded to this dilemma by booking their own shows in alternative venues, playing in local National Guard armories and community centers, before turning their own practice space into a musical venue, the 730 Club. The 730 Club provided the center of gravity for the local punk scene to gel. The band regularly put local bands on the bill, giving them opportunities to play. Through their own touring, Stevie Stiletto gained access to the national punk scene and used those contacts to book their own shows back at the 730 Club. Soon nationally known bands like Black Flag, Sonic Youth, SNFU , Neon Christ, and others were playing at the 730 Club between the bigger scenes of Atlanta and Miami, something that was virtually unthinkable a few years before. The 730 Club generated very little money for the band and existed primarily to help foster and maintain a scene in Jacksonville. After various line-up changes, the band decided to move to San Francisco in the late 1980s. The timing was fortuitous, as the band eased themselves into what was a growing punk scene in the Bay Area. The band continued to self-release their own albums—Food for Flies (1986) and Smell the Sock (1989)—and became fixtures in the local punk community, earning a spot on the cover of Maximumrocknroll. Unfortunately, San Francisco also provided hard drugs that the band indulged in, particularly McKelvey. He moved across the Bay to Oakland to be closer to his drug connections (just as Iggy Pop and most of the Stooges had moved out of their communal house to be closer to their own dealers). The nadir for the band occurred when McKelvey, in an attempt to come down from a drug high put himself in an alcohol and Nyquil-induced coma the day before a major concert featuring themselves and the Dead Kennedys. Shortly afterwards, while on tour, McKelvey literally walked out on the band. Upon returning to Jacksonville, McKelvey contacted guitarist and childhood friend Frankie Phillips and, after a few false starts under different names, re-launched Stevie Stiletto. Though there were several line-up changes, the band solidified with McKelvey, Phillips, Lorne Mays (bass), and Neal Karrer (drums). Continuing to self-release their albums (such as 1991’s Back in Arms), the band toured around the southern United States sporadically. Yet, by the early 2000s, McKelvey’s drug use and alcoholism took its toll on his health. He was diagnosed with hepatitis C, jaundice, and cirrhosis, and the doctors gave him days to live. Against the odds, McKelvey managed to survive and clean himself up . . . only to be diagnosed soon afterwards with cancer. After a painful struggle, McKelvey passed away in the early morning hours of March 24, 2013. I had moved away from Jacksonville around the same time the band left for San Francisco. As I began to form my own bands, I followed their do-ityourself model. My bands practiced in our own basements and garages. We

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booked our own shows; we handmade our own t-shirts and stickers. When it came time to release our music, we formed our own record label and did everything ourselves. Often my DIY practices stemmed from just not knowing how to act differently or from not having the funds to hire somebody to do things like make stickers or t-shirts. As I got older, I became more aware and reflexive of the DIY culture that I had embraced thanks to Stevie Stiletto and other similar punk bands. Ray’s story reflects a number of themes that run through this chapter, chief among them being the ways in which DIY punk can transform individuals into cultural producers, help develop oppositional identities, and contribute to a process of disalienation and self-empowerment. Ray McKelvey was a single individual, yet had a tremendous impact on hundreds of people, myself included. DIY punk is often spread by personal connections and role-modeling behavior, rather than a marketing campaign. While I discuss this latter point later in the book, I now turn to a more sustained discussion of the former themes.

DIY Punk as an identity, identity as a process In my formal interviews and conversations with punks over the past decade, there is no commonly shared narrative of how they became punks. For some, it was a gradual process of becoming involved and integrated into a particular local punk scene. For many, music was the gateway, for others it was zines or clothes. Some claimed that hearing a band like Minor Threat or the Bad Brains resulted in an instantaneous “road to Damascus” style conversion. This claim may be apocryphal, and yet it is repeated many times. For example, the Ramones and the Sex Pistols are both credited for turning hundreds, if not thousands, into punks by their live shows. One of the most infamous rock shows in history was the Sex Pistols’ June 4, 1976 performance at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall where the small audience included founding members of some of the most legendary Manchester bands, including Joy Division, the Smiths, the Fall, and the Buzzcocks. Though the audience only numbered between thirty-five to forty, thousands have since claimed that they attended the show, a phenomenon documented by music journalist David Nolan’s excellent book I Swear I Was There: The Gig That Changed The World (2006). Whether true or not, the ubiquity of these stories of spontaneous conversion speaks to the transformative power both of live music generally, given its affective power, but also to the power of punk in practice. People are not born punks, but choose to self-identify as punks. But why? What is the attraction? Again, there is no common answer. Some find the music entertaining. For example, Steve Albini of Big Black and Shellac was originally attracted to the “absurdity” of the Ramones, then slowly realized

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that they were the template for how he wanted to live his life: “Every significant life experience that I have had, I owe that to the Ramones. Without any questions whatsoever, all of those things that I got to experience, all of my moments in my love life, all of my creative moments, all of my professional accomplishments, every single thing that I did in my life has to do one way or another with me hearing the Ramones and deciding that they were great” (Albini 2014: 232–3). For others, punk provided an outlet for the anger and energy they carried around with them. For example, Anugrah Esa, who runs Doombringer Records and plays in the Indonesian band Zudas Krust, found the anger and power of punk an attractive response to the conservative Muslim family he was growing up in (interview May 26–27, 2013). For others, like Roddy Neithercut of the Scottish band Atomgevitter and Poopy Pants zine, it struck a political nerve, helping him articulate questions and concerns that he had inside of him, while providing a template for realizing answers to those questions (interview May 19, 2009). Scholars have written a great deal about identity and identification. Many have pointed out that our identities are not fixed, but articulated within a diverse web of social relations so that we occupy multiple social positions at any given moment, through identifications of race, gender, class, ethnicity, occupation, tastes, and so on (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Scholars have come to understand that identification does not happen once and for all but is an ongoing, complex, and often conflicted process (Hall and du Gay 1996). Yet, we tend to see ourselves as complete, non-contradictory whole individuals, which is but one of the ironies of life. Despite their feeling natural and fixed (“I just am who I am, and you can’t change me”), identities are constantly in the process of being made and remade within the complicated ideological fields of social life. What I would underscore is that identities are the result of an ongoing process and the meanings attached to those practices are constantly changing and contested. To illustrate this last point, Holly Kruse, in her discussion of subculture identities in alternative music scenes, points out that the practice of using LSD meant something quite different among members of the Bay Area counterculture community in the 1960s, than it did in Athens, GA in the early 1980s or in the London rave communities of the 1990s (1993: 34). This is largely due to the fact that the ideological terrain of these social fields is constantly changing. Thus, both identities and their social contexts are processes, rather than fixed things. Some sociologists have pointed out that identities exist within social structures to provide the mental maps, if you will, of how to understand the world around us and act within it (Bourdieu 1990). Think about being a male, working-class, Boston Red Sox fan. Each social category constructs a system of understanding that helps us make practical sense of the world and our place in society (what some refer to as habitus). It does not dictate action, but establishes some acceptable parameters of action. There are social

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expectations around being a male (e.g. “how to act like a man”) and a Red Sox fan (e.g. “thou shall always hate the Yankees”) that provide us with the cognitive frameworks for navigating the chaotic complexities of everyday life. For sociologists, this helps explains the production and reproduction of social life (Elliott 1999: 10). But it also raises the question about how much power (or “agency”) we have in shaping those social expectations and changing those social structures (sometimes understood as “reflexive communities”). Some sociologists have focused on the degree to which one “throws oneself” into these structures/communities. As individuals, we are shaped by our habitus (these social structures), but we can also shape them, particularly when it comes to embracing and/or altering existing practices and meanings (Lash 1994: 156). To put it in less academic terms, no one is born a punk, but one can choose to be a punk. Of course, there are varying degrees to the level of identification one might engage in. One can like punk music, but not consider oneself a punk. This is reflected in the degree one “throws” oneself into any given social field. And while it can be punk to claim that one isn’t a punk, I am interested in the people that have “thrown” themselves into DIY punk at the level of personal identification. Of course, such identification does not happen once and for all, but is an ongoing process. So it should be recognized that some punks might stop being punks over time (or, to extend the metaphor, the degree to which they “throw” themselves into a punk DIY varies and may cease altogether). For whatever reason, they stop identifying with punk as a way of being. Many of the people I have spoken to who no longer consider themselves punk talk about becoming disillusioned, usually with particular local scenes (discussed in the next chapter). Often people get disillusioned by the way the scene changes. New people and bands emerge that they don’t have the same affection for. For example, many people left the early LA scene when it shifted from the artistically inclined bohemian Hollywood set featuring bands such as the Weirdos, Screamers, and Zeros to a decidedly more masculinist scene emanating from Huntington Beach around such bands as Vicious Circle, TSOL , and the Screws (Spitz and Mullen 2001; MacLeod 2010; Bag 2011). Other times people become disillusioned because the scene doesn’t change. They get tired of the same bands, styles, and conversations being repeated. They are expecting and hoping for something more and the scene fails to deliver. For many, the break with the scene is complete and they turn their back on punk. For others, the break is more gradual and incomplete. For many, they incorporate certain, if not all, of the ethos of DIY punk, but choose to self-identify in other ways. Numerous people I have spoken with still continue to live in ways that embody the DIY and rebellious ethos of punk, but no longer consider themselves part of either a local scene or global culture. In my own case, my self-identification with punk has been a fraught and ongoing process. By my mid-thirties, I still actively listened to punk

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music, but didn’t identify myself as strongly with its DIY ethos as I had once. This was probably largely because I was in graduate school and involved in the academic rat race, becoming fairly alienated in my daily existence. I experienced a much-needed (and deeply appreciated) reorientation when I attended a punk concert while at an academic conference. The 2003 International Studies Association (ISA ) Conference was being held in Portland, OR precisely at the time when the US and its “coalition of the willing” were gearing up for their brutal invasion and occupation of Iraq. I had spent the preceding months engaged in various forms of anti-war activism, even going on a highly hostile Fox News show to argue against the illegal nature of the invasion. Yet, in Portland, throughout the halls of the soul-numbing conference supposedly aimed at grappling with the pressing issues of world politics, there was little talk of the impending war. My few attempts to stage some form of protest and intellectual outrage at the conference proved ineffectual. Then, at the end of the week, I went to a punk club a few blocks from the hotel to see a Joe Strummer tribute show. Strummer had died suddenly a few months before and now over twenty regional bands were coming together to play a benefit show. Each band performed two or three Clash songs; one band getting up after the other, sharing amps and a drum set. On stage, the bands were using the songs to make sense of the dangerous world we all found ourselves in. The in-between-song banter reflected this—comments about President George W. Bush, remarks about American nationalism, concerns about the impending war on Iraq, and pleas to register to vote. The people in the club were using the Clash and punk rock, much as I did years before, to help them understand the world they were inhabiting. While academics pontificated about world affairs to themselves down the street, it seemed to me that most of those scholars were doing a poor job communicating with people outside that conference hotel. In many ways, that night was both a catharsis and a rebirth for me. I recognized that the academic community, from the ISA to other organizations such as the American Political Science Association, was lacking in political action in contrast to the DIY punk community. Not only did it re-energize my belief that punk provides the opportunity for important political empowerment and resistance in the face of stultifying global forces, it reconnected me with punk’s DIY ethos (Dunn 2005). I present this personal anecdote in part to underscore the fact that identities are processes, being made and re-made constantly. But the larger implication is that identities grounded in DIY punk are politically significant, in ways that, say, your average scholar’s identity might not be. To return to the language of our sociologists, a scholar’s habitus is often shaped by academic expectations regarding proper behavior, intellectual objectivity, and professional advancement. In some cases, those social pressures actually work to neuter an individual scholar’s political activism. I know enough

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colleagues who have been punished (e.g., through the denial of tenure and promotion) to know that this is can be the case. But is there a punk habitus? I’ve already suggested that the social field of punk is always being made and re-made, always contested. But there are some core elements of DIY punk that contribute to a punk habitus, namely an anti-status quo disposition and a dedication to DIY. Together, these provide the opportunity for disalienation.

Anti-status quo In his work Punk Productions: Unfinished Business, Stacy Thompson argues that “capitalism is neither natural nor necessary, and punks have not forgotten this fact. They cannot fully imagine what the better world would look like, but they refuse to accept the one that they know as final” (2004: 4). This observation reflects that punk represents a critical opposition to the status quo. This anti-establishment disposition is a defining element of the genre. In his discussion of American punk at the end of the twentieth century, John Charles Goshert argues, “its tendency is a resistance to working within the usual terms of commercial success and visibility” (2000: 85). But participants are frequently more forceful in their articulation of punk’s antistatus quo ethos. Pat Thetic of the Pittsburgh punk band Anti-Flag argues, “Punk rock is a statement against the status quo. Punk rock is about fighting against the status quo and trying to find other ways of seeing the world that are more productive and less destructive to people” (interview May 12, 2005). Likewise, Guy Picciotto of the seminal Washington, DC band Fugazi observed: “The whole concept of punk was something that was against whatever seemed normal or whatever seemed kind of handed down. To me the basic tenets of punk have always been: no set of rules, no set of expectations, and that it always challenges the status quo” (interview March 30, 2007). In explaining why she identifies as a punk, Alex Martinez, a Mexican-American teenager, explained, “I identify with being an outcast and doing things your own way, which I think, is a big part of punk rock and punk ideals in general. I’m more aware about the things that I don’t believe in or won’t stand for, and me and punk rock usually agree about those things” (personal correspondence July 27, 2010). Many observers make the mistake of assuming that this anti-status quo disposition means that punk is inherently politically progressive. In fact, there has long been a substantial percentage of punks who identify with the political right. Yet, they are driven by an anti-status quo attitude as well. They believe the world is screwed up, they just believe that the causes and solutions are different than those espoused by liberal or leftist punks. Neo-Nazi punks in Eastern Europe are very much opposed to the status quo, as are radical Islamist punks in the Middle East and Asia. While many liberal Western punks might

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be uncomfortable with the anti-immigrant and veiled racism of Anti-Seen’s lyrics, they would most certainly identify with the band’s anger at the status quo. Across the political spectrum, what punk offers are cultural resources for the expression of an individual’s frustration with the way the world is. This anti-status quo disposition is at the core of punk (though often watered down or erased within commercial “punk”), but it is important to recognize that a certain set of political proscriptions does not necessarily follow. It has been argued by more than one observer that the early punk scenes in London and New York were not established on any well-developed social or political theories. As Craig O’Hara notes, “They may have been against all the standard ‘-isms’, but were more apt to spit and swear than to explain their feelings to the mainstream public” (1999: 27). Yet, both of these scenes were steeped in an anti-status quo disposition. Setting aside its lyrical content, the music generated often challenged established musical conventions and embraced dissonance and “noise;” representing an aural political intervention (Bleiker 2005). According to Ryan Moore, the original British punk subculture exemplified a “culture of deconstruction” in response to the condition of late twentieth-century postmodernity, offering “the practice of appropriating the symbols and media which have become the foundation of political economy and social order in order to undermine their dominant meanings and parody the power behind them” (2004: 311). Moore’s argument draws from Dick Hebdige (1979), who noted that UK punk style employed techniques of juxtaposition, pastiche, and irony to disrupt the transparency of meaning and the ideological “common sense” it supports. For example, the Sex Pistols inverted the image of a rock band through self-reflexive irony, both on and off-stage, while their fans employed provocative symbolism (such as the swastika and defaced images of the Queen) and disrupted class-norms around fashion as part of a mocking critique of the established order. For many early punks, the anti-aesthetic they employed was a mocking assault on dominant social norms. This anti-status quo ethos is still the major element within most, if not all, contemporary punk scenes. To be punk is to recognize that the world is fucked up.

DIY or die But there is more to punk than just realizing that the world is a mess. What makes punk’s anti-status quo disposition politically relevant is its linkage to the DIY ethos (Dale 2012). One of the best expressions of punk’s connection to DIY was offered by Daniel Sinker, founder of the magazine Punk Planet, who pointed out that “Punk has always been about asking ‘why’ and then doing something about it. It’s about picking up a guitar and asking ‘Why can’t I play this?’ It’s about picking up a typewriter and asking, ‘Why don’t my opinions count?’ It’s about looking at the world around you and asking, ‘Why are things

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as fucked up as they are?’ And then it’s about looking inwards at yourself and asking ‘Why aren’t I doing anything about this?’” (2001: 10). This quote captures a number of key aspects I consider important for my discussion. On the one level, it captures the anti-status quo aspect of punk discussed in the previous chapter. In a sense, punk is reactive; a response to the injustices of the world. But it is also proscriptive. Through its employment of DIY, punk offers a guide for action and self-empowerment. Instead of passively accepting the world as it is, punk inspires people to do something about it on a personal level. Don’t wait for someone else to fix what bothers you—do it yourself. Or, as the oft-quoted punk slogan goes “do it yourself or do it with friends.” When discussing DIY punk, Deek Allen, the singer for the Scottish anarcho-punk band Oi Polloi, observed “don’t expect other people to do stuff, we have the fucking power to do it. It’s not a case of petitioning politicians to please change things for it, we’re just going to go and do it” (interview April 20, 2009). This gets at punk’s intersection of DIY and anti-status quo at the individual level. Albert Camus famously asserted, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” I am not naïve enough to assert that DIY punk makes people “absolutely free” in the sense that Camus implies. But you don’t have to be “absolutely free” to engage in acts of rebellion. As the example of the global Occupy movement recently illustrated, even small-scale displays of democracy and freedom can be threatening to established systems of power. Moreover, as political theorist Bernard E. Harcourt (2012) has recently pointed out regarding the Occupy movement, there is an important distinction between civil disobedience, which legitimizes the system and seeks to make changes within, and political disobedience, which rejects the legitimacy of the system and creates alternative spaces. At its best, DIY punk is a global example of political disobedience—rejecting the way things are and questioning the naturalness of the social order, while also calling into being alternatives, other ways of thinking and being (Dale 2012). As such, DIY punk helps produce oppositional identities. In Dick Hebdige’s terms, the oppositional identities produced within punk scenes represent a “disruptive noise:” “interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media” (1979: 90). In this way, punk not only challenges the “naturalness” and “inevitability” of the accepted orders in society, but enables individuals to construct alternative forms of identity that are in opposition to societal norms and the political and economic practices underpinning those norms.

Punk oppositional identities in practice At the level of the individual, much of the political significance of DIY punk is that it provides resources to construct oppositional identities. These are

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not unproblematic processes. Nor do they necessarily lead to forms of progressive politics. But they do entail openings for individual empowerment. To illustrate this in greater detail, I discuss the Riot Grrrl “movement” before turning to the further examples of queercore and Straight Edge.

Riot Grrrl As noted earlier, the initial American and UK punk scenes were extremely diverse, drawing in males, females, transgendered individuals, straights, and homosexuals. Numerous bands contained women members and all-female bands abounded. It should be stressed that the presence of women in punk scenes was not the result of benevolent and enlightened punk men, despite myths to the contrary. British sociologist Angela McRobbie forcefully argued that women had already moved into the subculture spaces and helped make punk, rather than punk making space for them (1980; McRobbie and Garber 1976). In her discussion of women in the original UK punk scene, Lucy O’Brien argues that while the 1960s “counter-culture” may have challenged societal norms about sexuality and gender-relations, those norms were still very much intact by the mid-70s. “With punk, leading characters like Vivienne Westwood, Jordan and Siouxsie Sioux systematically set about dismantling these standards” (O’Brien 1999: 189). Within punk, women could express their individuality, solidarity and rage. As Liz Naylor, co-editor of the Manchester punk fanzine City Fun, and later the manager of the UK ’s leading 1990s Riot Grrrl band Huggy Bear, stated, “In a symbolic sense, women were cutting and destroying the established image of femininity, aggressively tearing it down” (quoted in O’Brien 1999: 191–3). Punk also gave women a sense of empowerment and solidarity. Viv Albertine, guitarist of the Slits, stated, “We’d walk down the street as a bunch and feel very very powerful. It was very exciting. I don’t think many girls get to do that” (quoted in O’Brien 1999: 194; see also Albertine 2014). In the UK , female bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, X-Ray Spex, the Slits, and the Raincoats emerged as major punk acts. Similarly, females were a major force in the development of punk in the US , both as band members—such as Debbie Harry (Blondie), Exene Cervenka (X), Penelope Houston (Avengers), Lorna Doom and Donna Rhia (Germs), and Alice Bag and Patricia Morrison (Bags)—as well as in other capacities—such as artists Philomena Winstanley and Diane Zincavage, Lisa Fancher (Bomp/Frontier Records), zinester Dee Dee Faye, and Marlene “Mama Zed” Zampelli (Zed Record store). Bags guitarist Craig Lee, wrote in Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave, “In Los Angeles circa 1977, female bass players were almost a requirement, and it seemed that it was often the women who dominated and controlled the Punk scene. This equality of the sexes was just another breakdown of traditional rock and roll stereotypes

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that the early scene was perpetuating” (Belsito and Davis 1983: 20; see also Bag 2013; Marcus 2010; O’Meara 2003; Leblanc 1999). By creating a productive and, at times, protective space, women drew upon DIY empowerment to foster and nurture oppositional identities. With punk, there was a lack of emphasis on technical expertise, and this meant that many untrained female musicians, writers, designers, and artists felt able to enter the world of cultural production which had previously been closed to them. Of course, it should be stressed that early punk spaces were not always protective. As O’Brien notes, “Contrary to myth, punk was not necessarily women-friendly, and it was hard to make an impact as a female musician. Apart from a few high-profile acts like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Pauline Murray, X-Ray Spex, the Slits and the Raincoats, women suffered the same discrimination they had always done, treated as novelty, decoration and not as serious contenders” (1999: 194; O’Meara 2003). Indeed, after the initial inroads, punk became less hospitable to women as scenes increasingly reproduced some of larger society’s patriarchal tendencies. This was particularly pronounced in the United States, especially on the West Coast, where hyper-masculine bands became leaders of the new American punk scene of the 1980s. As Lauraine Leblanc writes, “All-male bands such as San Francisco’s Dead Kennedys (formed in 1978), Hermosa Beach’s ‘muscle punk’ Black Flag (in 1979) and Fear (in 1980) invaded the California punk

FIGURE 2.2 Alice Bag of the Bags, 1979 (photo by Louis Jacinto; used with permission).

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scene. These bands had a harder-edged sound than did the previous San Francisco bands, and were less interested in (feminine) arty self-expression than they were in creating a controversial expression of (masculine) punk anger, energy, and humor” (1999: 50). Jennifer Miro of the San Francisco punk band the Nuns recalls, “There were a lot of women in the beginning. It was women doing things. Then it became this whole macho, anti-women thing. Then women didn’t go to see punk bands anymore because they were afraid of getting killed. I didn’t even go because it was so violent and so macho that it was repulsive. Women just got squeezed out” (quoted in Klatzker 1998). This was reflected across the US as hardcore rose to prominence not only on the West Coast but also in East Coast scenes like NYC and DC . As such, many women in the American punk community found themselves pushed to the margins of their own scene. Writer and political activist Anne Elizabeth Moore recalls finding herself “at the back of the club with other females holding their boyfriends’ jackets” while the boys slam danced and played in the bands (interview February 28, 2007). By the late 1980s, a female-led backlash aimed at reclaiming the multigendered spaces of the initial punk movement was underway, most clearly manifested in what became known as the Riot Grrrl movement. Riot Grrrl came into existence in the spring of 1991 after Allison Wolfe, Molly Neuman, and Jen Smith (fanzine editors and members of the band Bratmobile) created a collectively authored feminist zine called Riot Grrrl. At the same time, Kathleen Hanna (of the zine and band Bikini Kill) began organizing weekly “Riot Grrrl” meetings with about twenty other girls (1992). Female-only Riot Grrrl meetings included zine makers, activists, artists, musicians, and members of the punk community in their teens and early twenties. While the founding members of Riot Grrrl eventually moved back to Olympia and started another Riot Grrrl chapter there, Riot Grrrl DC continued to hold weekly meetings and produce fanzines. The original members of Riot Grrrl DC kept open lines of communication with the members of Riot Grrrl Olympia, and a national movement began to emerge (Marcus 2010).4 The definition of Riot Grrrl was self-consciously left open-ended. As Lisa Wildman of Riot Grrrl NYC wrote: “We want the definition of Riot Grrrl to be whatever anyone wants to use the term wants it to be. We feel that over-organization would cost us the individuality we spend too much of the time fighting the rest of the world for” (1994: 7). Riot Grrrl zines became spaces where young women “continually re-rehearsed self-definition[s]” (Gottlieb and Wald 1994: 253). The emphasis was on valuing subjective understandings of the political/social reality in which the girls found themselves. As Kathleen Hanna wrote in Bikini Kill #2, they were engaged in “taking over the means of production in order to create our own meanings . . . I encourage girls everywhere to set forth their own revolutionary agendas from their own place in the world . . . embrace subjectivity as the only reality there is” (1992: 2; emphasis in original).

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From July 31 to August 2, 1992 Riot Grrrl DC held a national convention that brought females from all over the country together to discuss issues central to the movement at the time: sexual identity, self-preservation, racism awareness, surviving sexual abuse, and whether Riot Grrrls “fit or don’t fit into the punk community” (Riot Grrrl Convention 1992). Many of the convention participants went on to create new Riot Grrrl chapters in their home cities. By 1993, weekly Riot Grrrl meetings were being held in dozens of cities across the country. A statement issued by Riot Grrrl DC published in Bikini Kill # 2 describes the Riot Grrrl movement as a place for young feminists to support each other and exchange ideas: “With this whole Riot Grrrl thing, we are not trying to make money or get famous; we’re trying to do something important, to network with grrrls all over, to make changes in our lives and the lives of other grrrls” (Hanna 1992). Several bands rose to prominence, such as Bratmobile, Bikini Kill, Calamity Jane, Heavens to Betsy, Huggy Bear, Tribe 8, Cunts with Attitude, and Team Dresch. A number of these bands were active around the Pacific Northwest region, but, like the Riot Grrrl movement, the punk feminist music scene was not regionally limited. Bikini Kill’s song “Double Dare Ya” became a rally cry for many in the scene, with its opening line: “We’re Bikini Kill and we want Revolution Girl-Style Now!!!” Politically charged, Riot Grrrl bands played aggressive punk rock with a pronounced feminist agenda, placing gender issues at the forefront. Directly challenging the physical marginalization of women in the scene, bands encouraged women to come to the front of the stage, where they passed out lyric sheets. For Riot Grrrls, the response to traditional patriarchy—in the immediate punk community and in the larger society—was “girl power.” Songs focused on issues central to Riot Grrrl such as rape, domestic abuse, women’s health, sexuality and, above all, female empowerment. Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna saw girl bands as a way for women to take ownership of their own bodies: “It’s a good way to act out behaviors that are wrongly deemed ‘inappropriate.’ This is a refutation of censorship and body fascism. This can deny taboos that keep us enslaved . . . To discuss in both literal and artistic ways those issues that are really important to girls. Naming these issues, specifically, validates their importance” (1991). Riot Grrrl offered both a critique of established feminist approaches and a continuation of the feminist political project (Nguyen 2012). Explaining “What Riot Grrrl Means To Me” in Riot Grrrl [NYC ] #5, Liberty wrote “Putting the punk back into feminism and feminism into punk” (Riot Grrrl NYC 1993: 2). One of Riot Grrrl’s main contributions to feminist change was its persistent opposition to the mainstream media and its call for women and girls to publicly express themselves. Alternative feminist forms of mass communication were central to Riot Grrrl’s mission from the very beginning. Riot Grrrl Olympia, for example, created a radio show and a television program in addition to their music and zines. Dana from the band Cunts

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with Attitude produced six episodes of The Riot Grrrl Variety Show for a cable access channel. It featured programs on feminist history, women’s punk music, and vegan cooking. Individual Riot Grrrls created spoken word performances, art projects, and short films. At DC -area protests and rallies, Riot Grrrls could often be seen writing provocative messages on their bodies in permanent marker. Spray-painting feminist slogans on public property was another common Riot Grrrl tactic. Perhaps Erika Reinstein best sums up Riot Grrrl’s attitude toward the media in her attempts to define the goals of the movement in Fantastic Fanzine #2: BECAUSE we girls want to create mediums that speak to US . We are tired of boy band after boy band, boy zine after boy zine, boy punk after boy punk after boy . . . BECAUSE in every form of media I see us/myself slapped, decapitated, laughed at, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked, and killed . . . BECAUSE every time we pick up a pen, or an instrument, or get anything done, we are creating the revolution. We ARE the revolution. REINSTEIN 1992 Reclaiming and politicizing the word “girl” was an integral part of Riot Grrrl’s feminist media project. An article in an early issue of Bikini Kill clearly emphasizes this goal: “[W]e are angry at a society that tells us that Girl=Dumb, Girl=Bad, Girl=Weak . . . girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will, change the world for real” (Hanna 1992). Reflecting on why she originally got involved in Riot Grrrl, May Summer stated: “Safety in numbers, empowerment, and affirmation was part of the appeal for me of Riot Grrrl as a community. It was emotionally rewarding for me to feel like girls were supporting me and I was supporting other girls. We felt that we were actively resisting sexism simply by loving each other, by refusing to hate each other the way we felt society was telling us to. Many zine pieces discussed girl jealousy and examined the issues that tend to get in the way of girl friendships, pointing out the sexism at the root of those conflicts. It was also just exciting, exhilarating, to stand together and be defiant, when alone we often felt vulnerable” (personal correspondence March 14, 2011).5 Using DIY punk to provide resources for individual empowerment, Riot Grrrl encourages females to engage in multiple sites of resistance. At the macro level, Riot Grrrls resist society’s dominant constructions of femininity. At the meso-level, they resist stifling gender roles in punk. At the micro-level, they challenge gender constructions in their families and among their peers. These daily forms of resistance are connected to Riot Grrrls focus on personal empowerment and increased self-esteem. In many ways, Riot Grrrls breathed new life into the feminist mantra “the personal is political.”

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It needs to be noted that this discussion of Riot Grrrl has purposefully focused on it as a North American phenomenon. I will discuss the global spread of Riot Grrrl and its continuation today more fully in Chapter Four.

Queercore Another, and somewhat related, example of individual empowerment via DIY punk is the emergence of queercore. Queercore’s roots can be traced to an influential 1989 article “Don’t Be Gay” in Maximumrocknroll by Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones, authors of the zine J.D.s. The MRR article was a scathing critique of both punk and gay communities. LaBruce and Jones attacked the gay “movement” for its implicit misogyny in privileging male “fag” culture over female “dyke” culture, and thus further segregating sexes. Their attack on punk culture dealt primarily with what they regarded as ubiquitous homophobia, despite punk’s queer roots (see Nyong’o 2008). As noted earlier, the early punk scenes in London, New York, LA and San Francisco were all intimately tied to the gay communities in those cities. As Gary Floyd, lead singer of the Dicks recalls, “The thing that set Austin apart in 1979 was that there were always a lot of queers in the scene . . . The scene was so young and uninfluenced; we didn’t have to live up to anything. Soon, other bands that had gay people started showing up. The popular bands in Austin were fronted by openly gay guys” (Rathe 2012). Any accurate historical account of punk must recognize the significant role gay members played in building and nurturing a wide number of scenes. Of course, these punk scenes were not idyllic spaces of unproblematic inclusion—nor are they today. For example, there was the notorious incident when transgendered Wayne County (soon to become Jayne County) was heckled by Dick Manitoba, lead singer of the Dictators, during a live performance at CBGB s. Fisticuffs between the two ensued, with Manitoba being taken to the hospital in serious condition. As photographer Bob Gruen recalls, “although there were a lot of gay people in the scene, it wasn’t spoken of that much. . . . I felt that it [the CBGB s fight] was kind of a turning point, that all these guys had to ‘fess up and say that Wayne’s our friend. And we stand up for him and it’s not okay to come into a club and call a guy a queer. It’s not okay” (quoted in McNeil and McCain 1996: 342). As the punk scenes in the US grew and changed during the 1980s, however, this atmosphere of sexual inclusivity was frequently eroded. Just as women found themselves marginalized to the back of the clubs, holding their boyfriends’ jackets, American punk scenes became seen less and less as safe spaces for gays. It was this marginalization and hostility within punk, along with the conservative nature of the queer movement in general, that LaBruce and Jones attacked. Their critique struck a nerve among other gay punks, who

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answered the call by starting their own zines, forming bands and record labels, and helping to create scenes and networks soon labeled “queercore” (Ciminelli and Knox 2005).6 While part of the drive was reclaiming space within punk, a larger motivation was creating a more radical queer movement grounded in punk’s sensibilities. As Larry Bob, author of the Holy Titclamps zine, observed: “I think that mainstream gay culture is alienating. The accepted social activities, like dancing in clubs which are too loud for conversation, don’t provide opportunities to interact with creative people” (quoted in Spencer 2005: 241). Jon Ginoli, founder of the band Pansy Division, noted his marginalization from the dominant gay culture, finding it homogenizing and intolerant of alternatives. Reflecting on the stifling aspects of the gay scene, he notes, “I didn’t realize gay culture meant you had to like disco or else . . . Champaign’s underground music scene, however, was turning out to be more productive and successful for me and more accepting of my tastes than its gay scene, so I turned my focus there” (2009: 12). Queercore drew upon punk’s promise of rebellion and DIY ethos to construct new oppositional identities and communities. Liz Naylor of Gay Animals recalls, “Punk was liberation from a life of Jefferson Starship. I didn’t know how I was going to survive in the world as a 14-year-old lesbian. Punk, though it didn’t give me any answers, gave me an escape from what I thought would be a hideous future” (Rathe 2012). In the wake of LaBruce and Jones’ MRR article and JD zine, a number of other queercore zines emerged, including Shrimp, Jane and Frankie, and Fanorama, joining pre-existing queercore zines such as Larry-Bob’s Holy Titclamps, Donna Dresch’s Chainsaw, Matt Wobensmith’s Outpunk, and Tom Jennings and Deke Nihilson’s Homocore. Wobensmith’s Outpunk mutated into the first record label dedicated explicitly to queercore, releasing two influential compilations in 1992: There’s a Faggot in the Pit and There’s a Dyke in the Pit. Wobensmith also began writing a regular column for Maximumrocknroll, which spread the message of queercore to a larger audience. Dresch’s zine Chainsaw also functioned as a record label, releasing material by bands such as the Fakes, Sleater-Kinney, Heavens to Betsy, and her own band Team Dresch. Early queercore bands included Fifth Column (also featuring Donna Dresch), God Is My Co-Pilot, Tribe 8, Limp Wrist, and Pansy Division. In 1996, more mainstream audiences were introduced to queercore when the outspoken Pansy Division opened for Green Day on their American tour. Bands like Pansy Division, with their pop-punk sensibilities, also expanded the sonic breadth of queercore, a label which Ginoli worried conveyed a privileging of noise and hardcore punk: “It presents a misleading image of raw noise with gay lyrics that doesn’t take into account the pop qualities of our sound. While too raw for mainstream rock, we’re way too poppy and wimpy for many punk fans” (Ginoli 2009: 28). The rise of queercore inspired several local queercore scenes, such as in Chicago where the organization

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FIGURE 2.3 Cover of Homocore #4, 1989 (courtesy of Tom Jennings; used with permission).

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“Homocore Chicago” was founded, featuring a monthly night of live queercore music. As Amy Spencer notes, “Through Homocore events, they aimed to create a space for men and women to be together, as opposed to the sense of gender segregation which was the norm in mainstream gay culture. The organizers were aware of the importance of the events they were presenting and the support they offered individuals and musicians. The majority of shows they organized were aimed at all-ages, acknowledging that those under twenty-one years old also needed a space where they could be themselves” (2005: 244). Reflecting on his experiences in numerous queercore bands such as Behead the Prophet and Mukilteo Fairies, singer Joshua Ploeg noted, “One of the things was not to necessarily make queer culture more acceptable, but

FIGURE 2.4 Publicity photo for Pansy Division, 2003 (courtesy of Jon Ginoli; used with permission).

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to make queer people feel like they could do whatever they wanted. It’s not to be more included, but to feel like you’re able to do something, no matter how crazy” (Rathe 2012). By the late 1990s, queercore had spread across North America and the local scenes of San Francisco, Olympia, Chicago, Toronto, NYC , London, Manchester, Berlin, and Rome had been strengthened by the global networks of punk culture. Queercore continues to be an active force for individuals to use punk to create empowered, disalienated queer identities (Ciminelli and Knox 2005; Steel Cut Queer 2013).7

Straight Edge Another example of DIY punk and personal empowerment can be seen in the straight edge movement.8 The roots of straight edge are often traced to the early 1980s, when club owners in Washington, DC and elsewhere would mark underage punks’ hands with a large X to signal to the club workers that they were not to be served alcohol. The X became a badge of honor as some kids transformed the X from a stigma to a symbol of pride. These kids began to mark Xs on their own hands, including of-age punks who advertised that they did not want to drink. In 1981, the DC -based band Minor Threat released their song “Straight Edge” containing lyrics that were explicitly anti-drug and anti-alcohol. Their song unexpectedly became the touchstone for a movement (often shortened to sXe) that inspired thousands of young people to abstain from alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and promiscuous sex. As Ian MacKaye, lead singer of Minor Threat, explained: “OK , fine, you take drugs, you drink, whatever . . . But obviously I have the edge on you because I’m sober. I’m in control of what I am doing” (quoted in Azerrad 2001: 136). For straight edgers, the use of alcohol and drugs was symptomatic of a general passivity that was wrought by consumer culture’s stifling of individual thought and expression. While the straight edge scene was founded around personal control, it was also about reclaiming youth culture and the political potential of punk. As Michael Azerrad argues, “Ethics aside, straight edge was a way of rescuing rock music from being simply a vehicle for selling drinks” (2001: 137). The straight edge philosophy quickly caught on and numerous sXe bands emerged across the US , including SSD, 7 Seconds, Warzone, and Verbal Assault. By the end of the 1980s, other bands had emerged in what can be considered a “second wave” of straight edge, also referred to as the “Youth Crew” era largely based around NYC and Revelation Records, with notable bands from this era including Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, No for an Answer, Bold, Insted, Turning Point, and Earth Crisis. Substantial straight edge scenes existed—and continue to exist—as part of the hardcore scenes in major urban spaces like Boston, New York,

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Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City, but are also found in small towns, rural communities, and suburbia across America and the globe (see Woods 2006; Lahickey 1997). The global reach of sXe is extensive. Straight edge became a significant part of a number of European punk scenes around the mid-1980s (Birds of a Feather 2009). As Robert Voogt of the Dutch sXe record label Commitment Records recalls, “Lärm was probably the first European band that clearly linked itself to straight edge. From 1986–1989 on, the European sXe scene was on the rise, especially in The Netherlands, England, Germany, Belgium and Italy. In the 1990s, it spread all over Europe, with a new peak at the end of the 1990s, with strong sXe scenes in Scandinavia, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Poland and Portugal” (interview August 21, 2010). While scenes and philosophical elements of sXe are in constant flux and up for debate, Ross Haenfler argues that “there is a set of fundamental values that underlays much of the movement: positivity/clean living, lifetime commitment to the movement and its values, reserving sex for caring relationships, self actualization, spreading the subculture’s message, and involvement in progressive causes” (2006: 35; see also Woods 2006). When I was in Indonesia, a number of the punks I spent time with were strict sXers. In our conversations, most noted that sXe meshed quite neatly with their religious beliefs. In this case it was Islam, but other sXers frame their beliefs in terms of a larger spirituality. Ray Cappo, the influential singer of Youth of Today, embraced Hare Krishna and sees a link between it and the sXe lifestyle. Commitment Records’ Robert Voogt recalls, “I never drank, smoked or used drugs and when I found out about ‘straight edge’ in 1986, by records of Lärm and Crippled Youth, I felt a connection with that concept right away. It totally was in line with the way I lived my life, and it was great to find out there were more people who did not feel the urge to drink alcohol, smoke or use drugs . . . I just never was interested in that kind of stuff, it did not attract me at all, and it never felt as it was meant for me. Later, my refusal of all of kind of drugs, also got an ideological (the ugliest face of capitalism shows itself in the drug industry), health and spiritual (you can not grow spirituality if you are under the influence of external stimulants) dimension” (interview August 21, 2010). Of course, straight edge is not without its contradictions. As Haenfler notes, “Straight edge, like other subcultures, also has illusory tendencies and reproduces prevailing ideology in several ways” (2006: 193). Perhaps central among its contradictions is sXe’s claim to be anti-sexist while doing little to promote female participation. Indeed, sXe scenes are often characterized by an almost complete lack of female musicians, hyper-masculine dancing at shows, and the promotion of hyper-masculine symbols and behaviors. More generally, there has always been a tension between sXe’s promotion of individuality and self-expression, on the one hand, and, on the other, conformity, close-mindedness, and intolerance among some participants. It

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FIGURE 2.5 Logo for the sXe label Commitment Records (courtesy of Robert Voogt; used with permission).

is not uncommon to hear former sXers (those who have “broken edge”) as well as current sXers complain about how doctrinaire other members of the scene can be. Some note that they’ve been criticized by the “sXe police” for drinking coffee, eating meat and/or dairy products, dining at fast food restaurants, and engaging in other activities not deemed straight edge. During the second wave of sXe, it was not uncommon for sXe kids (sometimes referred to as the “Earth Crisis generation”) to knock drinks and cigarettes out of people’s hands. Yet, it should be noted that conformity and intolerance tends to plague every social movement, despite stated objectives to the opposite. For example, despite the repeated calls for inclusivity, the Riot Grrrl movement was also plagued with cliques and factions. As with Riot Grrrl, queercore, and other forms of punk culture, straight edgers engage in multiple levels of resistance. At the macro-level, sXers challenge the larger mainstream culture that promotes and normalizes alcohol and tobacco use, and glorifies casual sexual encounters. Most sXers see these practices as manifestations of a mindless consumerist culture. At the meso-level, sXers react against mainstream youth culture, including their own punk culture. Indeed, sXe seems primarily focused on a direct, self-reflective engagement with their fellow youth. At the micro-level, sXe

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offers resistance as they challenge abuse within their own families and make changes in their individual lives (Haenfler 2006: 191–2). Straight edge puts these ideas of resistance into practice at a very personal level: leading by public example and creating a safe space in which this resistance to mainstream culture can be supported and nurtured. Thus, for sXe punk, the focus is on cultural resistance—challenging and redefining societal norms— and personal empowerment—what Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier call “the politicalization of the self and daily life” (1992: 117).

Commodifying and marketing opposition Lest I be accused of over-romanticizing punk’s oppositional identities, let me stress two major elements of concern. The first deals with appropriation and commodification. Again, the example of Riot Grrrl is informative. Despite Riot Grrrl’s emphasis on DIY feminist media production, or perhaps because of it, reporters from the mainstream press started to pay attention. The term “Riot Grrrl” had gone from appearing in small zines and protest signs to becoming a buzzword in entertainment magazines and major newspapers. At first, some members of the movement were encouraged by this new media attention, hoping that more people would read the zines and that the movement would grow as a result. Yet the coverage tended to be superficial, at best, and damagingly counter-productive, at worst. In hindsight, this faith in mainstream media seems more than a little naïve. May Summer remembers an article in the music magazine Spin as a critical moment. Erika Reinstein had spoken with a reporter about the Riot Grrrl movement and their zines. When the article was published, however, it contained some erroneous passages. Perhaps even more telling, Spin had hired a thin, “attractive” model to portray the image of a Riot Grrrl in the photo spread. The model appeared topless with words such as “bitch” and “slut” written on her body. As I have already mentioned, Riot Grrrls often wrote on their bodies with Sharpie markers, but Spin had appropriated this political act for a fashion statement. Summer and Reinstein found it offensive that the editors distorted Riot Grrrl’s message and portrayed its members as sex objects. While some Riot Grrrl members wanted to spread the word about Riot Grrrl and make connections with like-minded girls around the country (particularly in small isolated towns), they did not want the movement to become co-opted or turned into a sexy, pouty, pseudo-feminist fad. Reinstein wrote an article titled “Big Takeover” about the implications of corporate media on the Riot Grrrl movement: What we are doing is sincere and real. We are not trying to be trendy or the next big thing like we’re some kind of pop band. We are a group of girls who get together for support and to network because we need each

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other in this society that wants to act like we don’t exist. For any reporter to try and package and market that is fucking obscene. I mean it is not necessarily bad for “the movement” cause other girls are finding out about it and they might get inspired to do something of their own, it’s just that these big companies are profiting from riot grrrl. They’re taking it out of our hands and turning it into a commodity to be sold. REINSTEIN 1993 More articles appeared in the national press, even in prominent mainstream magazines like Newsweek and Seventeen. In these articles, like the one in Spin, a great deal of attention was paid to the ways some Riot Grrrls dressed and wore their hair. Riot Grrrl-related bands, particularly Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, also received a high degree of attention, but not for their political activism. The mainstream press rarely discussed the movement’s zine production or the social protests. At the same time, Kathleen Hanna was occasionally misconstrued as the movement’s leader. As she recalls, “I was uncomfortable being its spokesperson when it was the labor of so many that made Riot Grrrl popular” (2008). Reinstein saw this phenomenon as another inevitable consequence of the “Big Takeover:” “Even though we try to tell them [reporters], they just can’t seem to grasp the idea of a movement of individuals working together without some kind of map or chart or set of rules . . . they understand even less that we don’t have leaders and we are actively and continually trying to eliminate hierarchy whenever possible” (1993). The national media coverage detrimentally impacted the movement. As Corin Tucker of Heavens to Betsy said in an interview for the Riot Grrrl Retrospective online exhibition: “I think it was deliberate that we were made to look like we were just ridiculous girls parading around in our underwear. They refused to do serious interviews with us, they misprinted what we had to say, they would take our articles, and our fanzines, and our essays and take them out of context. We wrote a lot about sexual abuse and sexual assault for teenagers and young women. I think those are really important concepts that the media never addressed” (“What got lost”). Girls who felt exploited by this new media attention used fanzines to voice their discontent. Writing collectively in the zine Jigsaw #5½, Bikini Kill stated: We have been written about a lot by big magazines who have never talked to us or seen our shows. They write about us authoritatively, as if they understand us better than we understand our own ideas, tactics and significance. They largely miss the point of everything about us because they have no idea what our context is/has been. Their idea of punk rock is not based on anything they have ever experienced directly or even sought an understanding of by talking to those who have, yet they

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continue to write about it as if their stereotypical surface level view of it is all it is . . . So these kinds of experiences have led us to not feeling much like talking about our ideas at all. Sometimes not even to each other. But fuck that you know and we are making a new fanzine about this whole weird media phenomenon that we have been associated with and so you should look forward to that. But in the meantime we ask you to think about what you know about us and how you got that information cuz in most cases it probably isn’t too accurate . . . BIKINI KILL 1992 Though Kathleen Hanna called for a media blackout in 1992, the damage was done. Many felt that the mainstream media was misrepresenting, if not outright subverting, the message of the movement. The superficial appropriation of “girl power” by the Spice Girls and Lilith Fair further undercut the movement. Riot Grrrl countered this negative media attention through the creation of Riot Grrrl Press, which will be examined in greater detail in Chapter Five. In many ways, the Riot Grrrl movement was re-living challenges similar to those faced by their predecessors at the inception of the punk movement. One of the elements that originally made punk significant was that it represented not just a form of musical expression but a social and political disruption. In Dick Hebdige’s discussion of punk rock as a subculture and a style, he observes that “[s]ubcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media” (1979: 90). Within the highly mediated world of the past several decades, punk provides resources for the (often violent) disruption of the orderly sequence involved in the communication of dominant social ideas and practices. The Riot Grrrl movement continued that disruption of the authorized codes—particularly the gender codes—through which the social world is organized and experienced. Yet threatening cultural expressions, like punk in general and Riot Grrrl in particular, can be commodified and contained very quickly. As Hebdige notes, “As the subculture begins to strike its own eminently marketable pose, as its vocabulary (both visual and verbal) becomes more and more familiar, so the referential context to which it can be most conveniently assigned is made increasing apparent. Eventually, the mods, the punks, the glitter rockers can be incorporated, brought back into line, located on the preferred ‘map of problematic social reality’ ” (1979: 93–4). It is through the continual process of recuperation that the dominant social order is repaired and its social power reasserted. Drawing from the work of Roland Barthes, Hebdige notes that “The process of recuperation takes two characteristic forms: (1) the conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music, etc.) into mass-produced objects (i.e., the commodity form); (2) the ‘labeling’

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and re-definition of deviant behaviours by dominant groups—the police, the media, the judiciary (i.e. the ideological form)” (1979: 94). With the mainstream media’s coverage of Riot Grrrl, these processes of commodification and ideological redefinition had begun. With regards to the first move, Riot Grrrl and “girl power” style and fashion were commodified in ways similar to how punk had originally been mass-produced and marketed. Just as one could buy “punk” fashion and accessories in shopping malls across the US within a few years of its emergence in London and New York, so too was Riot Grrrl being commodified in the marketplace. With regards to the ideological form of the process of recuperation, Hebdige argues: “Two basic strategies have been evolved for dealing with this threat. First, the Other can be trivialized, naturalized, domesticated. Here, the difference is simply denied (‘Otherness is reduced to sameness’). Alternatively, the Other can be transformed into meaningless exotica, a ‘pure object, a spectacle, a clown.’ In this case, the difference is consigned to a place beyond analysis” (1979: 97). The mainstream media’s coverage of the Riot Grrrl movement, as evidenced by the articles in Spin, Seventeen, and Newsweek, provide excellent examples of both strategies: trivializing and exoticizing the Riot Grrrl Other. As Naomi Klein wrote in No Logo regarding the appropriation of girl power: “the cool hunters reduce vibrant cultural ideas to the status of archeological artifacts, and drain away whatever meaning they once held for the people who lived with them” (2000: 72–3). Soon after these “cool hunters” had promoted Riot Grrrl within the mainstream media, they began pronouncing that the movement was dead. For some Riot Grrrls, the exploitative media scrutiny was the accomplice, if not the killer itself. Yet, Riot Grrrl is far from dead, as I discuss in Chapter Four. The second cautionary claim I want to make is that there is nothing inherently progressive about these oppositional identities. I do not want to suggest some heroic narrative about the politics of punk, in large part because there is no such thing. As noted earlier, punks exist across the political spectrum. It is certainly true that many of the original bands coming out of the London scene had a progressive leftist bent. In Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus connects punk to the Situationist International (originally Lettrist International), a group of avantgarde revolutionaries best known for their activities in the French revolt of May 1968 when they spray-painted their poetic revolutionary slogans on the walls of Paris (1989; see also Nehring 2006). But conservative and neo-Nazi voices have also been prominent in punk rock (e.g., Skrewdriver, Brutal Attack, White Pride). Many punks have constructed oppositional identities along racist, fascist, and neo-Nazi lines. Currently in Eastern Europe, many youths reject the post-communist, neoliberal status quo by embracing significant aspects of a right-wing nationalist political agenda. Discussing their experience touring in the Ukraine in spring 2009, the Danish band Skarpretter notes: “Even

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though we have clashes with Nazi scum in west Europe, the situation in Ukraine and many of the eastern countries is a completely different story. Fascist youth groups are many and some are even backed by political parties and high ranking officials, meaning that they can get away with all kinds of shit. When they (occasionally) are arrested for their racist attacks on immigrants, gypsies or punks, their backers will make sure they get the best lawyers available. Scum protected by scum” (2009: 3). Likewise the Buffalobased band Lemuria had to confront neo-Nazi punks throughout their 2011 tour of Russia (interview October 12, 2012; Clem 2014). There is nothing inherently progressive about the politics and political openings that punk engenders. Indeed, there are numerous examples of right-wing, fascist, racist bands, zines, DIY record labels, and fans, not just in Eastern Europe, but across the globe. How people chose to form their oppositional identities via punk is not predetermined along a given route. Because it is the progressive political imaginings and practices that I am interested in, those are the ones I will dwell on most. I don’t deny that fascist punks exist. Yet, their existence does not negate the point that punk provides the resources and the political openings for individuals to be politicized. The actual character of that politicalization is shaped by personal agency and other socio-economic and historical forces. At the risk of over-generalizing, punks articulate what they see to be the problems of the present cultural, economic, and political system. They do this through various cultural forms and practices, such as through music, clothing, self-publication via zines, anti-corporate business practices, and so forth. They do this either explicitly or implicitly, but the fact is they feel empowered to articulate. Within a dominant culture that advocates passive consumerism, DIY punk promotes the idea that everyone’s voice is worth being heard. Not only are problems identified, but creative solutions are imagined and championed. In the face of passivity and nihilism, DIY punk promotes individual cultural production, engagement, and transformation. In the face of escapism, DIY punk promotes activity and connection. When discussing alternative media, political theorist and zinester Hakim Bey observed that, “Instead of measuring our success in terms of whether we can entrance someone, maybe we should measure our success by how we can knock people out of a trance” (quoted in Duncombe 2008: 134–5). This is succinctly captured by cartoonist Adrian Chi, also the drummer of punk duo Spokenest, in her Bite the Cactus comic “This is How We Fight” reprinted below. Ruptures in the status quo caused by oppositional identities do not necessarily lead to progressive self-empowerment. In his work on heavy metal, for instance, Robert Wasler (1993) discusses how that musical genre often embodies a rejection of the status quo. Yet it finds solace in escapism, withdrawal into a mythical world of warlocks and hobgoblins and a restoration of masculinities, coupled with the objectification of women,

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FIGURE 2.6 Bite the Cactus by Adrian Chi, 2015 (used with permission). among other outlooks. Stephen Duncombe has argued that oppositional identities are reactive by their very nature. As contrarians to the established order, Duncombe suggests that DIY punk’s identity is a negative one, and that a “negative identity only has meaning if you remain tied to what you are negating” (2008: 48). His argument is that oppositional identities are forever stuck within the larger cultural context that they are rebelling

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against. Oppositional identities are defined first and foremost by what they are against, and much less for what they are for. For someone like Duncombe, reactive identities simultaneously entrench the dominant culture’s dominance while thwarting a pro-active, progressive politics. While there is something to be said for Duncombe’s words of caution, his framing of the discussion strikes me as far too dichotomous. That is to say, he imposed an either/or choice that is unrealistic, especially given that neither identities nor the dominant culture are static. It doesn’t logically follow that negative identities cannot also be (or become) positive ones; that reactivity cannot lead to pro-activeness. Being anti-status quo is a reaction, a rejection, an identification of a problem. It’s called dominant culture for a reason. Many, including myself, would argue that dominant culture is the negative, and constructing an oppositional identity is a positive response. The construction of an oppositional identity is a significant first step towards greater political awareness and, to return to Harcourt’s term, “political disobedience” (2012). For many of the politically active punks I’ve spoken with, the oppositional elements of DIY punk initiated them into a process of further radicalism. For others who might not consider themselves politically engaged, they provide living examples of alternative cultures that can inspire others. Thus, the mere existence of an oppositional identity is a significant political action. Indeed, where Duncombe warns that oppositional identities offer only a reaction to a problem without the proposal of a solution, I argue that DIY punk offers the opportunity not just for rejection, but for resistance and for imagining and realizing alternative ways of being.

Disalienation and self-empowerment in DIY Punk My argument is more substantial than just “punks are political because they are different.” The three cases discussed—Riot Grrrl, queercore, and sXe— offer examples of how DIY punk enables individuals to imagine and realize alternative ways of being. It enables alternative ways of being female, feminist, male, queer, spiritual, Muslim, and so forth. There are other examples I can point to. For example, currently in the US , there is a vibrant community known as Afro-Punk in which individuals are using DIY punk to imagine alternatives ways of being black.9 Likewise, the documentary film Punk in Africa, about the emergence and resilience of punk in southern Africa, vividly illustrates how DIY punk produced alternative modes of being white, black, Afrikaaners, and so forth (Punk in Africa 2012; see also Stassen 2013). My point is that DIY punk produces alternative ways of being. Noting the global appeal of punk, Jeremy Wallach has observed: “While it began as an Anglo-American subculture, ‘punk’ is an unbounded serial

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identity which can be and is embraced by young people from any culture. Therein lies its power” (2014: 157). At its core, DIY punk provides the opportunity for personal empowerment by connecting an anti-status quo disposition with a DIY ethos. “Punk” can be commodified and sanitized, but DIY punk is a deeply ethical and political commitment to self-empowerment and disalienation. This helps explain why DIY punk continues to be relevant to people around the world some four decades after its emergence and why, in 2013, I encountered self-proclaimed Riot Grrrls and sXe punks in the streets of Indonesia. There are a couple of final points I’d like to make. The first has to do with degree. Different people, in different times of their lives, tend to embrace DIY to differing degrees. Or, to go back to the scholarly metaphor I employed earlier, the degree to which people “throw” themselves into DIY punk varies over time. Of course, the fact that there are differences in degrees relative to other people opens up debates about who is “more” punk or a “true” punk. The dumpster-diving, crusty anarcho-punk may look down her nose at “poser” punks who work in an office, but the issue is an important one. To illustrate the quandaries associated with “how DIY punk should I be in order for it to be relevant,” I always think of two songs. The first is by the English punk band I.C.H. called “Girl In The Dole Office” about a girl who works at the dole office and wears a t-shirt by Conflict, an influential UK anarcho-punk band. After they wonder if she is “taking the piss” or is an anarchist civil servant, they raise the question “how can you work for the system and claim to be against the system unless you’re for the system in the inside?” eventually dismissing her actions with the chorus “what’s the fucking point?!” This raises the important question about the degree and ways in which one employs oppositional identities. It is doubtful that simply listening to a DIY punk record is a radical move. Nor, for that matter, is it usually particularly subversive to wear a Conflict t-shirt. But at what degree does engaging in DIY punk become politically relevant? This question is indirectly answered by the song “Flies” by Imperial Can (one of the many bands featuring Chris Clavin of Plan-It-X Records, an influential American DIY anarcho-punk record label). The song begins with the lyrics “Each night when I lay down and I try to go to sleep, there’s a million thoughts that keep me awake. And I feel like I’m a failure because I didn’t change the world, but I tell myself tomorrow is the day . . . I keep on trying, it’s better than dying. They’re ain’t no flies on me.” The insight from this song is that the struggle is a process, not a destination. One could always do more—be more punk, more DIY —but it is important to keep striving. Thus, while I do believe the greater degree one is able to realize the ideal of DIY punk’s way of being, the greater potential they have for selfempowerment and disalienation, it is not an either/or situation. Again, the dumpster-diving crusty might look down her nose at the punk who goes to

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work in an office with his dress clothes covering up all the tattoos on his arm. But what if that person is Mitch Clem, who works for a bank during the day (until he recently got fired), but also books DIY punk shows in San Antonio and draws comics like My Stupid Life and Nothing Nice To Say that have been quite influential in the DIY community? Mitch reminds me of I.C.H.’s girl in the dole office, working a crappy job he cares little about so that he can spend his energy and creativity building and strengthening the DIY punk community he loves. The second concluding point I would like to stress concerns context. Oppositional identities like those associated with DIY punk carry different meanings and power in different contexts. Think about how early punks wearing t-shirts with a defaced Union Jack evoked different responses in London and in Belfast. It was a far more provocative act in Belfast, which was gripped with sectarian violence during the late 1970s. The degree to which DIY punk represents a “disruptive noise” varies at different times and in different places. I am reminded of this point when traveling amongst DIY punk scenes around the world. It would not raise many eyebrows for a Canadian Riot Grrrl band to sing an inflammatory song about the Prime Minister. But such an act takes on a far greater rebellious (if not revolutionary) degree when Pussy Riot does the same thing in Moscow. The fact that the members of Pussy Riot were sentenced to several years of hard labor for the performance of their “punk prayer” at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow is an important reminder of just how politically empowering and challenging DIY punk can be. I began this chapter with the anecdote of driving to the beach in Banda Aceh with my punk hosts. Sitting in that van, singing along to the music on the tape deck, I reflected on the fact that, despite our generational differences and geographical distance, we had all “thrown” ourselves into DIY punk, giving us a shared vocabulary and a common habitus. Almost four decades after the “birth” of punk, and on the other side of the globe, DIY punk was thriving in Indonesia and across the world. But why? Clearly DIY punk is doing important political work, and it is related to its combination of providing an anti-status quo disposition with a do-it-yourself ethos. Together, these elements have provided individual punks with the ability of selfempowerment, which helps explain why punk has been so attractive to so many people around the world for so long. But it has also done important political work at the level of the community, which is the topic of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER THREE

Fuck Your Scene, Kid: The Power of Local Scenes10

The Basque region lies in northeast Spain and southwest France and has been home to a separatist movement since the nineteenth century, with an armed nationalist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA ) forming in 1959. By the 1970s, as punk gained force in the UK and North America, Basque youth found themselves caught up in the politics of separatism, enduring stifling tradition and a severe economic recession with unemployment running well over 50 percent. Compounded by limited chance of a higher education, police persecution, the fragmentation of the social order, and bleak future prospects, many Basque youths embraced DIY punk as a means of turning their marginalization into a political stance. By the 1980s, the Basque punk scene began to construct its own organized infrastructure throughout the region. Pirate and independent radio stations emerged, DIY record labels and music venues were established, and underground zines were created. Basque punks created a local scene that enabled the construction of oppositional identities and alternative political spaces. But the ways in which Basques embraced and employed punk varied greatly. Some punks offered an anarchic rejection of the established order, promoting an “anti-order” in place of all forms of social order. The bands Eskorbuto (Scurvy) and Barricada (Barricade) embody this position. Another section of the punk scene advanced a more leftist critique of the established order, particularly bands such as La Polla Records (later shortened to La Polla [Cock]). A third sector, which included bands such as Kortatu, MCD, and Herzainak, explicitly aligned themselves with the nationalist Abrtzale movement (Lahusen 1993: 269–78). These groups expressed sympathy, and often outright support, for ETA and the armed nationalist struggle. In his investigation of the Basque punk scene, Christian Lahusen notes, “These 61

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groups picked up the terminology, grievances, demands, concepts and justifications of the Abertzale movement, composing a series of songs about the lack of respect for and discrimination against Basque people, breaking up of their territory, the forced denial of their history” (1993: 275). In this way, a section of the Basque punk scene mobilized support for the nationalist movement.11 Emerging after the death of fascist dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the DIY punk scene in the Basque region became known as “Euskal Herriko Rock Erradikala” or, in Spanish, “Rock Radikal Vasco” (Basque Radical Rock) (Salda Badago 2001). While varied, the punk scene that emerged in the Basque region provided space and resources for marginalized and alienated individuals to become active political agents. While their political inclinations may have stretched across the spectrum from anarchist, leftist, and nationalist, the Basque DIY punk scene provided space and resources for political engagement and the development of a community grounded in an anti-establishment, countercultural agenda. Basque youths used DIY punk to brandish their marginalization as an act of political disobedience, inverting the social order as part of a disruptive project. Where the previous chapter focused on the political work DIY punk does at the individual level, this chapter examines communities. Specifically, I look at local DIY punk scenes. Individuals do not exist in vacuums, but are part of larger social groupings. Scenes are not spatial containers, but are

FIGURE 3.1 Basque punk band Kortatu, 1987 (photo by Jon Iraundegi; used with permission).

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collections of like-minded individuals; what Lawrence Grossberg (1992) calls “affective alliances” or Ian MacKaye calls “tribes” (interview May 20, 2015). There is, after all, strength in numbers. As such, scenes serve to strengthen, protect, and nurture, while encouraging others to engage in similar practices, filtered through their own needs, desires, and experiences. Local punk scenes are sites for political engagement. There are two related threads to this argument. The first concerns the way in which punk scenes have been overt sites for political resistance. There are numerous historical examples from across the globe that illustrate how DIY punk helped provide resources for individuals and communities in their struggle against the political status quo. I will provide a discussion of three such scenes: Belfast in the 1970s, Eastern Europe in the 1980s, and Indonesia in the 1990s and 2000s. These scenes are intentionally not the “usual suspects” studied in the literature on punk scenes (i.e., London, New York, and Los Angeles). The three cases reflect the global scope of DIY and span the four decades of DIY punk so far. The second thread to the argument concerns how local punk scenes are discreet spaces for political resistance; resistance in everyday life. While not as attention grabbing as, say, punk scenes being the foundation for ending conflicts or agitating for democratic reform, these more mundane expressions of political empowerment and engagement are just as important.

Thinking about scenes I suspect a local punk scene exists in most major cities across the globe today. Over the past decade, I have spoken with punks in local scenes in almost every major and medium-sized urban center (and many small towns) in the United States and throughout Europe, in cities across Mexico and Latin America, in parts of northern Africa and South Africa, as well as the Middle East and Asia. There are significant variations in the size and characteristics of these scenes, many of which have received little-to-no scholarly attention. Generally speaking, local punk scenes serve two primary functions. The first is to protect, promote, and nurture individuals within the scene and their practices. Local scenes are produced and maintained by individuals facing material constraints and opportunities. Scenes help provide space for people to define and experiment with their personal identities, which is particularly important for youth who are dealing with the uncertainty of coming of age (see Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995: 25; Haenfler 2006: 189). Second, local scenes provide the lens through which global punk forms are understood and put into practice. Local scenes help construct spaces and provide resources for empowerment. Thus, it is often within these local scenes that political openings emerge for individuals to engage in political resistance.

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I use the term “scene” quite intentionally, as opposed to other labels such as “subculture” or “community.” The primary reason I use “scene” is because that is what I, and the people around me, have always called it. I was part of a scene in Jacksonville, FL before moving into other scenes in Boone, NC and Boston, MA . In all those locations, my compatriots and I referred to what was going on around us as a “scene” without much reflection on the matter. I don’t recall ever referring to it as a “subculture.” But as I became increasingly steeped in the scholarship around these issues, I began to understand that there was also an academic justification for using the term “scene.” The concept “subculture” was promoted in Dick Hebdige’s seminal study on punk, Subcultures: The Meaning of Style (1979), and has been closely linked with the work done by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS ), aka the Birmingham School. But over the years, Hebdige’s work has been criticized by other scholars for ignoring participants’ subjectivity, failing to do close empirical research, and being locked into a Marxist classbased analysis (see Muggleton and Weinzieri 2004; Muggleton 2000; Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995). The concept of subcultures itself has also come under considerable attack. The musicologist Keith Harris argues that subculture connotes “a tight-knit, rigidly bounded, implacably ‘resistant’, male-dominated, geographically specific social space (if such formations ever did exist). The concept clashes with contemporary concerns about globalization, the ambiguities of resistance and the heterogeneity of identity” (2000: 14). In general, critiques have worried that the term presumes there exists one common culture in society from which the subculture is a deviant expression. Moreover, it assumes that members of the subculture are determined by a rigid set of established standards, which often is not the case (see Peterson and Bennett 2004: 3; Bennett 2004: 225; Laughey 2006: 6–10). My own scholarly use of the concept “scene” draws upon a growing literature that focuses on the relationship between different musical practices within a given geographical space. To the best of my knowledge, the concept was first introduced into academic discourse by Will Straw, when he argued that a musical scene “is that cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization” (1991: 373). Others have noted that scenes are not just produced through musical practices, but an array of related social practices (Peterson and Bennett 2004: 8). In his examination of the development of southern California’s hardcore scene, Dewar MacLeod observed, “the arrival of hardcore punk reflected transformations in both the position of young people in American society and the landscape of Southern California. Hardcore punk developed less out of musical circumstances than social ones” (2010: 3). This approach captures the idea that scenes are socially

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constructed by individuals with shared sensibilities located within a loosely defined geographic space. That resonates with my own experiences and the experiences of those I’ve interviewed. The concept of scene connotes a flexible, loose kind of space within which music is produced; what Harris calls a “kind of ‘context’ for musical practice” (2000: 14). It assumes less about the homogeneity and coherence of its constituent activities and members than does “subculture.” In recent decades, numerous musicologists have produced significant works on the construction of musical “scenes,” the earliest of which may have been Sara Cohen’s (1991) insightful musico-geographical analysis of contemporary rock culture in Liverpool, England. Recently, there has been a number of books and documentaries produced about specific punk scenes—from early New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC scenes to later scenes in Toronto, Chicago, San Diego, and Long Island, as well as scenes based around specific bars or clubs.12 There are, however, several possible pitfalls with the employment of “scenes.” As noted above, there is the possibility that greater attention is paid to musical practices divorced from the social processes from which they emerge. That is, people may focus on the music generated from the Gainesville, FL scene and overlook all the important social actors and activities that have created and maintained that scene, from independent record stores and labels to the presence of the University of Florida and local community colleges. There is also a problem with treating a scene as a timeless, homogenous entity. Indeed, as anyone involved in any given scene will tell you, theirs is a scene riddled with divisions and camps. Likewise, scenes ebb and flow over time. Finally, there is the problem of using the concept so broadly that it obscures more than it illuminates. As Harris warns, “It is but a short step to arguing that all music and music-related activity takes place within a scene or scenes. This assertion allows us to avoid the endless task of drawing boundaries between what is a scene and what is not” (2000: 25). With these concerns in mind, there are several important elements about scenes to underscore. The first is the emphasis on the local. Music is deeply implicated in the construction of geographic place, as well as the individual and group identities tied to it. Martin Stokes has shown how music in various locations “evokes and organizes collective memories and present experiences of place with an intensity, power and simplicity unmatched by any other social activity” (1994: 13). Or, as Mark Olson has argued, musical scenes are “territorializing machines” that produce particular kinds of relationships to geographic space (1998: 281). Much of what has been written about punk scenes tends to focus on the uniqueness of a specific location, whether it is Los Angeles, Tokyo, Toronto, or Johannesburg. What provides the unique “local flavor”—or what Ian MacKaye has called a “regional accent”—is not caused by some kind of

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eternal essence of these cities. Rather, differences are due to what the sociologist Alan O’Connor (2002: 233) calls the “social geography” in which scenes are made and re-made by individuals. The social geography of a local scene includes such things as demographic make-up, but also the availability of practice spaces, venues, housing, record stores, safe gathering spaces, and so forth. One can consider these elements part of the “infrastructure” of a scene that, while shaped by material conditions, ultimately relies on individual practice and struggle. In addition to these socio-economic factors, the specific civic context is also important. That is to say, the local political climate also impacts the ability for scenes to coalesce and the form they take. It may be helpful to bring into this conversation some insights made by social theorist Pierre Bourdieu regarding fields and habitus. For Bourdieu (1990), all social practice occurs in fields, but how people operate within the multiple fields they find themselves in is largely shaped by what he calls habitus. Habitus can be understood as the social structures we inhabit that inform how we think, act, and (re)produce social life (Elliott 1999: 10). These help individuals make practical sense of the world and one’s place in society. The concept of habitus helps capture the interplay between structuring discourses (doxa) and individual practices. For many scholars, discourse (doxa) captures understandings at a structural level, while habitus captures their meanings at the agent/local level. Discourses produce preconditions for action, but they do not determine action. Bourdieu claims that “habitus makes possible the free production of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions inherent in the particular conditions of its production—and only those” (1990: 54). The social system cannot be seen as determining the activities or choices of individual subjects. As Anthony Elliott notes, “On the contrary, actors have a multiplicity of strategies or tactics at their disposal in the generation of social conduct; in this sense, human agents are purposive, reflective beings. But Bourdieu certainly wishes to emphasize the influence of specific social contexts (or what he calls the ‘field’ or ‘markets’ of the social domain) within which individuals act” (1999: 10; see also Regev 1997: 127). Musicologist Keith Harris adds, “In this way we can see that the scene limits or opens possibilities to follow particular trajectories. These possibilities are not simply drawn on by individuals or groups, but are continually being reformulated, negotiated and contested” (2000: 18). As individuals we are shaped by our habitus (these social structures), but we can also shape them, particularly when it comes to embracing and/or altering existing practices and meanings. This is one scholarly framework for understanding how scenes emerge and evolve. Strictly speaking, scenes have traditionally been identified as the relationship between given musical and social practices within a given geographical space and time. But some recent scholarship on musical scenes has argued for a recognition of virtual scenes: “a newly emergent formation

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in which people scattered across great physical spaces create the sense of scene via fanzines and, increasingly, through the Internet” (Peterson and Bennett 2004: 7). It has been suggested that Riot Grrrl can be considered an example of a virtual scene. It seems to me, however, that the concept of “virtual scenes” is simply another way of re-packing the concept of “subculture.” I am unsure that what people are calling “virtual scenes” is not a recognition that specific scenes are linked with others in complicated ways, especially given modern technology. This approach seems to privilege the forms of linkages (e.g., zines, internet chat rooms, online social networking sites) while downplaying the fact that what are being linked are individuals located in specific, but disperse, geographic scenes. The second point to underscore is that scenes are not autonomous spaces. At this time in history, it is clear that all local spaces are thoroughly penetrated by social influences that originate from far away (Giddens 1990: 18–19). Local scenes are linked in multiple, complex, and often contradictory ways to other local scenes as well as global cultures. Moreover, the local is a place for multiple expressions of musical life and social activities, thus spawning a series of coexisting scenes. As the social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz has argued, the local is “the arena in which a variety of influences come together, acted out perhaps in a unique combination, under those special conditions” (1996: 27). There are multiple music scenes existing within any geographic space, shaping, and reforming each other. For example, Austin punk, led by such bands as the Skunks and the Violators, was influenced by the country, blues, folk, rock, and Americana scenes in that Texas city (Shank 1994; Sublett 2004). Likewise, the Brazilian punk scenes have been shaped by their close interaction with the local heavy metal music scenes (Harris 2000: 17; see also Waksman 2010). When I was growing up, the Jacksonville punk scene had considerable overlap with the metal and southern rock scenes. Some individuals were often in multiple musical scenes, and a few simultaneously played in multiple heavy metal and punk bands. Meanwhile, the punk scene in New Orleans has been influenced by the other local New Orleans musical scenes and traditions. This may explain why the current New Orleans scene has more ska-informed bands, given the widespread influence of horns in New Orleans music, while Jacksonville has had a more hard-rock flavor. The third element that should be recognized is the construction (and perpetuation) of a material infrastructure within a local scene. Are there places to play, practice, make and distribute music and zines? Is it easy to connect to others with similar interests? In Nick Crossley’s (2008) examination of the early UK punk scenes, he asks the provocative question: why did punk emerge in London and not Manchester? After all, if one is to believe the narrative that punk emerged in response to the crises and conflicts of UK society in the mid-1970s, there were similar socio-economic conditions present in both geographic locations, as well as groups of musicians informed

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by the same musical and cultural precedents (such as the music of MC 5, Iggy and the Stooges, New York Dolls) who were actively looking for some way of expressing their frustrations with the world around them. His answer is that, “in contrast to the London punks, the Manchester punks lacked the [social] network necessary to turn aspiration into reality” (Crossley 2008: 96). As he points out, “Network structures are (in this instance) structures of relations and interactions between flesh and blood actors who act purposively and enjoy a capacity for self-reflection, deliberation and choice . . . Actors’ opportunities for action may be affected by their position in a network, as by their stock of resources, the balance of power in their relations and the convention of their field of action. This affects their liberty but does not alter their ontological status as actors” (2008: 91). Crossley concludes that a punk scene emerged in London out of the interaction of forty-six key actors. What brought this social network together and allowed for effective communication, coordination, and cultural formation was in part the material infrastructure of London: these forty-six were able to come together with relative ease because of London’s transportation network, proximity of bars, existence of music and fashion stores, availability of practice spaces, pre-existing networks of friends and acquaintances, and other aspects of the physical infrastructure. Local scenes require such physical infrastructures to support punk bands and other forms of creative activity. This is an extremely important point to underscore because infrastructures (such as record labels, performance venues, lines of communication, and so forth) have to be constructed and maintained. It is often assumed that large urban spaces are more conducive to the development of scenes than elsewhere. At least this had always been my assumption until I started looking closer. While large cities often have material infrastructures that are useful for the development of musical scenes, there can also be significant problems associated with large urban spaces. In Montreal, for example, noise ordinances and aggressive policing negatively impacted the DIY scene there in the early 2000s (interview with Ralph Elewini March 17, 2011). In some cases, the sheer size of a city can prove to be challenging. In their examination of popular music and the modern city, Brett Lashua, Stephen Wagg, and Karl Spracklen observe “Cities—sites of transitory experience, of global flows of things and people and information, of shifting groupings of association and identity, sites of opportunity, exclusion, transgression, and change—are too vast to be noted in their entirety” (2014: 1). Numerous interview subjects in LA , for example, complained that the scenes there are highly fragmented because the city is so complex, vast, and spread out geographically. Yet, like most cities, LA is not a coherent entity to be comprehended easily, but a fractured conglomeration of “good” and “bad” neighborhoods and districts. As elsewhere, this complexity is born out of geography but also the plethora of different ethnic cultures and socio-economic groups. The challenges concerning distances in

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LA pale when compared to mega-cities like Mexico City, Tokyo, or Beijing. In the case of Jakarta, there are over ten million people spread out for miles and miles in perpetual gridlock. It takes hours to get from the center of the city to its outskirts with traffic jams that are infamous across Asia. For example, I had a meeting scheduled with Esa of the band ZudaCrust and Doombringer Records, and it took him several hours at night to drive his motorcycle the roughly fifteen miles from southern Jakarta to where I was staying in the center of the city. He spoke about how the scenes were geographically split between south, north, east, west, and central Jakarta. When I asked him if there was any integration between the scenes, he responded: “We know each other and we support each other, although we are not really connected to each other because of the regions, because of the traffic, and because they have their own activities” (interview May 26–27, 2013). So while there are the usual genre divisions that help fragment the local Jakarta DIY punk scene, it is also divided by the city’s sheer size. Generally speaking, punk scenes in large Western urban areas benefit from the relatively protective cosmopolitanism of those major cities. Punks in smaller cities, suburbs, and rural communities often face greater social ostracism and repression. The communications scholar Paul Cobley argued that early punk’s challenge to a host of deep-rooted values—including class, masculinity, “decent” behavior, locality, and tradition—represented a greater and more dangerous challenge outside of safe city spaces: “That punk had to negotiate a set of pre-existing national attitudes is well known; but . . . the fact that these attitudes were even more formidably entrenched outside the main urban centres meant that being a provincial punk represented a considerable leap of faith. The social context of the provinces therefore made the punk ‘phenomenon’ a much different proposition from that which has been so slavishly rehearsed in written accounts” (1999: 171). Moreover, punk scenes in non-Western urban spaces tend to face both greater social stigma and government repression than those in the liberal context of Western Europe and North America. But even in places where the geography and demographics are seemingly hospitable to the development of a scene, it still takes work. Above all else, local scenes are the product of human agency. As Alan O’Connor has argued, “A scene . . . requires local bands that need places to live, practice spaces and venues to play. To do this within the punk ethic of low-cost and preferably all-ages shows requires hard work, ingenuity and local contacts. A scene also needs infrastructure such as record stores, recording studios, independent labels, fanzines and ideally a non-profit-making community space. Perhaps the most difficult matter is an audience to support bands and attend shows” (2002: 233). Of course, it doesn’t necessarily take a large number of people to construct a scene. The original London scene was the work of a few dozen people. What is important is that it takes dedication and commitment by a handful of individuals. The New Orleans punk scene in the late 2000s,

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for example, has been maintained by the tireless dedication of a small group of people. Central among them has been the community organizer/activist Bryan Funck who, among other things, maintains a website for DIY activities in New Orleans (http://www.noladiy.com) and has been booking shows for years. My favorite quote from Funck is his oft-repeated mantra, “New Orleans sucks because you suck,” which beautifully captures the DIY, self-empowering ethos of punk (interview February 19, 2010). Instead of complaining about the deficiencies of your scene, do something about it. Finally, it should be remembered that these scenes emerge as processes informed by the specific socio-economic conditions of a given place and time. This includes a city’s demographics, economic forces, civic context, and political climate. For example, in some European cities there are laws against squatting, and aggressive police practices to enforce those laws, while in other cities squatting is allowed or tolerated. Very different scenes will emerge depending on those circumstances (contrast, for example, contemporary Edinburgh with its strict laws against squatting against Copenhagen, where a whole section of the city, Christiania, has been effectively squatted). Likewise, cities with a large youth demographic, perhaps because of the presence of a college or university, often foster the development of more active scenes than small towns with a substantially lower youth population (contrast, for example, Denton, TX or Athens, GA , two college towns with active musical scenes, with Hickory, NC or Geneva, NY, smaller towns lacking in developed infrastructures necessary for sustaining musical scenes). The political climate also plays a role in the ability for the scenes to coalesce and the forms they might take. The importance of the socio-economic forces in the development and maintenance of a scene can be illustrated by the story of Chris Clavin (real name Chris Johnston). Chris has played in numerous bands and runs PlanIt-X Records, which was founded by his friend, the late Samantha Jane Dorsett. Clavin and the label were based for a time in Gainesville, FL which has had a vibrant punk scene for many years, in large part due to the presence of the University of Florida, multiple record stores and music venues, and No Idea Records (an important DIY label and distributor that helps supports the annual Fest music festival organized by Tony Weinbender). Despite the existence of an established infrastructure, Clavin was frustrated, citing apathy and excessive (collegiate) drinking as the primary reasons (personal correspondence June 24, 2009). So, Clavin decided to relocate himself and the label to Cairo, IL where he opened Ace of Cups, a coffee shop and bookstore. One of his primary goals was to breathe life into what was essentially a ghost town. With a population of roughly 2,000 and severe economic problems, Clavin hoped to turn Cairo into a “punk rock utopia” (personal correspondence, November 7, 2013). Despite the warm welcome from locals, Clavin was unable to create a local DIY punk scene from scratch. While rent was relatively cheap, the socio-economic conditions

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were not hospitable. For example, there were few amenities to help sustain an active cultural community, as is reflected in Clavin’s simple observation that he couldn’t buy tofu or decent bread. After a few years, Clavin and his friends had virtually bankrupted themselves and when a friend who was volunteering at Ace of Cups drowned in the nearby Mississippi River, they decided to throw in the towel. When I asked Chris what it would have taken to have made his dream of a “punk rock utopia” in Cairo work, his answers all underscored the importance of both socio-economic conditions and infrastructure: “We needed at least 10 people there. We usually had 3–5 and some of us would leave to go on tour . . . to make money. We could have really used a real internet connection. The town doesn’t have one, which made a lot of punks hesitant to come. We used mobile internet, with a 5GB per month limit, so we couldn’t watch videos or download things, and punks who worked online (which was a big hope for us) couldn’t move to Cairo and do their work there” (personal correspondence November 7, 2013). Chris and PlanIt-X Records relocated to his hometown of Bloomington, IN , which already had an active punk scene and a hospitable infrastructure. In the few years since his return, Chris has strengthened the local DIY punk scene and created an annual DIY festival that draws thousands from around the globe.13 So far, Clavin has been involved in several local DIY punk scenes across the US , each one quite different. In fact, ethnographic work on punk scenes across the world illustrate how, despite drawing from the same global cultures, each scene has a profoundly distinct local flavor due to its specific historical context, but as time progresses, scenes change. The experiences of Chris Clavin and the earlier discussion of agency within habitus both illustrate the fact that scenes, like fields, are constantly made and re-made. They are processes that require active engagement and, in many cases, hard work. Scenes are never static but constantly in movement, even when following particular “logics of change” (Straw 1991). In part, scenes are shaped by ongoing, unresolvable debates about the signs, symbols, and meanings within the scene and their so-claimed “authenticity.” Disputes about what and who is authentically a punk are familiar debates within most scenes (see, for instance, MacLeod 2010: 39). But this is not a phenomenon that is unique to punk. In his examination of the Chicago blues scene, David Grazian argues, “The search for authenticity is an exercise in symbolic production in which participants frequently disagree on what kinds of symbols connote or suggest authenticity, and even those who agree on the symbols themselves may share different views on how they might manifest themselves in the world” (2004: 45). Not only is the scene shaped by debates about authenticity, but also by the boundaries of the scene. As communications theorist Will Straw has noted, “The drawing and enforcing of boundaries between musical forms, the marking of racial, class-based and

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gender differences, and the maintenance of lines of communication between dispersed cultural communities are all central to the elaboration of musical meaning and value” (1991: 372). Ultimately, scenes are constantly shifting, splitting and combining—any stability can only be momentary. This process is repeated over and over. In the various memoirs about local punk scenes, there are always those who bemoan how the scene changed or “died.” In their oral history of the NYC punk scene, Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (1996) illustrate how the scene mutated from a Warhol-informed experimentation with art into a harder, more working-class dominated scene. For them, the “real” New York punk scene ended when they stopped being directly involved in it, a point that Legs has made to me in several conversations. In the story of the LA punk scene of the late-1970s documented in Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen’s We Got the Neutron Bomb (2001), numerous people claim the scene “died” when suburban hardcore bands began to dominate. Likewise, in the first edition of Steven Blush’s book American Hardcore (2001) he claims the hardcore scene died at the end of the 1980s, despite boundless evidence to the contrary, including the existence of very active hardcore scenes around the world today. My favorite example of this attitude occurred during a conversation with Steve Albini, well-known music engineer and member of Big Black and Shellac, in which he claimed that the punk scene in Chicago “died” in the late 1980s. He said this while sitting in the engineering booth of his studio, in which he continues to record albums for various artists including local punk bands. When I pushed him on this point, he quipped that the scene today wasn’t like it was back in his day (interview March 1, 2007). I offer this example not to suggest that Albini is a hypocrite (far from it, in fact). Rather, Albini’s position is a common and honest one. As the local scene changes, many people feel detached from it and no longer recognize it. Later that same day, I had a conversation with Jeff Pezzati, singer for Naked Raygun and the Bomb (and occasionally a bass player for Big Black), in which he spoke effusively about the vibrancy of the Chicago punk scene (interview March 1, 2007). Some adapt, others don’t. For many who were deeply invested in a particular scene at a particular historic moment, the scene literally becomes dead to them. Of course, this says more about them and their relationship to a specific historical moment than it does about the scene. When someone tells me that a specific scene “died” (let alone that “punk died”), it usually means: the scene changed in unrecognizable ways that I no longer considered myself part of it. The key point I want to make here is that scenes are fluid, constantly changing, constantly driven by internal tensions and divisions. To try to talk about a specific scene often means to freeze it in time and simplify all those tensions and divisions, creating a snapshot of a complex moving picture. A lot of scholarship on local scenes often read like autopsies on a living

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body or, worse still, involve attempts to kill a living, moving body in order to perform that autopsy. I attempt to avoid this as much as possible by focusing on a few of the processes at play within given punk scenes, as opposed to writing definitively about those scenes. Ultimately, scenes are locally grounded, but not autonomous; they are shaped by their material infrastructures, but driven by human agency; and they are real, but in a constant state of change and fluidity. I’m interested in the political potentials found within these processes.

The local punk scene as a space for political engagement Local scenes typically rely on small-scale infrastructures for the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural products. Because these spaces are rooted deeply within local circumstances, as evidenced in the Basque example, scenes can provide important openings for political action and intervention, especially when augmented by punk’s core elements of disalienation, rebellion, and DIY. To illustrate that local punk scenes can be sites for political engagement, I offer three examples that reflect the global reach of punk beyond its well-known Western epicenters.

Belfast, Northern Ireland—1970s When examining the rise of punk in the U.K ., most scholarly attention has understandably focused on the London scene. Yet, one of the most notable punk scenes that epitomize the political potential of DIY punk could be found in Belfast, Northern Ireland. While the rest of Ireland became independent in 1922 after a brutal armed struggle against the British, the six counties that made up Northern Ireland (and were predominantly Protestant) opted to remain part of the U.K . But this spawned resistance from the Catholic minority, some of which formed the paramilitary group the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Tensions escalated through the 1960s and erupted in January 1972 when a peaceful Catholic civil rights movement in Derry was met with deadly repressive force from the British Army. This initiated a violent struggle—commonly called “The Troubles”—between the IRA , the British Army, and local police forces, as well as several loyalist paramilitary groups. By the late 1970s, the region suffered from increasing political violence, debilitating sectarianism, and a stagnant economy. Social life in Northern Ireland, particularly in urban cities such as Belfast and Londonderry/Derry, was deeply divided along sectarian lines, punctuated by violence and crushing unemployment and economic malaise. This was the social backdrop for the emergence of a local DIY punk scene in the late

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1970s. Many observers credit the creation of the punk scene to the Clash’s October 1977 concert there (Bradbury 1997: 40–5). Except they never actually played. The show was cancelled, and the disappointed fans decided to riot (commonly known as “The Riot of Bedford Street”). As Martin McLoone notes in his history of punk in Northern Ireland: “The disappointed Belfast punks who turned up for the gig in a sense found each other . . . On that night, in other words, the individual punks of Belfast coalesced into ‘a scene’ and many of the bands that would emerge in the next few months could trace their genesis back to these events” (2004: 29). When the Clash returned a few months later to make good on their promise to play, a nascent DIY punk scene was already solidifying. The Clash and their progressive politics and multicultural solidarity provided an attractive template for the Belfast youths, suffering under the stultifying sectarianism of their surroundings. Sectarian violence framed almost every aspect of daily life for the Belfast punks. As McLoone writes, “The deep-rooted traditions that Belfast punks

FIGURE 3.2 The Clash in Belfast before the riots, 1977 (photo by Adrian Boot; used with permission).

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had to negotiate were not only those that punks nationally had to contend with but also included the IRA , the UDA , the INLA , the UVF, an armed RUC and an unreliable UDR .14 Johnny Rotten had only to name-check them in his music to gain some street credibility but Belfast punks had to deal with them every day” (2004: 32). While London punks rebelled primarily against the stifling and stifled commercial culture of Britain in the late 1970s, the punks in Northern Ireland contended with the stifling and stifled culture of sectarianism that had violently ripped apart Irish society. The Belfast scene was captured on film by John T. Davis’s documentary Shellshock Rock (1979). The film illustrates that the Belfast punks were deeply driven by an anti-status quo philosophy, a rejection of conformity and their parents’ culture. But the primary target of rebellion was their parents’ sectarianism that had divided society by religious labels, forcing young people into opposing camps. Punk was an active rejection of those camps and the religious, political, and social forces that erected those boundaries. As McLoone notes, in Northern Ireland “punk music and the punk scene in general is all about giving an identity to the young that would allow them to come together with a shared set of cultural beliefs and tastes that are beyond religious and political norms” (2004: 35). Young punks echo this sentiment over and over again in Shellshock Rock, driving home the point that the Belfast punk scene created a safe, non-sectarian space for Northern Irish youths. Interestingly, this space was physically located in the Belfast city center itself, which during the late 1970s was deserted at night by everyone except the security forces. The abandoned city center provided a meeting place where the overwhelming working-class punks could get together outside the sectarian pressures of their home housing estates. The venues for the punks were pubs such as the Harp Bar and the Pound. Along with Terri Hooley’s Good Vibrations record store on Great Victoria Street (which would give birth to Hooley’s DIY punk record label of the same name), these provided the material infrastructure around which the scene coalesced. In their recollection of the Northern Ireland punk scene, Sean O’Neil and Guy Trelford write that at the Harp: “Punk kids from both sides of the religious divide, working class, middle class, and even rich kids from Malone Road, mixed freely in the Harp without fear or intimidation, and drank alongside hoods, dockers and strippers” (2003: 97). As Brian Young of the pioneering Belfast punk band Rudi recalled, “The importance of the Harp can’t be underestimated. It was the first night-time venue in the city centre where punks from all over the place could meet safely . . . and where it was the music you liked that mattered, not where you were from or what religion you were” (quoted in O’Neil and Trelford 2003: 98). As one member of the scene later recalled, “It was a political statement just to go to the Harp and pogo to some decent music back then. Political cause we all just mixed together and that wasn’t encouraged; wasn’t allowed” (quoted in Stewart 2014a: 39).

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Numerous bands emerged from Northern Ireland, particularly Rudi, Stalag 17, and the Outcasts, with Stiff Little Fingers and the Undertones going on to greater notoriety. Stiff Little Fingers produced two hits critical of the situation in Belfast—“Alternative Ulster” and “Suspect Device.” The first, intended to be a flexi-single for the zine of the same name included the chorus stressing personal empowerment and resistance to the status quo: “An Alternative Ulster/ Grab it change it’s yours/ Get an Alternative Ulster/ Ignore the bores, their laws/ Get an Alternative Ulster/ Be an antisecurity force/ Alter your native Ulster/ Alter your native land.” Despite (or perhaps because of) their fame, Stiff Little Fingers were treated a little apprehensively in some corners of the Belfast scene for what was regarded as the band’s empty posturing (a criticism that the band responded to with their 1980 release “Nobody’s Hero”). In contrast, the Undertones from Derry scored a hit with “Teenage Kicks,” a song completely devoid of reference to the band’s socio-political context. Martin McLoone argues that “In a way, ‘Teenage Kicks’, by being about the ordinary, was an extremely political statement in the highly charged, extraordinary atmosphere of Northern Ireland at the time” (2004: 37). As lead singer Feargal Sharkey asserts, “People used to ask early on why we didn’t write songs about the troubles: we were doing our best to escape from it” (quoted in Savage 2002: 619; see also the documentary Teenage Kicks: The Story of The Undertones (2004)). The punk scene in Northern Ireland fashioned itself as a positive social and cultural force, an alternative to both the stultifying culture of their parents and the dichotomy dictated by the republican and loyalist paramilitaries (Stewart 2014a and 2014b). As McLoone argues, “Their opposition was to the status quo as well as those aggressive and violent opponents of the status quo who had reduced daily life to the abject. Punk was a third space beyond the fixed binaries of these opposing forces; it gave a sense that, pace Rotten, there could be a future, if not in England’s dreaming, then certainly in Northern Ireland’s re-imagining” (2004: 38). For many youth, punk provided a bridge with which to cross violently policed social lines. Reflecting on the scene in Northern Ireland, Alastair Graham of the band Wardance and Alternative Ulster zine recalls: “You could relate to this music as it was made by people who lived through the same experiences, were stopped by the same police, went to the same record shops and, much like you, had nothing much to do” (quoted in O’Neil and Trelford 2003: 22). Owen McFadden of the band Protex recalls, “There was no sense of religion. No one asked you where you were from” (quoted in O’Neil and Trelford 2003: v). The Irish journalist Henry McDonald recalls the time when he was walking down a Belfast street with a dozen other young punks and they were stopped by the police. After taking their names and addresses, the police couldn’t believe the kids were from all across the sectarian-divided city and let the kids go, shaking their heads in disbelief (quoted in O’Neil

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and Trelford 2003: 112). While the punk scene that emerged in the late 1970s mutated and evolved by the mid-1980s, members of that first wave were deeply affected by the personal and communal transformation envisioned by the punk scene. One participant of the Belfast scene reflects, “Suddenly you got to pick a side, you got to say this is who I am and my allegiances lie with punk and with the punks, they are my community you know. It’s hard to get that across like in terms of how monumental that was, cause just no-one done it before that I knew of” (quoted in Stewart 2014a: 38). Stuart Bailie recalls, “Anyone who was any way into punk would eventually realize that sectarianism was a vile thing” (quoted in O’Neil and Trelford 2003: viii). The Belfast scene created a safe space in which marginalized and, literally, terrorized youths were able to find their own voice and agency outside the bifurcated violence of sectarianism (Stewart 2014b). As Brian Young of the pioneering Belfast band Rudi later reflected, “Punk didn’t change the world, but it changed my life and broadened my horizons” (quoted in O’Neil and Trelford 2003: v). This quote captures an important tension that often appears when discussing punk’s impact: participant’s expectations that they could “change the world” versus the reality that their lives (their own lived worlds) were changed. For many in the Northern Ireland punk scene of the late 1970s, punk dramatically changed them and they, in turn, altered the social and political realities of Northern Ireland. Many became politically active, while others adopted alternative ways of being that defied the strict sectarianism and enabled the reconciliation that culminated in the Good Friday Agreement two decades later. As Gavin Martin, co-creator of the Belfast punk zine Alternative Ulster, asserts: “Did punk make a difference? You bet your life and tomorrow’s breakfast it did” (quoted in O’Neil and Trelford 2003: 20).

Communist Eastern Europe—1970s and 1980s While the Belfast and Basque scenes are examples of local DIY scenes providing space and resources for political engagement in contexts of armed conflict, there are also countless examples of local punk scenes emerging in politically repressive societies, enabling individuals to come together and draw strength from each other under punk’s anti-establishment, DIY banner. Throughout the 1980s, for example, local punk scenes emerged across Eastern Europe, representing an important vehicle for self-expression and political resistance under Communist rule. There were numerous punk scenes in Poland that strengthened resistance to government repression. In fact, punk scenes emerged fairly early in Poland, with bands like Warsaw’s Tilt forming in 1979. One of the most famous bands in Poland was Dezerter, which formed in Warsaw in 1981 originally as SS -20 (the NATO demarcation

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for a Soviet ballistic missile, which led to censorship of the band by the state, hence the name change). Dezerter, which is still in existence at the time of writing, toured the country often under fake names to avoid state censorship. Their debut EP, considered the first Polish punk record, was released in 1984 on the state-run label Tonpress, which selected four songs it considered the most lyrically acceptable. Despite government oversight, the EP was politically provocative and very popular, with 50,000 copies sold (see Grabowski 2010). David Ost, a political scientist with considerable expertise and experience in Poland, observed that the remarkable fact is not that Dezerter sold around 50,000 copies, but that Tonpress actually pressed that many. Socialist companies were not interested in making profits, so the products they produced tended to reflect a social need. Ost recalls that in the early 1980s, the Polish government was facilitating the spread of youth culture because they considered it to be a way to distract the youth from politics (personal correspondences, July 2010). The official line was that music and other forms of popular culture would occupy the youth and keep them from becoming politically disruptive. It is probably safe to assume that at least a few people within Tonpress and other government agencies were aware that the spread of the Dezerter EP would likely have the opposite effect on the youth. Indeed it did, as the EP sold briskly and the emerging Polish punk scene developed an explicit anti-state characteristic. Tonpress eventually destroyed its remaining copies to squelch the band’s growing popularity. The punk scenes in Warsaw and across Poland, however, shared bootleg copies of it and other Polish DIY punk releases, often on cassette and with photocopied covers (see Potaczala 2010).15 Indeed, the Polish punk scene, like others across Eastern Europe was DIY by necessity: punks often had neither the resources to work through the established (read state-controlled) media nor the inclination given statecensorship and repression. For someone like Michal Halabura, who started Poland’s Nickt Nic Nie Wie (NNNW ) label in the 1980s under Communism, there weren’t many options other than DIY: “There were really few chances for bands in 1980s to release their own record. Apart from the censorship, it required ‘connections’ of sorts. So, some small cassette labels erupted— not necessarily punk, but working in this DIY and—of course—illegal way. As there was a band connected to our crew—Ulica—and we were in touch with a lot of people by that time, we decided to try ‘doing it ourselves’ ” (interview January 4, 2010). Built upon a DIY ethos, Polish punk scenes provided marginalized youth not only a safe space to vent their frustrations, but an informal infrastructure with which to challenge the state’s repression and connect with other like-minded groups (Szemere 1983; Potaczala 2010; Grabowski 2010). Tonpress’s release of the Dezerter EP and other punk records (they also released the seminal Polish punk compilation Jak Punk to Punk in 1986) is

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an example of the Polish state’s complicated relationship to punk. On the one hand, the state attempted to co-opt the youth’s embrace of punk. They were, however, unable to control a movement that was explicitly a rejection of the established system. That isn’t to say that they did not try, illustrating that the state considered punk a politically dangerous movement if left unchecked. For example, the pioneering Polish punk band Brygada Kryzys (Crisis Brigade) had its gigs raided and cancelled with regularity, its equipment confiscated by police when it attempted to tour, and was eventually banned and forbidden to leave the country. On the other hand, the state—or, rather, individuals working for state agencies like Tonpress— were active in helping to nurture what they probably recognized was a politically disruptive force. This is a reminder that any story of political resistance is never as clear-cut as repressed-versus-repressor. Likewise, “the Establishment” is never a monolithic force, but has its own contradictions and inconsistencies, as all human endeavors do. Punk’s rather complicated relationship with state authority in Eastern Europe can also be seen in the case of Slovenia, where punk was introduced by the state itself. In an attempt to create an acceptable alternative space for youth culture, the Slovenia state established the quasi-autonomous “Radio Student,” which in 1976 began playing punk music from Western and Eastern Europe. At the time, Yugoslavia was in the midst of an economic crisis, which, exacerbated by Tito’s death in 1980, fueled tensions in a deeply conservative social climate, leading to what some referred to as an “apocalypse culture” (see Monroe 2005: 27). In their book, Punk pod Slovenci (Punk under the Slovenes), Neza Maleckar and Tomaz Mastnak (1985) discuss how the Slovenian establishment was shocked and alarmed by the rise of local punk scenes, in large part because the youth had lost their “speechlessness” and started talking about each and everything. Punk groups such as Pankrti (Bastards), O! Kult, Laibach, Berlonski Zid (Berlin Wall), and Otroci Socializma (Kids of Socialism) represented an emerging and highly politicized punk scene in Slovenia, one that often subverted the symbols, rituals, and rhetoric of the established order for both critique and to create alternative space. In his discussion of the Slovenian punk/postpunk band Laibach, Alexei Monroe states: “Young Slovenes experienced the state as an alien, intrusive presence in the music sphere, and sought to exorcise it by bringing it into audibility. The absence of such an overt state presence in most Western music scenes only masks the pervasive presence of market-state ideologies that are far more diffuse and less easily dislodged than ‘Eastern’ totalitarian ideologies” (2003: 209). By seemingly advocating state oppression, including the controversial employment of fascistic state imagery, the Slovenian punk scene engaged in an ironic rejection of rock per se. As the philosopher Slavoj Zižek stated, Laibach’s message was “We want more alienation.” That is, the employment of its own alienation to transcend an alienating field towards a utopian space (see Monroe 2003: 45).

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FIGURE 3.3 Laibach, 1998 (photo by Jože Suhadolnik; used with permission). Central to the emergence of punk was the Ljubljana student cultural center (SKUC ) that, despite being subsidized by the state, published material and sponsored events that the security and ideological arms of the state considered deeply threatening. In the early 1980s, the state engaged in

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numerous activities to harass and suppress punk, including the repeated closure of SKUC (Monroe 2003: 37). When writing about his experience with Slovenian punk, Joze Vogrinc referred to the punk scene as an “imagined community” where individuals felt connected and empowered through networking with like-minded people (1996: 3; personal correspondences). The punk scene provided members with a sense of political empowerment and engagement that they hadn’t enjoyed beforehand. As Alexei Monroe writes, “Punk’s impact in Slovenia was as much ideological as musical . . . Creating an authentic version of punk required a degree of politicalization, and the new bands rapidly incorporated local political issues into their work” (2003: 206–7). Interestingly, it was the support of SKUC and the state-sponsored youth organization ZSMS , along with various academics (central among them being Zižek), that, in Monroe’s words, “was crucial in turning what might have been a passing fad into the most high-profile and socially influential youth subculture yet seen in either Slovenia or Yugoslavia” (2003: 207). Indeed, the inclusion of the intelligentsia helped produce an extremely articulate discourse around the punk scene. In doing so, the punk scene simultaneously annexed cultural space within the totalitarian regime and engaged in constructing alternative ideologies of resistance, particularly as it found itself between the conservative Yugoslav society and the marketdriven popular culture of the West.

Indonesia—from the 1990s to the 2000s In December 2011, police descended upon a punk show in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and arrested sixty-four teenagers for being, well, punk. The concert was a fundraiser for local charities and, according to the organizers, had received the proper legal permissions to be held. The police claimed that the organizers lacked the correct permits, and also claimed to have found marijuana and sharp objects that could be classified as weapons. The sixtyfour youths were taken to the Aceh State Police Camps and held for almost two weeks. Their heads were forcibly shaved, their clothes burned, and they were forced to pray and take communal bathes to “cleanse” them. According to the BBC News coverage, the Aceh authorities admitted the punks had not broken any laws, yet they were being detained for “re-education” (BBC News 2011). Deputy Mayor Illiza Sa’aduddin Djamal proudly claimed that she personally supervised the police raid and pointed to previous raids against Aceh’s cafés and city parks to detain young punks. This clearly amounted to a focused and sustained harassment of the Aceh punk community. But why? Djamal justified her actions by stating: “Aceh is a Shariah [Muslim law] region. Everyone should obey it and the punk community is clearly against Shariah.” As Djamal claimed, “Punk is a new social disease.”

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FIGURE 3.4 Detained punks in Banda Aceh, 2011 (photo by epa/Hotli Simanjuntak; used with permission).

Are punks that big a threat to Islam and Sharia Law? A little over a year later, I traveled to Banda Aceh to find out more about that event in particular, and about the relationship between punks and the Indonesian state. The arrest was more about politics than religion. The Deputy Mayor was running for re-election and was campaigning on being “tough on crime.” For various reasons, the punks were easy and visible targets. In the end, the Deputy Mayor was re-elected. But there is a history of Indonesian punks challenging state authority that provides an important backdrop to the events in Banda Aceh. Indonesia is a massive country made up of over 130,000 islands. It was colonized by the Dutch, occupied by the Japanese during World War II , declared its independence in 1945, and then fought a war against the Dutch (who refused to recognize their independence) until 1949. Several decades later, General Suharto gained power and established the “New Order” regime that, thanks to American support, ruled the country with a repressive hand for almost thirty years. Faced with mounting popular pressure, Suharto stepped down in May 1998. Significantly, one of the driving social forces involved in bringing down Suharto’s New Order was Indonesia’s young, growing, and highly politicized punk community (Pickles 2007; Wallach 2005 and 2008). Punk came to Indonesia in a substantial way during the early 1990s. While tapes of early punk bands like the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys had

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circulated much earlier than that, it hadn’t resulted in the massive growth of a scene like what happened in the 1990s. The influx of CD s and tapes by bands like Green Day, Bad Religion, and Nirvana is generally credited with sparking the DIY punk scenes across Indonesia. In January 1996, the Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth, and the Beastie Boys performed at the Jakarta Pop Alternative Festival, with Green Day playing in Jakarta the next month (Baulch 2007; Wallach 2008; Martin-Iverson 2011). The irony of commercial major label acts spreading independent DIY punk culture is something I will discuss in the next chapter. But in Indonesia it did. While definitely not in abject poverty, Indonesia was (and is) a developing country, so any active youth culture had to be DIY by necessity. Bootlegged copies of Western DIY punk, hardcore, and metal bands began to circulate widely, and Indonesians began to form their own bands, release their own tapes, establish their own record labels, and write their own zines. All of this was occurring under the repressive control of Suharto’s New Order. Despite their usual attempts to control crowds and clamp down on dissent, the government initially took very little notice of the growing punk culture. They provided organizers with permits to hold shows because they thought punk and independent music was just entertainment, a distraction for the kids. In reality, these shows were instrumental in mobilizing resistance to the Suharto regime. They became sites for both expressing anti-Suharto sentiment and organizing politically. Anti-government songs were played and circulated, political tracts disseminated, and actions planned. Punks were organizing across the country. In Bali, one of the most famous bands of the time to emerge was Superman Is Dead (S.I.D.), a name that was a direct reference to Suharto. In Yogyarkarta, one of the most popular punk bands performed their hit song “I Want a Fresh President” in front of a banner proclaiming the same sentiment. In Bandung, bands like Turtle Jr. and Puppen released influential antigovernment songs, including “Kuya Ngora” and “Sistem” respectively. Also in Bandung, Riotic Records/Distro began circulating their zine Submissive Riot that dealt explicitly with social and political issues (Luvaas 2012). An offshoot of this group formed the Anti-Fascist Front that was highly active in political resistance against Suharto’s regime. In Jakarta, numerous punk bands emerged and were active in the anti-Suharto struggle, perhaps none as infamous as Marjinal. As the documentary Jakarta Punk: The Marjinal Story (2012) proclaims, “Living in Jakarta, they took to the streets with thousands of other students demanding the end of authoritarian rule by then President Suharto. Punk gave people like Mike and Bobby from Marjinal the impetus to protest and demand change against frightening odds.” In her study on the rise of “political punk” in Bandung, Joanna Pickles observed that over the previous decades the New Order regime had effectively forced young people out of the political sphere (2007). This was largely due

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to the recognition that Indonesian youths had been at the forefront of political resistance during the 1940s independence struggle. Seeing youth and college students as a potential threat, Suharto’s regime worked hard on forcing them to the margins of society, often by stressing cultural and religious requirements of respect for elders and social submission. Across Indonesia, punks began challenging these oppressive social norms. Youth of all stripes and backgrounds began hanging out and seeing common cause in their love of loud, angry music. In a brief time, political awareness among punks strengthened, especially as DIY punk became a way through which they became politically empowered (Martin-Iverson 2012; Luvaas 2012; Wallach 2005 and 2008). Hikmawan Saefullah, an academic and active member of the Bandung punk scene, observed: In the early to mid-1990s, Indonesian youths in the big cities such as Bandung, Jakarta, and Bali began to build informal networks of bands, events, fanzines, independent records labels, and small clothing companies dedicated to punk culture and ideals. The reason why the scene-building practices have become significant in the lives of many Indonesian youths is because it offers resources to resist what confines them in their everyday lives: state oppression and corruption, hypocrisy, injustices, discrimination, social and economic inequality, and the feeling of alienation that is prevalent in the modern capitalist society. SAEFULLAH 2012 The burgeoning DIY punk (and DIY metal) scenes were very important in empowering youths in their struggle to topple Suharto’s New Order regime. Gustaff, an active participant in the anti-Suharto protests, wryly observes that, “punk and metal are the unwanted children of modernization in Indonesia” (personal interview May 20, 2013). Gustaff’s personal experiences reflect how the DIY underground provided a space for organizing street protests and connecting like-minded activists. Suharto’s regime was eventually brought down in 1998 by country-wide protests, with the DIY punk scenes across Indonesia playing a pivotal role by being sites for political organization and collective action.

Everyday politics of local DIY punk scenes The same general outline of punk scenes emerging in politically repressive societies and giving speech to the “speechlessness” can be found across the globe, from Beijing to Bandung and North Africa to the Middle East. These scenes offer powerful examples of the various ways in which DIY punk provides individuals and communities with the space and resources for political engagement of different forms. But in some ways the examples are

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too easy. Yes, those scenes (and DIY punk in general) enabled otherwise marginalized people to experience political and social empowerment. Those scenes exist(ed) in already politically charged contexts of either direct political repression or explicit political conflict. How relevant are DIY punk scenes in contexts that seem more mundane, more pedestrian, more banal? Take the example of DIY punk in Vorkuta, Russia, a scene studied by Hilary Pilkington (2012 and 2014). Located inside the Arctic Circle with around 230 days of winter, Vorkuta is inaccessible by highway, giving it a distinct air of isolation and desolation. The city is a twentieth-century Soviet creation, founded as part of the Gulag system to extract coal via the mines, which have steadily been closing for years. As the industrial city has slowly rotted, Vorkuta’s punk scene has given its highly marginalized participants a voice and sense of purpose. As Pilkington observes, “If there is something ‘authentic’ about Vorkuta punk, as Kirill [a member of the punk scene] claims, it lies not in its capacity for aesthetic or political subversion but simply for survival in such ‘fucking harsh conditions’ [Kirill’s words]” (2014: 163). Like Vorkuta, most punk scenes I have visited and spent time in might be considered rather boring in comparison to those discussed earlier. They are not in war zones, post-conflict situations, or in places of great political upheaval. In Jacksonville, FL we didn’t sit around strategizing on how to bring down the local government (as much as we might have liked to). Like most punk scenes around the world, we were focused on the usual things: finding places to put on shows; getting more people to turn out to those shows; working on the distribution of music and zines; navigating petty squabbles, personal back-biting, and divisional feuds; surviving the ravages of alcoholism and drug abuse; and other mundane aspects of daily life. I suspect that most readers familiar with their own local DIY punk scenes will not consider them to be hotbeds of political activism. But I disagree. To see how these scenes are politically relevant requires us to both take a step back, pulling ourselves out of the banal so we can see the forest for the trees, and to re-think exactly what we mean by politics. It is easy to see how the scenes discussed above are “political” because they fit into our preconceived notion as what “counts” as being political, namely affecting the behavior of state institutions. But even looking at “banal” local DIY punk scenes, one can note the ways in which they frequently help channel direct political engagement. One can find examples of punks working within their scenes for demonstrating, community organizing, and participating in social movements. Often this is because there is an overlap between punk scenes and various activist communities in general. As such, it is not uncommon to find punk shows serving as fundraisers for a wide-range of groups and causes, from Food Not Bombs to local humane societies. Likewise, I have found many punks across North America engaged in collective actions around such issues as LGBTIQ rights, environmentalism, social justice, and poverty reduction, to name but a few.

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Even Fat Mike of NOFX used the punk community in his attempt to ensure George W. Bush’s defeat in the 2004 US presidential election via the Rock Against Bush movement. Inspired by the Rock Against Reagan campaign of the 1980s, Fat Mike organized a series of concerts, two compilation albums, and launched the Punkvoter website to encourage punks to register and vote against Bush. The campaign was picked up and advanced by many local DIY punk scenes across the US . These are all significant examples, but as mentioned in Chapter One, I employ a much broader understanding of what “counts” as political. I am interested in power relations across the broad spectrum of society. People can engage in a politics of engagement and resistance through a whole range of ways. Simply disrupting societal norms—be they around physical appearance, gender-norms, or acceptable behavior—can be a political act. Supporting independent and locally owned businesses by shopping local can be a political act that challenges the continuing dominance of multinational corporations in our daily lives. Some might argue that these are ineffectual acts that will never bring about major political change. I understand that criticism. If you are hoping for revolutionary action, it is hard to see how cross-dressing or holding a house party is going to bring that about. But there are three points I would stress in response. The first is that politics are personal, in the sense that the political, economic, and social forces at play in society are manifested and felt at the individual level. In fact, power is practiced and embodied at the level of the personal, even down to our bodies. This point has been argued by numerous theorists, most notably Michel Foucault who spoke of biopower to describe the “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (1976: 140). Thus, as multiple forces literally work to have control over our bodies, even minor acts of resistance are significant. Second, these acts of resistance can gain strength when repeated and amplified by more people over time. Thus, a cumulative effect is possible. Finally, when we think about political resistance, it is more useful to focus on the process of resistance than on an expected outcome. With that in mind, let me point out a few ways in which your boring old local DIY punk scene is actually quite relevant politically. Scenes bring likeminded people together in a way that creates a critical mass. Individual acts of resistance and engagement gain greater traction within scenes, because scenes act as “force multipliers” (a military term that refers to a factor that dramatically increases the effectiveness of something). Within these scenes, individual acts of resistance take on greater meaning and power. Personal acts of resistance become symbolic of larger, collective, oppositional meanings and consciousness. When it is just one kid thumbing her nose at the status quo in a town, she can be easily marginalized and dismissed. But when she is joined by a whole group of people, those actions are more

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FIGURE 3.5 Cover of Obscenely Loud #1.5 (South Africa), 2007 (published by Andries, Ruan, and Murray [aka Shadrack, The Uneditor, and Murfee]; used with permission). difficult to dismiss. Scenes provide individuals with a collective identity, giving further meaning to an individual’s actions, adding weight to what might be isolated, individual acts (Haenfler 2006).16 To offer but one example, a punk scene emerged in the mid-2000s in the small town of Bloemfontein, South Africa, driven largely by the DIY zine Obscenely Loud and a related festival called Obscenefest. As one of the participants in the scene reflects, “Obscenefest helped lift the city’s underground scene out of obscurity, and in spite of working with almost no budget and a complete lack of experience, that small, initial idea helped promote a shared sense of cultural identity and a voice for the voiceless” (Stassen 2013). It wasn’t just one person dreaming of alternative ways of being (whether of being white, black, Afrikaans, male, etc), but a larger group putting those alternative ways of being into practice within daily life. Local DIY punk scenes can provide the framework for collective identity and action, while offering space and resources for individuals to personalize their resistance and identity—from urban US to rural South Africa. At the same time, local scenes serve as “learning communities” where goods are shared, ideas exchanged, practices emulated, and collective actions planned. They are sites for information exchange, as new ideas are discovered and shared. Goods like music CD s and zines are produced and exchanged.

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Sociologists have long noted how this process of social learning is quite important for both individuals and communities. Think about how ideas and practices around such issues as vegetarianism, gender inequality, or racism get worked through in group contexts in ways that don’t happen among individuals in isolation. For example, I became a vegetarian in my teens, in part because the music I was listening to turned me onto that concept. But my ethical position around that practice greatly evolved by conversations with people in local punk scenes. Likewise, my ideas around feminism have largely emerged through the dual process of academia and working with friends engaged in challenging gender inequality within punk scenes. Finally, punk scenes introduced me to important concepts that I now hold dear, from basic DIY to barter economic practices and the lived examples of collective ownership. It is not that I wouldn’t have been aware of these concepts in the abstract form, but local punk scenes brought me into direct contact with them as lived realities. They did so because local punk scenes provide space for experimentation and creative expression. As noted earlier, punk scenes help provide space for people to define and experiment with their personal identity, which is particularly important for youth who are dealing with the uncertainty of coming of age (see Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995: 25; Haenfler 2006: 189). These spaces, and the resources that accompany them within DIY punk, enable individuals and groups to experiment and create outside of normal restraints. I hesitate to call them “safe spaces” because that would imply that punk scenes are absent of such things as sexism, racism, and homophobia, which simply isn’t true. But those general aspects of larger society seem to be challenged more openly and effectively inside punk scenes than they are outside. Thus, it may be useful to think of them as “safer spaces,” without pretending that substantial challenges and threats don’t still exist. Punk scenes are significant spaces were the status quo is challenged and alternatives are envisioned and put into practice. As social theorist Alberto Melucci has argued, the status quo must first be challenged at the cultural level before mass collective action can occur. One must “challenge and overturn the dominant codes upon which social relationships are founded. These symbolic challenges are a method of unmasking the dominant codes, a different way of perceiving and naming the world” (Melucci 1989: 75). In doing so, DIY punk scenes provide concrete examples of alternative ways of being. Punk scenes exemplify resistance in daily life by enabling individuals to create and live the future they envision. For example, while Stiff Little Fingers sang about imagining an “Alternative Ulster,” the original punk scene in Northern Ireland put that non-sectarian vision into practice. Through the politicizing of the self and everyday life, societal norms are challenged, redefined, and practiced. Even the seemingly banal fact that many local DIY punk scenes rely on house parties and basement shows actually provides concrete examples of

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how cultural life can be established and maintained outside of the established commercial music industry. You don’t need to play in bars or seek out expensive rental halls to have shows. Marty Ploy has been organizing shows for almost fifteen years, from acoustic sidewalk shows to larger shows in an all-age venue in Pomona, CA called the VLHS (named after the Vince Lombardi High School in Rock’n’Roll High School (1979)). As he notes, “I live my entire life for doing shows and helping people get shows and going to shows to support the people coming through. I’m so endlessly grateful for the punk community that I can’t allow anyone to come through this area and not get some love. I just wanna share it with everyone I can” (interview June 8, 2015). Another informative example is the Long Island hardcore scene of the late 1980s and 1990s, documented in the film Between Resistance and Community (2009). Ren, a key organizer of house shows in that scene, observed, “When you go to a show anywhere else, there are always people who don’t give a fuck, like the bartender or the doorman. But when you do a basement show, it seems like everyone cares, everyone there is working to keep it going for the same goal pretty much.” In their loving song to Ren and his basement parties, “I went to Ren’s House and all I got was this lousy feedback,” the band Latterman sing: “This is a model of how we’d like to live through communication and community. Of how we’d like to help each other and how we’d like to see people treating each other every single day.” That Long Island hardcore scene provided many with innumerable (and important) examples of alternative cultures, economics, and lifestyles that were transformative to individuals and communities. One member of the community, Craig, claims: “The Long Island DIY do-ityourself scene is composed of a group of kids who come together mainly through music and are trying to exist outside of mainstream standards. We’re not doing this to be rock stars, or for money, or anything like that. We’re doing this to build a community based on friendship and cooperation to do things ourselves and build an alternative.”17 Local DIY punk scenes, no matter where in the world they are, often rely on using alternative spaces, like basements and house parties. One result is the further democratization of cultural life, as boundaries between performer and audience are broken down and the category of participant is enlarged. Writing about experiencing her first DIY punk house show, where Black Flag played in Hermosa Beach, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth wrote: “The Black Flag show was one of the best gigs I’d seen before or since—scary, surreal, intimate. As the sound crashed and bounced off the refrigerator counter and shelves, and Henry Rollins twerked years before twerking existed, the performance fused hardcore punk with suburban sunlit banality, high theatre with the everyday, erasing any and all boundaries between band and audience” (2015: 147). These examples of house parties, from Long Island to Los Angeles, draw attention to DIY punks’ use of the “underground.” When I use the term

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“underground” I am specifically referring to spaces that firstly are outside of the formal domain of commercial life, or secondly use aspects of the formal domain for ways they were not intended. As examples of the first, one can think about how house parties and basement shows are beyond the domain of the formal economy. Likewise, at those shows, there are often people with crates of records and/or zines who are selling or swapping them. Those transactions are outside of the formal economy, neither taxed nor mediated by corporate forces. Those practices are quite different to a band playing at an established music hall, with the tickets being sold through TicketMaster, and their music being sold by a major corporate record company via WalMart, iTunes, or Amazon.com. But as the second point suggests, the “underground” also exists in spaces of the formal domain that get appropriated for different purposes. Punk shows are held or are organized in bars or restaurants that don’t usually hold music shows. In my early band years, we played in barbeque joints, church basements, Italian restaurants, and even in a post office after hours. My hometown heroes started renting out the national armory building to hold DIY punk shows. And the band the Evens currently conducts major shows in places like public libraries and used bookstores. The idea is to appropriate formal spaces for alternative practices. DIY punk has long relied on these underground practices, in large part because formal spaces didn’t exist, were too expensive, or simply unwelcoming to punk. Across the globe, DIY punk has been underground more often than not because it didn’t have a choice. But it has also done so by choice. Indeed, when there is a choice, one can note the difference between commercial and DIY punk. When punks choose to take the DIY underground option, that choice is political even when it is unconsciously so. For example, when the punks in the infamous Pink House of Asheville, NC organized house parties in the early 2000s, they might not have been thinking they were taking a political act. But they were. Just like the South African DIY punks organizing Obscenefest, they were creating alternative spaces for cultural production, as well as cultural, social, and economic exchange. They were creating spaces outside of the dominant formal structures of both society and economics. These were cultural events that were not mediated by established commercial and/or corporate forces, as opposed to the majority of “culture products” found in the world today. Social theorist and zinester Hakim Bey (aka Lamborn Wilson) has written quite insightfully about these alternative underground spaces, their importance, and the political significance of what transpires within them. The term he uses for them is Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ s). These are sites that are beyond the control of normal societal constraints—be they laws, hierarchies, or traditional roles and expectations. Bey has argued for the political importance of the TAZ : “Its greatest strength lies in its invisibility—the State cannot recognize it because History has no definition of it. As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it

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will vanish, leaving behind an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again invisible because indefinable in terms of the Spectacle” (Bey 2003: 100–1). For Bey, the TAZ provides a space for rebellion and resistance. This is important because Bey, and many others, believe that in our current global context, revolutionary change is impossible. In the ubiquitous face of global capitalism, the best we can do is to create sites of rebellion and resistance. To return to my opening example, the Basque punk band Kortatu sang: “They give us shit in drops/ They have destroyed us like cattle/ How can one get out of here?/ Revolution isn’t possible . . ./ Only rebellion is left!” Of course, not every musical scene offers the potential for the development of a TAZ . Going to a corporate-owned stadium to see a concert sponsored by the newest sports drink is an unlikely (though not impossible) site for a TAZ . But the DIY ethos of local punk scenes makes them particularly potential sites for resistance and rebellion. Because they operate outside direct corporate control, basement shows and other informal and independent gatherings become fertile grounds for TAZ s. One of my favorite examples of a DIY punk TAZ is Edinburgh’s “punk island.” Frustrated by a lack of safe spaces to gather and perform, the Edinburgh punk community regularly appropriates a small island in the Firth of Forth. The island is linked to the mainland by a causeway at low tide, and was used as a defensive outpost during World War II . Several years ago, Edinburgh punks carried sacks upon sacks of cement and built a stage area on the island. At least once a year, they carry out band equipment, PA systems, and supplies at low tide and hold a day-long punk festival on the island. Then they disperse, only to reconvene at a future date.

The fragility of scenes Local scenes are complex and dynamic. Writing about them often entails freezing them in space, ripping them out of their larger context, and creating a narrow focus that ignores a wide array of significant processes. Focusing on the political possibilities of local DIY punk scenes can also obscure some of their problematic aspects. Scenes are socially constructed and, like all social projects, reflect human frailties and foibles. Local punk scenes can be torn apart by clashing egos. For instance, the burgeoning queercore scene in 1990s Toronto was divided by the bitter feud between former friends and collaborators Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones. Scenes can also spawn aggressive gate-keepers or “scene police,” self-appointed guardians of the borders and “rules” of a given scene. As a scene gains in prominence, it may attract new members who re-define or re-direct it in ways that come into conflict with the visions held by those who came before. That is the oftrepeated narrative about the “erosion” of the early Hollywood-based LA

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scene. Of course, scenes often succumb to factionalism and fragmentation for reasons beyond personality differences. Scenes can also be force multipliers for destructive behaviors. Just as scenes emerge around “affective alliances” (Grossberg 1992), they also bring together people who might have an affinity with heroin or other such proclivities. I have witnessed the devastating impact of drugs and alcohol abuse on several local punk scenes. This is not unique to punk at all, but seems to be a re-occurring motif in many art and music scenes. Likewise, scenes can be force multipliers for non-progressive political engagement. The spread of fascist elements among European punk scenes or conservative Islamism within the Indonesian punk underground are but two examples of this. Finally, local scenes are fragile entities. They take hard work to construct and maintain. They usually need a critical mass to succeed, as Chris Clavin realized in Cairo, IL . But mere numbers are not enough. They require individuals in activist roles to help organize and execute. When such key players exit a scene, either literally or figuratively, it can put the scene’s survival at risk. Likewise, scenes require a material infrastructure and are impacted by the loss of vital elements of those infrastructures, be they venues, record stores, or the like. When these components are lost, a scene’s sustainability might be threatened. To reflect on the dynamics and processes within local scenes, I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which the Indonesian punk scenes have evolved post-Suharto. While I used Indonesia earlier as an example of scenes as sites for political engagement, in the post-authoritarian years, punk scenes there have shifted in ways that many in the West would readily recognize: it has fragmented as new scenes have emerged around specific genres and subgenres of punk; generational shifts have occurred as new kids get turned onto punk while older punks get even older (and sometimes leave the underground community); and the forces of commodification and commercialization by corporate interests have raided the scene with abandon. Some two decades after punk in Indonesia gained force, the scenes there are some of the largest and most active in Asia, if not the world. But it is a complicated landscape, defying simple characterizations. In 2008, there was a tragedy in Bandung at a local metal/punk show. Reportedly, the 600-person venue was packed to almost double capacity for the album release of the local band Beside. At the end of the show, aggressive security forces attacked from both outside and inside the venue, leading to a crush of bodies that left eleven people dead. In the aftermath, Indonesian authorities used the incident to clamp down hard on the underground music scene. Not only were punks increasingly cast in a negative light, but organizers now have to apply for police permission to hold shows. After the 2008 tragedy in Bandung, booking venues has gotten noticeably harder. Not only is police permission expensive and sometimes difficult to obtain, but it

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is sometimes hard to find willing venues. In Jakarta, one of the more popular venues reportedly charges around $400 to rent out the venue, which is extremely expensive for punks there. I was told that since there is an attempt to keep ticket prices cheap (around $1 or $2 each), bands often have to pay to play, or at the very least not expect any of the door. House parties and garage shows are often out of the question since the police show up quickly and shut them down. This has put a crunch on DIY organizing. Not surprisingly, the authorities are more willing to give permits to larger commercial venues and corporate sponsors. This is just one of the ways by which corporate interests, especially cigarette companies, have infiltrated the Indonesian underground. A number of cigarette companies, such as LA Lights, now sponsor “underground and independent” music festivals and even CD compilations. Many punks eschew these blatant corporate appropriations of independent DIY culture, but others have been willing to play along. Some of have tried to have it both ways—like Ucay, the former lead singer of Rocket Rockers who once wore an anti-cigarette t-shirt while performing on stage at a cigarette-sponsored concert (interview June 18, 2013). The commodification and corporatization of the Indonesian punk scene has been an ongoing process. It didn’t take long for major labels to realize that there was profit to be made from punk in the Indonesian market. In the 1990s, some punk bands signed to major labels, just as they had done in the US and UK , and were then doing again during the post-Nirvana signing frenzy. Bands like Superman Is Dead signed to Sony/BMG , as did Bandung’s Rocket Rockers. Not surprisingly, such bands were often labeled “sell outs,” while they defended their decision with claims that they could now reach more people with their message. Superman Is Dead began to wear their “sellout” status as a badge of honor, claiming they were “outsiders” everywhere. Rocket Rockers released one album with Sony/BMG and then founded their own independent record label, Reach And Rich Records. Opinions of them varied amongst the Indonesian punks I spoke to, with some calling them hypocrites and sell-outs and others regarding them as punk equivalents of Robin Hood. One punk I met who books DIY shows in Banda Aceh, Teuku Fariza, dismissed this logic head-on: “SID and Rocket Rockets are definitely sell-outs. If their main concern is getting a big crowd, please get the fuck out of punk. How did Minor Threat or Fugazi become well-known while keeping DIY ? DIY just has proven it for almost over 30 years. Krass Kepala and Kontra Sosial [Indonesian DIY punk bands] had even toured Europe with DIY ethic” (personal correspondence June 20, 2013). The issue of touring—and communicating with other punks across Indonesia—is actually quite complicated. Earlier I discussed the difficulty of traveling around Jakarta because of its size. But it is more of a challenge to travel across Indonesia, a country made up of thousands of islands. Two of the biggest islands are Sumatra and Java. As Esa of ZudaKrust pointed out,

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“If you visit Sumatra you can spend a week just to go to the whole Sumatra because in cities you can spend one or two days. Maybe in Jakarta it’s not really hard to go to other cities, but, compared to other islands, it’s really difficult to go” (interview May 26–27, 2013). Traveling between islands requires taking a ferry or plane, both of which can be expensive for your everyday punk band. So the people I hung out with in Banda Aceh hadn’t seen that many punk bands that were not from their island of Sumatra, though tapes and CD s were circulating rather easily. Indonesian punk scenes are more geographically isolated than their American or European counterparts. The punk scenes are also fragmented by genres. This is certainly true in Indonesia where the subgenres span the gambit of pop-punk and emo to grindcore, street crust, oi, and Scandinavian-style hardcore. There are even enough Celtic punk bands in Indonesia to have multiple genre-specific festivals called Celtic Punk Night Out in several cities. But while almost every person I spoke with talked about the genre-diversity within the Indonesian punk community, they also stressed that the community remained pluralistic. Shows tended to include a wide variety of genres on the same bill. No one I spoke with in Indonesia complained about exclusion, but rather the reality that the community was so huge that diversity was just a fact of life. If any serious division exists, it is between DIY punk and commercial “punk” (or what a number of Indonesians dismissed as “fashion punk”). There are also problems with violence within the scene. There have been tensions between the Jakarta and Bandung punk scenes related to footballinspired violence. In one incident—reportedly at a show in Jakarta by the British skinhead band Last Resort—a number of Bandung punks were attacked and the vocalist for Bandung’s Bulldog Brigade beaten with a chain. Adith Reesucknotoz, bassist for the Celtic punk band Forgotten Generation (and formerly of Bulldog Brigade), argued that much of the violence is committed by “fashion punks.” He states, “It is difficult to deal with some people who only expresses punk through their physical appearances. They have mohawks, they have leather jackets and boots. But they often engage in violent activities and it is my opinion that what these people do is come to underground punk rock shows and they get drunk beforehand and then they just make the events become chaos. They just destroy events. They always make problems. Because of these people, we have difficulties in organizing punk rock shows and getting permits to put on shows. It gives problems to other punk rock communities that have no relations with them. But the police department just generalizes that all the punk communities are just the same” (interview May 20, 2013). A number of other punks also talked to me about how punks still have a reputation in much of mainstream society of being criminals, which provided the backdrop of the 2011 detention of the punks in Banda Aceh.

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This discussion of the processes at play in Indonesian punk scenes postSuharto reflects a number of everyday issues that may be familiar to readers across the globe. In many ways, these are the seemingly petty issues that make local scenes appear mundane and banal. Bandung has a history of being one of the cultural centers of Indonesia, so it isn’t surprising that there is an active music scene there. As the punk scene matured, a number of participants started their own “distros” which, while including the trade of tapes and CD s (and occasional vinyl), primarily focused on independently produced clothing. According to some, at one time there were around 300 active distros in Bandung alone, though those numbers are decreasing as bigger stores and corporate interests are moving into their market. But the evolution of these DIY cultural producers into DIY entrepreneurs has been important for sustaining the underground community in Bandung and across Indonesia. They also serve as important role models of DIY sustainability for the large number of struggling unemployed youths across the country. One friend I made in Banda Aceh named Maggot runs his own Mad Goat clothing line, selling mostly t-shirts and hats from his house and at punk shows. Likewise, Homeless Dawg is a DIY punk/metal clothing line run by a guy who is, in fact, homeless in Bandung. These concluding examples from Indonesia illustrate the myriad ways in which local DIY punk scenes are politically significant around the globe.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Punk Goes the World: Global Networks, CounterHegemony, and the Contradictions of Globalization A plaque was recently erected in Lima, Peru proclaiming it the birthplace of punk rock. That claim relates to the fact that Lima was the home of Los Saicos (The Psychos), a band that formed in 1964 and played high-intensity, fuzzed-out garage rock.18 It is a curious claim, the most recent entry in the debate about where punk was “born.” The history of punk has a deeply contested origin myth, with New York and London both claiming to be the birthplace of punk. Some participants in the early New York scene claim that the British appropriated what they had spawned. Mary Harron, who wrote for the NYC zine Punk and was the first American journalist to interview the Sex Pistols, stated, “I felt that what we had done as a joke in New York had been taken for real in England by a younger and more violent audience. And that somehow in the translation, it had changed, it had sparked something different” (quoted in McNeil and McCain [1996] 2002: 303; see also Hermes 2012). In contrast, many British commentators have made strong claims that punk’s origins were unequivocally in London (see Savage 2002 [1991]; Lydon 1994; Dixon et al. 1979). It has also been argued that Los Angeles should be credited with creating punk (Spitz and Mullen 2001). The documentary film A Band Called Death makes a strong case that Detroit was the birthplace of punk, given the emergence of the band Death in the early 1970s. Participants in the early London and New York scenes were drawing upon a similar range of cultural precursors: the R&B artists who influenced the “birth” of rock’n’roll; 1950s “rebel” rockers such as Gene Vincent and 97

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Eddie Cochran; 1960s bubble-gum and garage bands; hard-rocking pseudohippy bands such as the MC 5; glam-rockers such as the New York Dolls, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop; arty avant-garde bands like the Velvet Underground; and the burgeoning reggae-styles of Jamaica, to name but a few notable musical streams. But all of these musical styles were already products of historic trans-Atlantic exchanges between Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. In the more immediate sense, the scenes in New York City and London were shaped by specific individuals who were already straddling both sides of the Atlantic (Lentini 2003: 156). For example, before he managed London’s Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren managed the New York Dolls. Likewise, there were several Americans floating through the London punk scene, most notably the Heartbreakers featuring Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan (formerly of the New York Dolls), as well as Chrissie Hynde of Akron, Ohio who moved to the UK in 1973, played in early versions of the Clash, Damned, and eventually formed the Pretenders. Punk has always been a global phenomenon. It was a product of globalization from the outset. As local DIY punk scenes became more geographically dispersed, a broader global culture has emerged. The ways in which local punk scenes are networked together—horizontally and through informal, independent, and decentralized flows—makes them politically significant in today’s globalized capitalist world. Individuals and scenes draw resources from the global culture while shaping and reconstituting that culture in a constant feedback loop. As a product of globalization, punk provides an interesting vehicle to explore the processes involved in contemporary globalization, some of globalization’s contradictions, and the ways in which globalization is resisted and/or restructured. One way to approach the subject is to explore how these local scenes connect to each other. In simple terms, they are connected through the global flow of communication and goods through established networks. This is basically how things work in today’s globalized economies: goods, information, resources, capital and, occasionally people, flowing through established networks. With DIY punk, these flows and networks are typically informal and independent. That is, they are largely outside the control of global capital and corporations. Moreover, DIY punk is based upon, and fosters, horizontal networks that contrast sharply with the hierarchical and vertical networks of neoliberal global capitalism. As such, these informal and independent flows and horizontal networks are significant sites of what some scholars call counter-hegemony. The mere existence of alternative, uncontrolled flows and networks can represent a challenge to both state power and global capitalism. This is an argument similar to the one made by theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their influential Multitude (2005), which focuses on the revolutionary and democratic potential of the world’s increasingly networked and alienated inhabitants. In

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this chapter, I examine how these flows and networks function within DIY punk. Of equal importance is what is flowing along these networks, namely core elements of punk: do-it-yourself, resistance/rebellion, and disalienation. More than forty years after its emergence, punk continues to flourish across the globe in local scenes nurtured by informal and independent global networks. Why? Because it is a cultural form that provides individuals and communities with resources for their own political empowerment. Unlike with most other cultural forms, with punk the message is the medium, and the medium is the message.

Today your love, tomorrow the world:19 networked scenes and a global punk community Local punk scenes are not autonomous. They interact with other musical scenes in the same geographic space, which helps develop the particular local “accent” of the scene. But at the same time, local scenes are shaped by the global music industry and the capitalist world economy. More importantly, they interact with other punk scenes in distant locations. It is the ways in which individuals and scenes connect with each other— producing a global DIY punk culture—that I explore here.

Networks and the contradictions of globalization One can conceptualize the interactions and connections between geographically dispersed individuals and local scenes as making up a “network.” In their discussion of musical scenes, Peterson and Bennett (2004) use the term “translocal scenes” to refer to the ways local music scenes interact with other, kindred but geographically distant, scenes. I find such a conception limited, in part because I think it is important to underscore that these interactions are fluctuating and uneven processes. For that reason, I prefer to think about them as networks. In part this draws from literatures on network theory that understand them as intangible, nonhierarchical forms of communication and interaction that allows agents to interact, even over great distances. For example, theorists Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1998: 12) used the analogy of the rhizome to conceptualize their interpretation of a network. As Anita Lacey notes, “A rhizome is akin to a map because it is open, detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification, unlike a genetic axis, which is like an objective pivotal point on which successive stages are organized or a deep structure that can be broken down into smaller constituents. Instead, a rhizome is not divisible and has multiple entry ways, just as an activist network has, with entrance

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points such as friendship groups, the Internet, and zines” (2005: 290). In her examination of Riot Grrrls, for instance, Marion Leonard uses the term network instead of collective, scene, group, or movement, because “whilst it identifies lines of interconnection. It does not suggest a singular voice or aim” (1998: 101). One concern about using the concept of network is that it may unintentionally imply fixed and rigid structures. Thus, some nuance is necessary. Networks are maintained by the flow of people, goods, ideas, and money. In some cases, this might result in physically recognizable networks that can persist over time. One can think of the formal ways in which music is distributed—shipped from pressing plants to distribution warehouses to record stores and other outlets—as examples of such “hard” networks. But networks can also be “soft,” reflecting fluidity and temporary connectivity between agents. An example of this could be two zinesters that cross paths at a show, exchange zines, and remain in sporadic contact afterwards. Moreover, the distinction between hard and soft networks is best envisioned as shifting points on a continuum, rather than a strict dichotomy. Likewise, distinctions between formal and informal networks are useful to keep in mind. In the case of music, there is a certain “malleability” (Taylor 1997) that facilitates its movement through networks; its export and import from one location to another. Music, after all, has an ephemeral quality to it. It can be sounds broadcast over the radio or a PA system, which results in people encountering and experiencing it in non-tangible ways. Take the Jawbreaker song “Bad Scene, Everyone’s Fault”20 in which the protagonist is at a party and somebody is playing Led Zeppelin on the stereo: “I felt ashamed, I knew every drum fill.” I also probably know the drum fill in almost every Led Zeppelin song, but have never owned a single Led Zeppelin album. Even without any tangible manifestation of Led Zeppelin’s music, I am intimately familiar with it because it circulates in lots of ephemeral ways. Of course, music can also have tangible aspects to it, from recorded sheet music to CD s, vinyl, and cassettes. Moreover, it can be quite easy to reproduce these material manifestations of music, whether photocopying the sheet music, dubbing cassettes, duplicating CD s, or copying the digital MP 3 file. This further increases the malleability of music’s circulation, but also underscores the role of human agency in its circulation. For a non-punk example, the documentary Searching For Sugar Man (2012) tells the true story of Sixto Rodriguez, a failed singer/songwriter from Detroit in the early 1970s. It is claimed that a young lady traveled from the US to South Africa to visit her boyfriend with copies of Rodriguez’ two albums in her possession. Her boyfriend and his friends were so captivated by what they heard, they started copying the recordings and circulating them to other friends. Within a short time two South African record companies were pressing vinyl copies of the albums and Rodriguez’ music became immensely popular across the country—completely unbeknownst to Rodriguez himself and his US record

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label. It’s a captivating story, one that echoes how DIY punk has circulated globally: an individual or individuals introduces a punk recording (such as a Dead Kennedys tape, a Ramones album, or a Bad Religion CD ) into a new environment (such as the former USSR or a country in the Global South), and soon copies of that recording are circulating and a DIY punk scene is emerging. A key point to underscore is that the flows across networks are shaped both by human agency and structural constraints. In the case of Riot Grrrl, the network was originally constructed by a small handful of young women who shared a dedication to feminist self-empowerment and punk selfexpression. As Nick Crossley observed in his study on the emergence of the early London punk scene, “There may be a story to be told about the ‘structure of feeling’ articulated by punk and its relationship to trends and conflicts in wider society. But feelings do not suffice to make movements. As work on both protest and social capital indicate, collective action and mobilization, which is what the birth of punk is about, is far more likely in the context of dense social networks” (2008: 94). Without human agency, no such network would have emerged. The importance of human agency cannot be stressed enough. But it is just as important to recognize the structural constraints that are at play. First and foremost is the global capitalist economy. Global musical flows are impacted by multinational corporations that wield considerable amounts of financial and other resources. Major record companies can flood a market with a certain release, promote specific artists and genres through multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, and drive shifts towards new technologies, as evidence by the rise of the CD in the 1980s and 1990s as the preferred medium for selling music (Murphy 2014). The international state system also affects global flows of music. This can be seen in cases of censorship as well as in more complicated ways, such as the uneven implementation of copyright laws (Harris 2000: 26). This results in networks and flows that are highly uneven and inequitable. Indeed, this is a rather basic description of today’s globalized world: local communities are connected to each other through fluid, uneven, and inequitable flows of people, goods, information, and capital. While some may naïvely champion the liberating promise of the modern network processes of globalization, the reality is that global capitalism and the modern state wield considerable power and control over those networks and flows. Globalization has not made the world flat. In many respects, it has opened up new avenues for profit making by multinational corporations and new ways in which to exercise state power. But at the same time, it has also created new opportunities for resisting state power and new alternatives to corporate capitalism. The focus needs to be not on the fact that networks and flows have been created, but on how they have been created. In the case of musical flows, one

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can clearly see the tremendous amount of power and influence multinational corporations have. Currently three entertainment corporations—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group— control the lion’s share of the distributing, publishing, advertising, and manufacturing of recorded music across the globe. As Todd Taylor, the editor of Razorcake, mused, “a vast majority of the population gets the impression that whatever hundred artists are being pushed at any one time are the only viable options of what can be considered ‘music.’ . . . Like the divisions between rich and poor, the two realities between [corporately controlled] ‘music’ and music are getting bigger and more sharply defined” (2008: 39). Most major performance venues are owned by multinational corporations. Bands on tour are often sponsored by major corporations, and even mid-sized venues, concerts, and festivals are sponsored by sports drinks, beers, or other corporate entities. Corporations also maintain a dominant position in the broadcasting of music, whether it is via radio, MTV, or various internet-based sites. Thus, it is not a stretch to observe that the global music industry, its networks and flows are dominated by corporate interests. DIY punk often explicitly sets itself in opposition to these corporatecontrolled global structures and flows. In doing so, there is frequently the understanding that nothing good can come from the dominance of corporatecontrolled “cultural” industry: what is produced is mediocre and mundane with little relevance to our daily lives, generally aimed to further pacify us into being docile consumers. After all, this was the initial battle cry of punks in the 1970s. Whether it was Johnny Rotten proclaiming that there was “no future,” the Clash longing for a “White Riot” while being “Bored with the USA” or Crass proudly announcing they were “Rejects of Society,” the common claim was that the status quo, especially as presented through the culture industry, did not speak for or to them. Many would argue that over the last four decades, the situation has become worse as corporations seek to extract greater profit via entertainment industries. The existence of readily accessible alternatives has diminished as mergers and buy-outs have shrunken the field of corporate ownership. Increased vertical integration has also expanded the power of the dominant corporations within the entertainment industries. Thus, it is not unusual that when a radio station plays a song to promote an upcoming concert, the same corporation might own the radio station, the record label, the concert venue, and the tour management company. Not only are consumers fed from a shrinking menu controlled by fewer but more powerful corporations, but they have occasionally become complicit in this process via such orchestrated spectacles as American Idol and the Eurovision song contest. The desire of multinational corporations to maximize profits has led them to construct global marketing strategies for certain musical acts, but also to manufacture market fragmentation. This has resulted in targeting

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specific demographics through the invention of brands and genres. Hence, the development of commercial “punk” as a musical category. Commercial “punk” is the result of corporate desires to capitalize on specific elements within the market through the promotion of a “punk” sound and lifestyle. The delineations of these sounds and styles are both an appropriation of elements developed within punk scenes (e.g., the recognizable pop-punk sounds associates with many bands on the Lookout! record label of the late

FIGURE 4.1 Photo of Bloomingdales ad promoting “punk” fashion, 2013 (photo by E.V. Grieve; used with permission).

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1980s and early 1990s) as well as the invention of corporate taste-makers (e.g., put a skull on it and call it punk). It is worth noting that many early punk bands, such the Flowers of Romance, Slits, and Weirdos, would not fit into today’s commercial “punk” category. Likewise, those unfamiliar with contemporary DIY punk often express confusion when hearing bands such as the God Damn Doo Wop Band, This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, and Aztlan Underground because they don’t fit into preconceived commercial “punk” expectations. Commercial “punk” is produced and presented simultaneously as a lifestyle accessory and a market category. Yet, ultimately, it is part of the dominant culture and its hegemonic practices. The concept of hegemony was developed by Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci in the first part of the twentieth century (see Gramsci 1971: 333). He was basically wondering how it came to pass that capitalism had become so ingrained in Western societies. More specifically, he wanted to know how people willfully embraced a socio-economic form that was so contrary to their interests. He had a great deal of time to think about this, as he was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime for being a communist. What Gramsci realized was that power is double-sided, combining aspects of coercion and consent. Coercion is based on force, but getting people to passively accept your power over them can be much more effective. And this is what Gramsci realized had happened in modern European society. The capitalist elites had effectively embedded their moral, political, and cultural values in society, where they are dispersed and eventually accepted by everyday people. This was the result of hegemony: the ability to get the exploited to become complicit in their own exploitation. For Gramsci, the system of domination is maintained because the dominant group transmits their ideologies and desires across the larger society. They are able to do this because the institutions of “civil society” (such as schools, churches, media, and so forth) function as vehicles for creating and spreading consent and hegemony. Gramsci suggests that taking a critical view of what is being taught in schools, preached in churches, and promoted via the media exposes both the content and workings of hegemony. The band Fugazi reflects some of the dynamics of hegemony via marketing in their song “Merchandise,” which opens with the lines: “Merchandise keeps us in line/ Common sense says it’s by design/ What could a businessman ever want more/ Than to have us sucking in his store?” Today, hegemony is maintained through the cultural products that flow through the corporate-controlled networks of globalization. Yet, in many parts of the world, local DIY punk scenes emerged as the result of the spread of commercial “punk.” As noted in the previous chapter, the influx of CD s and tapes by major-label bands such as Green Day and Nirvana sparked the emergence of DIY punk scenes across much of Eastern Europe and Asia. For many, those major label acts functioned like a gateway

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drug—an introduction to independent bands and the DIY punk cultures that had nurtured them. Commercial “punk” bands were attractive because of their energy and attitude, but the DIY elements of non-commercial punk led many to become punks rather just passive fans of “punk” music. For example, interest in Green Day led Teuku Fariza to find out more about the Gilman Street scene and the larger DIY community in the Bay Area, inspiring him to start organizing DIY punk events in Indonesia (interview May 22, 2013). Jeremy Wallach notes “punk in Indonesia emerged primarily as a result of autonomous local interpretations of imported artefacts—zines, recordings, patches, stickers, and other expressive forms that circulate as part of the global punk movement” (2014: 149; see also Hannerz 2005 and Wallach 2008). By the 1990s, Western releases by punk, hardcore, and metal bands and other artifacts began to circulate widely around the globe, and in places like South Korea, Colombia, and Russia, people began to form their own bands, release their own tapes, form their own record labels, and write their own zines. Ironically, global capitalism and its attempts to profit off of passive consumers actually led to the development of a vibrant independent, anti-capitalist DIY punk culture across the globe. These examples illustrate that corporate-controlled globalization is not monolithic, but is rife with contradictions.

Informal circuits of exchange and counter-hegemony The networks of neoliberal global capitalism are hierarchical by necessity, creating asymmetric power relations between strong and weak, haves and have-nots, employers and employed, and so on. By their very existence, horizontal networks fundamentally challenge the vertical and hierarchical structures of modern society (see Hardt and Negri 2005; Graeber 2013). It is worth underscoring that global DIY punk is based upon, and helps foster, just such horizontal networks. As discussed below, interactions within global DIY punk are usually based on reciprocity and mutual promotion. The connections are informal, but also non-hierarchical. Recall Kathleen Hanna rejected the role of spokeswoman for the Riot Grrrl movement that outsiders attempted to force upon her because she understood that such a leadership position would be anathema to the horizontal, non-hierarchical structure of the Riot Grrrl movement and DIY punk in general. In constructing horizontal networks, DIY punk often works through informal global flows. Local DIY punk scenes interact with other distant punk scenes through what could be considered “informal circuits of exchange.” People (such as bands, fans, and activists), goods (such as records, CD s, movies, visual art, and zines) and ideas (such as information, musical styles, and cultural tastes) are transmitted through independent, informal, decentralized, and non-hierarchical channels, usually outside the direct

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control of corporate capitalism. For example, a record might be recorded directly by a band, pressed by a friend who runs an independent label, sold or traded to someone in a foreign country while the band is on tour, then bootlegged and circulated among friends and across scenes. At no time does a major corporation or a sovereign state engage with its production, circulation, or reception. In this example, the circuits of exchange traveled by that record were outside the formal vertical flows of global capitalism. They relied completely on informal, interpersonal interactions. Informal circuits of exchange are the backbone of the global DIY punk community. The next two chapters explore DIY record labels and zines, but here I examine the example of the touring band. When DIY punk bands go on tour, they usually book the tours themselves. If there is a tour manager, it is often a friend of the band. There are numerous memoirs of punk bands on tour, perhaps the most notable being Get in the Van: On the Road with Black Flag written by lead singer Henry Rollins (1994), which details the trials and tribulations, personal disputes, and police harassment, that the seminal American hardcore band faced while touring in the early 1980s. Regardless of the band, there is a similar story to be told: punk bands on tour do virtually everything themselves (see Cahill et al. 2013). If they are lucky, they might have a roadie/driver (again, usually a friend of the band). But they drive themselves from city to city, playing in venues that they booked themselves. They set up and break down their own equipment. Some nights they might be able to stay in a motel, but more often they sleep on the couch or floor of their fans. These tours are rarely financially lucrative and most of the money they make on the tour comes from the selling of merchandise such as CD s, t-shirts, patches, and so forth.21 As Roxy Epoxy, then of the Portland-based band the Epoxies, explained: “We started out the way most punk bands do. We booked ourselves, we piled into a van that we hoped to hell wasn’t going to break down. We slept on floors. We lived out of gas stations. We could barely afford hotels here and there. And it’s still that way. We set everything up ourselves. We build a lot of our own stuff and put together little machines. It is thoroughly DIY ” (interview July 29, 2006). This is a common refrain for DIY punk bands—perhaps the most common refrain. Ian MacKaye of internationally renowned band Fugazi observed: “We manage ourselves, we book ourselves, we do our own equipment upkeep, we do our own recording, we do our own taxes. We don’t have other people to do that stuff” (quoted in Sinker 2001: 19). These bands are physically traveling informal circuits that are outside the direct control of corporate capitalism. When traveling abroad, bands usually connect with local punk bands or record labels that help them book shows and often share equipment with them, enabling the visiting band to avoid shipping their entire gear over, which can be quite expensive. Where they play is also significant, as DIY punk bands travel along alternative venue circuits.

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Punk bands regularly play in such spaces as small bars, community centers, record and/or bookstores, empty storefronts, factory loading docks, or a fan’s basement. Anywhere, basically, that someone is willing to set up a show. These are the typical venues for shows, not exotic exceptions. Playing lowpriced shows in non-commercial venues allows them to avoid the commercial music industry, while making live shows relatively accessible to all. The touring band is one of the most important elements that connects and nurtures global DIY punk networks. Local punk scenes are sometime created by these independent and informal networks. For example, the punk scene in Washington, DC emerged in the late 1970s via records and magazines articles about the punk scenes in New York and London. Visits by touring bands from outside DC , often playing in spaces outside the established club circuit, strengthened the emergence of a local punk community. The creation and evolution of the DC scene has been documented in the excellent book Dance of Days, and the authors note the importance of live shows from touring bands like the Damned (London), Ramones (NYC ), and the Cramps (Akron) in creating and strengthening the scene (Andersen and Jenkins 2001). Likewise, in his work on Mexican punk, Alan O’Connor notes the importance of Spanish punk bands touring that country (2004: 179–82). A vibrant DIY punk scene developed in Seoul, South Korea, in part by the interaction between local and touring bands (Dunbar 2015). Touring bands provide bridges between geographically distant scenes, functioning as conduits for ideas, styles, and other aspects of communication, including contact information for others along these informal circuits. While punk scenes across the globe are sustained by informal networks which facilitate the flow of information, goods, and bands it is often the touring band that functions as the glue holding these scenes together. For example, when Irish punk band Them Martyrs goes on tour across Europe, they play at small venues that they have booked. They meet other people, exchange ideas, meet local bands, help those bands book shows in the UK , swap zines/records/contact information, maybe even do a split-release or perhaps form a new band with people across different scenes. In the case of Them Martyrs, their touring across Europe has led to strong connections with local scenes from Finland to Italy (interview October 17, 2011). In return, they have helped bands from those scenes come to Ireland and the UK . Them Martyrs’ experience is representative of almost all bands within DIY punk. The process of reciprocity is central to the global DIY punk community. As Marty Ploy, who has booked DIY shows for over fifteen years, notes: “It’s a chain reaction where you book a band, put them up, feed them, whatever; and then when you go through their town on tour they do the same for you. Touring in a DIY community is the most beautiful and organic thing I’ve ever done. To be anywhere in the country or world and be able to know that you will be OK and people have the same ideals as you is a beautiful thing” (interview June 8, 2015).

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This scenario is repeated across the globe, as punk bands, fans, and scenes interact with each other. Of course, there are significant variations due to individuals and structural differences. The punk networks in much of Europe and across parts of Latin America are sustained by squats and anarchist collectives, but because of a different political climate and laws concerning squatting, there are far fewer such squats and collectives in the US . Therefore, the networks within the US look different from those, say, in Europe. Yet, the ethos and mentality of informal and independent exchange of ideas based on DIY, anti-status quo, and disalienation remains pronounced regardless of the specific context. In an attempt to strengthen global communication across communities, many punk zines such Maximumrocknroll and Profane Existence feature scene reports from around the world, or at least provide useful contact information for bands planning tours. Before the advent of the internet, a regular resource for touring was Book Your Own Fucking Life, which listed contact information for everything from venues that would book bands, zines that would review your music, stores that would sell your records, and locals who would give bands a place to sleep. Covering the US , it was published as a zine by some of the people associated with MRR. It now has a global scope and is run by a collective via the internet site http://www. byofl.org. The internet has proven to be an important tool for punks engaged in global exchange. Many punks have email accounts by which they communicate with other punks and punk scenes, sometimes via international punk sites and chat rooms. Punk bands and independent labels often have their own websites where they can communicate directly to an online global audience, as well as distribute their music and merchandise. Social media sites such as Facebook, as well as more focused sites like www. worldwidepunk.com, have helped connect individuals and communities. Teuku Fariza, the Indonesian DIY organizer mentioned earlier, reached out to the band Lemuria via email and arranged their entire 2013 South East Asian tour largely through his social media contacts. It is not unusual for individual punks to be in daily contact with DIY punks on almost every continent through their Facebook page. Indeed, the development of social media has had profound implications for creating, maintaining, and connecting DIY punk scenes across the globe. It has also helped make local products of a particular scene accessible to global audiences and thereby generates an international following and, in some cases, volunteer base. This level of connectivity was unimaginable forty or even twenty years ago. As such, putting together a DIY punk tour is much easier now then it was then. Not surprisingly, changes in global flows of information wrought by the ubiquity of the internet has generated much scholarly debate. For example, cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai (1996) has offered an influential portrayal of cultural globalization, focusing on the decentralized flow of people, technology, capital, media, and ideas around the globe. He has argued that

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electronic media “transform the field of mass mediation because they offer new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds” (1996: 3). For Appadurai and other like-minded theorists of globalization, we are currently experiencing transformative shifts in global technology and communication that produce new opportunities for empowerment and resistance, especially in the face of global capitalism. Viewed from this perspective, one could argue that the reliance of many punks on decentered networks and punk’s general commitment to disalienation make it an ideal mechanism for resisting hegemony in the emerging “mediascapes” of contemporary global communication. A few days after Typhoon Haiyan decimated the Philippines, killing more than 5,000 people, members of DIY punk scenes across Asia began organizing relief for the Philippine punk communities and their families via the internet. Similar email campaigns were prevalent regarding the fate of Pussy Riot in Russia and after the 2011 arrest of the punks in Banda Aceh. Individuals in DIY scenes use global technology and communication to create both alternative networks of information but also alternative/parallel networks of disaster relief and fundraising. In contrast to thinkers like Appadurai, other scholars have tried to create a more nuanced view of global flows of ideas and information in the globalized world. For example, through his multi-sited ethnographic work on punk communities, Alan O’Connor rejects what he regards as Appadurai’s embrace of a virtual “chaos theory” of global communication, arguing instead for the importance of habitus. As he notes “the flow of media, ideas and people between these [punk] scenes is socially organized . . . In particular, these flows of records and tapes, fanzines and visitors are unequal and unbalanced. Notions of center and periphery are still valid” (2004: 175–6). O’Connor argues that US punk scenes dominate the global punk field because of the greater economic resources at their disposal. European scenes exist in a semi-peripheral position, and those in the Third World are clearly on the periphery. O’Connor documents the limited flow of punk bands and goods from Spain to Mexico, but notes, “I don’t know of any Mexican punk group that has toured in Spain. The reasons are economic” (2004: 181).22 This observation is echoed by Keith Harris in his study of the globalization of heavy metal. As he argues, “The very mobility and malleability of music that makes it such a potent tool in empowering people to respond to their location in the world is of course the result of ‘flows’ of various forms of capital. These flows result in severe inequalities in the ability of groups to appropriate and distribute music” (Harris 2000: 26). While not a major destination for Western musicians in general, there is likely an American or European punk band playing in Malaysia as you read this. But it is highly unlikely that there is a Malaysian band on tour in the West right now. Likewise, it is far more likely you’d find Western punk zines and CD s circulating in Malaysia than vice versa.

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We should be skeptical of utopian claims regarding neoliberal globalization and the promises of “free” global flows of ideas, goods, and people. The example of punk rock illustrates that the “mediascapes” of contemporary global politics are still characterized by inequalities and gross disparities. While the horizontal networks and flows of punk are uneven and inequitable based in large part due to global capital, those networks and flows simultaneously offer a significant challenge to global capital. To return to the concept of hegemony, Gramsci argued that the only effective response to hegemonic domination was the creation of a counter-hegemonic culture. This was one in which a culture arises out of dissent and provides a counter-vision of society. It doesn’t exist outside of society, but works within the dominant society to produce an alternative system of meanings, representations, and practices. DIY punk, particularly through its independent, decentralized, horizontal, and informal networks, constitutes a counter-hegemonic alternative to the hegemonic culture of global capitalism. Given the dominant position of corporations within global culture industries, DIY punk networks and flows become highly significant for the simple fact that they represent an alternative. As tempting as it is, it would be incorrect to suggest that DIY punk is somehow outside the global capitalist system, simply because capitalism’s domination is so complete it is impossible to be outside of it. Moreover, there is always the fear that global capitalism will successfully “hijack” alternative informal networks (Moore 2007). Yet, DIY punk offers an important, and politically powerful, alternative based on informal and independent networks and flows. To put it another way, the networks that connect local punk scenes and create a global community are the expression of punk’s ethos of DIY, resistance, and disalienation in practice. In his examination of punk in Indonesia, Jeremy Wallach has labeled this process “indieglobalization.” His conceptualization is very much in line with my own, where ideas and artifacts are circulated across the globe through informal circuits of exchange working not for profit-maximization, but in “favour of ideological goals, identity construction, and community-building” (Wallach 2014: 149). As he writes: Indieglobalization is the far-flung circulation of texts, artefacts, sounds and ideas outside formal channels of commodity exchange, instead making use of informal networks connecting localized nodes of exchange known as ‘scenes.’ The most crucial aspect of this separate and distinct mode of globalization is not its structural difference from the globalization strategies employed by corporations, but its difference in cultural sensibility and priorities . . . [I]ndieglobalization is often non-profit or even anti-profit. WALLACH 2014: 156

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DIY punks have created vast networks of independent communication to share ideas, music, and cultural artifacts that they feel are not available elsewhere. These networks make up a distinct material infrastructure of communication that uses the technology of mainstream society— transportation networks, computers, mail—but steers the use of these technologies toward different ends. These networks also tend towards an idealized notion of social organization that is non-hierarchical, largely equitable, and based on the belief that everyone is an active producer, not just a passive consumer. Like all social endeavors, DIY punk is shot through with contradictions, but within it lies the potential for political resistance.

Do try this at home: the message is the medium, the medium is the message If the how of DIY punk’s global networks and flows provide the potential for counter-hegemony and political resistance, it stands to reason that what is flowing would be significant as well. But I don’t want to suggest that there is a specific political message that is being transmitted across these global punk networks. There is a political message, but it isn’t anything along the lines of “vote Socialist” or “buy organic” (though there are plenty of punks who would champion such causes). The real message of DIY punk is the medium itself. If punk is about people expressing a resistance to the status quo and championing a DIY ethos in order to disalienate themselves, then the “message” of punk is that others can do it too. You can resist the status quo (and you’re not alone in thinking it sucks). You can fight back against the alienating and disempowering forces in modern life. These are very powerful messages. In punk, the medium is the message and the message is the medium. First and foremost, the global networks and flows of DIY punk provide living expressions and examples of that message. One only needs to revisit the numerous “conversion narratives” to understand how transformative punk can be in people’s lives. It is not uncommon for people to talk about how punk changed (or even saved) their lives. The important thing to note is how they were exposed to the message of punk. It was usually through either seeing a punk band live or hearing one of their records. Exposure to live DIY punk acts can tear down the barriers between artists and audience, intentionally exploding and deconstructing the image of rock star. That aspect of punk music is frequently lost with recordings. A Clash album is sonically different from other records, but the distance between the listener and the band remains.23 When talking about DIY punk basement shows in the documentary Between Resistance and Community, one member of the Long Island scene, Steve, states: “It’s more than having a show in a basement for three hours. You can physically reach out and grab the band. They are

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right there. You can grab them. I think growing up that is a better way to have music or have a community. You don’t see them as a ‘great band,’ you see them as people that are playing in front of you, and they are doing it to share something with you” (Between Resistance 2009). The narrative is repeated across the global punk community. At the outset, the Sex Pistols’ live shows were extremely transformative, helping kick-start the UK punk scene. When Joe Strummer, then playing for the 101ers, saw the opening band the Sex Pistols, he recalled: “Five seconds into their first song, I knew we were like yesterday’s paper, we were over” (from Westway to the World; Crossley 2008: 98). Across London, converted punks formed their own bands, started their own zines, and embraced the DIY ethos. When the Sex Pistols played their first show outside of London on June 4, 1976, it triggered a massive wave of activity and helped birth the new Manchester music scene. In the audience that evening were Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, Morrissey, Paul Morley, Tony Wilson, Martin Hannett, and Mark E. Smith, and future Fall members (Nolan 2006). When the Sex Pistols launched their ill-fated US tour, the response was often the same. On seeing the Sex Pistols on that tour, Mary Harron recalls, “It was like something real was happening onstage. It was like they were living something very exciting. I felt like, ‘Oh my, this is some real-life extraordinary event’ ” (quoted in McNeil and McCain 1996: 305). In discussing that tour, Pete Lentini noted that, “it had a significant effect on altering, or in some cases stimulating, punk more broadly than a few distinct scenes scattered throughout the country . . . Within Los Angeles, punks there saw the British acts as a template for a more aggressive performance style, yet also drew significantly on the British bands’ use of independent record labels and doit-yourself culture” (2003: 168). The story is repeated ad nauseum, but it’s not a story about the Sex Pistols rather the transformative potential of live DIY punk. The infamous 100 Club Punk Festival of September 21–22, 1976 is generally credited with illustrating to a large audience that “punk was a democratized musical form and that audience members could be instantaneously performers” (Lentini 2003: 161). When the Clash went to Belfast (and failed to play), the Northern Ireland punk scene was born. When the Damned and Cramps first played in Washington, DC they instigated the development of the influential DC scene. When New York punk bands like the Ramones and Patti Smith first came to the UK in 1976, it was also a transformative experience for many in the audience. Though American popular legend incorrectly attributes the Ramones’ performance to the creation of the Clash (they had already played their first gig by then), the performance by the Patti Smith Group is often credited with giving further impetus for many young women to play a greater role in the UK punk scene. For example, the Slits were particularly inspired to form a band by this performance (interview with Tessa Pollitt May 28, 2015; Bockris and Bayley 1999: 121).

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It doesn’t take a major punk act to have this transformative power. I was influenced by the band Stevie Stiletto, who never enjoyed much national acclaim, yet still had an important impact on numerous people’s lives in the Jacksonville and San Francisco scenes. They taught me, and many others, what DIY punk was as a lived experience.24 Likewise, sociologist Ross Haenfler became a punk convert after seeing a minor band from Minnesota (the Skrods) play in an empty cinderblock building at the local fairgrounds (Haenfler 2006: 1). The point is that live punk can have an affective, transformative impact. Seeing the Rolling Stones or Jay-Z may be an affective, transformative experience for some in the audience, but not in the same way as live DIY punk can be, where the emphasis is on becoming an active cultural producer yourself, not just a passive consumer. It certainly doesn’t always have that impact. Different people respond to the music, the scene, and the message in different ways. But what is significant is that the message that DIY punk projects is that this is a mechanism for disalienation and self-empowerment, and that you can do this too. For many over the past four decades and across the world, the medium represents a message that is politically empowering. The bands (as well as the zines and records, discussed in the next two chapters) provide living examples of DIY punk put into action. Flowing through DIY punk’s global networks are material examples of what it means to live a life of DIY, resistance, and disalienation. As the seminal California punk band the Minutemen sang in their song “History Lesson, Pt. 2”: “Our band could be your life/ Real names’d be proof/ Me and Mike Watt played for years/ Punk Rock changed our lives.” That opening line was used as the title of Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life (2001), which detailed the experience of over a dozen American punk and indie bands from 1981–91, including the Minutemen, as well as Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Fugazi, Minor Threat, the Replacements, and Sonic Youth. Azerrad offers profiles of bands that embodied the DIY ethos of punk and created substantial followings outside of corporate structures and control (it should be noted, as Azerrad does, that not all of the bands profiled should be considered DIY punk bands. Rather they represent a broad spectrum of bands that were loosely called “indie rock” at the time, though many embracing DIY practices). One of the overarching messages of the book and the thirteen bands profiled within is that these were living examples of musical engagement and disalienation for others to emulate. Or, as Azerrad puts it: “in doing so, they lived out a very basic premise of punk: Think for yourself” (2001: 501). While successful acts in other musical genres champion virtuosity (from rhyming, fiddle-playing, or what have you) that stresses a hierarchy between musician and fan, and thus re-entrenching the former as a professional and latter as a passive consumer, DIY punk bands often provide living examples of how audience members can be their own cultural producers.

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Azerrad’s book avoids overly romanticizing the bands or their lifestyles. He details at great length the problems and challenges these bands faced in choosing the paths that they did, whether detailing the repeated cases of poverty or debilitating drug use and addiction. Azerrad’s discussion and interviews provide ample evidence to the personal sacrifices that these bands made, from fighting with bandmates to suffering police harassment. Moreover, it is notable that several of these bands would go on to sign contracts with major label record companies, indicating that, for some at least, the allure of fame was more powerful than an ideological position that eschewed commercial success. Azerrad shows how the DIY punk/indie rock scene is riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies, yet remains an important site for political empowerment, self-expression, and disalienation. While Azerrad frames his study from 1981–91, the DIY ethos he documents continues to thrive today—and not just in the US , but across the world. One need only pick up a copy of Razorcake or Maximumrocknroll on any given month to see how today’s global DIY punk culture remains dynamic, propelled forward because the medium is the message. Two important elements are missing from Azerrad’s discussion, however. First, he fails to recognize the DIY punk scenes from which the bands emerged. His approach conforms to the rock star hagiography that is common in most media portrayals of musical scenes (Azerrad was a writer for Spin magazine). What is ignored is a discussion of the local DIY punk scenes—fellow musicians and artists, booking agents, zinesters, record store owners, supporting audiences, and so forth—that enabled the success of the bands he focuses on. Such a focus would have produced a radically different book with substantially different insights. Second, he ignores the global contexts in which these processes existed. Azarrad is not alone in reifying the indie music scenes in North America. Many similar authors—both scholarly and journalistic—tend to present these musical developments as if they were autonomous and independent from global developments and influences. As a result, the image often produced is far too narrow and limited. As a corrective to this myopic North American focus, it is useful to pick up our discussion of the Riot Grrrl movement, begun in Chapter Two. The dominant narrative asserts that by the late 1990s, Riot Grrrl had effectively ended as a unified movement, a victim of personality squabbles and crushing media attention. One scholar argued that the entire movement was over “almost as soon as it began, having been swallowed up by the great maw of popular culture with dollar signs flashing in its eyes. Like hip-hop, grunge, and punk rock, the language style of Riot Grrrl were absorbed, repackaged, and marketed back to us in the most superficial form of its origin” (Bleyer 2004: 51). It is true that most of the founding members of the movement went off into different directions, both personal and professionally. For example, Carrie Brownstein went from the band Excuse 17 to Sleater-

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Kinney to, eventually, the cult TV show Portlandia. Kathleen Hanna shifted from the hard-rocking Bikini Kill to the danceable Le Tigre. But these are personal biographies of the founding members, not the narrative of a movement (Nguyen 2012). Young punk women across North America continue to self-identify as Riot Grrrls or cite them as a major influence. Those include prominent figures such as Danielle Bailey of the band Jabber, as well as less famous female punks (interview September 1, 2013). For example, as a Mexican-American female punk, Alex Martinez was influenced at an early age by Riot Grrrls: “listening to their [Riot Grrrl] music I identified with them and understood the longing for a zine that would talk about things that mattered to me as a girl. And I’m talking about the things that they won’t talk about in Seventeen Magazine or whatever. I’m glad that girls started taking matters into their own hands and saying this is the stuff we want to read, let’s start our own thing” (personal correspondence July 27, 2010). The narrative of Riot Grrrls’ demise—reproduced ad nauseum in the pages of mainstream media as various anniversaries of the movement have come and gone—is distinctly American-centric. It also fails to historically situate Riot Grrrl within the emerging currents of late twentieth-century globalization. The dominant narratives of Riot Grrrl tend to capture its roots in the complex histories and economies of local North American

FIGURE 4.2 Danny Bailey of Jabber, 2013 (photo by Kelly Lone; used with permission).

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contexts, but they fail to appreciate how, through the structures of global capitalism and global media flows, Riot Grrrl (already a product of globalization) was propelled into a transnational phenomenon. Riot Grrrl quickly spread outside of the borders of the US as soon as it began. Riot Grrrl groups were being founded in the UK as early as 1992, with the movement also extended deeper into Europe. Riot Grrrl UK (Leeds) produced a fanzine featuring a Riot Grrrl glossary, lists of European feminist organizations and zines, and a discussion of pro-choice activism in Poland (Riot Grrrl Press 1993). By the mid-1990s, Riot Grrrl-inspired zines were being distributed across Europe, South America, and Asia. For the last several decades, Riot Grrrl-inspired organizations continue to meet, publish zines, and exchange information all over the world. Today, there are established Riot Grrrl groups in places such as Malaysia, Brazil, Paraguay, Israel, Australia, and across Europe. In Brazil, there is an annual Riot Grrrl festival held every year in Salvador called Festival Vulva la Vida. Moreover, there are Riot Grrrl-inspired bands, zinesters, and activists across the globe. The global networks that spread and connect Riot Grrrls create a global community grounded in the practical expression of punk’s ethos of DIY, resistance, and disalienation. Riot Grrrl became a global phenomenon and, in doing so, reminds us of the complicated ways in which the “international” is constituted. Substantially different from the domain of state-tostate diplomacy or international organizations, Riot Grrrl constructs an internationalism through the diverse and uneven intersection of popular culture, global media, political economy, and human agency (both collective and individual). The messages and iconography of Riot Grrrl—representing a fusion of feminism and DIY punk—traveled across the globe, following circuits of global capitalism, as well as counter-hegemonic impulses of resistance to the neoliberal and corporate-controlled networks of globalization. Yet, Riot Grrrl was (and continues to be) re-employed, reconstituted, and re-figured by local actors embedded in local and national political contexts. They do so within the gaze of a global media that, as Radha Hegde has noted, “are part of the global machinery that discounts history in its populist emphasis on the present and the future” (2011: 8). Within the continuing Riot Grrrl “revolution” is an ongoing demand to be recognized as part of a borderless community of feminist agents seeking to make gender and gender bodies visible on their own terms, while also insisting on an awareness of local/national political and social contexts. For, as Saskia Sassen has argued, it is in these “local moments” that the global is performed, reproduced, and contested in the terrain of everyday life (2006: 307). In my interviews with self-declared Riot Grrrls around the globe, one of the primary reasons they give for Riot Grrrl’s continued importance is its self-empowering fusion of feminism and DIY punk. That is, they can selfconsciously engage in the process of representing gendered bodies with

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greater agency than may otherwise be available to them. It is useful to briefly turn our attention to current manifestations of Riot Grrrl outside of North America to both correct the dominant narrative of a deceased Riot Grrrl movement and explore the global diffusion of the “Girl-Style Revolution” in the twenty-first century as a cultural form and political strategy of resistance. To that end, I will briefly look at Pussy Riot in Russia and Muslim Riot Grrrls in Indonesia. Pussy Riot is a complex phenomenon to wrap your head around. They gained international prominence on February 21, 2012 when five members staged an impromptu performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Dressed in balaclavas, they launched into a “Punk Prayer” calling for the Virgin Mary to drive Russian President Vladimir Putin from power, with the chorus: “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away. Put Putin away!” After about forty seconds, security drove them out of the cathedral. If you were not there to witness the performance, you can view it on YouTube because the performance was videotaped by members of Pussy Riot. This fact is important because it indicates that the intended audience was not the churchgoers in attendance at that moment, but a larger cyber-audience (Gessen 2014: 40). The event and, more importantly, the videotape of it, gained notoriety and three members of Pussy Riot—Maria Alyokhina, Nadya Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich—were later arrested and charged with felony hooliganism motivated by “religious hatred.” In August, the Russian courts found the three guilty and sentenced them to two years each of hard labor, though Samutsevich eventually had her sentence suspended. During the Cold War, punk was present but understandably underground in Russia. Bootleg cassette recordings of punk bands from the West and parts of Eastern Europe were circulated by hand. State-control effectively kept punk underground and under wraps. With the end of the Cold War and the rise of second wave punk spearheaded by the success of Nirvana, Green Day, and others, commercial “punk” slowly spread across the former Soviet Union (Steinholt 2012). As Alla Ivanchikova, a Russian queer punk musician, recalls: “There was a lot of music available at that time [early 1990s] and it was cheap to buy it, too. All of it was pirated stuff and it cost pennies. There was this market in Moscow called Gorbushka with numerous kiosks selling pirated tapes, LP s, CD s, and posters . . . We would go there every weekend with a few bucks in our pockets and buy tons of CD s. However, the choices were limited—it didn’t pay off to pirate indie music because the niche market was too small” (interview August 10, 2013). Describing the Russian punk scene of the 1990s, Ivanchikova noted, “The punk crowd was an eclectic mix of various outcasts—anarchists, monarchists, witches, and weirdos. If you were queer, you would often hang out with the punk crowd to meet other queers. But it was certainly a maledominated subculture. In a way, we were all pretending that gender didn’t

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matter, but of course it did. For instance, many songs had sexist lyrics, really sexist, in a way that is hard for me to imagine today. One of the other challenges in Russia was the absence of a female music scene” (interview August 10, 2013). The transformation of Russian (specifically, Muscovite) indie culture occurred after the advent of the twenty-first century, as releases by Riot Grrrl bands eventually made their way into Russia, key amongst them being Bikini Kill, Ani DiFranco, Sleater-Kinney, Team Dresch, Butchies, and Le Tigre. Interestingly, the circulation of these bands was driven largely by ideological reasons, rather than through the established indie culture. As Ivanchikova notes, “My impression is that people learned about bands such as Le Tigre through feminist networks or LGBT networks and started listening to them because they were looking for role models in feminist music and art.” This was similar to the spread of Riot Grrrl in the West, where its zines and CD s were as likely to be advanced within feminist and LGBT networks as established music circles. A result of this circulation of Riot Grrrl material in Russia was the creation of Pussy Riot. Growing out of the feminist collective Voina (War), Pussy Riot explicitly adopted a Riot Grrrl approach to punk rock. Directly influenced by continental theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva, as well as broader feminist and queer theory, the members of the collective sought to publicly challenge Vladimir Putin’s increasingly repressive state apparatus, as well as the larger patriarchic and homophobic currents of contemporary Russian life. They sought to create “noise” that would disrupt the dominant social and political norms in a way that was both fun and mischievous. As Masha Gessen writes, they planned actions that were “as accessible as the Guerrilla Girls and as irreverent as Bikini Kill” (2014: 60). As the name itself connotes, the group identified themselves as Russian Riot Grrrls (Pussy Riot 2013; Gessen 2014). Pussy Riot is certainly a feminist punk band holding aloft the ongoing banner of Riot Grrrl, but they are also a feminist art collective in the tradition of the Guerrilla Girls, as well as political activists fighting against the increasing repression of the Putin state. They use popular culture and art as a platform to critique sexual politics, champion LGBT issues, advocate for prison reform, and challenge gender and sexuality norms in contemporary Russian society. But they do so by explicitly operating in highly mediated environments shaped by the cultures of globality, ultimately troubling global/local divides. They employ “Western” music, cultural gestures, and names (even using the Roman alphabet),25 while addressing political issues grounded in very specific local histories and contexts. While this strategy is explicitly intentional (Pussy Riot 2013; Gessen 2014), it has also opened the group up to an array of criticisms. On the one hand, some outside of Russia have labeled them naïve for assuming “publicity stunts” would be an effective source of resistance against an increasingly authoritarian state (Justice 2014). On the other

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hand, many in Russia have dismissed them for aping Western culture and political theory. Despite the desire of Riot Grrrls for a “girl-style revolution,” the gendered body remains a contested space produced by forces within and across borders, markets, and communities. I do not want to reduce Pussy Riot to a simplistic understanding. Part Riot Grrrl, part radical art collective, part liberal activists, part media pranksters, Pussy Riot defies easy categorization and has become far more than the sum of its parts. Nor do I want to construct a romantic and uncritical image of Pussy Riot and their tactics. They have served hard labor prison sentences and were attacked and beaten at an impromptu performance outside of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. But I do think it is important that Pussy Riot explicitly see themselves as influenced by the North American Riot Grrrl movement and as the embodiment of that movement within the Russian context. They are self-declared Russian Riot Grrrls for the twentyfirst century, and in many ways they illustrate the complex transnationalism of Riot Grrrl: simultaneously borderless, with its gesture towards a global feminist community (accessed via YouTube postings), and bordered, as their political agenda is so clearly grounded in Putin’s increasingly illiberal Russia. I have made several references to the December 2011 police raid on a punk rock concert in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. While the detention of the sixty-four punks garnered a degree of international media attention—and

FIGURE 4.3 Pussy Riot performing in Red Square, 2012 (photo by Denis Sinyakov; used with permission).

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inspired an impressive level of supportive activism and organization among North American punks on their behalf—little attention has been paid to why these youths were embracing punk in such a hostile environment, especially among the high number of young women involved. In his discussion of Indonesian punks in general, Jeremy Wallach argued, “their aim is to be ‘authentic though not exotic’ as they apply the lessons of punk music and culture to their everyday lives in the often-harsh environs of a developing nation” (2014: 148). This observation is especially true to the young women in the Indonesian punk scenes. When I was in Banda Aceh in 2013, I interviewed several self-described Indonesian Riot Grrrls. Sitting on the steps of the Tsunami Museum, they wore black headscarves, black t-shirts, jeans, and cheap black sneakers. Like many punk females around the world, they expressed concern about violence against women in their society, fretted about finding a supportive place for women in the local punk scene, complained that their male punk colleagues didn’t always take them seriously, and talked about police harassment. They also talked about how they dealt with the societal pressures in a dominantly Muslim society. They discussed at length how it was easier and more accepted for Indonesian males to be politically and socially liberal and the pressures on females to be more conservative. The case of Aceh Riot Grrrls illustrates Radha Hegde’s observation that “sexual cultures of postcolonial societies continue to have a tangled and contested relationship to Western modernity and its public manifestations in the world of consumption” (2014: 4). These Muslim Riot Grrrls seek to construct gendered bodies on their own terms, while navigating established cultural practices, which, in turn, reconfigures categories such as private/ public, tradition/modernity, regional/national, and global/local. They do so by employing the DIY ethos of punk and the open pluralism of Riot Grrrl (e.g., “Riot Grrrl to me is . . .”) as essential elements for their own political empowerment and engagement. To be sure, they face numerous constraints and challenges. But, in many ways, this is the ideal of “local feminisms, global futures” practiced in everyday life (Flew et al. 1999). In my encounters with females in the Aceh punk scene, as well as in other parts of Indonesia, there is frequently an explicit reference to the Riot Grrrl movement. Many young women cite Western Riot Grrrl bands (such as Bikini Kill, Distillers, and Pussy Riot), as well as Indonesian female punk bands like Boys’R’Toys (Bandung), Virgin Oi! (Bandung), and Punktat (Jakarta). They also point to other cultural practices of Riot Grrrls—from zine making to graffiti—as inspirational. One young woman in Banda Aceh proudly showed me graffiti of a stylized veiled woman with the words “Stop Rape” (in English) spray-painted on the exterior wall of a local coffee shop. In their self-identification as Riot Grrrls, these Indonesian female youths articulate a feminist engagement within their specific contexts. In addition to resisting and reconstructing dominant gender narratives within multiple

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terrains—e.g., family life, Banda Aceh’s punk scene, the larger Aceh society, etc.—these Indonesian women are also engaged in challenging Western media representations concerning Islam and sexuality, which have been instrumental in Western media spectacles that reinforce Western liberal scripts of liberation and modernization (Echchaibi 2011: 89–102). In many ways that were probably unimagined by the early Riot Grrrls in North America, the political importance of Riot Grrrls’ subjective self-definition and personal empowerment continues to be relevant around the globe, even outside of the mosques of Aceh.

Global punk: cultural imperialism or personal empowerment Over the past four decades, through the flow of people, goods, and information across the informal and independent networks, a global DIY punk culture has emerged. It is hard to define and describe that culture. That is largely because individuals and communities draw upon the global in order to construct the local. In this way, DIY punk promotes a way of being, as opposed to specific products, styles, or fashions. It offers large numbers of people across the globe resources through which to engage in their own political empowerment. This has already been illustrated in the earlier discussion of local scenes, where groups of individuals—from Belfast to Banda Aceh—have drawn upon the global punk culture to construct their own politically engaged local communities. Anthropologists often call what has taken place “transculturation,” meaning that groups and individuals incorporate external cultural forms into their own local forms and create something new. This is not an unusual process, especially regarding global flows of music (see Straw 1991). In his work Global Pop: World Music, World Markets, Timothy Taylor (1997) argues that music “moves” easier than most other cultural forms and products, and that such movements have been central to the creation and dissemination of new musical forms. As Radha Hegde argues, “The circulation of media images and commodities draws the global consumer into the circuits of the global cultural economy and its distinct ideological imprints. Consumers in the Global South flex this commodity space in order to create new responses to the scripts of Western modernity” (2014: 7). A process of “transculturation” takes place, in which groups and individuals incorporate external cultural forms into their own local forms and create something new. But this is never a simple, unproblematic process. As Hegde observes, “the gendered subject of globalization, far from being self-evident or transparent as often assumed, has to be situated within shifting formations of power” (2014: 1).

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Cultural theorists and musicologists have spent a great deal of time debating whether the spread of Western-style popular music is an example of cultural imperialism or offers the potential for liberation (see Malone and Martinez 2014; Laing 1986). Some have regarded the spread of punk as an example of cultural imperialism, with a form of Western music rock’n’roll replacing traditional cultural practices. Others have argued that the very mobility and malleability of music makes it a potent tool in empowering people to respond to their location in the world (see Harris 2000; Lash and Urry 1994). These arguments often focus on the fact that local scenes rely on small-scale infrastructures of production and dissemination that are infused with local circumstances, thus making them potentially significant sites of political expression. In his discussion of the 1980s alternative-rock culture, musical theorist Will Straw is dubious about such claims, and argues that the “aesthetic values” which dominate local alternative scenes are fairly stable from one community to another, and represent a relatively uniform “musical conformity” (Straw 1991: 378). Thus, the alternative-rock culture example indicates that the ability of local scenes to develop their own “musical vernacular” is significantly constrained, implying the limitedness of local political empowerment. Others have pointed out that the presence of “stable vernaculars” does not necessarily imply a form of cultural imperialism nor a negation of music’s political potential. In his detailed ethnographic study of the Brazilian heavy metal scene (which, it should be noted, has strong ties to the Brazilian punk scene), Keith Harris points out that the stability of the musical form has enabled people across the world to interact on a fairly equal basis. As his work illustrates, local scenes have pioneered new styles that have gone on to be popular throughout the global scene, “allow[ing] bands such as Sepultura to galvanise musicians and fans across the world yet still attend to local specificity” (Harris 2000: 27). In his work on music and cultural imperialism, Dave Laing raises critical questions about the whole cultural imperialism thesis (1986). He points out that much of the thesis rests on the acknowledgment that Western multinational corporations dominate the production and distribution of popular music. But Laing notes that two aspects are often ignored, the first being piracy, or the illegal copying and distribution of recorded music. This is a significant point concerning the flow of DIY punk goods, as much (if not most) of the tapes, CD s, and MP 3 are being copied and distributed freely, outside the control of major record labels. As I’ll discuss in the following chapter, many DIY labels and bands openly encourage the copying and distribution of the product, with many bands and labels providing them at little to no cost. But for Laing, the second point may be even more important, namely the need to investigate “the ways in which audiences and musicians in countries outside the Anglo-American ‘centre’ have made use of ‘imperialistic’ music” (1986: 340). He points to his own work on European

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youth’s appropriation of English punk for their own local self-expression (Laing 1985: 113–15) and Anna Szemere’s close examination of the ways in which Hungarian youths drew upon Anglo-American punk to create their own locally informed and politically disruptive punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Szemere 1983) as examples of how global punk has provided resources for local self-expression and empowerment. Motti Regev examined the global spread of rock aesthetics and claims: “the presence of rock music in their own local cultures and its influence on local music is hardly seen as a form of cultural imperialism. On the contrary, they perceive rock as an important tool for strengthening their contemporary sense of local identity and autonomy” (1997: 125). Take the example of the Celtic punk band Forgotten Generation. Celtic punk is itself a hybridization of “traditional” Irish music and instruments with “modern” punk rock. What perhaps makes Forgotten Generation interesting is that they are from Bandung, Indonesia. When I asked Adith Reesucknotoz, their bassist, what he saw in Celtic punk, he responded, “It involves a variety of instruments and that makes it fun. Fun and unique. But also it is flexible. We can play Celtic punk in any kind of concert. Whether it is a metal event, or punk event, or a hardcore event, or a skinhead event. They all welcome Celtic punk bands” (interview May 20, 2013). He saw nothing odd about being an Indonesian playing in a Celtic punk band. In fact, he saw it as musical

FIGURE 4.4 Indonesian Celtic punk band, Forgotten Generation (photo by Erik Firdaus; used with permission).

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form of personal empowerment tied to promoting a sense of pride in the Bandung scene. Of course, just because people don’t consider the popularity of a Western cultural form evidence of cultural imperialism doesn’t mean that it isn’t. But perhaps it does not matter. Perhaps it isn’t an either/or question. Within the spread of Western hegemonic culture there also exists the possibility of political empowerment. Or, to put it another way, hegemony carries with it its own counter-hegemonic forces and impulses. Recall that in the 1990s, anti-corporate DIY punk was spread throughout parts of the world on the back of corporate punk’s success. As sociologists Peterson and Bennett have pointed out in their examination of networked musical scenes, the global media can be the catalyst for what become intensely local scenes (2004: 9). Through an exposure and embrace of DIY punk, participants in local scenes feel simultaneously connected to a specific, contemporary, global culture, and active agents in the construction of local groups and identities. With the rise of globalization, in which societies are bombarded with a multitude of inputs from global mediascapes, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain a distinction between the global and the local. Sitting on a beach in Banda Aceh discussing globalization with local punks, it was impossible to draw a clear line between what constituted the global and the local in their lives and mine. If individuals face a tension between local and global cultural materials, one strategy has been the mixing of both types of material into a new contemporary identity. This view has been adopted by a number of scholars working on various aspects of popular culture across the globe. In his discussion of the global spread of rock’n’roll (and drawing upon theorist Pierre Bourdieu), Motti Regev has argued: instead of being disparate, relatively independent musical languages, local styles of music become part of one history, variations of one cultural form—without necessarily losing a sense of difference . . . And this is exactly where the rock aesthetic best exemplifies one of the cultural logics of globalization. Reflexive communities, whose existence in various parts of the world is based on local use and production of global cultural forms, become in fact positions in the international fields of the respective cultural forms on which these communities’ sense of identity depends. Fields of cultural production thus expand into webs of local and global positions, whose agents or occupiers integrate histories of the global and the local into one—and then perpetuate it. 1997: 139 This argument can also be found in Tony Mitchell’s Popular Music and Local Identity (1996), in which he argues that globally recognizable popular musical styles, such as punk and rock, can be reworked in ways that make

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them culturally significant to musicians and fans in particular local contexts. This involves reworking the musical styles to better fit local meanings, even through such simple acts as introducing local instruments or singing lyrics in the local language (Mitchell 1996; see also Bennett 2004: 227). Thus, one finds a band like Opozicion in Colombia donning black leather jackets (a Western symbol of youthful rebellion), playing Western-style punk rock (not that dissimilar in some aspects to 1977 UK punk), while incorporating traditional Colombian instruments, and singing in Spanish about the plight of indigenous Colombians. This example provides evidence for both the cultural imperialism and local empowerment arguments, indicating that both can be simultaneously true. This type of “cultural hybridity” is not that unusual in the context of twenty-first-century globalization. But DIY punk, with its emphasis on transforming consumer into producer, is particularly rife with opportunities for political resistance. Local youths around the world are often attracted to punk precisely because it offers resources for political empowerment. In explaining why he was drawn to punk, Ray, a member of the Chinese punk band NoName, stated that it “gave me [a] voice,” that it was “direct, true” and disruptive (personal correspondence May 7, 2009). Drawing resources from the global punk culture, local scenes develop around their own social resources and political needs. In his detailed work on Mexican punk scenes, O’Connor observes that, “I find that punk subculture is selectively accepted in Mexico according to the needs of marginalized Mexican youth” (2004: 178). The same can be said for local scenes across the globe, as evidenced by the earlier examples of Belfast, Jakarta, Basque, and Slovenia, but equally true in places like Washington, DC , Jacksonville, FL , New Orleans, Manchester, Bloemfontein, Beijing, Xi’an, Tel Aviv, and on and on. Across the globe, local DIY punk scenes emerge out of the intersection of the global culture and the immediate surroundings. Punks across the globe create scenes and cultural forms that reflect their local struggles and concerns. Significantly, punks across Latin America, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia employ punk as a tool for political empowerment in the face of repressive regimes, global inequality, and complex (and often marginalizing) social structures. For many on the global periphery, there is far more at stake in the expression of a punk subculture than there is at the core. Case in point: in 2007, members of the Turkish punk band Deli were facing charges of “insulting Turkishness,” a crime punishable by eighteen months in prison. The charges stemmed from the lyrics of their song “OSYM ” which is a critique of the Turkish standardized test for high school students.26 In the US , a punk band singing about standardized school tests wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow. Which reminds us that while punk has gone global, each local context is still quite unique.

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CHAPTER FIVE

If It Ain’t Cheap, It Ain’t Punk: Punk Record Labels and DIY as a (Anti-)Business Model

In his quasi-autobiography The Annotated Boris, Rev. Nørb discusses trying to get a record deal for Boris the Sprinkler, the much-loved band he fronted. In the mid-1990s, he sent out demo tapes to numerous record labels. Despite the band’s increasing fame, most never bothered to respond. The one record label that did express interest became a huge headache. Finally, Rev. Nørb decided to release the album himself. Or, as he writes, “Eventually, i just got sick of waiting for someone else to put [out] our album . . . after about a year of sending out tapes and waiting for some monied benefactor to descend, angel-like, from the heavens, i gave up on the entire idea of getting signed to someone else’s label and did it myself—ultimately what i should have done in the first place. LESSON LEARNED : SERIOUSLY, DUDE . DO IT YOURSELF ” (2013: 37; upper and lower capitalization by the good Reverend himself).27 While Rev. Nørb released his own band’s music on his own record label—and thereby circumvented the established corporate music industry—out of frustration, such acts of DIY cultural production have significant political importance. Rev. Nørb’s lesson has been learned by countless punk bands. DIY punk bands either release their own music or do so through small DIY labels. Globally, there are currently three major corporate record labels that dominate the music industry: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group. Within the industry, there are two ways of viewing market share: by distribution ownership and label ownership. In 2013, based on US market share by distribution ownership, Universal was largest with 38.9 percent, thanks in large part to its acquisition 127

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of Capitol Music Group that year (Billboard 2014). Sony had 29.5 percent of the US market and Warner had 18.7 percent. Independent labels (aka “indies”) accounted for 12.3 percent of the market share totals by distribution ownership. But when examining market share by label ownership, indies had over 35 percent of the US market share in 2014, followed by Universal with 27.5 percent, Sony with 22 percent and Warner with almost 15 percent (Statista 2015). The category of “indie” label can be a bit misleading. In his work on punk record labels, Alan O’Connor makes a distinction between commercial and DIY labels. Commercial punk labels are companies that regularly achieve sales of 20,000 to 100,000 copies, often through distribution in chain records stores and big-box stores like Wal-Mart (2008: 35–6). To achieve this, they usually work through major record distributors. In the US , there are currently four major “independent” distribution companies that are actually owned by major record labels: Fontana (owned by Universal Music Group), ADA (owned by Warner Music Group), RED (owned by Sony BMG ), and Caroline (also owned by Universal Music Group). Many of the commercial punk labels—Epitaph, Vagrant, Sub Pop, Fat Wreck, Equal Vision, Victory, Trustkill, BYO, Fueled by Ramen, Secretly Canadian, Bridge Nine, Mute—distribute through these “indie” distribution companies. This situation explains why indie labels accounted for around 35 percent of the US market in 2014 based on label ownership, but little more than 12 percent based on distribution ownership. DIY record labels, on the other hand, have much smaller record sales and distribute either directly or through actual independent distribution companies (though that line becomes harder to discern given recent shifts in the music industry, which will be discussed below). I see contemporary DIY punk record labels as potential sites of political engagement at the intersection of cultural production and the global political economy. Occupy Wall Street and related movements illustrated many people’s continued frustrations with existing global capitalist structures and practices, but also the inherent challenges of imagining, articulating, and realizing alternative ways of being. This is particularly true given the seeming ubiquity of global corporate-led capitalism. As Hardt and Negri (2000) argued in their influential book Empire, this system has become allencompassing. One cannot “opt out” of the capitalist system because we are all firmly entrenched within it. If that is true, how does one create culture that is critical and politically progressive in today’s context? Or, in the language of Gramsci (1971), how can one engage in counter-hegemonic struggles when global capitalism’s hegemony appears to be so absolute? For Gramsci, a “war of movement”— attacking the system from the outside—is impossible since there is no being “outside” of the system. A “war of position”—creating counter-hegemonic beliefs and practices from within the system by utilizing the tools of the

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system—seems to offer some potential, but the hegemonic practices of appropriation and assimilation are constantly at play; even more so in our irony-drenched postmodern consumerist culture. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the field of popular culture, as the Beatles “Revolution” is used to sell Nike shoes and sport celebrity/multi-millionaire David Beckham models a diamond-sequined CRASS t-shirt made by a famous designer. Over the past several years, I have interviewed hundreds of people around the globe who run their own DIY record labels. They do so with little fanfare, and usually with little to no financial gain. More often than not, they do it as a labor of love. But there is more going on than just altruistic fans helping out their friends. DIY punk record labels embody alternative and counter-hegemonic forms of cultural practices in the modern capitalist world. Below, I sketch out the development of the global DIY punk record industry over the past several decades, noting the networks that have helped create and connect punk scenes across the globe. Drawing from my interviews, I explore the specific practices of DIY record labels, paying particular attention to distinctions between them and major corporate record labels. I do so to illustrate some of the ways in which DIY record labels operate as examples of an anti-capitalist business model.

“When Hitsville hits the UK ”: a brief history of DIY record labels Independent, do-it-yourself record labels pre-date the origins of punk, and there is a long and respected tradition of small record labels within the history of the music industry. Sam Phillip’s Memphis-based Sun Records, after all, is generally credited with helping invent rock’n’roll. Before that, there was a plethora of small record labels in the US that recorded and released jazz, country, and soul music to small, dedicated audiences. Moreover, it was not entirely uncommon for bands to create their own labels, often as vanity projects within a larger multinational label. Some of the best-known examples are the Beatles’ Apple Records, the Rolling Stones’ Rolling Stones Records, and Elton John’s Rocket Records. But the arrival of punk signaled a marked increase in the number of small, DIY record labels. In part this was due to changes in major record companies themselves. Prior to the emergence of punk, American and British record companies began investing heavily in new recording technologies, which meant that older studio equipment and studios suddenly became available for independent music producers and companies to either buy or rent at affordable costs (Laing 1985: 29–30). Enterprising individuals, such as Miles Copeland, Bob Last, and Tony Wilson, were able to obtain old recording studios and equipment and create their own independent record

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labels: Copeland’s Step Forward, Last’s Fast Product, and Wilson’s Factory Records. Thus, pioneering punk bands benefited from changes in the established record industry that were unrelated to a promotion of a DIY ethos. Yet punk’s DIY ethos also encouraged many bands and enterprising entrepreneurs into the record industry. London’s Stiff Records was started with a £400 loan from Lee Brilleaux, singer of the pub-rock band Dr. Feelgood, and is credited with releasing the first punk single in November 1976, the Damned’s “New Rose” (Balls 2014). The Buzzcock’s Spiral Scratch EP was the first British homemade record. The band borrowed £500 from family and friends to record and release the EP. According to singer Howard Devoto, the actual recording session took three hours, with another two for mixing (Savage 2002 [1991]: 296–7). The EP was released in January 1977 on the band’s own New Hormones label and quickly sold all 1,000 copies of the first pressing. The EP went on to sell 16,000 copies, largely through mail order (Reynolds 2006: 92). Arguably, the Spiral Scratch EP is the most important of the original punk releases. While the Sex Pistols, with their “Anarchy in the UK ” single (released the previous November on EMI ), showed that virtually anyone could be in a band, the Buzzcocks showed that anyone could release a record. The EP literally showed how one could make a record, with the details of the recording process (e.g., number of takes and over-dubs) and pressing costs printed right on the record sleeve. The influence of the EP was profound, not just on bands and listeners, but on the recording industry itself. Bob Last claims that he founded his Fast Product record label after picking up Spiral Scratch: “I had absolutely no idea there’d been a history of independent labels before that. Spiral Scratch turned my head around” (quoted in Reynolds 2006: 94). In the wake of Spiral Scratch, small DIY record labels sprang up across the UK . Soon after, London’s punk band Desperate Bicycles formed Refill Records to release their own single in May 1977. The sleeve contained a breakdown of the recording costs (£153) as an inspiration to others to follow suit. As the band chanted at the end of the song “Handlebars” on the B-side of the single: “It was easy, it was cheap—go and do it!” One of the biggest problems faced by self-releasing bands like the Buzzcocks and Desperate Bicycles was how to distribute their releases across the country and beyond. Mail orders were important, so many labels advertised their offerings in the punk zines that were also emerging at the time (see next chapter). Many UK labels began distributing their releases through an organization of independent retailers known as the Cartel (Ross 1996: 168; Laing 1985: 30). The Cartel was centered around the Rough Trade record store in London, which had connected with other stores across the UK to form an independent record distribution service (Hesmondhalgh 1997). Thus, punk helped create a system of recording, pressing, and distribution that was autonomous from the corporate music industry.

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FIGURE 5.1 Cover of the Buzzcock’s Spiral Scratch EP, 1977 (courtesy of Howard Devoto and the Buzzcocks; used with permission).

The emergence of the British small record label scene was celebrated in the Clash’s song “Hitsville UK .” The song, also inspired by (then) independent Motown Records, name-checked several emerging UK indie labels, such as Small Wonder, Fast, Rough Trade, and Factory. The irony of the song was that the Clash was never on a small label, having signed to CBS in early 1977. The increasing popularity of punk at the time meant that the established record companies began to take notice. For the major labels, punk offered a new market of youth consumption from which they could profit. Within a few months, major UK record labels began signing punk bands, or bands that they thought might be profitable in the new “punk

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market” (Laing 1985: 32). The Sex Pistols was the first UK punk band signed by a major label, contracting with EMI in October 1976. The Stranglers soon followed, signing to United Artists. The following February saw the Clash sign to CBS , while the Jam signed to Polydor. By 1978, most of the best known UK punk bands had been signed by major record labels: Generation X and Stiff Little Fingers went to Chrysalis, the Vibrators signed with CBS , Siouxsie and the Banshees and Sham 69 signed to Polydor, the Undertones and the Rezillos went to WEA , and the flag-bearer of the DIY record label movement, the Buzzcocks, signed to United Artists. This major record label signing frenzy had a substantial impact on the UK punk scene. It created further divisions between bands who were now competing for possible major record label contracts. It also helped commodify the punk scene, bringing external attention to what had initially been a small scene built upon personal connections. Punk was now becoming a commercial product that was packaged and sold by the media and major record labels. Many bands did not resist the allure of a hefty paycheck or the promise of reaching a larger audience. But the signing spree also played havoc on the small record labels that had helped create and nurture nascent punk scenes across the UK . The small independent labels simply could not compete with the power, strength, and resources of the major record labels. The result was the pilfering of some of their best, most profitable talent by the major labels. For example, the Good Vibrations record label that had been so instrumental to the development of the punk scene in Belfast lost four of its first six bands to the majors. The raiding by major labels was devastating to small record labels, many of which effectively became little more than scouting agencies in the shadow of the major labels. But it would be too simplistic to create a narrative of small labels being born and then crushed by major record labels. Some of those DIY labels in the UK did close up shop (e.g., Good Vibrations, Fast Products), while others transformed themselves into bigger, more commercial record companies (e.g., Factory, Rough Trade). But many DIY record labels survived, continuing to release punk music. As the corporate music industry’s commercialization of punk mutated into “new wave” and then moved on, looking for new fashions to capitalize upon, punk went underground and continued to be nurtured by DIY record labels. As noted in the previous chapter, punk scenes developed across the globe, often grounded by local DIY record labels that had been inspired by the initial outpouring of UK punk labels. For example, the Los Angeles punk scene from 1977–79 embraced the DIY ethos, in part, by necessity as established labels ignored the local punk scene (Morris 2000: 20). Chris Ashford, a clerk at a local record store, formed What? Records and released the Germs’ single “Forming” in July 1977. Greg Shaw had started Bomp! Records in 1974, spinning it off the similarly named zine. Another zine writer, Chris Desjardins of Slash, began releasing records. David Brown, Pat “Rand” Garrett, and

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FIGURE 5.2 Yes L.A. compilation, 1979 (courtesy of Dangerhouse Records; by permission of Frontier Records).

Black Randy created Dangerhouse Records in 1977, which released singles by X, the Weirdos, the Dils, the Alley Cats, the Deadbeats, Black Randy, and the influential anthology Yes L.A. As David Brown recalls, “The do-ityourself aspect of the production and packaging spoke for itself. We created ideas for affordable products which set the pace for imitators, like the clear plastic-bag 45 sleeves (because traditional sleeves cost more than the records to be pressed) and the multi-color silkscreened picture disc used for Yes L.A.” (Brown 1991). The Yes L.A. was just one of the numerous influential compilation albums released by early independent punk labels. Many compilation albums were released by punk zines to document a specific local scene. An early example is Maximumrocknroll’s 1982 release Not So Quiet on the Western Front, featuring forty-seven bands from California and Nevada.

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That same year, the independent record store Newbury Comics released This is Boston not L.A. on their Modern Method Records imprint to document the burgeoning hardcore scene in Boston. Compilation collections are also released by record labels as samplers for the various bands on their roster. In this way, the album is aimed more to promote the label rather than document a scene. Notable examples include Alternative Tentacles’ 1981 Let Them Eat Jelly Beans!, Epitaph’s Punk-O-Rama series, and Fat Wreck’s 1994 Fat Music for Fat People. For many listeners, these compilation albums represent important introductions to scenes and bands they might not be familiar with. For example, ROIR ’s influential 1984 compilation World Class Punk, with twenty-seven bands from twenty-five countries, was an important reflection of, and introduction to, the increasingly global scope of punk at that time.

FIGURE 5.3 Cover of MRR ’s compilation Not So Quiet on the Western Front, 1982 (courtesy of Maximumrocknroll; used with permission).

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As in the UK , American DIY punk bands also released their own albums. The Plugzs self-released their first album Electrify Me in 1979. Greg Ginn of Black Flag formed SST Records to release his own band’s music, and went on to release some of the more influential hardcore punk bands from Southern California. Likewise, Jello Biafra and East Bay Ray of the Dead Kennedys formed Alternative Tentacles in 1979 to release their band’s “California Über Alles” single, before going on to release a wide range of influential punk bands. That same year, the Bad Brains put out their first single (“Pay To Cum” b/w “Stay Close To Me”) on their own label. The following year, their Washington, DC friends in the Teen Idles posthumously released an EP on their own Dischord Records. For many, Dischord would provide the template for punk DIY record labels, further strengthening the position of small record labels within the US punk scene. By the early 1980s, small DIY punk labels continued to spring up across the US , Europe, and the globe, as documented in George Hurchalla’s excellent Going Underground (2005). In the US , DIY punk labels were instrumental in creating the 1980s indie music scene documented in such places as Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life (2001), Steven Blush’s American Hardcore (2001), and Eric Davidson’s We Never Learn (2010). One of the dominant narratives concerns how this scene exploded with the run-away popularity of Nirvana following the 1991 release of Nevermind, producing something akin to “The Punk Explosion, Part Two.” Underground DIY bands like the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Replacements and, most notably, Green Day, that had been slogging around the tour circuit, playing in small venues, and releasing records on small indie labels suddenly found themselves being courted by major record labels and MTV. Each of those bands listed above chose to sign contracts with major record labels (often before the commercial success of Nevermind). In a case of history repeating itself, the heightened media/major label attention impacted the DIY punk scene from top to bottom. Big Black’s Steve Albini recalls, “I saw a lot of friends and acquaintances turn their bands which were previously something that they did out of passion into a shot at a small business. In the course of doing it, they ended up hating their bands in a way that I used to hate my job, because it became something they had to do: it was an obligation” (Albini 1998: 41). In the wake of Nirvana’s success, there was another frenzied round of major label signings, similar to the pilfering that took place in the 1976–8 UK punk scene. Again, major labels were signing away the best-known bands from the small record labels that had released their previous work. One of the benefits that occurred to these small labels was that, in some cases, the major labels bought off an act’s contract for a substantial fee, providing the small label with a much-needed cash infusion. In other cases, the label was able to make significant profit from holding onto a band’s back catalog. Such was the case of Berkeley’s Lookout Records, after Green Day signed to

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Reprise in 1994 and achieved mega-star status.28 Other labels found themselves catapulted into larger commercial success as their bands rode the wave to greater popularity. Such was the case for LA’s Epitaph Records, which was started by Bad Religion’s guitarist Brett Gurewitz in 1988. In 1994, three of the label’s acts—the Offspring, NOFX and Rancid—all had hit records (ironically, Bad Religion had signed to Atlantic Records the year before), transforming Epitaph into a moderate-sized commercial record label, with several sister labels, including Anti- and Hellcat Records. Indeed, the 1990s “resurgence” of punk in the US transformed a number of small labels into more commercial labels. The impact of the Nevermind-inspired explosion is often bemoaned in American DIY punk circles. Ian MacKaye of Fugazi commented that “a few years ago, when punk rock spread everywhere, it became really hard for me. Suddenly it was like some weird horror movie” (quoted in Azerrad 2001: 497–8). Jon Ginoli of Pansy Division mused, “Alternative music was now so mainstream that it was safe for frat jock types to embrace. Instead of punks being the runts, now jocks were becoming punks, adding a new ignorant macho edge to the scene” (2009: 176). Azerrad complained that, in the post-Nevermind world, “Punk had winnowed its heritage down to a single inbred white gene, working hairsplitting variations on a simple theme” (2001: 498). Yet, this characterization is only true if one looks at the cookie-cutter “punk” acts that continue to be marketed by major record labels (Warped Tour, I’m looking at you). Azerrad laments the death of the DIY punk scene, but only because he stops looking for it after 1991—and because he was only looking at North America. Just as DIY punk in the UK went underground post-1978, DIY punk in the US continues to thrive under the radar long after the media hype-machine and major record label spending splurges of 1994. In other corners of the world, the Nirvanainspired “Punk Explosion, Part Two” helped spread DIY punk culture. As I noted in earlier chapters, in places such as Indonesia, Russia, and the Philippines, the influx of CD s and tapes by bands like Green Day, Bad Religion, and Nirvana sparked indigenous DIY punk scenes. Ironically, DIY punk labels have sprung up globally partly because global capitalism’s attempts to profit off of passive consumers actually led to the development of a vibrant independent, anti-capitalist DIY punk culture. Today, DIY punk culture thrives on the existence of thousands of DIY record labels across the globe.

Us versus Them: turning consumers into collaborators The difference between DIY labels and the major labels (as well as larger commercial punk labels) has substantial political significance. These small

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labels are putting into practice the DIY, anti-status quo, and disalienation ethos of punk. Within the market-saturated world of global capitalism, DIY punk labels represent a challenge and an alternative. In the most basic terms, they represent an anti-business model in practice. Which is why people involved in DIY punk get so worked up when discussing bands that sign to major labels. In the documentary Between Resistance and Community about the Long Island DIY punk scene, tensions emerge between individuals and groups as one of the most beloved bands in that scene, On the Might of Princes, is courted and eventually signs to Revelation Records, a moderate-sized label based in California (Between Resistance 2009). The case of On the Might of Princes is not entirely unique. A great deal of energy is spent in zines, in letters to MRR , on internet chatboards, and in curbside conversations about whether punk bands that sign to a major record label are “selling out.” I’ve witnessed the same conversation about whether or not Green Day “sold out” while hanging out on the streets of Indonesia, the pubs of Ireland, the basements of the US , and countless other places—and it has never been a conversation that I started. For many, the relationship between DIY punk scenes and the corporate music industry is framed in terms of “us-versusthem,” a slogan Punk Planet magazine used as a tag-line on their t-shirts. As Ruth Schwartz, then the head of Mordam Records, asserted, “What independent music is about, is anger against major labels and the music business [on] all levels. . . . I think my job is to be a part of the support system for artists to freely express themselves and to express an alternative point of view that they are not necessarily going to be able to express through a big major multimedia corporation in this country—either orally or aurally” (quoted in Sinker 2001: 115–16). From this perspective, signing to a major label is not just a rejection of the DIY punk scene, but actively weakens that scene. If a band is enjoying greater popularity, staying on a independent record label will increase the revenue to that label, which will then be able to sign and release more up-and-coming bands. This is the “rising tide lifts all boats” argument. But for others, signing to a major label is less about increasing one’s financial situation than reaching a larger audience. If a small DIY label only presses 500 copies of a band’s 7-inch, their ability to “get their message out” is greatly limited. After all, the first wave of major punk bands such as the Ramones and Clash were on major record labels (Sire and CBS , respectively) and were instrumental in promoting punk on a global scale. Like many of my contemporaries, I found both those bands at the record store in my local mall, but then had to hunt down releases by Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and Naked Raygun. If I had not encountered those major label punk releases, I may not have ever encountered punk in my provincial Southern US town. In the case of the Sex Pistols, signing with major record labels was a strategic move aimed at fleecing those very corporations. As Johnny Rotten wrote in

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his autobiography Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (Lydon 1994), his goal was to destroy the whole music industry from within (which failed, by his own admission). Charges of selling out arose in 1997 when the anarchist punk musical collective Chumbawamba scored a major commercial hit with “Tubthumping” after signing to EMI in Europe and Universal in the US — after being dropped by their indie label. Defending his band’s decision to sign with the majors, Boff argued: “We know what we are doing. It is not as if we are naïve. We understand the relationship between band and label. We are trying to use them to sell whatever message we have and the music we make, and they use that to make a profit. That’s fine and we accept that. If they are good at getting our records widely distributed, we acknowledge their role. If I thought we could do that on our own record label and have complete control, we would, but we can’t” (1998: 43). In part, the defense is about extracting money from corporations that can then be used for various causes. Boff pointed out that “when we are offered $40,000 for thirty seconds of music every day for four weeks [for a Renault car commercial], then what we do is give that money to an anti-fascist organization, social center, or community group” (1998: 43). He suggested that it would be selfdefeating “for us to turn down that type of money when people in Italian anarchist centers and social community centers are so short of money and getting economically hammered by the state” (1998: 43). Conversely, Steve Albini, producer as well as member of punk bands Big Black and Shellac, has argued that “The ugly truth and the thing that everybody seems to be living in denial of is that the great majority of bands that sign to major labels not only sell fewer records than they did in their independent lives, but they make less money. . . . Historically these things have proven themselves true: People who get involved with major labels make less interesting music; they end up suffering personally, and as a band, aesthetically” (1998: 38). This was an argument that Albini developed with great detail in his essay “The Problem with Music,” published in Maximumrocknroll (1993). In my own conversations with Albini, he remains quite adamant and eloquent in his dismissal of signing to major record labels. Discussing famed ex-Black Flag singer Henry Rollins’s decision to sign with a major record label, Albini dismissed Rollins’s claim that he was signing in order to increase his listening audience: “Does Henry really think most of those knuckleheads care what he is saying?” He then offered a gardening metaphor: staying with a small DIY label is like focused gardening, where you get a high yield from a small plot. Signing to a major record label, Albini suggested, was like spraying fertilizer everywhere and hoping something grows somewhere (interview March 1, 2007). Yet the belief that signing to a major label increases a band’s ability to get their message to larger audiences remains popular. The American punk band Anti-Flag signed to RCA (owned by Sony BMG ) in 2005, sparking charges

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of “selling out.” Defending the decision to me, drummer and founder Pat Thetic argued: “You have to use that system [global capitalist economy]. Obviously it’s cliché but you have to at least be able to have a voice to say this is fucked up, rather than to have no voice and scream in the wilderness and nobody hears you” (interview May 12, 2005). Before signing with RCA , the band was on the commercial punk label Fat Wreck where their previous release, The Terror State, sold over 100,000 records. It is perhaps worth noting that Anti-Flag went back to smaller labels when their contract with RCA was not renewed, as sales were lower than the label expected. The band’s first album on RCA sold around 97,000 copies, illustrating Albini’s argument quite clearly. There is certainly some irony that many of the most well-known punk bands that helped spur the global movement, such as the Sex Pistols, Clash, and Ramones, were signed to major record labels. As Ian MacKaye reminisced, “People would say ‘that’s weird that you like this band, they’re on a major label,’ but it didn’t matter to us. What I gleaned from them was self-definition; that you could do whatever you want to do. And so we did” (interview May 20, 2015). While these bands might not have practiced DIY themselves, they inspired numerous kids to do so. Significantly, a few of the early punk bands that signed to major labels would eventually seek out smaller indie labels in the future. For example, after Johnny Rotten left the Sex Pistols in 1978 and formed Public Image Ltd (PiL), reclaiming his birth name John Lydon in the process, he made sure the new band managed itself and produced its own records. After struggling with Malcolm McLaren and major record labels, Lydon was able to take control of his own culture production, rejecting the punk musical style of the Pistols while embracing punk’s DIY ethos. Today, the band manages and produces itself, and maintains control over their “product.” Likewise, Joe Strummer, formerly of the Clash, snubbed major record labels to release his later work with the Mescaleros on Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat Records, a vanity label under the Epitaph Records umbrella. Reflecting on his evolution, Strummer commented, “when I was his age, I didn’t know fuck-all. I didn’t know nothing, especially how to put a label together and sign guys . . . Thank God Tim Armstrong is a sorted out young geezer . . . Imagine a jacket with ‘Hellcat Recording Artists—piss off’ on the back of it. It’s so great to say that rather than [mumbles] ‘Uh, I’m on Sony.’ It doesn’t compare” (Gross 2003). His former Clash bandmate Mick Jones would later self-release singles via the internet. I understand the arguments that signing to a major label improves a band’s ability to “get their message out” to more people, yet history has shown that such bands inevitably become disillusioned by the promise of amplifying their political effectiveness via a major record label. As Lawrence Grossberg has wryly noted, the history of rock and roll is one of continual cooptation in which “rock and roll constantly protests against its own

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cooptation” (1984: 252). Or, as Todd Taylor, editor of the punk magazine Razorcake, put it: “And every artist from Hole to Rage Against The Machine who said they were going to bring the machine down from the inside? They lied or were delusional. The machine has paid them well and they’ve since shut their fuckin’ mouths about toppling the industry” (2008: 39).29 The reasons why this is the case can be found by revisiting the work of Walter Benjamin, a German social critic associated with the famed Frankfurt School who tragically committed suicide while trying to escape the Nazis in 1940. In his 1934 essay “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin explores how poets (and other artists) can create politically progressive works of art in the existing capitalist system. He begins by questioning the relationship between form and content, and argues that artists need to insert themselves “into the living social context” (Benjamin 1999 [1934]: 765). For Benjamin, it is less important what the artist actually says than the “technique” of the work. The realization that content is less important than “technique” draws our attention back to why punk bands signing to major labels are deluding themselves about their ability to “use the system.” Ultimately, it is the “system” that uses them. As Benjamin noted almost eighty years ago, the mainstream will “assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes, indeed, can propagate them without calling its own existence . . . seriously into question” (1999 [1934]: 774). Take, for instance, Nike’s use of the Beatles’ song “Revolution” to sell sneakers. Thus, commentators who focus only on the actual content of an artistic message are fundamentally missing the point. The primary result of a band singing about how crappy multinational corporations are, while signed to a major label, is the further enrichment of that multinational corporation. If raging against the machine from the inside is a fruitless endeavor, then how might progressive cultural production be realized? Again, Benjamin is instructive here, as he points to the importance of “technique,” understood as the artist’s “position in the process of production.” Benjamin makes a distinction between an “informing writer” (one who merely proselytizes) and the more effective “operating writer,” who employs an interventionist cultural mode. It is a case of what some might call “the propaganda of the deed,” or putting your principles into action. It is worth quoting Benjamin fully on this point: “What matters, therefore, is the exemplary character of production, which is able, first, to induce other producers to produce, and, second, to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better, the more consumers it is able to turn into producers—that is, readers or spectators into collaborators” (1999 [1934]: 777). This observation gets to the crux of why DIY labels are politically important. A progressive cultural politics is not achieved through content but via position. Being DIY and independent is far more effective than talking about DIY and independence. As Ruth Schwartz, founder of Mordam Records, observed: “I still believe that independence in the manner in which you

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work is more important than what you say. This creates a means for the disenfranchised to communicate with each other and is still of the upmost value” (1990: 23). At its core, DIY punk is a form of cultural production that can turn passive consumers into active producers in their own right.

“It was easy, it was cheap—go and do it!”: DIY punk in practice The record industry is constantly in flux, with the business terrain shifting and technological advances altering established practices. In the late 1970s, there were six major labels dominating the Euro-American market and two major formats: vinyl was preferred, but the cassette market was also healthy. As of 2015, three major labels have consolidated their hold on the EuroAmerican market even as CD sales are rapidly being replaced by digital downloads. It is worth noting that when I began writing this book, there were four major record labels, but EMI was bought by Universal Music Group in 2012. In a few more years it is likely that the terrain will change further: some of the labels cited below will probably be out of business, with new ones taking their place, and music will likely be bought, and listened to, in different formats and on new devices. Major record labels have entire divisions called A&R (Artists and Repertoire) dedicated to scouting out new “talent” to sign to the label. These divisions are tasked with recruiting and overseeing the “artistic development” of newly signed artists. Artistic development is generally understood here as “commercial marketability and success.” Most of the contact an artist will have with the major label is conducted through the A&R department. The A&R representatives tend to be young, with connections to particular music scenes, either as musicians, journalists, or record producers. They tend to scout out talent through word of mouth. It is very rare that a band is discovered by sending its demo to a record label. Once a label’s A&R representative has identified an artist they wish to sign, they offer the artist an exclusive recording contract, though the details of the contract are usually hammered out by lawyers for both sides (Albini 1993: 11–13; Weissman 2003: 22–6). Depending on the terms of the contract, the artists are contractually obligated to provide the record label a set amount of material for release: perhaps just one album, but usually several albums over an established amount of time. To assist in the recording of that material, the major label will usually provide the artists with a monetary advance. That advance is usually used for hiring a producer (often determined by the record label), booking studio time, and maybe purchasing new equipment. The Ramones were notorious for trying to keep their recording costs to a minimum in order to pocket the remainder of their advances (see M. Ramone 2015; J. Ramone 2012).

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Once the artists finish their recordings, they will submit it to the record label for approval. Often the A&R department will be involved in the recording process itself, encouraging changes and making suggestions, usually with the goal of producing at least one commercially viable single. Once the record is finished and accepted by the record label, the art, promotion, and marketing divisions become active in trying to generate consumer interest in the record. The artists are usually expected to go on tour to help promote the record, and the record label may provide some financial assistance and support for the band’s tour, which are effectively loans since the label usually expects those advances to be repaid. As the record begins to sell, the record label maintains all control of that revenue until its costs have been recouped. The costs generally include the artists’ advance, as well as the production, processing, and promotion costs. The artists do not see any profit until after those costs have been recouped by the label. And as Steve Albini (1993) observed, bands rarely see any profit and many often find themselves in debt to the major label. As the following discussion illustrates, contemporary DIY punk labels tend to operate in substantially different ways than the corporate music industry. Of course, there is a fair degree of variation among labels. There is no single way of doing things for a DIY punk label—this variability is part of what distinguishes it as a mode of production from corporate mass production. Yet, there are important distinctions between DIY and major corporate labels in terms of practices, and my primary goal here is to draw attention to these differences.

Supporting friends and scenes First, there is usually a personal connection between the DIY label and the bands they release. Often the DIY label was started by a musician in order to release their band’s own music. Mike Park of Asian Man Records spoke for a number of label owners when he said, “I was in a band [Skankin’ Pickle] and we just put out our own records. I wasn’t looking to start a label, it just kind of happened” (interview July 24, 2010). Yumikes, who runs the Japanese label MCR , recalled, “I played in punk band called Fuck Geez and I wanted to release our record, but we cannot find any label who can release our band record, so I decided to do it on my own label” (interview September 19, 2010). Likewise, Andy Instigate of the Swedish label Instigate Records claimed he “couldn’t think of anyone willing to release my crappy bands (and I still don’t) so the only option was to do it myself” (interview July 25, 2010). Esa, of Doombringer Records in Jakarta, noted that “My bandmates Chris and Nate [of Zudas Krust] were trying to find a label to release their songs . . . and we really find it hard to find one. I learned one or two things from the old labels so I tried to create a new one. Basically, Doombringer

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exists just to release my own band and then I try to release my friend’s band” (interview May 26–27, 2013). The result is retaining personal control over one’s own creative production. Other people start DIY labels because they want to be more active participants in their scene, releasing music made by their friends. Alex DiMatessa of Grave Mistake said his “main motivation was to put out records for bands from my area (at the time MD /DC ) that I was either friends with or just thought were good bands that should have something on record” (interview August 14, 2010). In fact, many labels create an identity for themselves based on the specific scene they reflect. A label like Dischord, for example, states that its goal is to help document the Washington, DC scene, so almost all of its releases are from DC -based bands. Likewise, Knwyr-own Records only releases music by artists based in and around Anacortes, WA . Such locally focused DIY labels are extremely important in the creation and nurturing of punk scenes around the globe. In general, there is a personal connection between the DIY label and the artists released on that label. The majority of record labels I’ve spoken with deal almost exclusively with bands they know personally. Sam Richardson of Feel It Records said that is a criterion many record labels also want. “I only release records by bands that I personally know at least one member of” Richardson said (interview July 31, 2010). The logic behind this position is further clarified by Justin Pearson of Three.One.G. Records: “Obviously we have to like the band or artist first off. But we also factor in things like our personal relationship with the musicians. That is important for a few reasons. One, typically we lose money on releases, so if we are going to put time, energy, and money into something, we want to know exactly who we are putting effort into” (interview August 8, 2010). Larger commercial punk labels might have personal connections with the bands they release, but often they work with bands that have got increased attention while being on smaller DIY labels. Thus, for some bands, moving to a commercial punk label is seen as a sign of moving up without “selling out” to a major label. Given that most of today’s bands have the ability to self-release their material via the internet, it seems that the primary purpose of a record label is to cover the production, advertising, and distribution costs that might be beyond the band’s financial means. Labels can also assist with booking and providing tour support. Another vital role provided by the record label relates to community building. The respected DIY punk labels tend to be those that, regardless of size, treat their bands and other labels well by fostering a sense of community. Renae Bryant of On The Rag Records also plays with the band All Or Nothing HC and she pointed out, from a band’s perspective, “the only reason to be on a record label is to be a part of a community of other bands you admire and agree with their ideas. Being on a record label, in the punk world, is like being a part of another

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family. We co-released one of the All Or Nothing HC releases through Rodent Popsicle. It was all a handshake deal. We love Toxic Narcotic and were stoked to be a part of the family of bands Bill puts out. Being a part of this family helped us as we booked our own local shows and US tours. More importantly, we made many friends through the label and shows” (interview October 31, 2010). Of course, sometimes those communities can fray and fall apart. Prominent labels such as Lookout, SST, and Alternative Tentacles have each experienced troubled relations with bands, often over late payments and unpaid royalties, which have occasionally resulted in legal actions (Prested 2014). Some labels are only interested in releasing certain musical subgenres of punk, such as ska, grindcore, or pop punk. Other labels deal exclusively with bands that share the same political commitment. For example, in 1992 Matt Wobensmith formed Outpunk Records as an offshoot of his similarly named zine in order to focus exclusively on releases by openly queer punks. Two early releases were the influential compilations There’s a Faggot in the Pit and There’s a Dyke in the Pit. Likewise, J-Lemonade, who runs the Polish label Emancypunx, said that in order for her to work with a band “it has to have women or queers involved. It has to be a non-commercial, DIY, feminist band. Preferably raw, angry hardcore/punk” (interview September 18, 2010). Robert Voogt of Commitment Records said, “Commitment Records was started to promote the positive straight edge, so I want all bands that I release on the label to stand behind that idea too. I have to like the music. The bands must have a good message to share and they have to be a straight edge band. I also try to check out what kind of people are in the band. I don’t want to release records by bands made up of right-wing people or of intolerant and violent people” (interview August 21, 2010). Other labels are more pluralistic about who they are willing to work with. The New Orleans-based label Community Records, for example, is seriously dedicated to both the New Orleans scene and skapunk, but has signed bands from outside the region and the genre. But more often than not, there are often personal connections between labels and their bands. Explaining their vision, co-owner Greg Rodrigue, stated, “That is our goal, do something by our own means for ourselves and for our friends and try to be as nice about it as we can while we’re doing it” (interview February 21, 2015). Many bands actually use multiple record labels. They may release a 7-inch on one record label, a split EP with another, and their full length LP on yet another. Their reason for doing so generally relates to their desire to help out friends at different labels, as well as sharing the cost of releases. Bands with significant international audiences will often use different DIY labels in different countries to release their music in order to broaden the distribution networks. Often, a record will be released by two or three different labels working together. These collaborative efforts lower the cost

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FIGURE 5.4 Cover of There’s a Dyke in the Pit compilation by Outpunk Records, 1992 (used with permission; original photo by Chloe Sherman).

for each label, and also extend the release’s distribution range to the benefit of all involved.

Contractual obligations Another critical distinction in practices between DIY and major labels is the use (or non-use) of contracts. As noted earlier, one of the primary characteristics of the relationship between artists and the major label is the contract. The details of each contract tend to be different, reflecting the result of the negotiations that took place between the competing lawyers. But in general, the contract stipulates that the artist is in an exclusive relationship with the major record label for a given amount of time or

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number of releases. Larger commercial punk labels often use contracts, but in most cases it is more to spell out expectations and rights than for constructing a long-term obligatory relationship with the artists. For example, Fat Wreck Chords (founded by NOFX front-man Fat Mike Burkett and his then-wife Erin) uses contracts with artists, but they are on a release-by-release basis. Bands are free to leave the label whenever they choose. In most of my interviews with DIY punk labels, nothing seemed to inspire as strong a response than the issue of using contracts. The overwhelming majority of DIY punk labels eschew the use of contracts. Mike Park of Asian Man stated that, “A contract only creates problems. If you’re not happy with me, I’d rather you be able to just pull your stuff from my label without any contractual obligation” (interview July 24, 2010). Chris Mason (of Low Culture) at Dirt Cult Records said, “I don’t use contracts. It’s generally a verbal agreement and a handshake. I don’t generally generate enough money to worry about such things” (interview July 21, 2010). When asked about contracts, Dan Emery of Anti-Corp (and formerly of the hardcore band Sanctions) responded, “Absolutely not. Never will. If somebody wants to take their release elsewhere when the pressing runs out, or release something on another label, it is fully endorsed” (interview July 22, 2010). Todd Congelliere of Recess Records (as well as the bands F.Y.P and Toys That Kill) said, “If something happens where a band doesn’t feel right about keeping a record with me, then I don’t wanna do it” (interview October 14, 2010). Derek Hogue of G7 Welcoming Committee Records (co-owned by the band Propagandhi) pointed out, “Generally, it seems unnecessary to us. Even if a band screws us over, how are we ever going to enforce a contract? We wouldn’t even know how” (interview October 14, 2010). Some people believe there is no place for contracts in punk, including J-Lemonade of Emancypunx. “Cooperation in the DIY network should be based on trust,” she said. “It’s not a business” (interview September 18, 2010). Ryan Cappelletti of Punks Before Profits added, “I just think a handshake and a smile is fine. I don’t care about being ripped off. I just hope they don’t do it. I mean, punk to me has always been the anti-business movement. Money and contracts destroy everything” (interview July 23, 2010). In that same vein, Will Rutherford at Penguin Suit Records (and the band Acts of Sedition) said, “if I can’t have a handshake deal and make it stick, they’re not actually my friend and I’d rather not release it” (interview July 21, 2010). A few labels, however, do use contracts of a kind. Justin Pearson of Three. One.G. Records states: “Yes. So everyone is on the same page when we jump into working together. Also to make sure the artists know we typically pay a higher royalty rate than the industry standard. And lastly, if a band gets offers from larger labels, they can’t just take their album from us . . . that

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seems to happen to smaller labels” (interview August 8, 2010). Basement Records also uses contracts, as Chuck Dietrich explained, “I didn’t when I first started. There was still a sense of trust and companionship amongst bands, but nowadays people sue for cutting in line at McDonald’s. So I do it, but I’m proud to say I have never had to use or execute a single contract for anything, which probably amounts to over 1,000 contracts I’ve done” (interview July 27, 2010). Despite many labels’ aversion to signed contracts, it is clear that many of them do take the time to spell out specific expectations that the band and the label agree to. Bird at Warbird Entertainment stated, “We don’t call them contracts. Agreements? Yes, we use them. Why? So the label and the band are all on the same page and knows what each party is getting out of the deal” (interview July 24, 2010). When Pansy Division signed to Lookout Records, they insisted on a contract spelling out who was entitled to what and when, even though it ended up being only a page long and full of typos. As Jon Ginoli writes, “Some punk commentators thought that any written contract was a betrayal of punk ethics, but I knew that punks could be jerks like anyone else, and I wanted protection” (2009: 51). Given the financial disputes between Lookout and a number of its bands in later years, this concern was prescient. Todd Taylor, of Razorcake Records (and editor of Razorcake), offered the following observation: “I understand many punks’ aversion to business. I wholeheartedly recommend you never sign a contract that’s drafted by a large corporation because they have lawyers to void that shit and put you over a barrel. But, if you all want to be on the same page with people on your level—let’s be honest, many of us drink, forget, have other things on our minds—two or three pages of simple language can ease a lot of future anxiety” (interview August 3, 2010). This is a similar position held by Jerry Dirr at Phratry Records (and of the bands Knife the Sympathy and Autumn Rising): “I started typing out the agreements that we’d previously discussed in person, or over the phone, and I’d give copies to each band member. These written agreements are meant to serve as a reference tool that we can revisit down the line, if need be, after the verbal agreement is put into motion. If anyone ever has a question about splitting royalties, etc. it’s there—on paper. I never ask for anyone’s signature, but it’s a backup in case anyone forgets any of the aspects of our verbal agreement” (interview August 22, 2010). What are the general details of these arrangements? There is slight variation among labels, but there is a general trend. The work of the bands is always privileged and protected, in the sense that they retain control over the masters and rights to the music. Dirtnap Record’s Ken Cheppaikode speaks for most when he said, “the band generally retains ownership of the masters/publishing, etc., and give us an exclusive lease on them for however long we agree on” (interview October 31, 2010). Labels tend to give the bands a percentage of the pressings, usually between 15 percent and

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20 percent, but occasionally as high as 50 percent. The band can do whatever they want with those copies, but they usually sell them while on tour. If the band wants more, the label will provide them at wholesale or cheaper. If there is a second pressing, the band gets another percentage of the copies or the cash equivalent. Almost every label I have spoken with operates along similar lines, suggesting that a norm seems to have been established among DIY punk labels. The general opinion for most of these DIY labels is that the relationship between themselves and the artists is a personal agreement, based on mutual respect and a code of conduct (“Don’t fuck me, I won’t fuck you” is a common refrain). This is a significantly different approach than the major labels, primarily because it doesn’t accept the terms of the relationship that define that way of doing business. In the corporate model, the “talent” are regarded as something akin to employees (or lower) that work for the label in order to generate profit for the label. The “talent” is expendable. More often than not, the music is less significant than the marketing and promotional machinery that helps construct market desire for the “product” (Albini 1993: 11–13). The DIY labels I surveyed characterize the relationship between label and artist as more collaborative and mutually beneficial. Because they tend to be personal friends, artists are treated with greater respect and autonomy. This doesn’t mean that frictions and outright hostilities don’t emerge. Anti-Flag started their own label, A-F Records, after frustrations over the release of their debut album with New Red Archives. As drummer and founder Pat Thetic notes, “We released a record with a record company that fucked us over, and we were like ‘Screw this, we can do it ourselves’ ” (interview May 12, 2005). Most people in the scene have stories about a band or label screwing the other over. In fact, this communal knowledge about the ethos of certain bands and labels is an important feature of maintaining a general honesty in the community. If a label gets a reputation for mistreating artists, other bands are less likely to work with that label. Given the enormous number of DIY labels, as opposed to the major record label’s oligopoly, a band has many options. Likewise, DIY labels tend to be averse to working with bands that have a troubling reputation. In this way, the DIY music scene is self-policing similar to the way the buyers and sellers on eBay self-police that community with public feedback and ratings. By not using contracts—or just not making them the center of the label– band relationship—DIY punk labels are accomplishing a number of significant things. First, they are rejecting the inherent foundation of labor relations at the core of the capitalist system. Capitalism, as we have come to know it, rests on a constructed hierarchy between labor, management, and owners. That hierarchy is often formalized through legalistic means such as contracts. This is particularly important within culture industries because

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they often don’t replicate the easy-to-recognize hierarchical structures of the office workplace. The disavowal of contracts (or minimizing their importance) by DIY punk record labels often stems from a rejection of corporate culture, but it also reflects an inherent unease with the hierarchical practices at play there. Second, eschewing the primacy of contracts is part of a large move to de-commodify music and culture. Not only do DIY punk labels tend to not treat the music as a commodity by which to maximize their profit, but they also actively work to empower the artist, ensuring they have a level of creative control that is unheard of in the corporate music industry. A major record label operating the way most DIY labels operate would be downright revolutionary. And that is telling.

Formats and distribution In recent years, there has been a marked change in recording technologies. Previously, booking studio time could be exorbitantly expensive. In the early 1990s, my band booked off-peak blocks of studio time because it was cheaper. We would go into the recording studio late at night and in the early hours of the morning. We had to hire sound engineers, as we had no idea how to run most of the recording equipment. Today, however, recording has become more affordable and accessible for most artists in the Western world. It can still be exorbitant in other areas of the globe. But the rise of computer software, like ProTools and GarageBand, has made recording accessible and affordable. This has made DIY recording even more common than in the Buzzcocks’ day. For many DIY punk artists, it is just as easy to self-release their own recordings as it is to deal with a label. Instead of shopping around for a label, why not just release the album themselves? Many then create a name and launch a DIY punk label. But many bands prefer to work with established record labels for several reasons. They simply may not have the time to run a label, which requires a fair amount of time and energy to deal with orders, package shipments, keep track of the accounts, answer email questions, and other day-to-day activities. Also, bands might not have the money to press thousands of CD s or vinyl copies, or the skills and resources to deal with the difficulty of distribution. For example, in explaining Lemuria’s move from Asian Man Records to Bridge Nine, Sheena Ozzella stated, “Mike Park [of Asian Man] is awesome. He does such a great thing and he’s such an honest guy . . . [But] after Get Better we were looking for something that could help us do that better, meaning distribute the record, in a larger sense” (interview October 12, 2012). But before I turn to a discussion of distribution, it is worth paying some attention to the question of formats, in large part because it raises issues about global inequality discussed in the previous chapter.

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Setting aside digital downloads for the moment, the three main formats for releasing music are vinyl, CD, or cassette. When CD s were introduced, they supposedly signaled the demise of vinyl. Yet, in North America and Europe, the overwhelming majority of DIY punk labels continue to release on vinyl. The problem with releasing on vinyl is that it can be expensive, especially for labels outside of the US . In much of the developing world, such as in Latin America and much of Asia, vinyl is simply beyond the reach of both the label and the listeners. As Shaun of Australia’s Tenzenmen Records pointed out: “Vinyl is still a little too expensive for us here in Australia, despite us having two pressing plants in the country” (interview July 24, 2010). Yumikes of Japan’s MCR sees a tension between the US and European punk markets and the rest of the world: “I usually use CD

FIGURE 5.5 Various Doombringer Records releases on cassette (courtesy of Doombringer; used with permission).

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for release, but vinyl will be more important for a punk label. But, it’s a bit hard to sell in Japan. But Europe and North American punks are not interested about CD format so much. It’s a problem; to be or not to be” (interview September 19, 2010). For punk audiences in the developing world, the cassette has always been a cheap and accessible medium, plus few people own a turntable. During my time in Indonesia, I exclusively encountered cassettes and CD s. Esa of Doombringer Records in Jakarta observed that tapes were much cheaper than CD s so he tended to release on cassette, with his CD s being co-released with other labels in order to help share the cost (interview May 26–27, 2013). The option of releasing on vinyl was simply not feasible. Thus, global inequalities are directly manifested in punk through the formats being promoted and privileged. With the advent of the MP 3 format, digital downloading has grown into one of the major ways in which people acquire music. In 2013, in terms of format distribution, CD s remained 57.2 percent of the albums sold in the US , with digital albums at 40.6 percent, vinyl at 2 percent, and cassettes and DVD s 0.2 percent. Yet, 2013 marked the first time since iTunes began selling digital downloads that the US music industry finished the year with a decrease in digital music sales. Industry executives blamed the rise of adsupported and paid subscription services, such as Pandora and Spotify, for undercutting digital sales. That year, album sales declined by 8.4 percent to 289.4 million units from nearly 316 million units in 2012. The CD declined 14.5 percent to 165.4 million units, down from 193.4 million in the prior year. In contrast, vinyl sales continued an upward swing, rising to 6 million units from 4.55 million in 2012 (Billboard 2014). Globally, almost half of the recorded music industry’s revenues (46 percent in 2014) came from digital downloads (the same as generated by physical format sales). That was a significant increase from 12 percent in 2008 and 27 percent in 2009 (IFPI 2015: 6). But those figures do not account for illegal or free music downloads. It is estimated that the majority of music downloads are done illegally or for free. For example, it is estimated that 70 percent of all music consumed in the US , UK , France, and Germany in 2009 came from digital downloads, but sales from those transactions only account for 35 percent of the industry’s revenues (IFPI 2010: 5). This has had a damaging effect on the corporate music industry, with the global music market decreasing by 30 percent from 2004 to 2009, at the same time that digital sales increased by 940 percent (IFPI 2010: 7). Streaming has also dramatically impacted the global music market, with music subscription services accounting for a quarter of the digital revenues globally (IFPI 2015: 6). While these shifts have caused grave concern for the corporate music industry, most DIY punk labels are generally unfazed by the trend, seeing the rise of digital downloads as yet another way to release music. Reflecting upon the decision to distribute releases on multiple formats, Dan Emery of Anti-Corp Records states, “If lazer discs were a viable format to release

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albums, we would release those too. I think it’s kind of elitist to overlook certain formats because they aren’t ‘cool enough.’ I want everybody to be able to embrace our bands. Punks, metal heads, comic book nerds, old ladies at bingo halls. Everybody” (interview July 22, 2010). It is this issue of distribution that is perhaps the primary reason why many bands today choose to work with an established record label instead of releasing an album themselves or starting their own label. Corporate record labels have vast distribution networks, ensuring that their releases get into record stores around the globe, particularly in the big box stores that currently make up one of the primary purchasing points for music. The ability to access these markets is a major distinction between commercial punk labels and DIY punk labels. Distribution companies basically serve as the conduit between individual record labels and retailers. Record labels will send the distro companies copies of their releases, usually to be housed in a central warehouse. The distro companies then work with a wide array of retailers. They could be anyone from the big box stores, like Wal-Mart or Best Buy, records store chains, independent records stores, “one-stops,”30 and even individuals selling records out of her apartment or at shows. The distro company takes orders from the buyer, ships out merchandise, and collects the cost. It then turns around and sends the labels their money, minus a distribution fee (usually around 15–20 percent) that is taken off the top. As noted earlier, commercial punk labels usually work through major record distributors, including “independent” distribution companies that are actually owned by major record labels, such as Fontana (Universal Music Group), ADA (Warner Music Group), RED (Sony BMG ), and Caroline (Universal via its Capitol subsidiary). This creates a rather interesting gray area in conversations about punk record labels. A commercial punk label like Epitaph may pride itself on being independently owned and operated, yet they have a distribution deal with Alternative Distribution Alliance (ADA ), which is owned primarily by the Warner Music Group (Warner currently owns 95 percent of ADA , with Sub Pop owning the remaining 5 percent). This illustrates the point that, at almost every juncture, there are interactions with consumer corporate culture that must be navigated. Often the connections are complicated and hard to see at first. For example, Dischord Records and Crass Records currently use Chicago Independent as their primary distributor. Chicago Independent in turn distributes through Fontana, which is owned by Universal. Most of these record labels maintain that the corporate-owned distribution companies have no say in the day-to-day activities of the label; the relationship is just a fact of business and has no impact on who or what bands they release. While reflecting on the complicated nature of ownership in the distribution field, Derek Hogue of G7 Welcoming Committee Records said, “We’ve

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always been hyper-aware of this, and struggled for many years with trying to find distributors who could do a good job without involving the major label-owned distributors. By now, almost every smaller distro is either owned by a major, or turns around and sells to one that is. It’s pretty much impossible to avoid” (interview October 14, 2010). Yet, many small-scale DIY punk labels have successfully avoided it, sometimes by intentionally keeping themselves small. DIY punk labels generally do not operate on the same scale as commercial punk labels and, therefore, do not have direct access to these large distribution companies. Instead, they have several options available to them. At one level, there are several “true” independent distribution companies to use. These include Ebullition, Redeye, Independent Label Collective, Revelation (aka RevHQ ), No Idea, and, until its spectacular 2009 collapse, Lumberjack Mordam.31 Lumberjack Mordam’s messy collapse altered the independent field in numerous ways. In some cases, many labels got burned and suffered financial losses they have not been able to recover from. “A lot of labels got hurt with all these big distro companies going out of business,” said Chuck Dietrich of Basement Records. “Everyone was owed money, but you’ve got to move forward and keep on picking up the pieces and putting them down somewhere else” (interview July 27, 2010). At the same time, several distribution companies stepped in to fill the vacuum left by Lumberjack Mordam, usually with strengthened anti-corporate, independent commitment. One example was the Richmond, VA -based Independent Label Collective (ILC ) which was formed in 2009 by two former employees of Lumberjack Mordam, Jason White and Dan Phillips, but went out of business a few years later. While making money is clearly important to these companies, most independent DIY distro companies seem to operate less as profit-maximizing entities and more as scene-builders. There are, of course, exceptions. Redeye prides itself with operating much like the larger, corporate-owned distribution companies. As co-owner Glenn Dicker stated, “We try to have the same business practices [as the majors] for the most part, but we are just a whole lot smaller” (interview July 29, 2010). In contrast, there was a marked non-corporate ethos for ILC . Before closing up shop, Phillips stated: Profit-maximization is not the driving motivation. Of course we’ve gotta meet the overhead and meet the operating costs. But we can do that while still being honest and true to the labels and customers. We want to keep making money but the bottom line is supporting the independent music scene . . . We’re trying to help the scene and people in the scene stay in business. Doing that means getting their stuff out there. Our goal is to keep operating and keep everyone around, to help everyone survive in the music business. INTERVIEW July 30, 2010

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Distribution companies do the important legwork of getting a label’s releases out into the world. Sometimes they will just order a handful of copies of a new release. Other times they may order almost half of the pressing if they think it is a likely seller. In most cases, these independent distros are small affairs. California’s Ebullition is basically a one-person operation run by Kent McClard. Florida’s No Idea has a slightly larger staff, but it is still an intimate affair. In both cases, the distribution company developed from a DIY punk label. “I had been doing a zine and a record label and if I wanted to get those things out to the world then I had to do the distribution myself,” McClard said. “After a few years, it was apparent that the distribution was larger than the label” (interview September 29, 2010). A number of DIY labels also distribute through online stores. Amazon. com is the obvious behemoth in the market, but few DIY labels deal with it, usually on principle and because of the hefty fee they extract from each transaction. Instead, many labels use a handful of independent “one-stop” stores like Interpunk and RevHQ. These “one-stops” tend to accept copies of releases on consignment (the number varies on expectations of sales, but they’ll usually take a few of an unknown release) and offer them in their online stores for a fairly minimal mark-up. Some labels prefer not to work on consignment because it is often hard to ensure that you’ll get paid what you are owed. But a number of labels expressed positive experiences working with these independent online distros, which have largely replaced the preinternet mail order system. Most DIY punk labels are small affairs and their distribution tends to be very direct. Selling through mail order and online, many label owners personally package the releases and take them to the post office at least once a week. They sell their releases at shows, and perhaps at a few local indie record stores. Seeing folks selling records and CD s out of boxes is a common sight at many punk shows. Ryan Cappelletti of the label Punks Before Profits observes: “I just trade records with people and then I just bring some boxes to shows. That’s my favorite part about punk: some kid with some boxes of records at a show. I got most of my records that way” (interview July 23, 2010). One of the most important ways that DIY punk labels distribute their releases is by trading with other small DIY labels. Swapping releases is a time-honored tradition in the DIY community and it allows labels to increase their own offerings and to get their releases out to more people. Dan Emery of Anti-Corp said, “We get everything in the distro off of trades with other labels, mainly because it makes distribution work for both parties, but the financial aspect of being able to barter is also pretty cool” (interview July 22, 2010). Trading between labels is especially common for labels in different countries. Michal Halabura of the Polish Nickt Nie Nie Wie label said, “We see a DIY network as our natural ecosystem, so we try to use these channels mainly. Mail order, auctions, trades—that’s the reality

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FIGURE 5.6 Chris Mason of Dirt Cult Records packaging releases by hand, 2015 (photo by Liz Mason; used with permission).

of labels like ours” (interview January 4, 2010). Jordan Atkins of Residue Records noted the importance of trading with overseas labels when he observed, “It can take awhile to see the results of trades, but it is the best way to get records overseas and to places that are hard to get people to pay a more expensive wholesale” (interview July 29, 2010). This examination of DIY punk labels illustrates the use of alternative ways of distributing products, both through independent networks and simple bartering. These represent alternative practices of operating outside— and against—the dominant corporate music industry. In many ways, they are not just alternative ways of doing business compared to the established corporate model, but direct challenges to the dominant capitalist practice of maximizing profits above all else.

Intentionally bad capitalists The people who run DIY punk labels are people from all walks of life. Alan O’Connor has offered the best sociological investigation into the background of label owners. He finds that they come from a wide spectrum of class backgrounds, and my own research finds similar results. There is no given age frame for DIY punk label owners. The people I’ve interviewed have been in their teens, twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. They include young kids in high school, drop-outs, recent college graduates, folks working

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regular jobs, and a few who have made their label successful enough to avoid having to work for someone else. They come from a wide range of educational backgrounds. Some are high school drop-outs, some graduated from college, and a few have post-graduate degrees. They also represent a range of socio-economic classes, with most coming from working or middle class backgrounds. In North America, most of the people running DIY punk labels are white, but not exclusively. The most common characteristic is that most are male. Still, there are a number of significant female record label owners, such as Lisa Fancher at Frontier, Renae Bryant at On the Rag, Ruth Schwartz, formerly of Mordam before the Lumberjack buy-out, Heather at RealPunkRadio the Label, and Jennifer, the co-owner of No Idea. But these are definitely a minority. In the case of Lisa Fancher at Frontier, she was involved in the LA punk scene from the beginning. She was originally a writer and worker at Bomp! Records, but started Frontier in 1980 to support the burgeoning hardcore scene. She was instrumental in releasing some of the pivotal hardcore albums from that era, including albums by the Circle Jerks, Adolescents, TSOL , and Suicidal Tendencies. Other female-owned labels emerged from the Riot Grrrl movement. For example, Renae Bryant began On The Rag Records (named after her established zine) in 1993 out of her frustration with the lack of inclusion of female punk bands in compilation releases: “Usually, I’d get a compilation to review [for the zine] and I’d be lucky to find one band with a female musician in it. So, I decided it was definitely time for a compilation to come out that would mainly feature women” (1998). For Bryant, the connection with the Riot Grrrl movement was direct: “One of the first shows He’s Dead Jim (the first punk band I sang for) played was with Bikini Kill at Scrips in Claremont. This band, Ms. Magazine, the feminist collective Women Enraged and my Women’s History studies at UCR [University of California, Riverside] each had a part in inspiring me to do On The Rag zine and label. I started the label for the same reason I started the ’zine. I wanted to put the spotlight on women, build some solidarity between female musicians in a world that teaches most women to hate each other, compete against each other, and think of each other as the enemy” (1998). Bryant’s On The Rag released two seminal female punk compilations, Put Some Pussy in Your Punk, vol 1 and 2 (which may be the greatest slogan in the history of punk). In the liner notes of the first volume, she offered a call for DIY engagement, illustrating the fact that what usually drives a DIY record label is the championing of the DIY ethos instead of profit-maximization: Remember, I am no different than you. If you see a need for something, make it happen! ACTION , ACTION , ACTION !!! Start a band, a ’zine, a label, do a benefit show, volunteer, read a fucking book, just do something! If you sit on your ass nothing will happen and when you are

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forty with a big ass or a beer gut, you’ll wish you really would have lived your life. If you start acting, you will see the fruits of your labor come. They may not come right away. It could be like the Chinese Bamboo that is planted as a seed and fertilized. Nothing happens for four years. Each year the farmer waters and fertilizes the seed. Finally, in the fifth year the bamboo shows itself. In that fifth year it grows 90 feet. In other words, you have to ‘do’ in order to see the results. They may not come right away, but they will come. BRYANT 1998 There are substantial challenges to running a DIY label. Perhaps the biggest challenge mentioned by most people was simply having the time to dedicate to the label. Part of the time required to running a label is spent on marketing and self-promotion, things that many in the DIY punk scene find distasteful. One concern I expected to hear more in interviews was the challenge to sustain the label financially, but I was surprised at how rarely that issue came up. Very few labels are actually making a profit (e.g., Asian Man, Basement, Big Action, Collision Course, Dirtnap, and Livid Records) while many are just breaking even (e.g., Eradicator, G7 Welcoming Committee, Razorcake Records, and Warbird Entertainment). Most DIY record labels are labors of love. Bryon Lippincott of Kiss Of Death Records speaks for most folks when he said, “the label is actually like a hobby business. I do it because I love it and love the bands” (interview September 26, 2010). Richard Lynn of Super Secret Records added, “I realized early on this wasn’t going to be a big money maker. I do it because I love the bands and their music, and I want there to be a record of their music for people now and in the future to be able to listen to” (interview July 23, 2010). For many, the goal is just to make the label self-sustaining. As On The Rag’s Renae Bryant observed, “I consider the label a labor of love. It would be great to make a profit, but all I want to do it break even and put out more releases” (interview October 31, 2010). Others take an even more stoic view, like Andy of Sweden’s Instigate Records: “I’ve lost so much money because of this shit label. But I don’t give a shit” (interview July 25, 2010). Many DIY punk labels lose money regularly. There is a simple reason for that: their way of existing is not one defined by profit-maximization. In the simplest terms, they are intentionally bad capitalists. But that is often the point. The DIY record industry can be seen as an alternative model to the world of the corporate music industry. DIY punk labels tend to invest in bands they like, not the ones that they think are going to make them rich. They tend to price their releases so that people can afford them, rather than worrying about increasing the profit margin. As Chris Clavin’s Plan-It-X Records proclaimed: “If it ain’t cheap, it ain’t punk.” At the core of this approach is a dedication to DIY self-sufficiency that stresses a love for what you do, grounded in a sense of support for a community or scene.

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As the interviews presented in this chapter have repeatedly illustrated, DIY punk record labels have created a global horizontal network of “collaborators.” Through their activities, they continue to inspire others to produce while providing a powerful apparatus—the informal yet vibrant global DIY punk network outside the direct control of the corporate music industry—at their disposal. For example, Greg Rodrigue started Community Records after interning with Mike Park at Asian Man: “I went and hung out with him every day for a month and a half and seeing, ‘OK , yeah, this is this record label that we really love and look up to and he’s working really hard, but I could do that too.’ It wasn’t this huge barrier to entry where it was just impossible to figure out. It’s just a very hands-on DIY approach to being a record label. I picked up on cues while I was there that led to wanting to start our own thing” (interview February 21, 2015). Ultimately, DIY record labels function as a “threat by example,” which is also the title of a collection of musings by punk writers, artists, and record owners edited by Martin Sprouse (1990). As Sprouse writes, “I consider these people to be constructive rebels. Their personal ideologies and creativity have inspired them to live their lives against the grain” (1990: 4). The people behind these DIY punk labels are also key components in what Jeremy Wallach labeled “indieglobalization,” the process in which alternative and counter-hegemonic ideas and practices circulate across the globe to challenge and resist the globalization strategies employed by corporations (2014: 156). While today’s capitalist system can easily appropriate and assimilate messages and symbols, it is far more difficult to appropriate the actual practices and ethos that are at the heart of DIY punk culture. Benjamin would recognize that, in the end, the practices of the DIY punk record community are far more rebellious and threatening to the status quo than any major label band singing about the evils of capitalism.

CHAPTER SIX

Satan Wears a Bra While Sniffin’ Glue and Eating Razorcake: Punk Zines and the Politics of DIY Self-publishing Around 1983, I met a girl from Nevada who sent me a couple of issues of Flipside, a punk zine that had started several years before. Reading it was a revelation, not just because it introduced me to a huge world of punk bands I had never heard of before, but because it was my first exposure to the world of DIY self-publishing. I had only seen glossy mainstream magazines like Time and Newsweek, with the occasional music magazine like Rolling Stone. In contrast, Flipside looked like it was put together by music-obsessed amateurs just like me. Which it was. There were no color photos, the cheap black ink stained my fingers, and the advertisements were for bands and small record labels, not corporate alcohol conglomerates. The content was exciting, but so was the format itself. I thought to myself, “I can put something like this together!” Within a few months, I was cut-and-pasting little zines, photocopying them, and leaving them in random places around town. DIY self-publishing was an area of punk culture that I had not realized existed, but that I immediately gravitated towards. Zines preceded punk, but punk clearly re-energized and transformed the zine world. In many ways, self-publishing was a perfect match for punk and its DIY ethos. On one level, punks use the zine as a powerful mechanism for disalienation. Punk zines also offer a powerful critique of the capitalist status quo. But more than just offering a forum for attack, zines provide concrete alternative practices and imaginaries. Finally, the spread of punk zines globally offers another powerful example of how DIY punk spread, not so 159

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much because of its content (though that was important as well) but because of its form. The DIY punk zine is a transformative medium in its own right. Taken together, these elements illustrate to the opportunity for political critique, empowerment, and resistance offered by DIY punk zine culture.

Hidden in plain view: zines and DIY self-publishing A zine often refers to any self-published work reproduced via a photocopier or small printing press, but a number of definitions offer an array of qualifications. Fred Wright has defined them as “self-published periodicals with small press runs, often photocopied, frequently irreverent, and usually appealing to audiences with highly specialized interests” (1997). In her examination of the rise of “lo-fi culture,” Amy Spencer offers a useful definition: “Zines are non-commercial, small-circulation publications which are produced and distributed by their creators” (2005: 17). Stephen Duncombe defines them as “noncommercial, nonprofessional, smallcirculation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute themselves” (2008: 10–11). Like punk, zines are impossible to define definitively. Part of their appeal is that zines can be produced by anyone and everyone. Most zines are one-person operations, but there are plenty of exceptions that break that rule. They come from people in any geographic location: urban, suburban, and rural. Zines can be written in a variety of formats, from computer-printed text to crudely drawn comics and handwritten prose, and can take many different forms, from the single-sheet “8 up” to bound (stapled or otherwise) photocopied paper. The print-run of zines varies greatly. Some definitions suggest that circulation must be 5,000 or less, though this is an arbitrary definition. In reality, most zines are printed in much lower numbers, often in the hundreds. While some formal distribution networks have been created, zines are usually distributed and circulated by hand, often by the writers themselves. While topics, formats, means of production, print-runs, distribution, and circulations vary greatly, what is usually emphasized is the DIY nature of zines, with the understanding that profit is not the primary intent of publication. For zine-makers, there is an explicit desire to avoid established commercial networks and practices. Zines are often traded freely or inexpensively just to cover costs. Profit is usually not a primary concern, and most zines are produced and distributed at a financial loss. Few zine publishers expect to make a monetary profit from their work, and yet they spend an amazing amount of time, energy, and money on their zines. Zines are often treated by their producers more as gifts than products. This point is underscored by the

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FIGURE 6.1 An 8-up zine consisting of instructions on how to make an 8-up (illustration by Doug Reilly; used with permission).

fact that “zine” is not short for “magazine.”32 As Larry-Bob, publisher of the Holy Titclamps zine has stated, “A magazine is a product, a commercial commodity. A zine is a labor of love, producing no profit . . . Information is the reason a zine exists” (quoted in Wright 1997). Likewise, many people argue that a zine is not the same thing as a fanzine, though there is considerable overlap and the boundaries between the two are oft-times quite blurry. Fred Wright, for example, has argued, “Fanzines, not just those devoted to fantasy/science-fiction literature, but in all areas of interest, are still, paradoxically, products created by consumers . . . The telling difference between the two types of publications is that ultimately fanzines rest upon a hierarchy of producer and consumer that zines transcend. The best zine, whatever their subject, do not inhabit a ready-made world; they create one unto themselves” (1997). Many zine producers create their zines as part of a conscious rejection of consumer culture, using DIY to create one’s own cultural experience. It is a constant refrain passed on to readers: make your own zine. Don’t just be a passive consumer, but an active producer. One of the earliest academic examinations of the zine culture was written by American psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, known in the 1950s for his campaign on the supposed relationship between popular youth culture and juvenile delinquency. Writing in his book The World of Fanzines, Wertham enthuses:

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Zines give a voice to the everyday anonymous person. The basic idea is that someone sits down, writes, collects, draws or edits a bunch of stuff they are interested in or care deeply about, photocopies or prints up some copies of it and distributes it. The zine creating process is a direct one, remaining under the writer’s control at all times. Perhaps its outstanding facet is that it exists without any outside interference, without any control from above, without any censorship, without any supervision or manipulation. This is no mere formal matter; it goes to the heart of what fanzines are. 1974: 71 Wertham’s observation underscores the process of self-empowerment at the core of zine-making. As Amy Spencer notes, “That anyone can write about anything when producing a zine is both the blessing and the curse of the zine format. Some zines can be truly awful, scrappy illogical rants stapled together, others are brilliant and unique documents” (2005: 23). But one person’s trash may be another’s treasure. Indeed, the zine format can be used for any imaginable subject, from John Marr’s infamous Murder Can Be Fun, which documents various murders in painstaking historical detail, to Dishwasher Pete’s popular stories about his experiences as a dishwasher across the US , to the autobiographical musings of a mother in New York City, as found in Ayun Halliday’s The East Village Inky. Indeed, the range of topics is unlimited, from politics, art, ephemera, autobiographic confessionals, fan fiction, sexual fantasies, and single topic obsessions. In her essay “Be A Zinester: How and Why to Publish Your Own Periodical,” Anne Elizabeth Moore argues that zines are one of the places that society’s “hidden histories” are exposed and archived: “Zines are personal, small-scale paper ventures and tell the kinds of stories deliberately ignored, glossed over, or entirely forgotten by mainstream media. Zines are created by prisoners, young girls, people with emotional and physical disabilities, queers, geeks, non-native speakers of English, survivors of sexual assault, radical offspring of conservative politicians, homeschoolers, members of the military, Native Americans, sexworkers, and anyone else who has ever felt that the voices speaking for them in the larger culture weren’t conveying their stories” (Moore n.d.). Indeed, zine makers often point to the unlimited horizons of the form as one of its most important characteristics.

A short history of zines It is common for some zine historians to claim that zines first emerged in the twentieth century among fans of science fiction (Spencer 2005: 79; Moore n.d.; Wright 1997). While admittedly an important narrative, the roots of zine-making can be traced much further back. Doing so underscores the historical legacy of self-publishing as an alternative to commercial publishing.

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Yet, it is difficult to know where to start a historical narrative of selfpublishing as a form of alternative or dissident expression: Thomas Paine’s self-published Common Sense pamphlet? Quilt-makers throughout history who encoded their work with messages and social critiques? Neolithic cave wall painters? One can find a long tradition of self-publishing well before the creation of a so-called mass media. Benjamin Franklin began his own literary magazine for psychiatric patients that he distributed to patients and staff, thus embodying the key elements of modern zine-making. Eighteenthcentury political pamphlets exemplified the practice of offering personal interpretations to the news. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is usually the most oft-cited example of the political pamphlet in America, but there are over a hundred surviving examples of this popular and vibrant form of selfpublishing from the pre-Revolution era. With the rise of major commercial publishing ventures in the eighteenth and nineteenth century came the related development of amateur small presses and self-publishing. Using toy presses and scavenged printing equipment, hundreds of amateur publishers emerged in the nineteenth century, with over 500 writers and editors and almost as many publications active by 1875 (Duncombe 2008: 54). As many academics have noted, literary Modernism, which began at the end of the nineteenth century, was deeply shaped by the development of so-called “little magazines”: independently published periodicals featuring short stories, poetry, essays, reviews, and literary criticism, that served as an alternative to larger, more commercially oriented literary magazines (Bulson 2012). In the 1920s, science fiction magazines such as Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories began being distributed in newsstands across the US . The editors of Amazing Stories made an important and innovative decision to reprint letters from readers, listing not only their names but also their addresses. This enabled readers to begin corresponding with each other, leading to correspondence clubs that began sharing opinions and their own stories via the mail. Soon these readers were creating their own handmade and hand-printed zines, filled with their own stories and writings. Some scifi zine writers simply enjoyed sharing their stories and passions, while others, such as Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, aspired to become more professional writers. It is worth noting that, as an underground vehicle, sci-fi zines provided opportunities for females to participate in ways they could not in the traditional, masculine world of professional publishing. Largely marginalized by established commercial presses, women sci-fi writers gravitated to the self-publishing zine community. The self-published zine medium soon moved beyond the domain of science fiction. By the 1940s, American “beat” writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg began self-publishing their work in zines as a way of selfpromotion. Often times this was by necessity since they tended to find established magazines and literary publishers inhospitable. Turning to

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outsider independent presses and embracing self-publishing, beat writers such as Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan were able to enjoy a level of success denied them by the established commercial literary outlets (Clay 1998). The beat writers helped engender a further generation of self-publishing that bridged the earlier “little magazines” and modern zines. A number of small independent presses sprang up in the US (such as New Directions and City Lights), the UK , and Europe. Yet, even before the emergence of the American beat movement, the zine offered the potential for cultural resistance, as underground groups around the globe used it as a primary tool of communication. In the early twentieth century, the Dadaists produced a wide collection of art zines, from Cabaret Voltaire, Dada, 291, 391, and New York Dada, in many ways creating the template for the modern zine with their use of collage, appropriation, and detournement (that is, “hijacking” existing symbols of capitalism and turning them against that system) (Spencer 2005: 101–2). Avant-garde political groups such as the Situationist International embraced the form in their attempt to get their ideas and agenda circulated. The Situationist International adopted the novel approach of distribution by mailing their self-published works to people chosen at random from the phone book. In Russia, political dissidents produced political zines as samizdat, literally “self-publishers.” The material conditions of publishing changed dramatically in the twentieth century, facilitating the rise of self-publishing and zine-making. The established printing method using hot lead and linoleum was bulky, expensive, laborintensive, and relatively technically sophisticated. But the development of offset printing, with cold ink and a rubber “blanket,” provided a relatively cheap and accessible way of printing. In part, this helped spur the explosion of underground presses in the US and Europe around the mid-century. But it was the invention of the photocopying machine by Xerox in the 1960s that revolutionized the form, making self-publishing inexpensive and accessible to most in the industrialized world. With the spread of counterculture ideas and movements in the 1960s, the decade also witnessed the concurrent rise of active underground presses in the US and other Western nations. In the UK , underground publications such as IT (originally International Times) and Oz gained popularity and even police harassment. A diverse range of underground papers emerged across the US , from Los Angeles Free Press to New York’s Rat (McMillian 2011; Neville 1970). Many of these publications were explicitly focused on resistance and rebellion, though a number (such as Boston’s The Phoenix) would later morph into less radical publications commonly referred to as the “alternative press.” In the 1960s, the zine also began to be more closely linked to the emerging explosion of rock music. This was partly related to the fact that many of the people producing sci-fi zines began to get interested in rock’n’roll and thus began producing music-themed zines. For example, two early music zines— Paul Williams’s Crawdaddy and Greg Shaw’s Mojo Navigator Rock’n’Roll

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News (both started in 1966)—were started by writers active in the sci-fi fanzine scene (Spencer 2005: 154). The 1960s were an active time for selfpublishing and underground presses. But by the early 1970s, self-publishing seemed to be ebbing, despite the growing availability of photocopying machines. The early 1970s were generally a stagnant time for zine-making and self-publishing. The political fervor that had fueled the 1960s selfpublishing activism had largely dissipated. The two major sources of fanzine interests, music and science fiction, had become increasingly corporatized, with slick professionalism championed over fan accessibility.

Punk meets DIY self-publishing publishing, a love affair ensues With the emergence of punk as a cultural movement, a zine revolution blossomed as punk’s DIY ethos connected with the DIY tradition of selfpublishing. Punks did not invent the zine, but it was quickly embraced as part of the punk culture. As Amy Spencer observes, punks used “elements of its own aesthetic style to adapt the medium and make the zine its own” (2005: 157). Zines and punk made a perfect match, with punk zines embodying the ideal of do-it-yourself self-expression (see Triggs 2010). Photocopied fanzines, such as Sniffin’ Glue, Search and Destroy, Slash, Damage, NY Rocker, Touch and Go, Flipside, and Profane Existence, became major aspects of punk scenes. Those early punk zines provided readers with invaluable information from emerging punk scenes, but also counteracted the hostile coverage punks were then receiving in the mainstream media. Dick Hebdige has noted that with regards to the early punk zines, “The overwhelming impression was one of urgency and immediacy, of a paper produced in indecent haste, of memos from the front line” (1979: 111). For many readers, this effect of immediacy seemed to provide punk zines with a higher degree of authenticity than glossy mainstream publications. Not surprisingly, there is some disagreement about which zine was the first “punk zine.” In 1976, John Holmstrom, Ged Dunn, and Eddie “Legs” McNeil began producing Punk to chronicle the emerging New York/CBGB ’s punk scene. Punk’s first issue included a feature on the Ramones, Lou Reed, several comic strips, and a fictitious interview with Sluggo from the Nancy comic strip. The zine proved to be immediately successful, selling 3,000 copies locally and over 25,000 worldwide. In numerous conversations with me, Legs McNeil continues to claim that Punk was not only the first punk zine, but also the originator of the label “punk.” But a year earlier, in February 1975 Fred “Phast Phreddie” Patterson published the first issue of the fanzine Back Door Man from his bedroom in Torrance, CA, featuring Iggy Pop on the cover. Back Door Man was arguably the first

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“punk fanzine,” with an emphasis on the growing underground musical scene in Los Angeles. As one of the contributors, Don Waller (aka Doc Savage), recalled later: “We wanted to throw a metaphorical brick through the plate-glass window of a pop-cultural world that didn’t want to know about anything but an increasingly pointless worship of musical technique

FIGURE 6.2 Cover of Punk #3, 1976 (courtesy of John Holmstrom; used with permission).

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or ‘going up the country, gonna get my head together’ platitudes that stifled any other type of expression. And had absolutely nuthin’ to do with the alltoo-real lives that we were living” (Waller n.d.). Fifteen issues were published over the next three-and-a-half years, with a focus on what the writers considered “hard core rock’n’roll” stretching from the blues, metal, and punk, but not limited to one specific musical genre (Spitz and Mullen 2001). In 1976, Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue emerged from the nascent London punk scene (Baker 2000). Copies of Punk were actually in circulation in London, and Perry has acknowledged that he was inspired by that zine and the New York punk scene, particularly the Ramones. Perry named his zine after the Ramones’ song “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” The Soho music shop Rock On had encouraged Perry, a bank clerk, to produce a zine, which he finally did in the summer of 1976 after reading a review of the Ramones’ first album by Nick Kent and deciding he could do it differently: “I decided that they should be written about on that level, a basic street level, not intellectual” (quoted in Parsons 1977: 12). Rock On quickly sold out of the first issue and Perry discovered there was a substantial market for the zine. Speaking about the first issue, Perry was later to state: The whole first issue was what I could do at the time with what I had in my bedroom. I had a children’s typewriter plus a felt-tip pen, so that’s why the first issue is how it is. I just thought it would be a one-off. I knew when I took it to the shop there was a good chance they’d laugh at me, but instead they said, How many you got? I think my girlfriend had done 20 on the photocopier at her work and they bought the lot off me. Then they advanced me some money to get more printed. 2002: 105 Handmade and hand photocopied, the zine initially featured Perry’s take on such bands as the Ramones and Blue Oyster Cult, as well as reviews of record releases and up-and-coming bands. Eventually featuring photographs and interviews, Sniffin’ Glue was intentionally basic in its layout and design. As Perry states, “In a way, we were making a statement—You don’t need to be flash. Anyone can have a go” (2002: 105). This adherence to punk’s DIY ethos helped spur on countless other zines throughout the UK punk scene. Jon Savage, author of England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, began publishing his zine London’s Outrage in November 1976, inspired by Sniffin’ Glue and the punk bands he was seeing: “The aim was for me to put down my thoughts and feelings on experiencing punk rock for the first time that autumn. After seeing The Clash and The Sex Pistols I was so fired up that I felt I could do what I wanted to do, which was to write . . . The whole idea was to do whatever you wanted, to communicate in a totally pure form without any other mediation/editorial intervention” (quoted in Spencer 2005: 162). The

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FIGURE 6.3 Cover of Sniffin’ Glue #6, 1977 (courtesy of Mark Perry; used with permission).

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first issue was done in two days, photocopied, and distributed through Rough Trade. Other notable punk zines in the early UK scene include Ripped & Torn out of Glasgow, London’s Burning, Anarchy in the UK (exclusively about the Sex Pistols), Bondage, Sideburns, Fishnet Stockings, and 48 Thrills. Many of these zines were passed along by hand via the growing social networks of the punk community, both within the UK and beyond. Indeed, there is evidence of early zine exchanges between the UK punk scenes and those across continental Europe. For example, two French zines, I Wanna Be Your Dog and Malheureusement, could easily be found within the early London punk scene (Parsons 1977: 12). Punk zines also spread across the US , concurrent with emerging local scenes. Inspired by Punk, New York Rocker was published from 1976 until 1982, first under Alan Betrock and then Andy Schwartz, and had a circulation of around 20,000. In LA , the zine Slash was a key component of the development of the local punk scene. Started in May 1977 by Steve Samiof and Melanie Nissen, the zine ran until 1980 and spawned the eponymous Slash Records label. In San Francisco, V. Vale published the influential Search and Destroy from 1977 to 1979. As Vale states, “Our approach was really minimalist, we felt that that was the new philosophy. It wasn’t just going to be a documentation, it was going to be a catalyst . . . I soon realized that Punk was total cultural revolt. It was a hardcore confrontation with the black side of history and culture, right-wing imagery, sexual taboos, a delving into it that had never been done before by any generation in such a thorough way” (quoted in Savage 2001: 439). Self-publishing in the US and Europe dramatically increased during the late 1970s and into the 1980s. This was partly due to punk energizing the zine medium, but there were material conditions at play as well. Due to technological improvements and the increased availability of inexpensive photocopying, zines became the primary form of self-publishing, easily eclipsing independent newspapers. Johan Van Leeuwen, editor of the Dutch punk zine Nieuwe Koekrand, recalls: “Originally, doing a fanzine was a way to be part of a scene, and as far as I’m concerned, it also was a necessity to stay active and become an accepted member of the punk community. Over the years, it’s more and more become a way to have ‘my humble opinion’ known to others” (1991: 10). The connection between self-publishing and DIY punks became an immediately strong one, as zines offered an important mechanism for individual self-empowerment and disalienation. Punk zines are not merely catalogs of adulation for the authors’ favorite bands. The zines are active parts of the culture, building networks, spreading news and ideas to others, and providing a forum for the authors’ opinions on social and political issues. Zine writers are instrumental—and equal— members of the punk scenes. In many ways, this reflects the egalitarian nature of punk: tearing down the boundaries between audience and artists. Just as punk bands preach the philosophy that anyone could (and should) pick up an

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instrument and play, so too the punk zinesters preaching the DIY ethos of self-publishing. As John Holmstrom wrote in an editorial in issue #3 of Punk, “The key word—to me anyway—in the punk definition was ‘a beginner, an inexperienced hand.’ Punk rock: any kid can pick up a guitar and become a rock’n’roll star, despite or because of his lack of ability, talent, intelligence, limitations and/or potential” (1976: 2). As Perry proclaimed in the pages of Sniffin’ Glue #5: “All you kids out there who read Sniffin’ Glue, don’t be satisfied with what we write. Go out and start your own fanzines” (1976: 2). And they did. And they still do. Despite the repeated eulogies of the zine—and the printed word in general—supposedly killed off by the internet, blogs, and social media, zines (like punk and vinyl) continue to thrive around the world. I have purposely used the past tense, and will continue to do so when speaking of early punk zines, but it is important to state explicitly that this chapter is not an autopsy on a rotting corpse. The DIY punk zine is alive and well, and continuing to do significant political work around the globe. First, zines make the author visible and amplify her voice. In a world in which forces are at play to alienate and disempower individuals, zines provide an opportunity for disalienation and self-empowerment. Second, zines challenge the accepted order by providing material examples of alternative ways of thinking and being. There has been much ink spilled (and pixels generated) debating the relevance of zines in the internet age. Many zinesters have embraced online blogging as an alternative to the materiality of the printed zine, others use an online presence to complement their paper zines, while others eschew the virtual world altogether. Certainly there has been an explosion of online blogging in recent years, as well as the rise of Twitter, Facebook, and newer forms of communication that supposedly give users a greater voice. Personally, I use all of these forms of communication and resist attempts to frame the debate in either/or terms or within a luddite vs. tech-savvy dichotomy. But for my purposes here, I privilege the printed zine not just because of its materiality and more democratic accessibility (for instance, you can’t leave laptops open to your blog page in laundromats across your hometown like you can zines), but because newer online forms of communication—be they Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and the like—are inherently mediated by consumer capitalism. Zines are not. This illustrates the third way in which punk zines are politically significant: they help construct global horizontal networks of information and cultural transmission outside of corporate-led global capitalism.

Giving voice to the marginalized: the case of Riot Grrrl zines33 Just as punk bands urged their audiences to become performers as well, punk zine writers sought to turn their readers into writers. As I discussed in

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the previous chapter, this echoes the desire of Walter Benjamin for art to be a progressive force by turning passive consumers into active cultural producers. It is worth underscoring yet again the potentially radical impact this can have because it challenges the division between producers and consumers, which is the foundation of consumer culture. Zines provide an alternative to mainstream media, giving voice to those who are often marginalized or disempowered, about topics that are frequently ignored or belittled. The political importance of the zine in the hands of the marginalized can be seen by returning to the example of Riot Grrrl. As I discussed in Chapter Two, Riot Grrrl emerged as a commitment to female empowerment and self-representation. Central to these goals was the creation of alternative media and DIY self-publishing. This turn was driven in part because mainstream media both ignored aspects of social and political life that Riot Grrrls considered extremely important and tended to portray the Riot Grrrls themselves in demeaning and patronizing ways, often misconstruing their message and producing damaging representations steeped in gender stereotypes. In short, Riot Grrrls embraced DIY selfpublishing largely because, as Stephen Duncombe observed about zine makers in general, “Doing-it-yourself was also a reaction against how the mass media was doing you” (2008: 126). One of Riot Grrrl’s main contributions to feminist change was its persistent opposition to the mainstream media and its call for women and girls to publicly express themselves in a wide range of media, including music and zines.34 As many marginalized members of society have repeatedly discovered, wanting more “accurate representation” from the mainstream media is naïve and a particularly ineffective waste of energy. Riot Grrrls realized that the zine format was a powerful tool of empowerment and disalienation. Instead of pleading for the powers-that-be within the mass media to do a better job of representing them and their views, Riot Grrrls (and punks and other zine makers) just did it themselves. Of course, Riot Grrrl zines were frequently full of complaints about the ways mass media misrepresented them (as well as women and other underrepresented groups in general), but at the same time that were creating and circulating their own selfrepresentation. Through these seemingly simple acts, Riot Grrrls were using zines to both resist the authority of others, while simultaneously asserting their own authority and authorship. Interestingly, the Riot Grrrl movement grew as much out of zine culture as it did punk (Marcus 2010). The very name was taken from an established zine and, as mentioned earlier, Bikini Kill was a zine-making collective before it was a band. Writer Jennifer Bleyer observes, “From the late eighties to the mid-nineties, thousands of zines sprouted up like resilient weeds inside the cracks of the mainstream media’s concrete . . . after Xerox machines became widely accessible and before the explosion of the Internet, there was a brief moment during which people realized that they could

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make their own rudimentary publications on copy paper, fasten them with staples, and send them out along the zine distribution thoroughfares that coursed across the country, without any permission or guidance whatsoever” (2004: 44). With its roots in the zine culture, Riot Grrrl helped inspire a revolution in female writing and self-publishing. Significantly, the media blackout announced by the Riot Grrrl movement in 1993 meant that zines like Girl Germs, Satan Wears a Bra, Girly Mag, and Quit Whining became the primary form of communicating and archiving the history of the movement. Johanna Fateman, zinester and member of Le Tigre, writes, “The feminist punk zines of the 90s, with their DIY aesthetics, humor, and raw truth telling, were a crucial counterpart to the urgent and infectious music associated with riot grrrl. They were also instrumental to the pre-Internet formation of local scenes and an international network of angry-girl punks” (2013: 13). To help with the distribution of Riot Grrrl zines, Erika Reinstein and May Summer formed the zine distribution network Riot Grrrl Press in the spring of 1993. Originally members of Riot Grrrl DC , they had chosen to relocate to Olympia to join the Riot Grrrls there and attend Evergreen State College. However, before completing their first year at Evergreen, Reinstein and Summer returned to the DC area to start Riot Grrrl Press. They recruited the assistance of fellow Riot Grrrls Mary Fondriest and Joanna Burgess and set up the press in their apartment in Arlington, VA . Members of Riot Grrrl Press each worked outside jobs while also running the press in their spare time. While the founders of Riot Grrrl Press lacked the funds for copy machines and computers, they maintained a connection with a Riot Grrrl who worked at a Kinko’s photocopying store. This provided them with access to state-of-the-art copy machines and computers at reduced prices. With the creation of Riot Grrrl Press, “what resulted, given the climate of free expression already engendered by the larger zine community, was a media revolution of unprecedented proportion” (Bleyer 2004: 46). Riot Grrrl Press and the girl-made zines complemented Riot Grrrl’s musical output through the production and distribution of self-published zines from across the movement. “This is our revolution—it’s right here in these pages . . .” proclaim the editors of Riot Grrrl #8. Reinstein and Summer, like many others in the Riot Grrrl movement, felt that they were creating alternative, girl-made, independent media for a reason. For young feminists to be in control of their own image they created a zine distribution network so that zinesters could speak for themselves and find a broader audience. Riot Grrrl Press also functioned as an effective tool for combating the media’s appropriation of Riot Grrrl, enabling Riot Grrrls to express themselves and reach large audiences without having to rely on the mainstream press. Writing at the time, Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald observed, “zines provide a forum, outside (though not detached from) the music, in which the members of riot grrrl subculture can engage in their own

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self-naming, self-definition and self-critique—can comment, in other words, upon the very shape and representation of the subculture itself” (Gottlieb and Wald 1994: 265). After the media blackout became the movement’s policy in 1993, Riot Grrrl bands, such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy, agreed to simply refer reporters to Riot Grrrl Press if approached by the mainstream media (though some Riot Grrrls continued to speak to reporters, causing divisions within the movement). The September–November 1993 Riot Grrrl Press Catalogue listed six reasons the Press was created. The first is perhaps the most important and deserves to be quoted in whole: Self representation. We need to make ourselves visible without using mainstream media as a tool. Under the guise of helping us spread the word, corporate media has co-opted and trivialized a movement of angry girls that could be truly threatening and revolutionary. And even besides that it has distorted our views of each other and created hostility, tension, and jealousy in a movement supposedly about girl support and girl love. In a time when Riot Grrrl has become the next big trend, we need to take back control and find our voices again. RIOT GRRRL PRESS 1993 In addition to offering their own zines, such as Discharge, Cherub, Jaded, Marika, Star Gang, and Wrecking Ball, Riot Grrrl Press also solicited flat master copies of girl-made zines from around the country. These were subsequently listed in the Riot Grrrl Press Catalogue. As the Press stated: “We will take the burden off of (usually) young women who can’t afford to distribute their zines, or whose zines aren’t well known. First it’ll get the word out to everyone who gets the catalogue and PLUS we’ll be doing all the shit work of copying and dealing with $.” The zines listed in the catalog were sold at minimal cost and the authors sending flats did not receive royalties. May Summer recalls, “we were not trying to make money, just cover costs” (interview August 25, 2008). In 1993, Riot Grrrl Press carried over sixty zines and a handful of videos. The catalog listed zines about the sex trade industry (Buy Me), masturbation and sexual health (Clitoris), incest and sexual abuse (Fantastic Fanzine, Hangnail, Luna, Rape), high school (Curmudgeon, Upslut), women of color (Lost ID ), body image (Grrrl Trouble, Cherub), queer identity (Brat Attack, Luna, Party Mix), among other topics relevant to feminist readers. Writing at the time, authors Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald describe how zine making cultivates solidarity among marginalized girls and illustrates the feminist belief that the personal is political: [T]he small “girlcore” fanzine network that has sprung up around Riot Grrrl allows women to participate actively in the ongoing perpetuation

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FIGURE 6.4 Cover of Bikini Kill #2, 1992 (author’s personal collection).

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and (re)definition of the subculture. Most obviously, the ’zines foster girls’ public self-expression, often understood as the ability to tell private stories (secrets), which are otherwise prohibited or repressed by the dominant culture. These include girls’ descriptions of their experiences of coming out as lesbian (especially in the “queercore” ’zines, which as early as the mid-eighties took to protesting hardcore’s heterosexism and homophobia); the disclosure of their traumas as rape and incest survivors, or as women struggling with eating disorders; and their gushy affirmations of girl-love and devotion to punk music. Thus publicized, such narratives often become the stuff of political commitment and an affirmation of girls’ legitimacy within the realm of the political. 1994: 264 The zines produced and distributed by Riot Grrrl Press were aimed at doing explicit political work, primarily challenging established gender norms but also pushing the boundaries of feminist conversations. Riot Grrrl Press was instrumental in expanding the network of likeminded feminist zinesters. Distributing zines across the country connected young females in small towns to a larger community. As Riot Grrrl Press Catalogue stated, “RG Press will make women’s zines available to people who wouldn’t necessarily get them otherwise. Yeah, that’s right. Networking. There are a lotta people in this world and there are probably several who would benefit from and/or enjoy reading our zines but haven’t had the opportunity. There are also a lot of radical activists and groups that we really need to network with NOW OK ?” In this way, the Press was as useful in spreading the punk feminist message of the Riot Grrrl movement as the bands that were receiving increased media attention. While networking is clearly an important facet of the zine culture, perhaps a more important aspect is spreading the message of personal empowerment and disalienation. This message has always been at the forefront of zine culture. Riot Grrrl zines encouraged readers to produce their own zines; to be more than consumers of culture, but producers of their own media. Moreover, many of the Riot Grrrl zines offered by the Press were explicitly framed as part of a process of self-discovery. Mary Fondriest’s description of Discharge sums up the sentiments of many girl-zine editors, “I think my ongoing goal with Discharge is to find my voice—and with each time I put out an issue, I come closer. Sometimes I feel it’s unsuccessful and incoherent. But it is the only way, for now, that I can feel safe” (quoted in Riot Grrrl Press 1993). The biggest obstacles facing Riot Grrrl Press, like most other independent presses and zine distributors, were money, time, and space. They did not want to charge a lot per zine so they usually asked for a couple of dollars and a stamp as payment. But that left no money for the Press’s workers. Even with four people running Riot Grrrl Press, it was difficult for the members of the collective to balance their zine work with college and outside

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jobs. In the winter of 1994, Reinstein and Summer moved back to Olympia. The Press stayed in DC , operated mainly by Mary Fondriest and Seanna Tully. Reinstein maintained her involvement in Riot Grrrl Press as she traveled back and forth between Olympia and DC . In the spring of 1994, Reinstein and Summer moved to Chicago, where they rented a space for Riot Grrrl Press within the anarchist collective, the A-Zone. Sarah Kennedy, who joined the Press at that time, remembers that orders for zines were coming in regularly. Kennedy was excited to work on the project, even without pay, because she felt a personal connection with the Riot Grrrl movement. She had heard about Riot Grrrl while still in high school in the small town of Normal, IL and had been inspired to make her own zine, Miss America. During the day, Kennedy worked full time at a bookstore but spent most of her evenings and weekends stocking zines and filling orders. Just as it had in the DC area, Riot Grrrl Press soon discovered a way to obtain free photocopies in Chicago; a friend with the key to an office building allowed Riot Grrrl Press to sneak in to the copy room and set up shop after work hours zine-making (interview September 13, 2008). Riot Grrrl Press successfully operated in Chicago for two more years. However, Summer and Reinstein relocated Riot Grrrl Press once again when they moved to Olympia in 1996. Focusing their energies on other pursuits, Reinstein and Summer passed their zine collection on to other volunteers who kept it going for a short time after that. As noted in the earlier discussion of maintaining infrastructures within local punk scenes, these endeavors take a great deal of time, energy, and dedication. It is not clear exactly why the Press ceased operations but, most likely, the new organizers lacked easy access to photocopiers and workers willing to dedicate time to project. Keeping prices down had always required members of Riot Grrrl Press to work for free and to continually rely on illegal and clandestine photocopies. Some observers, such as writer Jennifer Bleyer, have argued that the Riot Grrrl zines of the 1990s were predominantly produced by “white, middleclass young women” (2004: 52; see Nyugen 2012). This is a fundamentally inaccurate claim, but one intimately related to a larger posture. I have noted in earlier chapters that critics have repeatedly made this same claim about punk in general, namely that punks are predominantly white, middle-class American males. The case of Riot Grrrl disproves the claim that punk is an exclusively male domain. The conversations about the globality of punk equally undercut claims about it having a narrow class, race, or national character. Yet such claims get repeated ad nauseam in face of overwhelming evidence. Why? Clearly such claims are used as a way of dismissing a movement, in this specific case Riot Grrrl. But it begs the question why would a movement of middle-class whites inherently lack legitimacy? Why are so many critics—often white and middle-class themselves—so quick to imply that white, middle-class kids can’t challenge the status quo? The assumption seems to be that one has to be disenfranchised by a system to

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critique it, which does not logically hold. These criticisms likely stem from complicated issues around competing claims of victimization, anxieties about authenticity, as well as the (subconscious?) need to delegitimize anti-status quo movements to compensate for the critic’s own complicity in the status quo. Regardless, most members of Riot Grrrl in North America during this time came from lower middle-class and working-class backgrounds. Many of the Riot Grrrls in college worked outside jobs to pay their way through school. Several Riot Grrrls worked poor-paying jobs to make ends meet, with very little time to produce or distribute zines, which was precisely one of the reasons Riot Grrrl Press took over zine distribution. More than a few Riot Grrrls worked in the sex trade industry. Access to equipment—such as copiers and stamps—were either perks of low-paying jobs or acquired through illicit means. Yet, despite these facts, Riot Grrrl members were never naïve about their privilege. Indeed, most zines produced through Riot Grrrl engaged in direct and challenging discussions about class and race privilege. However, it is true, as Bleyer also claims, that most Riot Grrrl zinesters exhibited a high degree of self-esteem. Empowering girls was, after all, one of the main goals of Riot Grrrl, feminist punk bands, and girl-zine distribution. Up to this point, I have been writing about Riot Grrrl zines as if they were exclusively a phenomenon of 1990s North America. But as I discussed in Chapter Four, the dominant narrative of Riot Grrrl’s supposed rise-and-fall is distinctly American-centric and historically inaccurate. Riot Grrrl spread outside of the borders of the US as soon as it began, and continues to flourish around the world today. For the last several decades, Riot Grrrl-inspired organizations continue to meet, publish zines, and exchange information all over the US and the world. I have personally seen and collected Riot Grrrl zines recently published throughout Asia, the Middle East, North and South America. One unlikely place that a small zine culture has emerged is in Cambodia, largely due to the intervention of Anne Elizabeth Moore. Former co-editor of Punk Planet magazine, well-known zinester, and self-identified Riot Grrrl, Moore traveled to Cambodia in 2007 to live in an all-female college dormitory and teach first generation female students about selfpublishing and zine-making. Moore documented the project and its progress on her online blog, and in the concise and engaging book Cambodia Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh (2011). In a culture where punk was a rather alien concept (but political resistance certainly wasn’t), Moore wasn’t interested in sharing music, but in spreading the DIY punk ethic that leads to self-empowered individuals. The ideas of self-publishing and DIY cultural production were almost unknown in Cambodia, especially given its history of government repression and violent social engineering. But informed by her Riot Grrrl-roots, Moore regarded the first generation female students in the Harpswell Dormitory for University Women as ideal agents of change,

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especially as they were deeply committed to social justice and equality. Working with Moore, these young ladies produced zines that articulated their own vision of what feminist emancipation would look like for them. They circulated those zines and created a small, but growing zinester culture in Cambodia steeped in Riot Grrrl’s DIY and feminist sensibilities.35 Moore’s work in Cambodia (and elsewhere) illustrates that selfrepresentation through alternative media sources is not a luxury of some privileged group, but rather a necessity for all those wishing to challenge the destructive social forces—from patriarchy to corporate-controlled capitalism—within society at large. As the case of Riot Grrrls across the world illustrates, one should not under-estimate the disalienating potential of zines. They are a tool for consciousness raising and making the marginalized visible.

DIY punk zines and anti-status quo: more intentionally bad capitalists Punk zines, and zines more generally, self-consciously position themselves against the mainstream. In some cases, they are critical responses to the status quo. In other cases, they seek to provide alternatives to the consumerist culture of modern society. That is to say, punk zines reflect an anti-status quo disposition in terms of both content and action. One of the common themes that unites punk zines is their general anti-status quo disposition, particularly their critique of consumer culture. In his detailed discussion of the political importance of zines, Stephen Duncombe argues: The medium of zines is not just a message to be received, but a model of participatory cultural production and organization to be acted upon. The message you get from zines is that you should not just be getting messages, you should be producing them as well. This is not to say that the content of zines—whether it be anti-capitalist polemics or individual expression—is not important. But what is unique, and uniquely valuable, about the politics of zines and underground culture is their emphasis on the practice of doing it yourself. It’s a simple idea, but in a society where consuming what others have produced for you—whether it be culture or politics—is the norm, the implications are far-reaching and radical, for doing it yourself is the first premise of participatory democracy. 2008: 135 What is happening in the pages of a zine is often an explicit attempt of the writer to destroy the seductive pablum fed to consumers in modern capitalism that seeks to keep them passive.

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Of course, punk zines are not alone in providing a critique of modern consumer capitalism, nor are they the first. As noted earlier, the history of the zine can be traced through the development of the “little magazine” of modernist literature. In their 1946 investigation of that phenomenon, Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich offered this description of the stereotypical author/editor of the “little magazine”: “Such a man is stimulated by some form of discontent whether with the constraints of his world or the negligence of publishers, at any rate something he considers unjust, boring, or ridiculous. He views the world of publishers and popularizers with disdain, sometimes with despair . . . [and] he generally insists that publication should not depend upon the whimsy of conventional tastes and choices” (Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich 1946: 3–4). Such a passage would be an apt description for many zinesters today. By and large, these are ordinary people using the tools at their immediate disposal—markers, pencils, typewriter, personal computers, and photocopying machines—to offer their own critique of the world around them. This is a significant act of empowerment; the belief that articulating and circulating an alternative interpretation of the world is a valid act. One of the most famous American zines is produced by Pete Jordan, aka Dishwasher Pete, whose stated ambition was to hold a dishwashing job in every state in America and write about the experiences (he stopped after thirty-three states when he fell in love and moved to Amsterdam; see Jordan 2007). Reflecting on his decision to start a zine about his adventures, he recently observed: “there were no revolutionary aspirations. I just wanted to share some tales. But it became very much something that many dishwashers—and other low-wage shitjob workers and dropouts and quitters—read as empowering, if only in a personal way” (Jordan 2014). Through his zine, Dishwasher Pete engaged in an important act of disalienation in the face of the stifling banality of labor in the capitalist system. Through his celebration of the American underground workforce, his championing of the liberating potential of temporary (i.e., mobile) labor, and his examination of the history of dishwashing and social attitudes towards it, Dishwasher Pete engaged in an ongoing redefinition of what labor means, how it is organized, and what it is expected to symbolize. Just as zines were an important part of the disalienation project within the Riot Grrrl agenda, zine-making people counter the alienating aspects of modern life, from the stifling banality of labor to the passivity of consumerism. For zinesters like Dishwasher Pete, librarian R. John Xerxes (Ghosts of Ready Reference #1–4) and countless others, zines offer a means for coping with the alienation one finds in the modern workplace. But modern capitalism is not just about being alienated from your labor. It is also about being alienated from the entertainment and products we consume. One aspect of zine culture is that zine makers, consciously and not, re-forge the links between themselves and the consumerist world we all inhabit. They do so in

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part by insisting on interacting with commodities—books, music, clothes, TV shows, anything really—in ways that go well beyond what is expected (and usually accepted). As Duncombe has observed, “By writing record reviews, interviewing their favorite bands, and commenting on their local music scene, the people who put out music zines are taking a product that is bought and sold as a commodity in the marketplace and forcing it into an intimate relationship. Instead of relying upon sanctioned mediators like Rolling Stone or Spin, they assert their own right to speak authoritatively about the music they love—making the culture theirs” (2008: 114–15). Thus, they are engaging the dominant culture and recreating their own relationship to it, often in ways that challenge the logic of consumer capitalism. There is far more to the zine as a tool against the status quo than just its occasional anti-consumerist content, though that is certainly significant since it provides an alternative critical voice in the face of a project that seeks to erase and/or appropriate all dissent (see McLaughlin 1996). While the content is certainly important, the critical potential of a zine resides in the form itself. That is to say, rejection of the status quo begets cultural production itself. DIY punks and punk zinesters actively challenged the passive relationships inscribed within consumer culture by producing a participatory model of culture. Dan Werle, editor of the zine Manumission, put it this way: “Doing something like a zine, as small as it may be, is very much a refutation . . . It’s refuting the whole pathetic, sit down and be entertained type of environment . . . This is saying: No, I’m taking things into my own hands, I’m not gonna allow someone else to bombard me. I’m going to be the entertainer of myself” (quoted in Duncombe 2008: 111). Today’s capitalist consumer culture constructs relationships between consumer and product that are devoid of any sort of reciprocal creativity. Products are there to be consumed, passively. Zines reinscribe the individual as a cultural producer instead of a passive consumer. Creating your own culture flies in the face of the established consumerist order. Zine makers create networks and cultures that privilege alternative practices that are neither profit-driven nor centralized. Zines are distributed for free or at prices that barely cover production costs. There is also a reformulation and, at times, outright rejection of the understanding of “intellectual property” and copyright ownership. When I was in Indonesia, a friend wanted to share a couple of local punk zines that were in his collection. He only had one copy of each—and they were photocopied reproductions of the original themselves. So he went to a local store that had a photocopying machine, removed the staples, and photocopied each zine for me. If it had been a mainstream magazine like Spin or Rolling Stone, his actions would have been considered illegal, as there are clear prohibitions against unauthorized reproductions in each. But I seriously doubt that the maker of these zines would have been anything but pleased that their product was being re-copied and distributed further.

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The simple fact that the zine exists largely independent of (and in opposition to) established corporate media and commercial culture should be recognized as a subversive act, with profound political potential. But what happens when the punk zine crosses over into the greater mainstream? What happens when a zine becomes, if you will, a magazine? What can be lost and what can be gained by shifting a zine’s subject position within the market? Maximumrocknroll is perhaps the most well-known punk zine, with a reach that is international in its focus and distribution. Initially begun as a radio show in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977, MRR began its print life in 1982 and soon became one of the most important punk zines in the US . It is also the punk zine that gets the most attention by mainstream media and scholarship. I also occasionally write for them and have been interviewed by them. So, for all those reasons, I will focus on three other case studies—Flipside, Punk Planet, and Razorcake—for insights about what happens when punk zines get big.

Flipside One of the earliest punk zines in the US was Flipside, first published in August 1977 by a group of teenagers from Whittier High School outside of Los Angeles, CA. According to one of the original creators, the group had been turned on to punk after reading Lester Bangs’ “ranting and raving” about the Ramones and hearing Rodney on the ROQ ’s alternative music radio show (A. Flipside 1990; Hali n.d.). After exposure to live bands at the Whiskey in Hollywood, the group decided to start a fanzine to chronicle the nascent Los Angeles punk scene. The first issue was a stapled 1⁄3 page photocopied fanzine that they hand-distributed to local clubs and “sold to punks hanging out in the parking lot of Licorice Pizza record store in Hollywood. They gave Rodney a couple of issues as well, and he plugged it on his show” (Hali n.d.). The first few issues had a print run of 1,000 copies and were distributed around Los Angeles. Within two years they established a distribution deal that took the zine nationwide. At the same time, the zine evolved into a major semi-professional glossy-covered “magazine,” with a related record label. It eventually was sold in major chain outlets, like Tower Records and Borders Books, with a global distribution reaching as far as Japan. By 1983, it had a US print run of 6,500, with a separate print run in Germany to cover European distribution. Al Kowalewski, aka Al Flipside, was the zine’s publisher and editor for its entire life, though Holly Duval Cornell, aka Hudley Flipside, was co-owner from 1979–89. Though maintaining a focus on the LA punk scene, Flipside also sought to reflect the globality of the punk community. It ran articles on punk bands and scenes from across North America, Europe, and Asia. At the same time

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it was one of the textual forces that gave shape and coherence to the movement. That is, in the words of one of its senior writers, “the [punk] world looked to Flipside as its voice” (M. Flipside n.d.). This was most clearly evident in Flipside’s letters section, which served as a “sounding board for the common punk on the street and usually took up three or four pages in an issue. Its popularity was a testament to the fact that so many people felt they could have a voice through its pages” (M. Flipside n.d.). The move to use glossy covers and offset printing on heavy white stock paper gave Flipside a visual appearance quite different from most photocopied punk zines of the time. Flipside eventually went out of business in 2000, largely because of financial difficulties. In 1978, Flipside had created a subsidiary record label, releasing a range of punk bands as well as Beck’s first recordings. For several years, they had been working with Rotz, a Chicago-based distribution company owned by German-born Kai Dohm. Rotz was one of the US ’s biggest indie punk/alternative music distributors, handling such indie labels as Epitaph, Hopeless, Kung Fu, Moon Ska, Fat Wreck, Stiff Pole Records, Cyclone, and Liberation (Bessman 1999). Reportedly, Rotz had failed to pay Flipside Records for over a year, so Al Flipside sued them. After years of legal wrangling and depleting most of its financial resources, Flipside won in court, only to see Rotz declare bankruptcy the next day (Morris 2000). The demise of Rotz had repercussions throughout the indie media world, with one of the casualties being Flipside itself. Unable to recover from the financial straits it found itself in, Flipside (both the record label and the zine) closed up shop.

Punk Planet The death of Flipside is not dissimilar to that of Punk Planet, another American punk zine-cum-magazine. In fact, an examination of the two cases offers important insights regarding indie media within a global capitalist system. But where Flipside was brought down when the distributor of their record label declared bankruptcy, Punk Planet was the victim of a much bigger distribution catastrophe. Based in Chicago, Punk Planet published its first issue in May 1994, reportedly as a response to the view that MRR had become too elitist and aggressive in policing the boundaries of punk. Founded by nineteen-year old Dan Sinker, the zine was originally printed on newsprint (as is MRR ) but soon shifted to a format similar to Flipside (full-color cover with offset printing). The bi-monthly zine’s print run eventually reached 16,000, with a global distribution network. In 2003, Sinker created the Independent’s Day Media as the parent company of Punk Planet. In addition to Punk Planet, Independent’s Day Media also published other quarterlies as well as Punk Planet Books, started

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FIGURE 6.5 Cover of Punk Planet #78, 2007 (courtesy of Daniel Sinker; used with permission).

in 2004. Purposefully attempting to be more inclusive than MRR , Punk Planet reviewed almost all material sent to it, as long as it wasn’t on a major record label. Thus, the coverage of the zine included alternative musical genres beyond a strictly delineated understanding of punk. This broader focus generated some criticism, as did its relatively high production values

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(such as the full-color cover, perfect binding as opposed to staples, and professional-looking design and layout). The cost of Punk Planet—the list price for the final issues was $4.95—was also notably higher than competitors MRR and Flipside. Over the years, the editorial scope of Punk Planet moved beyond punk music to reflect a broader interest in left-leaning politics, as evidenced by interviews with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and articles on US foreign policies, wars of aggression, and American education policies. As Punk Planet grew in size, so did its distribution needs. Punk Planet began distributing through the Independent Press Association (IPA ), which was founded in 1996 as a non-profit that provided its members with technical assistance, access to loans, and other services aimed at supporting independent publishers. But in 2000, IPA made the decision to begin distributing for its members, buying the troubled BigTop Newsstand Services, and relaunching it as Indy Press Newsstand Services. Within a few years, the IPA non-profit was operating as a multi-million-dollar distribution venture for over 500 members, including Mother Jones and The Nation. In 2003, the IPA went through a change in directors that affected its business practices. A number of members began to complain about the increased “corporate” mentality at the IPA , which included a tightly regulated, top-down management approach coupled with high executive salaries (Davis 2007; Tanzer 2006; Smith 2007). They also started complaining about cash-flow problems. A number of the IPA’s members were not seeing the revenue that was owed to them. Punk Planet’s co-editor and associate publisher Anne Elizabeth Moore was quoted as stating, “We don’t know why there was a crisis with cash flow, but there was changing of attitude. They were trying to compete with major national distributors and we knew that was going to fail . . . That’s what you get when you work with a corporate entity” (Tanzer 2006). Seeing the writing on the wall, Sinker and Moore investigated creating an alternative, collective distribution network, but got little support from other IPA members until it was too late (interview with Moore May 7, 2008). Concerns about the IPA publicly came to light when the San Francisco Weekly ran a major investigative piece in 2006. In late December, IPA quietly informed its members that it was closing its doors. The announcement did not come as a shock to most of its members, who had become increasingly vocal about their concerns. Yet, the repercussions were profound. Paul M. Davis, writing about the collapse in the final issue of Punk Planet, wrote: “For publishers of IPA -distributed titles, the irony is palpable. An organization once established as an advocate for the independent press, the IPA has brought an array of the publications it was founded to support down with it” (2007: 74). Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to the independent publications simply disappeared. For some publications, such as Bitch (reportedly owed $81,000), the unpaid debt

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was crippling, but not a fatal blow. But for many others, the unpaid revenue and loss of their distributor simply meant that they could not continue. Punk Planet continued publishing for a few months, but called it quits with issue #80 in the summer of 2007, publicly placing the blame on the IPA debacle. Reminiscing about the end of Punk Planet a year later, Moore told me “Punk Planet died due to the twin causes of the independent distributor (the IPA ) we’d recently aligned ourselves to—also the organization charged with watch-dogging such problems—self-destructing in an explosion of bad practices, stupid hires, and a for-profit mindset that just didn’t make fiscal sense given to economic realities of independent publishing, and no one outside of our office really giving a shit until it was too late. That being said, the magazine died at the right time. We did everything we could—and much, much more—and I’d already given a couple decades to making projects like this work, and I was taxed and tired and angry” (interview May 7, 2008). For Moore and many others, the demise of Punk Planet and IPA were related to how one chooses to conduct their business in an increasingly corporatized world.

Razorcake Before the demise of Flipside, one of its managers left to create Razorcake. Todd Taylor had begun working at Flipside in the mid-1990s, getting the job because, as he claims, he had a valid driver’s license to pick up the mail and showed up when he said he would.36 Taylor was frustrated by the inertia and disorganization with Flipside. When the Rotz bankruptcy left Flipside $120,000 in the hole, Taylor offered to become co-owner of the magazine but Al Flipside turned him down and they parted ways. A few months later, Taylor teamed up with long-time friend Sean Carswell, who moved to Los Angeles to help Taylor start up Razorcake. The funds for the zine came from the money Taylor had saved over the years, but also from a house that Carswell, a carpenter, built and sold for that purpose. Where Flipside had often wandered beyond music to include investigations of UFO s and drugs, Razorcake’s declared focus was on DIY culture first and foremost. With a print run of roughly 6,000, Razorcake is a small operation with only two full-time “employees,” a production team of five to six part-timers, and a vast network of over a hundred regular contributing writers, illustrators, photographers, editors, and proofers.37 From a small basement they run the entire production of the zine, the website, a YouTube channel, a regular podcast, Razorcake distribution, and Razorcake Records. Around 2003, Taylor and Carswell claim they saw the writing on the wall regarding the future of independent publishing and started making changes in how they operated. Preceding the global economic crash of 2008,

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independent media was already facing severe economic hardships. Unlike Punk Planet, Razorcake refused to sign exclusive contracts with any distributors. They also limited the number of copies bigger distributors could take, seeking to insure that the distros ordered only what they were able to sell. But they also changed their legal designation. Taking advantage of American tax laws, Taylor and Carswell applied to make Razorcake an official 501(c)(3)—a charitable organization that can accept tax-deductible donations. Because of their non-profit status, they do not have to pay federal taxes, can accept donations, are available for grants, and get some discounts with the post office. In recent years, their non-profit status has allowed them to receive grants from the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Arts Commission. As Taylor notes, being an official non-profit is also a psychological designation: I want people to know that we put DIY culture first, that, if by some chance, Razorcake starts making appreciable money, that no one person can directly benefit from it. Those monies go directly back into making Razorcake stronger. Razorcake is here, in its small part, to help perpetuate DIY culture by being an example and being a critical, creative component. I want us to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. I think it’s important for people to know that we’re fundamentally different than, say, Hot Topic, Victory Records, or Alternative Press in that respect. INTERVIEW October 29, 2008 Razorcake can thus lay claim (and they do) to being the first and only official non-profit DIY punk rock fanzine in America primarily dedicated to supporting independent music culture.38 As Taylor observes, being an official 501(c)(3) has altered the material conditions of zine making: “We’re a unique entity. We aren’t part of an industry. We’re in uncharted territory. We also have a lot of opportunities open to us that we wouldn’t otherwise.” But while Razorcake’s legal designation is unique in the punk zine world, their distribution model certainly is not. While they briefly succumbed to the lure of large, national distribution corporations, they have since returned to a core DIY ethos. This DIY distribution model has proven to be an even more significant factor in their sustained survival than their non-profit status. As Taylor states, The last big, independent distributor—a self-proclaimed “progressive” distributor, BigTop [bought by IPA ]—took down an entire host of zines, Punk Planet included. Razorcake was largely untouched by that Titanic going down because I watched our statements closely and called bullshit on their payment schedule (which was always behind) along with all the fees they tacked on. On the day we could officially and legally end our

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FIGURE 6.6 Cover of Razorcake #75, 2013 (courtesy of Razorcake/Gorsky Press; used with permission).

contract, we were out and working on another plan. DIY, to me, means that you can’t just hand over an entire section of your livelihood over to someone, trust they’ll care about it half as much as you do, and wait for a check. Traditional magazine distribution—especially distros that deal nationally—is a dying dinosaur. INTERVIEW October 29, 2008

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In place of working with a national distributor, Razorcake has put together a patchwork array of regional distributors and direct-to-stores networks. But most significantly, they have become their own biggest distributor through subscriptions. So, while large-scale independent zines of the Flipside and Punk Planet variety have largely failed to survive in the twenty-first century, Razorcake offers an interesting survival story, managing to stay afloat (grow even) due to the combination of innovation through its official non-profit legal designation and an adherence to the traditional DIY ethos of punk. If there is a general lesson to be learned from these three cases—and that of Maximumrocknroll as well—it is that punk zines that try to operate as part of, and within the logic of, the corporate capitalist system tend to fail. Those that continue to adhere to the ethos of DIY punk have, so far, managed to survive, but it takes a great deal of work. Flipside and Punk Planet were both victims of distribution networks that emulated larger commercial practices, including profit-maximization and disregard for small producers, that eventually contributed to their demise. Though personal responsibility for mismanagement should not be ignored. When there is only one person hand-making zines, the expectations and responsibilities tend to be minimal. But as the ventures become larger, financial situations become more complex, especially if there are employees and/or interns involved. On the one hand, there are certain skills, regarding finances and personnel, which are important to possess. I am not referring to skills of “business savviness” that tend to be rewarded in the corporate business world, but fundamental skills, such as balancing accounts, treating employees with respect, and so on. On the other hand, because DIY and other alternative business practices rely heavily on fairness and reciprocity—as opposed to corporate capitalism’s practice of maximizing profits from other people’s labor—issues of ethics and integrity are important. The reality is that publicly proclaiming support to a DIY punk ethos doesn’t make someone an ethical person. The previous chapter’s discussion of record labels suggests that there are plenty of punk label owners, as well as zinesters, whose practices are not beyond reproach. Both MRR and Razorcake continue to survive largely because they have managed to structure their growth on the ethos and distribution practices of DIY punk culture. Neither operates as a profit-making entity, but survive as labor-of-loves driven by a large cadre of dedicated volunteers who do “shit work” (to use the term lovingly used by MRR volunteers) such as opening mail, sorting incoming releases, stuffing packages, labeling envelopes, delivering mail to the post office, and taking out the recycling and garbage. Reliance on unpaid labor makes issues of ethics and integrity all the more important. For example, when the owner of PunkNews, an online zine-style website that relied extensively on volunteer labor, sold the site to Buzz Media in 2012, a number of critics responded vocally.39

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In the end, larger punk zines like MRR and Razorcake have managed to survive because, just like smaller punk zine makers and punk record labels, they operate as intentionally bad capitalists, more dedicated to the promotion of global DIY punk culture than to making a profit. Their continuing existence provides powerful examples of how DIY punk zines are antistatus quo in both their content and their ways of being.

Punk literary presses I would be remiss if I did not provide a brief discussion of small independent literary presses that have evolved out of DIY punk culture. Microcosm, for example, emerged as one of North America’s most important zine distributors, but also a literary press in its own right. There are a number of other examples, such as Love Bunny Press, in which punk zine makers transitioned into literary presses. Punk Planet Books was formed by Dan Sinker as an off-shoot of Punk Planet, both operating under his Independent’s Day Media umbrella. Founded in 2004, it was effectively a collaborative imprint with Akashic Books, a Brooklyn-based independent publishing company. Between 2004 and 2006, Punk Planet Books published six titles, a combination of novels, short story collections, and non-fiction works, including We Owe You Nothing, an edited collection of Punk Planet interviews (Sinker 2001). Gorsky Press was started by Sean Carswell, one of the co-founders of Razorcake. Created simultaneously with Razorcake, Gorsky Press (together officially known as Razorcake/Gorsky Press Inc.) now operates as an official non-profit entity. But its inspiration and ethos was directly related to DIY punk record labels. Carswell notes, “there are so many record labels that exist in bedrooms and garages and produce great stuff, I figured we could do the same with Gorsky” (interview December 24, 2013). A novelist in his own right, Carswell’s book, Drinks for the Little Guy, was under consideration at a subsidiary of Random House. But Carswell did not want to accept their suggestions that he turn his working-class characters into caricatures. Nor, upon reflection, did he want to publish with a company owned by Bertelsmann, the largest publisher of Nazi propaganda during the Third Reich. So he decided to start his own publishing company. As he notes, “At the core, I couldn’t justify being a punk rocker and boycotting major labels on the one hand and seeking to publish my own work through the corporate cultural industry on the other. I guess it was my own personal way of not selling out” (interview December 24, 2013). Carswell’s connection between the corporate music industry and corporate publishing industry is instructive given the number of similarities. In the US , while the music industry is dominated by three corporate behemoths, the publishing industry is dominated by the so-called “Big

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Four”: Simon & Schuster (owned by the CBS Corporation), HarperCollins (owned by NewsCorp), Penguin Random House (owned by Bertelsmann and Pearson), and Hachette Livre (owned by Lagardère).40 Globally, the top book publishers over the past several years have been Pearson (with a 2013 revenue of $9.33 billion), Reed Elsevier ($7.29 billion), Thomson/ Reuters ($5.58 billion), Wolters Kluwer ($4.92 billion), Random House ($3.66 billion), and Hachette Livre ($2.85 billion). The top ten publishers accounted for over 54 percent of the overall global market revenue in 2013 (Publishers Weekly 2014). This revenue is not just made through fiction/non-fiction books, but also specialized publications for business professionals, medical experts, scientists, and educators across the globe. While there has been a high degree of mergers and acquisitions within the global publishing industry over the last decade, the top ten publishers have remained relatively intact. In addition to the dominance of a handful of corporate publishing houses, another characteristic of the publishing industry is the increased centralization of outlets, namely the rise of online sellers, such as Amazon.com, and large mega-chains, such as Barnes & Noble. In 2011, Amazon had around 22.6 percent of the US book market, while Barnes & Noble enjoyed 17.3 percent of the market. Threatening the traditional print format, eBooks generated $3.2 billion of the book sales in 2011. All of this continued to threaten and undermine the survival of independent booksellers. The number of independent bookstores in the US decreased from 2,400 in 2002 to 1,900 in 2011. Overall, there were an estimated 10,800 bookstores in the US in 2011, a 12 percent decrease from five years earlier (OEDB 2012). Thus, much like today’s music industry, the publishing industry is dominated by a handful of corporate entities—both as publishers and distributors—that are increasingly squeezing out alternative, independent voices (Laties 2011). While an examination of the global publishing industry is beyond the scope of this book, it is important to note that independent punk presses are driven by a rejection of consumer corporate culture, and also have a fundamentally different way of thinking about cultural production. Punk literary presses, like the successful large punk zines discussed above, tend to survive by maintaining an ethos rooted in DIY punk culture. A press like Gorsky uses small, independent printers to actually produce the books in relatively small runs, and uses independent distributors or direct contact to get books to readers and into independent bookstores. Sounding like a number of DIY punk record label owners discussed in the previous chapter, Carswell observes, “we know how many books we can sell and how not to lose money on a book. We’re sustainable, if not profitable” (personal correspondence March 22, 2015). Punks who are intentionally bad capitalists tend to be more “successful” than those who try to be good capitalists. This is not just a case of irony, but points to the strength and sustainability of DIY punk culture.

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Local zines, global form: zines and cultural transmissions Most punk zines tend to be geographically limited in terms of their subject matter. That is, they tend to be aimed at a local punk scene or are personal zines speaking from a specific subject position. There are, of course, enough exceptions to call this generalization into question. But in terms of content, most zines stress the local. They are, however, connected to other zine networks and communities globally. Indeed, the zine’s global– local interchange is a significant aspect of zine culture, and underscores its importance in constructing a global politics of resistance in everyday life. As I noted earlier, one of the antecedents of contemporary zines was the “little magazine” of modern literature circles. In his examination of the global reach of the “little magazine,” literary scholar Eric Bulson makes the claim that “the little magazine functioned as a world form, a place in which writers, readers, critics, and translators could imagine themselves belonging to a global community that consisted of, but was not cordoned off by, national boundaries” (2012: 267). Not just a phenomenon of the Anglo- or Francophone literary worlds, as is generally assumed, the “little magazine” was adapted globally to respond to particular audiences, literary traditions, and print cultures across the globe, from Africa to Asia. The same holds true for the modern zine. But where the “little magazine” was often a vehicle for the spread of Modernism between relatively elite literary circles, the global zine carries far greater potential for political critique and resistance because it is fundamentally more democratic, accessible to and producible by virtually anyone. Zines, like other cultural products, are shaped by the material conditions of their time and place, including everything from print technologies to postal rates. As zines emerged in the twentieth century, a global network of exchange developed. Initially, the music zine network was built upon the preceding sci-fi zine network, particularly because they originally drew from the same group of individuals. But in the wake of punk, as more people turned to the zine as a self-publishing medium, the networks expanded both numerically and geographically. Soon after it began publication, for example, NYC -based zine Punk was available in London in a matter of weeks. Punk zines quickly spread across Europe, nurturing and inspiring local punk scenes, and connecting those local scenes with a global (and globalizing) network. Sometimes the zines were traded through the mail, sometimes they were hand-carried by traveling fans, and just as often they were distributed by touring bands. Often, they were re-photocopied, so second and third generations of the original would extend the original print run. Very quickly there developed punk transnational circuits of exchange and circulation that remain vibrant today.

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Many of the books on zine culture tend to focus on it as an American phenomenon. This is unfortunate because it misses the fact that zines, like the “little magazine,” have become a global form. Over the years, DIY punk and punk-inspired zines have appeared all over the world, but under a variety of guises as local conditions, interests, tastes, and material conditions have shaped their aesthetic and content. Zines do not belong to a single nation, continent, or hemisphere. To borrow a phrase from Bulson (2012: 270), punk zines have created a “global literary ecosystem” that is outside established commercial culture, media networks, and capitalist relations of exchange. While no authoritative estimation about the number or location of zines exists, it is still safe to assume that the majority of zines are produced in the Western world and it would be naïve to suggest that the transnational circuits of exchange and circulation are equitable. The divisions between the global core and periphery in terms of the flow of information and products are just as real in DIY punk and other alternative networks as they are in the larger global economic system. The production and circulation of zines face substantial material challenges that limit their mobility, from postal costs, customs, shipping timetables, printing, and distribution networks, and so on. It is far more likely to find a copy of MRR , Razorcake, or Profane Existence in Jakarta than an Indonesian punk zine in NYC , London, or Los Angeles. While the global circulation of zines is important, perhaps more important is that the zine as form has become a global medium. Employing a global form like zines, the global punk community works to construct a decentered universe. Writers may have an eye on Western models, but zine production, circulation, and consumption are not dependent on the West. They are local products, connected to a decentered global universe. And while there are substantial obstacles to their movement, they do move, particularly because they operate at the margins of established systems of commercial exchange. For example, when I was in Banda Aceh, I came across punk zines from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Australia. I brought copies back with me, made copies, and circulated them within North America. Since most zines circulate outside established commercial networks of exchange, it is difficult to document (or control) their circulation. Some zines can be found in alternative bookstores that have a zine section. But many zinesters spread them around randomly, leaving them in laundromats, sticking them in books, or upon seats in buses or trains. For instance, Cindy Crabb would often slip copies of her zine Doris into the backpacks, bags, or pockets of random people she thought might be interested in her highly personal musings. Once the zines are put out into the world, who knows where the informal hand-to-hand circulation networks will eventually take it. The uncertainty around the distribution of the zine (both in terms of specific zines and as a form) actually increases the perception of its globality.

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FIGURE 6.7 Cover of Shock and Awe #7 (Malaysia), 2015 (courtesy of the Knot Collective; used with permission). Some zines advertise their range, either explicitly by listing “official” distribution sites or by including a letters section that serves to suggest their global reach. For example, the early punk zine Damage (1979–81) was based in San Francisco but adopted an explicitly global scope, covering

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punk scenes in London, Paris, Tokyo, and elsewhere. This approach was carried on by another San Francisco-based punk zine, Maximumrocknroll. Started in 1982 by Tim Yohannan to reflect the Bay Area punk scene, MRR quickly evolved to explicitly situate itself within an international punk community. It has the self-defined goal to “keep the worldwide scene connected.” It does this by offering reports from punk scenes around the world, actively reviewing non-US musical releases, and maintaining a letters section that regularly features submissions from outside the US . In this way, it tries to construct the image of globality. As Eric Bulson asks, “what is more important, being global within certain clearly defined geographical parameters, or seeming global?” (2012: 285; italics in original). Readers of MRR , for example, can feel connected to other like-minded individuals in Sweden, Japan, and Brazil because of the shared experience of consuming the same DIY punk artifacts. This global connectivity of local scenes is reflected both by the content of MRR , but also by individuals interacting with the zine and other readers through the letters section. The actual globality of the zine is unknowable and potentially endless, which makes it a powerful site of cultural resistance within globalization. Circulating largely by hand, through informal networks, and via random exchanges, the zine moves undetected in multiple directions across national and international boundaries. Thus, the zine’s globality becomes abstract, and helps to foster a powerful imagined community, heightening its impact as a cultural force. This imagined globality, coupled with the very real material globality, of the zine works to connect local individuals and scenes to a global imagined community unified by a DIY ethos and anti-status quo disposition. But the world of punk zines is not entirely imaginary, in the sense of only existing as a mental construct. It is built upon human agency, hard work, and material networks of distribution. Of course, sometimes zinesters burn out, get overwhelmed by other aspects of life, or get interested and excited about other projects. The fact that they stop producing zines should not be regarded as a “failure.” These are fundamentally different from the cases of Flipside and Punk Planet, where external forces thwarted the publishers’ desire to keep publishing. A more useful comparison is with bands who release several albums and then break up. Such bands are not regarded as a “failure,” often because they have left material artifacts of their existence (i.e., recorded music) and have had an impact on their listening audience, hopefully inspiring some to start their own bands and make their own music. The same logic should apply to the makers of zines. They’ve left material artifacts and inspired others to do likewise. Expecting longevity and/or profitability is to impose a commercial mentality that is antithetical to the whole endeavor. As I noted earlier, long after many Americans assumed the death of the Riot Grrrl movement, Riot Grrrls and Riot Grrrl zines continue to thrive

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globally. When May Summer, co-founder of Riot Grrrl Press, began working on an academic article with me (after having stepped away from many Riot Grrrl colleagues and the scene years before), she was surprised to find females drawing inspiration from Riot Grrrls (and several self-identifying themselves as such) and producing zines in places like Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Malaysia, Netherlands, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. What she realized was that these women were inspired not only by the content of Riot Grrrl zines, but by the zine form itself. In his exploration of the political relevance of underground zine culture, Stephen Duncombe offers a mix of optimism and cynicism, but ultimately worries that zines culture is “incomplete” if not “woefully inadequate” (2008: 184). Its core limitation, according to Duncombe, is its failure to move from cultural imagination to political implementation. As he argues, “It conflates a model of communication with a model of politics, and politics at the macro level is about not communication, but contestation” (2008: 198). This is not to say that Duncombe considers zine culture politically irrelevant. Far from it. He regards the political imagination produced within zine culture to be highly relevant, if not essential for political resistance. But ultimately, it is just not enough for him. Duncombe’s concern is with politics at the macro level and he argues that underground cultures rarely pose any sort of sustained threat to the “above ground world” (2008: 9). In fact, as Anne Elizabeth Moore (2007) observed in her excellent work Unmarketable, today’s sophisticated marketing machine appropriates everything it can from the underground, often with their complicity, and profits from it. This was exactly the issue Benjamin grappled with eight decades ago. But perhaps Duncombe’s framing is mistaken. One gets the sense that theorists such as Duncombe want to see cultural products have a clear political effect on the macro level. They want to see zines, or a musical movement, or a specific band, actually bring about the revolutionary change that they write and sing about. Do Riot Grrrl zines destroy patriarchy? Of course not. Neither did the Sex Pistols bring Anarchy to the UK , nor the Clash actually cause a White Riot or stop those Washington Bullets from flying. Nor did NOFX ’s Rock Against Bush campaign stop his re-election. People who expect such results want revolution as an end product of culture. Despite our romantic notions, and the grandiose claims of artists and lead singers, culture doesn’t actually work like that. It works at the micro and meso levels, often incrementally and in undetectable ways. Do Riot Grrrl zines help young girls feel selfempowered and disalienated in the world? Yes. Do they help young men to rethink their own privilege and ultimately become allies in fighting patriarchy? Yes, absolutely. What is more important is to practice resistance and rebellion as part of an ongoing process. As Hakim Bey suggested, perhaps success should be measured by the degree to which people are knocked out of a trance. Zines

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do just that and punk zines even more so. The power of cultural forms like DIY punk zines is rooted in their being “politics by example.” This is similar to what some have called “prefigurative politics,” those modes of being and organizing that seek to reflect and call into being the vision of a future society (Boggs 1977). Zines do so through providing alternative ways of thinking and being; in their ability to provide alternative networks of communication and exchange; in their ability to transform passive consumers into active cultural producers. These result in the ongoing (and hopefully never-ending) process of resisting and rebelling. DIY self-publishing and zines remain vital aspects of that process.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Total Resistance to the Fucking System: Anarcho-punk and Resistance in Everyday Life

When Johnny Rotten proclaimed, “I am an anarchist” on the Sex Pistols single “Anarchy in the UK ,” he helped to cement the link between punk and anarchism within the popular imagination. Released on November 26, 1976 by EMI , “Anarchy in the UK ” was the Sex Pistols’ first single, the second single by a major British punk band (the Damned’s “New Rose” was released the previous month), and became emblematic of the emerging UK punk scene. Arguably most punks at the time thought very little about anarchy, employing the term and the circle-A symbol in the same way that they used the swastika: appropriating a symbol for its shock-value. While there can be a case made that Johnny Rotten was sincere in his proclaimed affinity to anarchism (understood as a part of a disruption of established societal norms and an attack on the established music industry in line with those practiced by earlier Dadaists and Situationalists), it is certain that the rest of the band had little connection with anarchist ideas or ideals. The same holds true with other punk bands on both sides of the Atlantic that emerged in the first wave of punk. For most, if they thought about it much at all, anarchy seemed to have been little more than part of a general anti-establishment disposition. Yet, for other punks, anarchism was neither a symbolic affectation nor a fashion accessory. Perhaps the first punk band that actively and purposefully embraced anarchy as a political and personal philosophy was Crass. Indeed, 197

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it has been suggested by members of the band that several were anarchists first (and hippies, to boot) who were inspired by the energy and potential of punk to form a band. Following Crass, an anarcho-punk culture was born that connected punk’s do-it-yourself ethos with anarchism’s perpetual struggle against hierarchies of all kinds. Some forty years later, anarchopunk remains vibrant globally and, for these groups and individuals, it is more than just an alternative lifestyle, but a process of political resistance within everyday life. Over the years, one of the things I have noticed about punk culture is how many people attempt to realize very complicated political philosophies and ideologies within their daily lives. As someone who teaches political science for a living, I am familiar with the fact that people often feel disconnected from political ideology. That is largely because political ideologies are typically internalized and not self-consciously reflected upon. But when they are, many people often engage with political ideologies and philosophies at the abstract level. It is not surprising that many punks around the world are quite unconscious about the political implications of their actions or the ideological assumptions and presuppositions underlying those choices. But others are quite explicit in their attempts to put ideology into practice. Two very clear cases of this within global DIY punk concerns feminism and anarchism. Throughout this book I have discussed Riot Grrrl and its ongoing attempts to put feminism into practice, as well as other punk “sub-movements” such as straight edge and queercore. But I have purposefully minimized my engagement with anarcho-punk up to this point in order to devote a full chapter on it. For the sake of transparency, I do not consider myself an anarcho-punk. Nor am I trying to argue that anarcho-punks are always successful in putting their ideology and ideals into practice. But I do believe their attempts to realize anarchism within their daily lives is noteworthy and worth exploring. Specifically, it is the intersection with DIY punk that makes these everyday political practices potentially significant (Dale 2012). It is through DIY punk that transgressive political ideologies, such as anarchism and feminism, can gain traction within the politics of everyday life. Or, to put a finer point on it, understanding why anarcho-punk is politically relevant requires less emphasis on the “anarcho” and more on the “punk.” Focusing on anarchopunk reinforces a number of my arguments about the political significance of DIY punk in general. Drawing upon extensive global research, this chapter explores the opportunities that anarcho-punk offers for self-empowerment and resistance. Some of this chapter includes an engagement with secondary sources, but most of the source material comes from extensive interviews with hundreds of self-defined anarcho-punks around the globe over the past decade. To be clear, not all punks are anarcho-punks, just like not all anarchists are punks. For this reason, I will always use the term anarcho-punk to refer to

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those punks who explicitly identify themselves as anarchists. And, given the illegal activities some anarcho-punks engage in and my promise to protect their identity, I will occasionally use pseudonyms when attributing quotes. The chapter begins with a brief sketch of the development of anarchopunk over the past several decades, pointing out the development of specific scenes and transnational networks that have helped create a global anarchopunk culture within the larger global punk culture. These anarcho-punks are extremely important in reviving and sustaining anarchy as a political “school of thought” in today’s world. As such, it is useful to examine in some detail the ways in which anarchy is conceived. The chapter then explores in some detail the various ways in which anarcho-punks practice anarchism and resistance in their everyday lives. Here I am interested in examining the social practices of these anarcho-punks, as opposed to people who may claim to be anarchists but whose social practices suggest otherwise. Particular attention is paid to anarcho-punk squats, youth houses, touring bands, and DIY record labels. Finally, I engage with a significant debate within anarchist circles about the efficacy of so-called “lifestyle anarchism.”

“Do they owe us a living? Of course they fucking do!”: a brief history of anarcho-punk In the beginning there was Crass. Partly inspired by the Clash and similar bands of punk’s first wave, Crass helped foster the anarcho-punk movement in the UK and beyond. While members of Crass were captivated by the energy, anger, and political potential they witnessed in the emerging punk scene, they were cynical about the crass commercialism that accompanied it, from the marketing of “punk” fashions to bands signing contracts with large multinational record labels. Rejecting what they regarded as the “selling out” of the initial punk movement, Crass and like-minded bands sought to live their lives closer to an idealized DIY punk ethos. The seeds of the band were planted when members of the Dial House collective went to see the Clash in Chelmsford on May 29, 1977. The members of the commune were electrified by the energy of the Clash and punk in general (Berger 2006: 75–80; Ignorant 2010; Rimbaud 1999). But Penny Rimbaud, one of the founding members, was conflicted: “I thought the Clash were very exciting, but when I started looking at what they were doing, I couldn’t continue my interest. It was another piece of pantomime” (quoted in Berger 2006: 76). Crass mocked the band in “White Punks on Hope” (1979, a pun on the Tubes’ “White Punks on Dope” but also a blatant swipe at the Clash’s “White Riot”), suggesting the Clash were fools for believing their “white liberal shit” was helping anyone. While never

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achieving—or seeking—the commercial success enjoyed by the Clash, Crass had a significant impact on the creation of a global anarcho-punk movement (Glasper 2006; Cross 2004). As they would later write in the liner notes of their compilation album Best Before: “The true effect of our work is not to be found within the confines of rock’n’roll, but in the radicalised minds of thousands of people throughout the world. From the Gates of Greenham to the Berlin Wall, from the Stop The City actions to underground gigs in Poland, our particular brand of anarcho-pacifism, now almost synonymous with punk, has made itself known” (Crass 1986). Crass’s articulation of their anarchist political message was framed in the DIY ethos of punk. While the Clash and many other bands in the first wave of punk had signed to major corporate record labels, Crass explicitly adopted a do-it-yourself approach, recording and releasing their music on their own label and sharing resources and expertise to encourage others to do likewise. This DIY attitude permeated their political philosophy, as it resonated with anarchism’s core message of taking charge and directly addressing the immediate issues in one’s life rather than asking for some governmental solution to a problem (interview with Steve Ignorant January 20, 2011). While other bands and activists in the punk scene paid lip service to the concept of self-reliance, Crass made it a touchstone of their daily lives. They strove not to just sing about anarchism, but to live it on a daily basis. In doing so, Crass became the vanguard for a huge wave of like-minded bands that followed in their footsteps. Inspired by Crass’s music, lyrics, politics, and/or social practices, bands like Conflict, Flux of Pink Indians, Sin Dios, Los Muertos de Cristo, Oi Polloi, and countless others emerged across the UK and Europe, and eventually the globe (see Cross 2010 and 2004; Glasper 2006; Gosling 2004; Thompson 2004). In North America, bands such as DOA , NoMeansNo, Propagandhi, Appalachian Terror Unit, Fallas del Sistema, and others built up a significant following. Informed by the growing subgenre of hardcore, these North American bands were sonically different from Crass, but still embraced both a DIY ethos and anarchist sensibilities, though often not as pronounced as in the UK and European anarcho-punk scenes (see Keithley 2004). The anarcho-punk fanzine and record label Profane Existence, out of Minneapolis, MN , also became a significant banner-holder for American anarcho-punk scenes (see Thompson 2004: 92–118). But while Profane Existence champions a heavy and aggressive style of punk commonly referred to as “crust,” other anarchopunk scenes and genres have also emerged, such as the folk-punk scenes associated with the Plan-It-X record label and affiliated bands such as This Bike is a Pipe Bomb and Imperial Can. The Spanish anarcho-punk bands Sin Dios and Los Muertos de Cristo helped spread anarcho-punk far beyond the Anglo-American world, influencing a wide range of anarcho-punk scenes in Europe and Latin America (see O’Connor 2003 and 2004). In Mexico, Fallas del Sistema emerged as an influential anarcho-punk band in the first

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wave of Mexican punk. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, one is likely to find anarcho-punk scenes in many major urban spaces across North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Moreover, the range of musical styles employed—from crust to folk-punk—make categorizing an anarchopunk “sound” a misguided exercise.

Conceiving anarchy If one understands anarchy as “without government” (as opposed to chaos or nihilism), one can see a long tradition of people arguing that human beings are best when they are free of hierarchies, exploitation, and repression. Many notable anarchist thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin have argued that human resistance to authority and hierarchies has always existed in mankind (Kropotkin 1987 [1910]: 10). Indeed, one could chart a lengthy list of characters included in the anarchist pantheon: Max Stirner, Pierre Proudhon, Makhail Bakunin, Enricos Malatesta, Peter Kropotkin, the Paris Commune, Emile Pouget, Lucy and Albert Parsons, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Nestor Makhno, Ricardo Flores Magon, and Alfredo Maria Bonanno to name but a few. But what should be stressed at the outset is how little importance most of these names have to anarcho-punks. This is not to say that these thinkers are irrelevant. One will often find quotes from them cut-and-pasted in anarcho-punk zines. For example, Bonanno is particularly well represented in the anarcho-punks zines circulating across Europe and Latin America, especially passages from his Armed Joy. A representative quote concerning revolution with clear resonation for DIY anarcho-punks that I have seen repeatedly is: “It’s easy. You can do it yourself. Alone or with a few trusted comrades. Complicated means are not necessary. Not even great technical knowledge. Capital is vulnerable. All you need is to be decided” (Bonanno 1977). Yet, in my interviews with well over a hundred anarcho-punks, only a handful ever referred directly to these “luminaries” of the anarchist movement. Even in those cases, it was usually to point out that they didn’t “stay up at night reading Bakunin or Chomsky” (interview with Roddy Neithercut May 19, 2009). Studying the “classic works” of the anarchist tradition seems to have little appeal to anarcho-punks and they often expressed a general disdain for academic theorizing about anarchy. As Esben, drummer of Danish anarchopunk band Skarpretter stated, “I read some biographies like Berkman and Bakunin and all these people, because I think it’s interesting how they lived. I read some of it but the preaching things about anarchy, I always found it pretty boring. The ways I have always experienced things are what have led me to be an anarchist” (interview May 13, 2009). The most significant source material for learning about anarchy is from other anarchists and anarcho-punks. Most interview subjects traced a

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familiar transformation: they became punks through exposure to the music and/or a local scene, but over time they moved towards identifying themselves as anarcho-punks due to increased exposure to the thoughts and ideas of other anarchists and anarcho-punks in the scene. This exposure may have come from picking up certain albums by anarcho-punk bands or by hanging out with anarcho-punks within the context of a local scene, often in youth houses or squats. Of course, there are many exceptions to the rule that calls this generalization into question. For example, several anarcho-punks stated that they were political activists first, considering themselves anarchists before getting into the punk scene. While anarcho-punks would rarely name check the “classic anarchists,” it was not unusual in my conversations to hear repeated references to Crass, Sin Dios, Los Muertos de Cristo (LMC ), and Conflict. Just as often, anarcho-punks would refer to the thoughts or ideas of fellow anarcho-punks that they knew personally. So while there wasn’t a strong identification with “classic anarchists” or much interest in abstract debates around the concept, they clearly drew their ideas from their community, as well as their own lived experiences. So what do anarcho-punks believe? Or, more to the point, how do they conceive of anarchy? Almost to a person, there was resistance to applying a universal definition of anarchy. A familiar refrain was “Anarchy, to me, means . . .” thus embracing the subjectivity of any conceptualization of the term. In a 1983 interview for Maximumrocknroll, Dave Insurgent, lead singer for Reagan Youth, asserted: “[Anarchy] just comes down to showing no authority over other people . . . Live your life the way you want to live it” (Pike and Insurgent 1983). Chris Clavin of Plan-It-X Records and multiple bands declined to define the concept but asserted, “any sane person would consider themselves anarchist” (interview June 20, 2008). Many of the people I interviewed echoed Esben of Skarpretter’s observation: “I have my own definition and if you ask someone else, they have theirs. And that’s what’s beautiful about anarchy” (interview May 13, 2009). Yet, there tends be a similar thread through most people’s understanding of anarchy: to be opposed to hierarchies and resist them wherever they are found. The differences are largely around identifying where the hierarchies exist (or rather, which ones are more important to resist) and how to resist them. Deek Allen, singer for the Scottish anarcho-punk band Oi Polloi, observed: “If you want to try to put it in a nutshell, it’s basically respect, as in respect for other people and all other forms of life on the planet. And if you subscribe to those ideas then that’s going to give you a rough idea and guide to things. But also in the sense of don’t expect other people to do stuff, we have the fucking power to do it. It’s not a case of petitioning politicians to please change things for it, we’re just going to go and do it” (interview April 20, 2009). In his examination of contemporary anarchist thinkers, Leonard Williams observes: “At the most basic level, anarchism is fundamentally opposed to

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the existence of the State and the authority relations that the State codifies, legitimates, or represents” (2007: 300). This is generally true, but may overstate the centrality of the State in anarcho-punk discussions of anarchy. To be certain, there is no love for the State. But many anarcho-punks see the State as merely one material manifestation of a larger system of hierarchies and exploitation. As TK , a Belgian anarcho-punk, stated: “The State is just the ugly face of the system. Yeah, I fucking hate the State and all the fascist cops, but I know the powers are much bigger. The cops are just working for the State, but the State is just working for the capitalists, and the capitalists are just working for the system . . . You can’t just fight the State. You gotta fight the system, you know?” (interview May 2, 2009). What this quote captures is an understanding of systemic sources of exploitation and

FIGURE 7.1 Cover of Oi Polloi’s Total Resistance to the Fucking System, 2008 (courtesy of Oi Polloi; used with permission).

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oppression. While many anarcho-punks will talk with passion about their distaste for the police and their violent practices, many will also be quick to recognize that the cops are merely the foot soldiers for larger forces of hierarchies and repression. For conceptualizing this, the term “the system” is often employed, even if it is rarely defined. Rather than quibbling over definitional debates, there is a general understanding that there are systemic sources of exploitation and oppression and they need to be resisted. As the Finnish anarcho-punk band Kansalaistottelemattomuus entitled one of their albums: Full-Spectrum Resistance to their Fucking System (2008). Or the Danish anarcho-punk band Skarpretter sang: “Fuck You, System.” In some cases, “the system” is used as shorthand for the global capitalist economic system, but more often than not it is a blanket term used broadly to capture all the forms of hierarchy that are systemic in modern society. Thus, patriarchy and patriarchic forms of exploitation are part of the system, as feminist anarchists have frequently noted (see Nicholas 2007). Likewise, many anarcho-punks situate the deteriorating health of the world’s environment as a manifestation of the system. Many, though certainly not all, anarcho-punks are vegetarian or vegan, seeing the eating of meat as another form of hierarchy and exploitation. In some cases, “the system” seems to be used as a vague label to categorize whatever is unappealing to a particular speaker. In one conversation with a group of Danish anarchopunks, for example, a young female interjected “It’s the fucking system” with almost mantra-like repetition. Regardless, many anarcho-punks, despite their resistance to universal definitions or developed theories about anarchy, seem to easily adopt a system level of analysis while grappling with the more immediate and close manifestations of authority, hierarchy, and exploitation in their daily lives. In many ways this resonates with Andrej Grubacic’s claim that the “new anarchists” seek to “highlight not only the state but also gender relations, and not only the economy but also cultural relations and ecology, sexuality, and freedom in every form it can be sought, and each not only through the sole prism of authority relations, but also informed by richer and more diverse concepts” (quoted in Williams 2007: 312). Indeed, the diversity of opinions among anarcho-punks (and other anarchists) seems to be a point of pride, with open-ended pluralism as the “beauty” of anarchism. This illustrates Leonard Williams’s observation that: “More than anything else, it seems, today’s anarchists opt for a characteristic stance of theoretical open-endedness. Thus, the typical theorist sees in today’s anarchism a worthy diversity and pluralism, rather than a destructive factionalism. In other words, doctrinal differences among anarchists are assumed to be surface differences of emphasis rather than deep differences of principle” (2007: 307). There are definitely criticisms regarding this pluralism, as well as what some have denigratingly called “lifestyle” anarchism, but I will develop those later. In my experience, anarcho-punks,

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by and large, have little desire to engage in factional debates about theory, but tend to embrace an appreciation for ambiguity, indeterminancy, and choice. Above all else, anarcho-punks seem to sense that anarchism is a process, as opposed to rigid game-play or a utopian end-point (see Sofianos, Ryde, and Waterhouse 2014).

Practicing anarchy Rather than debate revolutionary theory, anarcho-punks are primarily interested in engaging in actions that, to them, will make a difference in daily life. As one Czech anarcho-punk said to me, “Anarchism isn’t about how to think, it’s about how to do. And that means to resist” (interview with CP May 28, 2009). While anarcho-punks are not generally concerned with engaging in lengthy theoretical discussions about anarchism, they are, however, deeply interested in discussing tactics and strategies for direct action, as evidenced by anarcho-punk zines and internet forum boards. For example, the internet board at Profane Existence features countless forums and threads about what others are doing. One of their most active forum topics is “From Protest to Resistance” which carries the following summary: “This is the place to post news of protest, resistance, state oppression, antifascism, anti-imperialism, etc.” Other topics provide means of the global anarcho-punk community to network, from information about touring bands, tips on traveling, information on events and demonstrations, and information about “liberated zones,” such as collectives, info-cafés, show spaces, and so forth (Profane Existence 2010). This example illustrates two of the more notable facets of the global anarcho-punk culture. First is the high degree of active communication, even when conducted through informal circuits of exchange. Second is the primacy of praxis. Praxis here is understood not just in terms of political demonstrations, which is usually the only time mainstream media and culture pay much attention to anarchopunks, but the praxis of anarchism in everyday life. While I address the more headline-grabbing activities connecting direct action and anarcho-punk, most of this chapter focuses upon the everyday practices of anarcho-punk that offer alternatives to accepted ways of thinking and being. These practices are not just disruptions of the status quo, but possible sites of political resistance in everyday life.

The praxis of everyday life: squats and youth houses Anarchism mutates according to time, place, and circumstances, so any attempt to set out a definitive discussion of praxis is simply doomed to fail. Anarcho-punks engage in a wide array of social practices that defy easy

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categorization. But, it is possible to roughly outline a number of important practices as they relate to certain elements of the punk DIY culture discussed earlier. Many local anarcho-punk scenes are anchored by squats, youth houses, or anarchist centers. This is particularly true in many Western European countries, but there is a great degree of variation not the least because of different municipal laws concerning trespassing and the rights of squatters. For example, Scottish laws on trespassing and squatting are different to English ones, so there are virtually no squats in Scotland. Currently the anarcho-punk scene in Edinburgh is anchored by a “House of Crust” where several active scene organizers live legally. While the early London punk scene was nurtured by the existence of various squats, the New York scene wasn’t. It should be stressed that there is considerable variation around the globe concerning squatting. This is often related to the degree to which a country has historically affirmed the social and human rights of its citizenry. For example, Scandinavian politicians have tended to safeguard youth culture and, as such, there are examples of the government “gifting” youth houses in keeping with accepted practices of the welfare state. This is quite different from government attitudes towards squatting in places such as Spain, Greece, or Italy (a country in which several of my interview subjects were charged with “terrorism” for attempting to occupy a building). In other countries with a legacy of authoritarianism, squatters could be shot. So the discussion on squatting and youth houses needs to be tempered with an awareness that these experiences are not shared equally across the global anarcho-punk movement. In those parts of continental Europe where squats have been established, it has often been through anarcho-punks illegally occupying vacant buildings. Some squats are quite well established, having been taken over years earlier to gain a certain degree of permanence. Other squats, indeed I would suggest most squats, are far more temporary, existing for days, weeks, months, and maybe a few years before government authorities decide to evict the squatters. Squats are usually held collectively, though the numbers of occupants range enormously, from a mere handful to several dozen inhabitants. Often there is a fair degree of transiency in squats, as members come and go, though it is not unusual for there to be a “core” group that reside in the squat for longer periods of time. For example, Squat Milada in Prague, a self-declared “Point of Free Culture and Resistance,” was originally squatted in May 1998, but had a complete change of hands to a new community of squatters in September of that year. The types of buildings being squatted also vary greatly, from empty houses to abandoned office buildings to derelict factories.41 Where squats exist, they often serve as a central focal point for local anarcho-punk scenes by providing a safe-space for anarcho-punks to

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congregate, sleep, eat, and socialize. Many squats also function as important sites of DIY cultural production. For example, the Polish squat Wroclaw (run by the CRK collective) houses an independent radio station, printing press, rehearsal spaces, art studios, screen printing workroom, and recording studio, as well as a café and a Food Not Bombs (interview May 19, 2009). In this way, squats/youth houses provide important resources for establishing and nurturing local scenes and local community activism. Squats also provide the important role of connecting local scenes to global networks. Squats offer space to sleep for “fellow travelers,” and many put on regular shows, workshops, art showings, and so forth. Touring anarcho-punk bands frequently organize their tours via the squats. For example, a tour of Poland may include stops at squats like Zakazny, Krzyk, and DeCentrum. Crossing into Germany, one could play at Squat Køpi in Berlin before heading down to Squat Milada in Prague. Then one could spend several days, if not weeks, bouncing between numerous anarchopunk squats across Greece and Italy. One can also find youth houses in numerous European countries, particularly within established welfare states. These buildings have often been squatted, but not always. In most cases, these are not places for sleeping, but usually have some degree of legal recognition by the state as autonomous spaces for “youths” to use. Youth houses often feature (vegan) cafés, a bookstore, rehearsal space, office space for various organizations, and a performance area. In Oslo, for example, the Blitzhuset (“Blitz House”) has been an important focal point for the Scandinavian anarcho-punk scene. Blitzhuset was originally a building in downtown Oslo squatted in 1981. Government authorities evicted the squatters the following year, but they relocated to a new place with municipal approval. Despite the payment of symbolic rent to the city, in 2002 the city government, then run by the Conservative Party, put the house up for sale. In the face of massive protests, however, the government backed down and actually agreed to renovate the building. Blitzhuset contains a vegetarian café, an anarchist bookstore, practice rooms, a music hall, and the feminist radio station radiOrakel (interview May 24, 2008 and personal correspondence). There are also a number of anarcho-punk “open houses,” many formed along the lines of Crass’s Dial House, in which the space was run by the band but open to all who were willing to share in the responsibilities of its upkeep. One example of an open house is the Common Room in Bandung, Indonesia where DIY punks and metalheads hang out together. Indeed, there is a strong overlap between the DIY punk and metal scenes in Indonesia. Both scenes emerged around the same time, shared the same social–political agenda, and regarded the state as a common foe. Joking about the integration between metal and punk in Indonesia, Gustaff, an organizer at the Common Room, said, “We’ve become very postmodern now, where the sign and signifier have lost all original meaning” (interview

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FIGURE 7.2 Blitzhuset in Oslo, 2015 (photo by author).

May 20, 2013; see also Waksman 2009). Probably one of the smartest and most articulate punks I’ve ever met, Gustaff also explained the popularity of DIY punk in Indonesia by referring to French postmodern philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: “creativity is the product of poverty, not wealth.” Gustaff saw the purpose of DIY punk and metal in Indonesia to evoke political and societal change, drawing upon waves of angry youths looking for tools to express their thoughts and feelings, and he considered the Common Room open house to be instrumental in achieving that goal. In many ways, anarcho-punk squats/open houses/youth houses provide a physical manifestation of anarcho-punk praxis. They often represent local responses to unbridled real estate speculation, offering up an example of

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communal housing and self-managed social spaces as an alternative. They serve as visual markers—frequently covered with colorful graffiti to further attract attention—signaling that there are alternatives to the status quo. They also provide lived examples of anarchist principles being put into action as these houses actively work to realize the goal of creating alternative lifestyles devoid of hierarchies. While most squats/youth houses operate as autonomous, self-governed centers, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t rules. How each house decides to self-govern varies greatly. In some cases, like at Wroclaw and Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen, there are weekly meetings based on openness and consensus. Some houses/collectives prefer to reject what they regard as the oppressiveness of democracy and voting in favor of consensus building, while others opt for regular voting in order to emulate an idealized form of direct democracy. Other houses/collectives operate with much less structure, with individuals working on whatever projects they are interested in and seeking assistance from others as they see fit. Resources are shared according to the needs of various projects, reflecting the ideals of a gift economy. This practice usually involves individuals and small teams working within a set of constantly changing responsibilities. While there is a high degree of variation around procedures for decision-making, virtually every house/collective I have spoken with observed that their given decisionmaking structure remained fluid, adapting to the needs of the community. That is to say, there were no set rules about the rules. That said, one cannot help but be struck by the ubiquity of similar signs posted in almost every house/squat/collective I’ve visited: “Nazi-free zone,” “Macho-free zone,” and “Meat-free zone.” These signs raise the issue about the convergence of anarcho-punk and mainstream liberal/leftist political consensus. In some cases, I would suggest that these signs reflect a “safe” posturing around issues generally accepted by much of the wider society. In other cases where punk culture is characterized by the existence of large and active right-wing neo-Nazi factions, in parts of Eastern Europe for example, these can also be important declarations that might need to be violently defended. The point is not that these squats/youth houses have achieved an ideal situation devoid of hierarchies and exploitation. There are petty disputes and personal frictions that can often debilitate, if not completely destroy, the house/collective. Many discussants were quick to point out that their squats/ youth houses were not perfect, noting a wide array of problems in selfgovernance, not the least of which was trying to navigate personality disputes. But they also stressed that the making and maintaining of a collective was a process. Indeed, “project” was the term frequently employed, illustrating a sensitivity to ongoing struggle, revision, and reflexivity. In an examination of anarcho-punk squats/youth houses, it is worth revisiting Hakim Bey’s discussion of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ ) (2003; see also Halfacree 1999). These are sites that are beyond the control of normal societal constraints—be they laws, hierarchies, or

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traditional roles and expectations. Bey argues that today’s anarchists should reject the idea of a “permanent revolution” and instead engage in spontaneous acts of “rebellion” to create temporary zones of freedom (TAZ s) in the midst of ordinary life, throwing into relief how that life is marked by hierarchy, domination, and brutality. It should be noted that Bey would probably not consider squats/youth houses ideal TAZ s because they strive for greater permanence than he prefers. In speaking of the TAZ , Bey has argued that its “strength lies in its invisibility—the State cannot recognize it because History has no definition of it. As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again invisible because undefinable in terms of the Spectacle” (2003: 99). Squats/youth houses strive to be quite visible manifestations of rebellion, regardless of how temporary the actual occupation may be. Yet, the anarchopunk squats and youth houses can function in many of the same ways as Bey’s TAZ . They are material disruptions of the status quo. They point a middle finger at established societal norms, to say nothing about legal practices concerning property ownership based on the fragmentation and commodification of space. As Laurence Davis (2010: 79) notes: “they [squatters] have committed themselves to short-run utopias, specific projects of urban transformation, and especially a whole revolutionary change of their own lives.” As a focal point for people engaging in alternative lifestyles, squats exist as beacons of strangeness, providing inspiration to like-minded travelers and possibly opening the eyes of others who hadn’t reflected on the stultifying power of societal norms. Equally important, they provide safe spaces for individuals to draw strength and succor from like-minded thinkers. I recall a conversation I had in Brussels with an anarcho-punk who was anxious to return to the Berlin squat he called home. Originally from Brussels, he was uncomfortable about being back, noting that he had neither a sense of belonging nor security in Brussels, where he spent much of the time either avoiding or confronting the police and other “Nazi scum” (interview with GP May 2, 2009). For him, and countless others, anarcho-punk squats/ youth houses provide a community where they are both protected and enriched. Squats/youth houses are also focal points where people can collectively create, learn, organize, and coordinate. For many, the squats/youth houses allow them the opportunity to learn from others within the scene. And given the transient nature of visitors to the squat/youth house (whether they be touring bands or individuals moving around aimlessly), they provide a significant function of networking, connecting disparate scenes within the larger global anarcho-punk culture. Likewise, the squats/youth houses also connect these individuals and groups with other like-minded travelers, from other anarchists to feminists to eco-warriors.

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DIY in daily business practice: record labels and distros Just as Crass is often credited with being the first anarcho-punk band, so too is Crass Records regarded as the first anarcho-punk label. The label was formed in direct response to censorship within the established music industry. The band’s 1978 debut The Feeding of the 5000 EP was to be released by the small independent label Small Wonder. But workers at the Irish pressing plant refused to manufacture the record because they considered the lyrics to the song “Reality Asylum” (listed as “Asylum” on the original sleeve) to be blasphemous. Small Wonder replaced the song with two minutes of silence entitled “The Sound of Free Speech” and released the EP. Afterwards, Crass decided to form their own label to ensure they had full editorial control over their material, releasing a single version of “Reality Asylum,” and a fully restored version of the EP a few years later. Chapter Five examined DIY punk record labels and distro networks, illustrating the ways in which they represent an important alternative to the corporate music industry. Most of the arguments in that chapter apply to anarcho-punk labels and distro networks as well. Perhaps the two most pronounced differences concern their organization and musical focus. Anarcho-punk labels, to the extent that they identify themselves as such, are often individual operations, but for those that are more than that, they tend to be organized as a collective, such as the G7 Welcoming Committee, a collectively owned-and-operated record label out of Winnipeg, Manitoba. They also differ in that they tend to promote music that is explicitly political. Some labels are also drawn to certain musical styles within anarcho-punk. For example, Plan-It-X Records is currently known for championing folkpunk while Profane Existence or Problem? Records favor the more abrasive crust style of punk. While Profane Existence is a well-established American record label affiliated with the zine of the same name, Problem? Records is a small one-person labor-of-love run out of Scotland. Most anarcho-punk labels are small affairs that may only put out a handful of releases over the course of a few years. In many ways, their mere existence points out that there is an alternative model to the profit-maximizing capitalist model of the corporate music industry. DIY anarcho-punk labels tend to invest in bands they like, not the ones that they think are going to make them rich. They tend to price their releases so that people can afford them, rather than worrying about increasing the profit margin (see Dunn 2012). In one of the few scholarly studies of anarcho-punk labels, Tim Gosling (2004) examined a handful of Anglo-American labels, seeking to understand why some fared better than others. Specifically he focused on three American labels: SST, Alternative Tentacles, and Dischord Records. SST was established in 1978 by Greg Ginn of Black Flag, Alternative Tentacles was originally set up by Jello Biafra and East Bay Ray of the Dead Kennedys in 1979, and Dischord Records was formed in 1980 by Ian MacKaye and Jeff

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Nelson originally of Teen Idles, then Minor Threat. The UK counterparts he examines are Crass Records, Spiderleg, and Bluurg. Spiderleg was established by Flux of Pink Indians in 1981 after they acquired the skills and capital from working with Crass Records. Bluurg was founded by the British anarcho-punk band the Subhumans (different from the Canadian band of the same name), who released their first album on Spiderleg. For the sake of argument, I will ignore the rather questionable claim that SST is an anarcho-punk label. Regardless, Gosling argues that the American labels have clearly out-performed their British compatriots. His conclusion is that the UK anarcho-punk labels had a harder time succeeding because American entrepreneurial culture was more conducive than British class consciousness (2004: 176–7). Yet, Gosling seems to be judging the “success” of an anarcho-punk label not on their own terms, but through the corporate mentality of commercial capitalism. Specifically, he is interested in whether or not a label had a lengthy existence, got bigger, and branched into other areas of money-making (2004: 173). That seems to be an unfair and misguided move. In the case of the UK labels, the Crass Label directly influenced the creation of Spiderleg. Crass released Flux of Pink Indians’ debut, but quite purposively were working to give Flux (and other bands) the experience and financial ability for them to start their own labels and release their own music in the future. Flux of Pink Indians then released the Subhumans and helped that band form their own Bluurg label. There was a clear and explicit transmission of knowledge and resources concerning how to release your own music that was at the core of these anarcho-punk labels. This initial role-modeling inspired countless other anarcho-punk DIY record labels and distros, who then turned around and influenced others. Roddy of Problem? Records recalls picking up a Discharge record that provided him with the instructions on how to start his own label, which he then did (interview May 19, 2009). A label’s longevity and activity are sometimes a sign of capital accumulation, but not always. Record labels sometimes go through slowdowns, experiencing more down time but still remaining active. Ultimately, it is worth reflecting on what the goal of a label is: quantity versus quality? Commerce versus ideas? Perhaps the best measurement of success for an anarcho-punk record label isn’t how long they have survived, but rather how many bands and labels they have inspired. Given the existence of hundreds of anarcho-punk labels, the evidence seems to suggest that the message of self-reliance has been quite successfully sent and received. Of course, running a label/distro is extremely hard work. As I discussed in Chapter Five, it is both labor- and time-intensive, with little-to-no economic benefits. Because many of these labels are small, personal endeavors, individuals can quickly become over-whelmed and burnt out. And more often than not, these DIY enterprises can become serious moneylosing affairs. Since Gosling wrote his comparative analysis of those six

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Anglo-American labels, both Alternative Tentacles and SST have experienced serious challenges, relying heavily on sales from their back catalog as opposed to releasing new material. Like other independent labels, such as Berkeley’s Lookout! and Chicago’s Touch and Go Records (both of which were tied to major corporate distribution networks), they became overwhelmed by debt and back payments. There have been a number of high profile anarcho-punk bands that have signed to major label record companies in recent years, the two most notable being Chumbawamba and Anti-Flag, which yielded very mixed results. Indeed, as I discussed earlier in the book, the debate over signing to a major/ selling out the underground is a hot button issue for punks in general, one that becomes even more heated within anarcho-punk circles. It is worth recalling Walter Benjamin’s argument that a progressive cultural politics is not achieved through content, but via position. It is less about what you say, but how you say it. This is not to claim that content is unimportant. Punks pay attention to content and bands that proclaim to be anti-corporate but sign to major record labels should not be surprised that their original audience deserts them and their credibility is henceforth treated as suspect. Thus, the importance of DIY as a lived ethos for anarcho-punk communities.

Learning and cultural transfers: global anarcho-punk networks What is notable with many anarcho-punk musical releases is the global coordination around the music’s pressing and distribution. One can see this in the high degree of split releases and compilations, as well as joint releases from multiple bands, often from different countries. Sometimes this evolves out of bands being on tour together and wanting to have a joint release to sell at shows, but more often than not these releases represent like-minded bands pooling their resources, not just in the cost of making the record but also in the distribution networks each band and their scene has. For example, a Swedish anarcho-punk band may do a split release with a Czech band so that each band will circulate and promote the release via their own local/ regional networks. Thus, the Swedish band will get exposure in scenes and to audiences that they might not ordinarily have access to. Finally, these transnational releases are often used by anarcho-punk bands to explicitly critique the notion of nation-states and the fragmentation of the globe into discrete autonomous political spaces. Take, for example, the 2008 split release by Belarus’s Bagna and Denmark’s Skarpretter which is accompanied by the following statement: This split was released in April 2008. It is made by two bands from each their side of the Schengen border. There’s still iron curtains dividing our

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earth, and the only ones who are free to cross them are world leaders and multinational companies. Everybody else is forced to humbly ask the authorities to be allowed to cross borders. Some people because they have to flee from war and state terror, some because they want to visit their friends and family. We have been fortunate enough to make a lot of friends despite barbed wire, concrete walls and insane visa rules. The Bagna crew is some of these friends and this release is something we talked about doing ever since we visited them in Belarus in 2006. This piece of vinyl is only a very small “fuck you” to the system that tries to divide us in so many ways. But it’s a “fuck you” nevertheless, a sincere one. Fuck borders & walls, may they all crumble and fall. This transnational cooperation is not just limited to bands coming together on vinyl or CD, but often permeates the entirety of anarcho-punk’s musical production and distribution. Anarcho-punk bands often use multiple record labels from around the globe on any given release. For example, a band like Oi Polloi intentionally releases their music on multiple media (CD, vinyl, and cassette) through different labels to reach a wider global audience that may have limited access to different technologies, but also ensure all their eggs are not in one basket. As Deek notes, “It’s good to work with lots of different ones [labels] in lots of different countries because if they have contacts they can trade the records. And if something happens with one of them—say someone’s life falls apart or they get sent to jail or something—it doesn’t mean you’re suddenly in the shit because all your stuff is tied up” (interview April 20, 2009). From the record label’s perspective, this coordination makes good financial sense. The cost of pressing is shared and, given that the labels involved are usual in different countries, each label can work through their immediate and established distribution networks, while being exposed to new audiences through the distribution carried out by the other label. Through this global coordination, links between bands, labels, and scenes are formed and solidified, but knowledge and culture is also transferred. Bands returning from tour will often have picked up new ideas about music, social practices, and political activism while on the road. For instance, the introduction of an anarchist vegan café in Edinburgh was inspired by seeing similar cafés at youth houses while Oi Polloi was on tour. Others share strategies for organizing political demonstrations and struggling against local fascist groups. Of course, the flows across these global networks are usually uneven, particularly given that bands from the developing world have significant challenges to touring in the US and Europe. Yet it is important to recognize that these networks represent an alternative flow of communication and ideas outside the domain of corporate capitalism. Anarcho-punk scenes are linked in multiple ways, all of which are grounded in the DIY, anti-status quo ethos of punk, from the band

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on tour to the independent traveling squat-hopper, from cassette distribution done through hand-traded zines to “gatherings of the tribes” meetings held underground. Through these linkages, local scenes interact with geographically distant like-minded scenes to shape and re-shape the global anarcho-punk scene. One of the visual markers of the global anarcho-punk scene can be found in the prevalence of a particular fashion sense: the black hoodie, black shirt, black cargo pants, and black boots. Many point to Crass as the originator of this fashion style, as the band decided to all dress in black during gigs as a statement against the “punk uniform” that was then becoming dominant in the UK punk scene, namely the Mohawk, studded leather jacket, bondage pants, and so forth. The band found it ironic that this anti-uniform quickly became adopted as the anarcho-punk uniform (see Berger 2006). But the source of this fashion also comes from the Black Bloc, which emerged in the 1980s. Black Bloc is often used to refer to a group of activists, but it is probably best conceived of as a tactic. In the early 1980s, participants attending anti-nuclear demonstrations began dressing in all black clothes, with ski masks, and occasionally protective helmets. The decision to wear all black, as with the mask, was to avoid being identified by authorities. As anti-globalization demonstrations increased in the 1990s and authorities increased their surveillance technologies, the use of this tactic increased across the globe. Again, it was the case where information about a successful tactic was transferred from its original local scene (in this case, Germany) to other scenes around the world. But the all-black clothing was also intended to convey the image of solidarity and strength. Nine thousand masks were distributed prior to the June 18, 1999 Carnival Against Capitalism, a demo that wrecked havoc on the financial district of central London, with the following message: “Our masks are not to conceal our identity but to reveal it . . . Today we shall give this resistance a face; for by putting on our masks we reveal our unity; and by raising our voices in the street together, we speak our anger at the facelessness of power” (quoted in Young 2001). Indeed, the Crass/Black Bloc-inspired look of many anarcho-punks serves as a visible marker for group solidarity. But it can also be oppressive and many anarcho-punks I’ve spoken with make a point of not looking like stereotypical punks or anarchists. In fact, there is currently a trend growing across anarcho-punk scenes to adopt more non-descript clothing and hairstyles. Again, this represents an idea spread through the various informal networks that help make up the global anarcho-punk community. Dressing in the Black Bloc style has opened many up to harassment from government authorities and/or attack from neo-Nazi groups. Likewise, if a demonstrator has a dayglo green Mohawk or long dreadlocks, she will be recognizable through surveillance techniques despite the black clothing and mask. So, in response, today’s anarcho-punks across the globe are increasingly looking

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less like the anarcho-punks of the 1980s and 1990s. This is much less to do with changing fashion styles and more to do with sharing political tactics (see Crimethinc 2008).

Direct action: Punks With Rocks One of Skarpretter’s t-shirts has the picture of a fist holding a rock with the words “Punk Rock Won’t Change Anything. Punks With Rocks Will!” This advocacy of direct action is typical of anarcho-punk, but it also points to a site of considerable debate across the global community, namely the use of violence. The range of opinions is quite diverse, with some opting for total non-violent resistance to others advocating, and glorifying, the use of violence against specific targets, such as corporate property (i.e. a McDonald’s restaurant or Nike store) and, of course, the police. This range of opinions came to the forefront within the Danish anarchopunk community around the eviction of Ungdomshuset, the anarcho-punk youth house in Copenhagen, and the subsequent struggle to get a new building. When it became apparent that the Copenhagen government was going to move against the house for a forceful eviction, there were discussions on how best to resist the move. Some wanted to employ non-violent resistance while others advocated barricading themselves into the building

FIGURE 7.3 Illustration by Adam of Skarpretter (used with permission).

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for a sustained fight against the police. In the end, there was a consensus for everyone to engage in the type of resistance they felt most comfortable with. When the police eventually moved against the house on March 1, 2007, they had to contend with the handful of people who had barricaded themselves in the building and who, according to the police, were armed with Molotov cocktails and fireworks. These activists (including two members of Skarpretter) were arrested and were sentenced to eighteen months in prison. In the aftermath of the eviction and the riots that immediately followed, the members of the youth house and their supporters again debated how to best pressure the government to give them a new house. Again, it was decided to adopt a wide range of strategies. Some individuals non-violently squatted other buildings in Copenhagen, quickly being evicted each time. Numerous non-violent demonstrations were held in the city, frequently shutting down traffic and businesses. The city was covered in graffiti and posters reminding passers-by about the struggle. Violent actions were also employed, including destruction of property (such as disrupting the multiple attempts to build on the original site of the now-razed youth house) and street battles with the police. Some citizens were turned off by the use of violence, which diminished some of their support. For example, several Danish college students I spoke with told me that they were originally sympathetic to the Ungdomshuset cause, but stopped their public support and attending non-violent rallies because they did not endorse or want to be associated with any acts of violence. Within the Danish anarcho-punk community, however, most saw the range of tactics employed as reflecting the diversity and pluralism of the community; a pluralism they felt should be celebrated and defended. But direct action does not necessarily have to be rooted in violence. At its core it is about DIY action. One of my favorite examples of this mentality comes from the long-running Jakarta anarcho-punk band Marjinal. Putting words into action, Marjinal has been instrumental in supporting not only the DIY punk scene but also other marginalized groups within Indonesian society, from local farmers to street youths. As mentioned in Chapter Three, one of their most well-known practices is teaching street kids how to play ukulele and guitar so that they can busk for money. They also help coordinate support for local farmers, from planting, harvesting, and distribution. For groups such as Marjinal, they are putting the ethos of DIY punk and political strategies of anarchism into action at the individual level, in a highly transformative way, shifting beyond mere survival strategies to selfsufficiency and personal empowerment.

Anarcho-punk as lifestyle anarchism? No discussion of anarcho-punks, especially one that draws upon the arguments of Hakim Bey, would be complete without an engagement of the

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scathing critique waged by Murray Bookchin on “lifestyle anarchism.” Bookchin, who passed away in 2006 at the age of eighty-five, was an American anarchist, organizer, and author. Quite prolific throughout his life, in 1995 he published an influential polemic entitled Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. The arguments within have direct relevance to this chapter (and the overall book), so it is worth engaging them here. Bookchin begins the work by stipulating that anarchism has long contained a tension between contradictory impulses: a “personalistic commitment to individual autonomy and a collectivist commitment to social freedom” (1995: 4; emphasis in original). During much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the former was marginalized by mass socialist workers’ movements throughout industrial societies. But during the late twentieth century, Bookchin argues, Euro-American anarchism has been dominated by the spread of individualist anarchism, which he derisively labels “lifestyle anarchism.” For Bookchin, this development has been extremely harmful. As he writes: Ad hoc adventurism, personal bravura, an aversion to theory oddly akin to the antirational biases of postmodernism, celebrations of theoretical incoherence (pluralism), a basically apolitical and anti-organizational commitment to imagination, desire, and ecstasy, and an intensely selforiented enchantment of everyday life, reflect the toll that social reaction has taken on Euro-American anarchism over the past two decades. 1995: 9 The tension for Bookchin is between the pursuit of autonomy (focused on the self-sovereignty of the individual) and freedom (which interweaves the individual with the collective). He argues that Euro-American anarchists have forsaken organizing for the realization of collective freedom, and settled for self-realization informed by liberal individualism. As he asserts, “Today, what passes for anarchism in America and increasingly in Europe is little more than an introspective personalism that denigrates responsible social commitment; an encounter group variously renamed a ‘collective’ or an ‘affinity group’; a state of mind that arrogantly derides structure, organization, and public involvement; and a playground for juvenile antics” (1995: 10). He takes aim at a number of contemporary anarchist theorists, including Hakim Bey, whom he refers to as “one of the most unsavory examples of lifestyle anarchism” (1995: 20). Dismissing Bey’s idea of TAZ , Bookchin writes, “A TAZ , in effect, is not a revolt but precisely a simulation, an insurrection as lived in the imagination of a juvenile brain, a safe retreat into unreality” (1995: 24). Bookchin clearly prefers collectivist organizing and action, what he nostalgically calls “The Left That Was” in a companion essay within this short book. For him, it is through old-fashioned struggle

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and collectivism that radical change can be realized. Lifestyle anarchism is considered escapist and ultimately ineffectual. As he argues: “The bourgeoisie has nothing whatever to fear from such lifestyle declamations. With its aversion for institutions, mass-based organizations, its largely subcultural orientation, its moral decadence, its celebration of transience, and its rejection of programs, this kind of narcissistic anarchism is socially innocuous, often merely a safety valve for discontent toward the prevailing social order” (1995: 25). For Bookchin, the dichotomy between socialist anarchism and lifestyle anarchism is an unbridgeable divide with the latter eroding the former. As one might imagine, such a scathing polemic garnered significant attention among left-leaning intellectuals. Some applauded Bookchin’s attack on the anti-social(ist) currents of contemporary anarchism, and echoed his blaming of such currents for the movement’s failures. Others criticized his overly broad generalizations, pointing out that he combined so many disparate thinkers and movements under the label of “lifestyle anarchism” that it became a “polemic invention with no real explanatory value” (McQuinn 1997: 40). One critic dismissed Bookchin as a “grumpy old man,” noting that, “there’s no such thing as ‘lifestyle anarchism.’ There are only a lot of anarchists exploring a lot of ideas—a lot of different ideas— that Bookchin disapproves of” (Black 1997: 13). A number of observers pointed out the irony of Bookchin’s polemic, given what seems like his earlier advocacy of what might be considered lifestyle anarchism. In earlier works, Bookchin celebrated the countercultural movements of the 1960s, arguing that the liberation of everyday life was an essential component to anti-authoritarian revolutionary change. Bookchin had recognized that state and capitalism worked together to quantify and commodify all human relationships and destroy individual integrity and that the countercultural politics were a form of “revolutionary personalism” (Bookchin 1971). His earlier self had recognized that personal attempts to “live the revolution now” entailed “establishing alternative cultural institutions that ran parallel to the old world but had as little to do with it as possible” (Davis 2010: 65). As Laurence Davis points out, Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) praises the countercultural forces of his day—undoubtedly examples of “lifestyle anarchism”—as a form of prefigurative politics in which the seeds of a new way of life were being planted. Davis points this out not to show that Bookchin was being hypocritical (a claim several critics have made), but to underscore that Bookchin had long argued that such rebelliousness was not enough to lead to revolutionary change. For that, these acts of counterculture had to be coupled with more organized forms of politics. Without rehearsing the myriad critiques of Bookchin, I want to draw out three useful points. First, there is perhaps some utility to Bookchin’s critique, particularly his concern about the atomized egotism produced by

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capitalism. Throughout this work I have made a distinction between DIY punks and “punks,” or what others have often derisively labeled “fashion punks,” “parrot punks,” or “mall punks” referring to people who bought their “punk identity” at a mall outlet such as Hot Topic. Punk for these individuals is generally regarded as a commodity, a fashion choice, a lifestyle to be purchased within the capitalist marketplace; an affectation usually devoid of any intellectual and ethical commitment (which is not to say “punks” cannot become DIY punks over time). As such, Bookchin’s critique of the superficiality of capitalist-produced “lifestyles” might hold some analytical value. Unfortunately, any nuance in his analysis is lost by his clumsy and heavy-handed generalizations in which he lumps together anyone he dislikes into the category of “lifestyle anarchism,” stripping it of any explanatory value. Second, Bookchin creates a false and unproductive dichotomy between the individualist and collectivist tendencies of anarchism. Why frame the options as either/or? One of the insights of early Bookchin was his realization of the interconnectedness between the two impulses. Many anarchist theorists have pointed out that meaningful social change is ultimately rooted in a transformation of the individual. As Davis notes, “Yes, one can find numerous examples of purely narcissistic and hedonistic behaviour, but one can also find countless counter-examples of radical struggles that begin at the micro level but that promise or demand much wider social transformation” (2010: 78–9). Bookchin is forcing a stark dichotomy where there isn’t one, and thus erases the insights provided in his earlier writings regarding the transformative promise of countercultural movements. Perhaps a better conceptualization of the tension within anarchism is to view individualism and collectivism along a continuum. Doing so would allow one to plot anarcho-punks across the spectrum, rather than forcing them all into one pole. Doing so would also recognize the political potential of the middle ground, in which individuals engage in grassroots projects that address people’s immediate needs and help them to confront the sources of alienation in their everyday lives resulting in changes for larger social groups. This leads to the third point regarding Bookchin, namely his narrow vision of revolution as a singular watershed moment. Bookchin employs a “perfectionist conception of utopia and strictly time-bound understanding of revolution” (Davis 2010: 69). For Bookchin and other like-minded thinkers of anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-communism, revolution is often conceived as a one-time event that divides the domination-ridden prerevolutionary world from the post-revolutionary utopia. Many of the people he criticizes, such as Hakim Bey, have rejected that view in favor of understanding “revolution” (such as it is) as an ongoing, open-ended process over time. It is thus conceived more broadly in social terms, recognizing the need for the long process of attitudinal change and individual transformation rooted in the politics of daily life. If we move away from thinking about

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revolution as a utopian watershed moment towards a more nuanced understanding of the process of rebellion, one sees both the limitations of Bookchin’s polemic and the importance of resistance and rebellion in everyday life, particularly as practiced by the anarcho-punks discussed in this chapter.

Contradictions and shortcomings Anarcho-punk is not without its contradictions and criticisms. One common complaint aimed at anarcho-punk bands is the naivety of their lyrics. They often employ simplistic rhetoric in discussing complex political issues. Sometimes this simplicity is intentional. Oi Polloi, for example, is not known for the nuance of their lyrics, a point they often self-deprecatingly acknowledge on stage with an over-sized “lyric wheel” that randomly generates the verse, chorus, and topic of a song based on a variety of pat phrases (such as “Fuck” or “Down With” paired with “Nuclear Annihilation” or “Animal Abuse,” appended with the ubiquitous “Oi! Oi! Oi!”). Many anarcho-punk bands are self-consciously playful, like when the Jammy Dodgers sing on their anarchist anthem, “No Gods, No Masters” that “your moustache does not give you authority over me!” This represents the tactical employment of humor and clichés to make a point and get a subversive message across. In some cases, what can appear to be a lack of critical analysis in the songs turns out to be a tactical move by a band that spends a great deal of time thinking about both the issues and the ways in which to draw people’s awareness to them through a song. While this is certainly not true of every anarcho-punk band, I have found it true of many. For example, I was privy to a discussion by Oi Polloi as they planned their set list for a 2010 show in Toronto. They spent several minutes reading the audience and the issues in that immediate space (namely, hypermasculinized and violent dancing by a handful of male skinheads, with several groups of women seemingly marginalized in the back of the venue), and structured their song list to win over the skinheads, diffuse their male posturing, and create a pluralistic space on the dance floor. They opened with some of their louder, fast tempo songs to engage the skinheads, employing onstage banter to establish a sense of camaraderie. Then they launched into “When Two Men Kiss,” a song about sexual tolerance, followed by several songs with feminist lyrical content. Doing so, they explicitly invited women and homosexuals to more actively occupy the dance floor, while maintaining a friendly rapport with the skinheads to ensure they didn’t leave or threaten anyone in the audience. The end result was a crowded venue where feelings of good-natured tolerance and understanding dominated. The choice and placement of each song was a tactical decision aimed at doing political work in that immediate time and place.

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Yet, it is equally true that there is a good deal of empty rhetoric and posturing in anarcho-punk. As noted at the outset, many punks use the term anarchism more as a catchphrase to show their punk “credibility” than to express any affinity to the political philosophies behind it. In numerous conversations with self-declared punks, they would casually use the term “anarchism” as if it was synonymous with “chaos” in an uncritical glorification of chaos and destruction. One may well suspect that this stance is connected to a certain degree of showboating, posturing, bravado, and machismo. Equally, the employment of the circle-A logo of the anarchist remains very much part of the “punk uniform” made and sold to a mass audience. One can go into major retail outlets that target the youth demographic and find expensive shirts, hats, and skateboard decks covered with the circle-A logo. Thus, anarchism continues to be used unreflectively as a fashion accessory for some in the “lifestyle punk” demographic. The connection between anarchism and punk portrayed in representations of “punk” within popular culture also helps produce a deluge of punk bands that uncritically sing about anarchism because they think that is what they assume punk bands are supposed to do. As Deek Allen of Oi Polloi jokes, “If you form a Heavy Metal band, you are supposed to sing about the devil. If you form a punk band, you are supposed to sing about anarchism” (interview April 20, 2009). It is many of these types of bands and fans who often produce politically themed songs that are striking in their naïvety. I recall a conversation with Anti-Flag who informed me that they were currently writing “their Darfur song.” When I asked them what they knew about the conflict in the Sudan, one admitted that they knew very little beyond what they had seen in the Western media (a media, it should be noted, that they have criticized in numerous songs) but that they felt an obligation to write a song about contemporary political issues, despite it would seem, their limited understanding of those issues. Returning to the larger anarcho-punk culture, one frequent criticism is that there is both a lack of consensus and no common plan for the future. While people may agree on the need to struggle against hierarchies, there is little consensus on what the ideal society will look like. As Mike Gunderloy, zinester and former editor of Factsheet Five, mused, “Most anarchists know what the true anarchist society would look like. They all disagree about it” (quoted in Duncombe 2008: 39). The tension between honoring individual thought while trying to build a political movement has been an eternal conundrum for anarchism and has fueled factional disputes among intellectuals (Williams 2007: 301–5). Yet, on the ground and the lived praxis of everyday life, these differences are often held as evidence of the rich diversity and pluralism of the anarcho-punk (and larger anarchist) culture. Williams suggests that the “sheer diversity of approaches to anarchist thought and action may well make it difficult for a unified movement to be identified, let alone built and sustained” (Williams 2007: 311). This begs the

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question of whether or not a unified movement is needed or even desired. Most anarcho-punks I’ve spoken with seem to reject, if not be repelled by, the idea of a “unified movement” for that seemed contrary to their own desires and practices. For them, building a “unified and sustained movement” smacks of moribund leftist political strategies. They also seem little troubled by the lack of a coherent course of action towards a commonly held goal. In general, they are not interested in the detailed planning of a new society, seemingly more concerned with finding pragmatic solutions and practices within their daily life. Thus, in the final analysis, anarcho-punks tend to understand that anarchism is not about a utopian end-point but more of perpetual process grounded in the praxis of everyday life.

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Punk Rock Won’t Change the World, It Already Has Arthur’s Seat is a large hill in the center of Edinburgh. I was climbing up its side with Deek Allen, the lead singer of Oi Polloi. We were carrying several bottles of cider to sit and conduct a slightly formal interview. On the way, we began discussing the transformative power of punk. “Can punk change the world? Absolutely!” he asserted. “It already has, and it does everyday.” As we continued up the hill, Deek insisted that we not frame the conversation about “changing the world” solely in terms of radical geopolitical shifts, such as governmental regime changes or social revolutions. Those are important aspects of life, but that wasn’t how most people experience their social worlds. He insisted that we think about how punk impacts people within the realm of their everyday life. Citing an example where a teenager was paralyzed after being attacked by fans of the white power neo-Nazi punk band Skrewdriver, Deek pointed out that undoubtedly punk changed that person’s life. If we were willing to accept the negative implications of punk’s influence—such as inspiring fans to engage in seemingly random acts of violence—we should also be able to recognize the positive contributions as well. Deek’s claims clearly resonate with the arguments throughout this book. Punk has changed the world, and continues to do so, at the individual, local, and global levels. Or, as Ian MacKaye proclaimed in the Prologue, “Punk won.” Over the past four decades, punk has become a global force that constructs oppositional identities, empowers local communities, and challenges corporate-led processes of globalization. It provides individuals and communities around the world with resources and opportunities for self-empowerment and resistance for their personal needs, in response to uniquely local challenges, and against the broader pressures of global capitalism. In multiple ways, punk challenges the status quo and also provides alternative ways of being. This book has provided numerous examples, from DIY record labels swimming against the rising tide of global 225

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corporate capitalism to Muslim Riot Grrrls in Indonesia resisting patriarchy, fundamentalism, and stifling social traditions. The personal, local, and global are not separate levels, unconnected from each other. Politics and economics may appear as distant, uncontrolled, alien forces in our daily lives, but they are not. There is a multiplicity of “worlds” that make up our social reality. These are interconnected and layered upon each other, from the individual to the local to the global. We inhabit and traverse multiple worlds at any given moment. Deek’s point reflects this, noting that as individuals we are often navigating the worlds of closest proximity. Thus, changes on those immediate levels can have quite profound implications for individuals. Think of the case of a building collapse, such as the one that occurred in 2013 when the Dhaka garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed killing over a thousand individuals. The world’s geopolitical situation might have been unchanged, but the worlds of the survivors and the families of the victims were profoundly altered. Deek’s observations were not to relegate the implications of DIY punk exclusively to the level of the individual. In fact, our discussion on Arthur’s Seat then turned to a recounting of the profound impact punk has had across local scenes, national contexts, and at the global level—citing many of the examples that have been recounted throughout this book, from punks empowered through queercore to anarcho-punk collectives organizing antisectarian activists in Belfast. Beginning at the level of the individual allows us to appreciate the transformative power of punk at the level where it is most immediate. But that level also informs and transforms other levels, such as the local, national, and global. As I noted at the outset of the book, alienation has become one of the defining aspects of our modern society. Individuals are led to believe that they are powerless in the face of social, economic, and political forces beyond our control. This is one of the significant ways power operates in our society: convincing people that they are powerless to change the worlds around them. The result is the idea that people are merely passive inhabitants of a world made and run by external forces. DIY punk should be understood as a process of disalienation, self-empowerment, resistance, and rebellion against these forces. And it functions across the multiplicity of worlds that we inhabit. DIY punks challenge and re-imagine their immediate surroundings, affecting social attitudes about sexism, racism, homophobia, and more. Local scenes have come together through DIY punk to reject the forces of alienation and control, whether it was in Belfast, Bandung, or postsuburbia San Pedro. Across the globe, these individuals and communities resist corporate capitalism and the related stultifying, alienating processes of globalization that turns everything into a commodity and everyone into a passive consumer. But DIY punk does not just offer tools for resistance, it also provides the means to imagine and realize alternative ways of living and acting in the multiple worlds of our making.

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In 1995, French scholar Pierre Hardot published his masterpiece What Is Ancient Philosophy? (2002). By posing that question, Hardot attempted to give a comprehensive answer that drew together a diverse array of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Ultimately, his answer was quite simple: those thinkers were trying to transform people’s ways of perceiving and being in the world, not just by what they said but what they did. Just as Socrates famously claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living, Hardot shows that ancient philosophy was not merely about ideas, but a way of life in which those ideas were put into practice. Hopefully this book has shown that the same is true for DIY punk. Does that mean that someone like Todd Congelliere, owner of Recess Records and the brains behind such bands as Toys That Kill and F.Y.P, is on par with Socrates? Maybe not. But they both represent a way of being that not only challenges the status quo, but illustrates alternative ways of being that inspire others. As a teenager, Congelliere was a professional skateboarder who got into punk through the skate scene, listening to Black Flag and 7 Seconds tapes while practicing. Since then, he has formed numerous bands, founded Recess Records out of his bedroom in 1989, and later opened Clown Sound recording studio. For several decades he has produced his own culture, and helped others produce and release their own as well. His bands and label are inspirational; profound examples of the everyday politics of DIY punk put into action. Socrates and the ancient Greeks asked what life would be like if we lived our life more intentionally and thoughtfully. They sought to realize their answers through schools and their dialectical discussions. A critic of the status quo and a threat by example, Socrates was convicted of corrupting the youth and executed. Punks like Congelliere and others have asked what culture would look like if the artists and fans were in control, didn’t try to profit off it, but instead tried to nurture greater personal expression and greater freedom. The previous chapters have provided examples of how their answers have been realized. And while no one has forced Congelliere to drink poison hemlock yet, it is worth noting the degree of violence and repression punks have faced around the world over the past several decades, from the Slits’ Ari Up being stabbed on the street to Indonesians being imprisoned for being punk. A conclusion for a book like this should probably pose a few questions along the lines of “Where do we go from here?” or “What does the future hold?” Yet, such questions are not easy to answer, for who really knows what the future holds? Ultimately, DIY punks, both as individuals and groups of individuals working together, will provide new and creative answers to the questions and problems that will emerge. And they will undoubtedly face challenges that I probably cannot imagine at this point, such being the beauty and unpredictability of life. One thing for certain,

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however, is that they will continue to face an onslaught of forces attempting to appropriate and commodify. Beyond that, local scenes will come and go. Existing ones will mutate and evolve with their shape, composition, and tenor changing over time. Some will become dormant, while new local scenes will emerge, informed both by their own local needs and realities and by their interactions with global DIY punk networks. And those local scenes will navigate an onslaught of forces attempting to appropriate and commodify. Likewise, individuals will come and go. Some DIY punks will get grayer and flabbier, but will still remain active agents in their scenes. Some may drop out of the scene but keep the DIY, anti-status quo ethos close to their heart, letting them be their guiding principles throughout life. Sometimes those principles may be more pronounced than at other times. Others may turn their back on the scene, likely to explain their actions by claiming to have “grown out of their punk phase.” Perhaps such claims will betray the superficiality of their initial investment in the scene, while others may enact a break from the scene based on a personal trauma or changing life conditions. New technologies will undoubtedly emerge that will impact record labels and zinesters, creating new obstacles and/or opportunities. The death of vinyl and print (like punk itself) has been trumpeted several times in my life, so I would not be so foolish as to assume an actual corpse will emerge anytime soon. But neither do I assume their immortality. In my own life, I have owned music on a wide variety of media: 8-tracks, cassette tapes, vinyl, CD s, mini-discs, and MP 3 players. As such, I know better than to presume to know how people will be listening to music in the next forty years, let alone twenty. Yet, regardless of how punk music, writings, and other artistic expressions are circulated, they will certainly face an onslaught of the forces seeking to appropriate and commodify. Punk music will evolve, as it has over the past four decades. New musical styles will be incorporated, leading to new subgenres as well as the resurrection of past ones (is everybody ready for ska’s fifth wave?). Existing bands will break up. New bands will emerge, forging into new uncharted grounds. While other new bands will re-interpret and re-tread already welltrodden ground. And, of course, a few old bands will re-unite, perhaps inspired to break new ground or to just bask in nostalgia. But ultimately the music that is, has been, and will be produced—as important and inspirational as it may be—is just the soundtrack for the much larger social phenomenon of DIY punk. And that social phenomenon will continue to attract new adherents searching for ways in which they can resist and rebel against the onslaught of the forces in their lives seeking to appropriate, commodify, alienate, and control. People and communities around the globe will continue to draw strength from DIY punk as they create new worlds of their making, forging alternative ways of thinking and being. Continuing to prove that punk matters.

NOTES

1 The following paragraph is insightful as well: “I stopped trying to define Punk around the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. They aren’t so far removed as you’d think. Both began in tremendous bursts of truth and vitality but seem to have lost something along the way—the energy, perhaps, that comes with knowing the world has never seen such positive force and fury and never would again. Both have suffered from sell-outs and hypocrites, but also from true believers whose devotion had crippled their creative drive. Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing can be further from the truth” (Knight 2004: 7). 2 For example, their song “Melting Pot” opens with the line: “I thought I lived in America, not Mexico, Africa, or Vietnam.” 3 This narrative history of the band is compiled from numerous interviews conducted with the band, some of which appear in the documentary film My Life is Great: The Stevie Stiletto Story (2009) that I directed and produced. All lyrics quoted with permission. 4 The original members of Riot Grrrl DC included Allison Wolfe, Erika Reinstein, May Summer, Joanna Burgess, Mary Fondriest, Claudia VonVocano, Ananda, Morgan Daniels, Kristen Thompson, and Sarah Stolfa, while members of Riot Grrrl Olympia included Danni Sharkey, Corin Tucker, Tracy Sawyer, Kathleen Hanna, Becca Albee, Wendy Alboro, Angie Hart, Misty Farrel, and Nomy Lamm. 5 Though she is no longer active in the scene, Summer reflected on the impact Riot Grrrl continues to have on her: “Riot Grrrl majorly shapes the way I think. Working so hard to resist the internalization of self-defeat had positive, lasting effects on my self-confidence and my ability to achieve. The group support I felt processing trauma at Riot Grrrl meetings helped me then, and now, to assert myself in interpersonal and romantic relationships. Riot Grrrl taught me not to fear being combative and not to be ashamed of expressing myself and of being emotional. Doing zine writing and Riot Grrrl press was also liberating for me because I had had poor grades in high school and, probably, a learning disability. My terrible spelling and the Ds and Fs I got in high school were frustrating and embarrassing. They also made my college prospects dim. Had I not met Riot Grrrls my last year of high school and been encouraged by them to apply to an alternative college 3,000 miles away from home, Evergreen, I may not have gone to college at all. I also may not have gained the writing confidence I now have had I not published first in zines, where spelling and punctuation really did not matter. Riot Grrrl taught me to 229

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constantly examine the power structures that influence my behavior and the behavior of others as well. I left Riot Grrrl to pursue my studies of LatinAmerican literature, however, my studies returned to women and feminism in graduate school where I focused on first-wave feminist playwrights in Argentina, many of whom published in small, DIY, publications that look strikingly like our Riot Grrrl Zines a century later” (personal correspondence March 14, 2011). 6 Two worthwhile documentary films about the emergence of the queercore movement are Queercore: A Punk-U-Mentary (1997), directed by Scott Treleaven, and Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band (2008), directed by Michael Carmona. 7 For a sustained discussion of issues regarding transgender and punk, see Razorcake issue #86 (2015). 8 While I treat straight edge as a form of punk, some participants consider it to be separate from punk. For those, it is often held that straight edge was as much a rejection of punk culture as it was a continuation. For example, Peter Russo recalls, “most of our friends bought into the straight edge lifestyle (positive peer pressure), punk was far too self-destructive. We weren’t dirty, we were middle-class, and playing dress up seemed ridiculous. The ‘punk kids’ in our town were all losers who did terrible bands and had no credibility” (personal correspondence March 24, 2007). 9 A good source of information on this community can be found at http://www. afropunk.com/. For good discussions of race in punk, see Duncombe and Tremblay 2011; Nguyen 2012. 10 The title of this chapter is inspired by the Swedish label Kranium Records’ excellent compilation series of the same name. 11 For an excellent documentary on the development of the Basque DIY punk scene, see Salda Badago (2001), directed by Eriz Zapirain. Available at https://vimeo.com/16649768. 12 Regarding the early London scene, see Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming (2002 [1991]), John Lydon’s Rotten (1994), and Viv Albertine’s Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys (2014). Covering the early New York City scene, see Legs McNeil and Gillan McCain’s Please Kill Me (1996) and Will Hermes’s Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (2012). For the Washington, DC scene, see Dance of Days by Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins (2001). For the emergence and evolution of the Los Angeles scene(s), see Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen’s We Got the Neutron Bomb (2001), Alice Bag’s Violence Girl (2011), and Dewar MacLeod’s Kids of the Black Hole (2010). For San Francisco, see Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor’s Gimme Something Better (2009), James Stark’s Punk ’77 (2006), and Alfie Kulzick’s Chatterbox (2004). And for the emerging punk scene in San Pedro, CA, see Craig Ibarra Wailing of a Town (2015). 13 See If It Ain’t Cheap, It Ain’t Punk, a documentary about the Plan-It-X fest, directed by Eric Ayotte and Joe Biel (2010). 14 These acronyms refer to the Irish Republican Army, Ulster Defence Association, Irish National Liberation Army, Ulster Volunteer Force, Royal Ulster

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Constabulary, and Ulster Defence Regiment, some of the armed forces involved in the Northern Ireland conflict. 15 While punk was circulated via cassettes, censorship and state control also led to ingenious ways of bootlegging music. For example, in the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe, punk records were often bootlegged onto discarded medical x-rays. Nicknamed “bones” or “ribs,” these records were usually of music banned by the communist state. They were a popular format for Soviet punk bands given the high cost and low availability of vinyl at the time, as well as the fact that punk was suppressed by the government. 16 As Haenfler points out, “New Social Movement scholars contend that collective identity is especially important in modern societies characterized by complex power relationships. In an increasingly individualized world, the New Social Movement assertion that the politicalization of everyday life becomes central to movement activity makes sense” (Haenfler 2006: 197). 17 It is worth noting that the film glosses over several serious concerns about class, race, and misogyny within the Long Island DIY punk scene. 18 See http://music.remezcla.com/2011/latin/peru-the-birthplace-of-punk-los-saicospunk-outlaw/ (accessed October 11, 2013); as well as the 2012 documentary Saicomania. 19 The title comes from a Ramones song written by Dee Dee Ramone and sung from the viewpoint of a young Nazi. I am clearly employing it in a different context here. 20 I would be remiss if I did not note that this song is off of their major label release Dear You, released in 1995 by Geffen shortly before the band broke-up. While it does not qualify as a DIY punk song (I’ll discuss the important distinctions at stake in the next chapter) it hopefully illustrates my point well. 21 A memorable exchange took place in front of the Soda Bar in San Diego during the 2013 Awesomefest DIY punk festival. A male in his early twenties was complaining that his band just got back from tour in debt. An older veteran musician laughed and said, “Of course! But you’re already planning your next tour aren’t you?” The kid said, “Yeah, we’re heading out in October for two weeks.” Everyone laughed. 22 The Mexican band Tijuana No! toured Spain and released a 2000 live album recorded in Balboa, but O’Connor’s general point is important nonetheless. 23 As the documentary Let’s Rock Again (2004, directed by Dick Rude) illustrates, Joe Strummer was quite aware of this and went to great lengths to bridge the performer/audience divide, including personally handing out fliers for his show that night and hanging out in the parking lot outside his show with young fans. 24 Seeing live punk bands like Stevie Stiletto was inspirational because suddenly I realized that I could do that. Inspired, I got a beat up guitar and convinced two friends to join me, one on a makeshift drum kit and the other on a saxophone (none of us could actually play our instruments). Calling ourselves the Red Army we crashed a party, set up in the living room, and started bashing on our instruments with me screaming spontaneous lyrics. We were invited to leave the party (supposedly after a chair was thrown through a window), but my life as a performing punk was established.

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25 There is no good, direct translation of “Pussy Riot” into Russian. My favorite translation of the band’s name is “uprising in my uterus.” 26 Coverage of the case can be found at http://www.thestar.com/News/article/ 236227 (accessed July 17, 2007). A good source of information about punk scenes across Latin America, and the repression they sometimes face, can be found at http://punkoutlaw.com/po09/2010/09/punktology-the-documentary/ (accessed February 26, 2015). 27 It is worth mentioning that Rev. Nørb also self-published this autobiography through his own Bulge Records. 28 Lookout later encountered serious financial problems and many of its bands sued for breach of contract, seeking to reclaim the masters of their recordings after Lookout failed to adequately compensate them. A number of their best selling bands left the label. When Green Day successfully rescinded their masters in 2005, Lookout was effectively crippled, laying off staff and halting all new releases. For a good history of Lookout Records, see Prested 2014. 29 It is worth noting that members of Rage Against the Machine have a long history of political activism and engagement, including guitarist Tom Morello’s work with Pacifica Radio and Axis of Justice, as well as his involvement in the 2012 occupation of Zuccotti Park. 30 One-stops are basically other major distribution companies that offer a wider range of products than just music, such as DVD s, clothing, and other merchandise. The big independent one-stops are currently Super-D (employeeowned and based out of Irvine, CA ), RevHQ, Edge (family-owned and based in Cleveland, OH ), and Cargo in the UK . 31 For a detailed discussion of the saga behind Lumberjack Mordam’s collapse, see the oral history published by Razorcake in issues #53 and #54. 32 Etymologically speaking, the word “magazine” comes from the Middle French word magasin, meaning “warehouse, depot, store,” which derived from the Arabic word Arabic makhazin, plural of makhzan, meaning “storehouse” (from khazana “to store up”). Its usage to convey a “storehouse of information” was probably first used in 1731 with the publication of a periodical journal entitled Gentleman’s Magazine. Thus, the division of “maga-” and “-zine” does not reflect any etymological logic. 33 Parts of this section draw from my (2012) co-authored article (with May Summer) “ ‘We ARE the Revolution’: Riot Grrrl Press, Girl Empowerment and DIY Self-Publishing,” Women’s Studies, 41(2). 34 The Riot Grrrl Collection, edited by Lisa Darms (2013), is a fantastic (but by no means definitive) collection of many influential Riot Grrrl zines. 35 In an email to me, Moore argued that zines are “a very good solution to certain problems plaguing other parts of the world. So the problems in Cambodia with the group of people I was working with were: that the traditional culture’s extremely disinterested in providing girls educational opportunities, much less allowing them voice to participate in culture; and that freedom of expression is heavily censored, self-censored, and punished. And to me, the solution is small, self-published, very personal projects that don’t catch national attention, that

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don’t go too far outside of girl culture, that are cute and sweet, but also formally deeply revolutionary—meaning profoundly different from what came before it, from what surrounds it. There isn’t even official publishing in Cambodia, so self-publishing is pretty crazy, on one hand. On the other hand, the girls were like—‘I get to draw! and share with my friends! This is great!’ Which, you know, was exactly how I felt when I started doing this when I was around their age. It was only later that I realized, Holy fuck, this has pretty interesting political implications” (personal correspondence, March 2007). 36 This section on Razorcake draws from multiple personal correspondence and conversations with Todd Taylor. 37 Of which, in the spirit of full-transparency, I am occasionally one. 38 The long-running punk zine Maximumrocknroll claims that it is also a not-for-profit punk zine, but there is a subtle distinction between MRR and Razorcake. MRR is under the umbrella of another non-profit organization, so they do not administer their own status. As Todd Taylor points out, “There is also a subtle difference between not-for-profit (lots of projects never make money, but that’s not a distinction made by the govt. It’s still a ‘for-profit’ business; it just didn’t generate income) and a registered non-profit charity that has to show where all the money is going and that the money is being allotted correctly. By law, no one person can directly benefit from profits made at Razorcake. All profits must be used to fulfill our mission statement.” 39 For transparency sake, it should be noted that I was one of them. A discussion of the sale and the issues involved can be found in Razorcake #71, including my own critical essay. 40 There is also a “Big Four” in academic publishing: Taylor & Francis (owned by Informa), John Wiley & Sons, Springer Science+Business Media, and Elsevier. When looking for a publisher for this book, I only considered independent academic presses. I eventually chose Bloomsbury because of their reputation and the personal connections I made with Matthew Kopel, the initial acquisition editor—a process not unlike working with an independent DIY record label. 41 Though it isn’t always up-to-date, there are important news items regarding the state of various squats across Europe posted on http://www.squat.net.

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Interviews cited Albini, Steve. March 1, 2007. Allen, Deek. April 20, 2009. Atkins, Jordan. July 29, 2010. Bailey, Danielle. September 1, 2013. Blitzhuset collective. May 24, 2008; personal correspondence. Bryant, Renae. October 31, 2010. Cappelletti, Ryan. July 23, 2010. Carswell, Sean. December 24, 2013; personal correspondence March 22, 2015. Cheppaikode, Ken. October 31, 2010. Clavin, Chris. Personal correspondence June 20, 2008, June 24, 2009, and November 7, 2013. Congelliere, Todd. October 14, 2010. CP [pseudonym]. May 28, 2009. CRK collective. May 19, 2009. Dicker, Glenn. July 29, 2010. Dietrich, Chuck. July 27, 2010. DiMatessa, Alex. August 14, 2010. Dirr, Jerry. August 22, 2010. Elewini, Ralph. March 17, 2011. Emery, Dan. July 22, 2010. Epoxy, Roxy. July 29, 2006. Esa, Anugrah. May 26–27, 2013. Esben (of Skarpretter). May 13, 2009. Fariza, Teuku. May 22, 2013; personal correspondence June 20, 2013. Funck, Bryan. February 19, 2010. GP [pseudonym]. May 2, 2009. Gustaff. May 20, 2013. Halabura, Michal. January 4, 2010. Hogue, Derek. October 14, 2010. Ignorant, Steve. January 20, 2011. Instigate, Andy. July 25, 2010. Ivanchikova, Alla. August 10, 2013. J-Lemonade. September 18, 2010. Kennedy, Sarah. Interviewed by May Summer Farnsworth, September 13, 2008. Lemuria, October 12, 2012. Lippincott, Bryon. September 26, 2010. Lynn, Richard. July 23, 2010. McClard, Kent. September 29, 2010. MacKaye, Ian. May 20, 2015. McKelvey, Ray. Multiple interviews and correspondence, 2001–2013.

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Martinez, Alex. Personal correspondence July 27, 2010. Mason, Chris. July 21, 2010. Moore, Anne Elizabeth. February 28, 2007 and May 7, 2008; personal correspondence, March 2007. Neithercut, Roddy. May 19, 2009. NoName, Ray. Personal correspondence May 7, 2009. Ost, David. Personal correspondence, July 2010. Ozzella, Sheena. October 12, 2012. Park, Mike. July 24, 2010. Pearson, Justin. August 8, 2010. Pezzati, Jeff. March 1, 2007. Phillips, Dan. July 30, 2010. Picciotto, Guy. March 30, 2007. Ploy, Marty. June 8, 2015. Pollitt, Tessa. May 28, 2015. Ray, Daniel. February 21, 2015. Reesucknotoz, Adith. May 20, 2013. Richardson, Sam. July 31, 2010. Rodrigue, Greg. February 21, 2015. Russo, Peter. Personal correspondence March 24, 2007. Rutherford, Will. July 21, 2010. Summer [Farnsworth], May. August 25, 2008; personal correspondence March 14, 2011. Taylor, Todd. Multiple personal correspondence, 2010–2015. Tenzenmen, Shaun. July 24, 2010. Them Martyrs. October 17, 2011. Thetic, Pat. May 12, 2005. TK [pseudonym]. May 2, 2009. Ucay. June 18, 2013. Vogrinc, Joze. Personal correspondence, July 2010. Voogt, Robert. August 21, 2010. Warbird, Bird. July 24, 2010. Yumikes. September 19, 2010.

250

INDEX

100 Club Punk Festival 112 48 Thrills 169 7 Seconds 4, 48, 227 730 Club 31 A-F Records 148 A&R (Artists and Repertoire) departments 141–2 Ace of Cups 70–1 Acts of Sedition 146 Adolescents 156 Adorno, Theodor 16 Afro-Punk 57 Akashic Books 19 Albertine, Viv 28, 39 Albini, Steve 32–3, 72, 135, 38, 141–2, 148 Alcohol/alocoholism 2, 22, 26, 31, 48–51, 85, 92, 159 Alienation, theories of 21, 27–8, 79, 179, 220, 226 All Or Nothing HC 143–4 Allen, Deek 38, 202–14, 222, 225–6 Alley Cats 133 Alternative Distribution Alliance (ADA ) 128, 152 Alternative Tentacles Records 134–5, 144, 211–13 Alternative Ulster zine 76–7 Alyokhona, Maria 117 Amazing Stories 163 Amazon.com 90, 154, 190 Anarchism 197–223 Anarcho-punk 197–223 Anarchy in the UK zine 169 Anti- Records 136 Anti-Corp Records 146, 151–2, 154 Anti-Flag 36, 138–9, 148, 213, 222

Anti-Seen 18, 37 Anti-status quo 36–8, 57–9, 178–89 Appadurai, Arjun 108–9 Appalachian Terror Unit 200 Apple Records 129 Ari Up 10, 227 Armed Joy 201 Armstrong, Tim 139 Ashford, Chris 132 Asia 25–6, 36, 63, 69, 92, 104, 108–9, 116, 125, 150, 177, 181, 191, 201 Asian Man Records 142, 146, 149, 157–8 Athens, GA 33, 70 Atkins, Jordan 155 Austin, TX 4, 44, 67 Autumn Rising 147 Avengers 39 Azerrad, Michael 48, 113–14, 135–6 Aztlan Underground 104 Babes, too many 115 Back Door Man 165 Bad Brains 7, 32, 135, 137 Bag, Alice 39–40, 65 n.12 Bags 39–40 Bailey, Danielle 115 Bailie, Stuart 77 Bakunin, Mikhail 201 Banda Aceh 25–6, 59, 81–2, 93–5, 109, 119–21, 124, 192 Bandung 83–4, 92–5, 120, 123–4, 207, 226 Barile, Al 4 Barnes & Noble Books 190 Barricada 61 Barter economies 88, 154–5 Barthes, Roland 53–4 251

252

INDEX

Basement Records 147, 153, 157 Basement shows 19, 88–91, 107, 111–12, 137 Basque 61–3, 62 n.11, 77, 91, 125 Bay Area 11, 31, 33, 105, 181, 194 Beastie Boys 83 Beatles 12, 129, 140 Beckham, David 129 Belfast 59, 63, 73–7, 112, 121, 125, 132, 226 Benjamin, Walter 140, 158, 171, 195, 213 Berlin 48, 200, 207, 210 Berlin, Thommy 29–32 Berlonski Zid 79 Bertelsmann 189–90 Between Resistance and Community 89, 111–12, 137 Bey, Hakim 55, 90–1, 195–6, 209–10, 218, 220 Biafra, Jello 135, 211 Big Action Records 157 Big Black 32, 72, 135, 138 Big Boys 4 BigTop Newsstand Services 184, 186–7; see also Indy Press Newsstand Services Bikini Kill (band) 41–2, 52–3, 115, 118, 120, 156, 171, 173 Bikini Kill (zine) 41–3, 171, 174 Bitch 184–5 Black Bloc 215 Black Flag 4, 31, 40, 89, 106, 113, 135, 138, 227 Black Randy 133 Blaine Crews Band 30 Bleyer, Jennifer 171–2, 176–7 Blitzhuset 207–8 Bloemfontein, South Africa 87, 125 Blondie 39 Bloomingdales 103 Bloomington, IL 71 Blush, Steven 72, 135 Bluurgh Records 212 Bold 48 Bomp! Records 39, 132, 156 Bonanno, Alfredo Maria 201 Bondage 169

Book Your Own Fucking Life 108 Bookchin, Murray 218–21 Bootlegged recordings 78, 78 n.15, 83, 106, 117 Boris the Sprinkler 127 Boston, MA 4, 48, 64, 134, 164 Bourdieu, Pierre 33, 66, 124 Bowie, David 98 Boys’R’Toys 120 Brat Attack 173 Bratmobile 41–2, 52, 173 Brazil 11, 67, 116, 122, 194–5 Bridge Nine Records 128, 149 Brown, David 132–3 Brownstein, Carrie 114–15 Brutal Attack 54 Bryant, Renae 143–4, 156–7 Brygada Kryzys 79 Bulldog Brigade 94 Bulson, Eric 163, 191–2, 194 Burgess, Joanna 41 n.4, 172 Bush, George W. 18, 35, 86, 195 Butchies 118 Butler, Michael 29–32 Buy Me 173 Buzz Media 188 Buzzcocks 14, 32, 130–2, 149 Cairo, IL 70–1, 92 Calamity Jane 42 Cambodia 177–8, 178 n.35 Cambodia Grrrl 177 Camus, Albert 38 Capitol Music Group 128 Cappelletti, Ryan 146, 154 Cappo, Ray 49 Caroline 128, 152 Carswell, Sean 185–6, 189–90 Cartel 130 CBGB s 44, 165 CBS Records 131–2, 137, 190 Censorship 15, 42, 78, 78 n.15, 101, 162, 178 n.35, 211 Cervenka, Exene 39 Cheppaikode, Ken 147 Cherub 173 Chi, Adrian 55–6 Chicago Independent 152

INDEX

Chicago, IL 45, 47–8, 65, 71–2, 176, 182, 213 Chomsky, Noam 184, 201 Christiania 70 Chrysalis Records 132 Chumbawamba 138, 213 Circle Jerks 156 Clash 2, 10–12, 28, 35, 74, 98, 102, 111–12, 131–2, 137, 139, 167, 195, 199–200 Clavin, Chris 58, 70–1, 92, 157, 202 Clem, Mitch 26, 55, 59 Cleveland, OH 27, 49, 152 n.30 Clitoris 173 Cobley, Paul 69 Cochran, Eddie 98 Cohen, Sara 65 Collision Course Records 157 Colombia 105, 125 Comic book nerds 152 Commitment Records 49–50, 144 Commodification 16, 51–7, 92–3, 132, 219 Common Room (Bandung) 207–8 Communism 77–81, 78 n.15 Community Records 144, 158 Compilation records 45, 61 n.10, 78, 86, 93, 133–4, 144–5, 156, 213 Conflict 58, 200, 202 Congelliere, Todd 146, 227 Copeland, Miles 129–30 Copenhagen 70, 209, 216–17 Cornell, Holly Duval 181 Counter-hegemony 98–9, 105–21, 124, 128–9, 158 County, Wayne (aka Jayne County) 44 Crabb, Cindy 192 Cramps 107, 112 Crass 12, 107, 129, 197–200, 202, 207, 211–12, 215 Crass Records 152, 211–12 Crawdaddy zine 164 Crippled Youth 49 CRK Collective 207 Crossley, Brian 101 Crossley, Nick 67–8 Cultural hybridity 121–5 Cultural imperialism 121–5

253

Cunts with Attitude 42–3 Curmudgeon 173 Dadaism 164, 197 Damage 165, 193–4 Damned 2, 10–11, 98, 107, 112, 130, 197 Dance of Days 65 n.12, 107 Dangerhouse Records 133 Davies, Matt 28 Davis, Laurence 210, 219–20 Davis, Paul M. 184 Dead Kennedys 31, 40, 82–3, 101, 135, 211 Deadbeats 133 Death 97 Deleuze, Giles 99–100, 118, 208 Deli 125 Derry/Londonderry 73–4, 76 Desjardins, Chris 132 Desperate Bicycles 130 Dezerter 77–9 Dial House 199, 207 Dicker, Glenn 153 Dickies 12 Dictators 12, 44 Dietrich, Chuck 147, 153 Dils 133 DiMatessa, Alex 143 Direct action 205, 216–17 Dirr, Jerry 147 Dirt Cult Records 146, 155 Dirtnap Records 147, 157 Disalienation, theories of 27–8 Discharge (band) 212 Discharge (zine) 173, 175 Dischord Records 1–8, 135, 143, 152, 211 Dishwasher Pete 162, 179 Distillers 120 Distribution of records 149–55 Distrust 30 DIY record labels, history of 129–36 Djamal, Sa’aduddin 81 DOA 200 Dohm, Kai 182 Donegan, Lonnie 13 Doom, Lorna 39

254

INDEX

Doombringer Records 33, 69, 142–3, 150–1 Dopamines 19 Doris 192 Dorsett, Samantha Jane 70 Dott 11 Dresch, Donna 45 Drugs/drug abuse 2, 7, 22, 31, 33, 48–51, 85, 92, 114, 185 Duncombe, Stephen 56–7, 160, 171, 178, 180, 195 Earth Crisis 48, 50 East Bay Ray 135, 211 Eastern Europe 36, 54–5, 78 n.15, 104, 117, 209 Ebullition distribution 77–81 Edinburgh 70, 91, 206, 214, 225 Elewini, Ralph 68 Elvis 12 Emancypunx Records 144, 146 Emery, Dan 146, 151–2, 154 EMI 130, 132, 138, 141, 197 Epitaph Records 128, 134, 136, 139, 152, 182 Epoxies 106 Epoxy, Roxy 106 Equal Vision 128 Eradicator Records 157 Esa, Anugrah 33, 69, 93–4, 142–3, 151 Eskorbuto 61 ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) 61–2 Evens 11, 90 Excuse 17 114 F.Y.P 146, 227 Facebook 108, 170 Factory Records 130–2 Factsheet Five 222 Fall 32, 112 Fallas del Sistema 200–1 Fancher, Lisa 39, 156 Fantastic Fanzine 43, 173 Fariza, Teuku 93, 105, 108 Fast Product 130–2 Fat Mike 86, 146 Fat Wreck 128, 134, 139, 146, 182 Fateman, Johanna 172

Fear 40 Feel It Records 143 Feminism 39–44, 51, 57, 88, 101, 116–20, 144, 156, 171–8, 198, 204, 207, 210, 221 Fest 70 Festival Vulva la Vida 116 Fields, theories of 33, 66, 71 Fifth Column 45 Fishnet Stockings 169 Flipside 159, 165, 181–2, 185, 188, 194 Flipside, Al 181–2 Floyd, Gary 44 Flux of Pink Indians 200, 212 Fondriest, Mary 41 n.4, 172, 175–6 Fontana 128, 152 Foo Fighters 83 Food Not Bombs 85, 207 Forgotten Generation 94, 123 Foucault, Michel 86 Franklin, Benjamin 163 Frontier Records 39, 133, 156 Fuck Geez 142 Fueled by Ramen Records 128 Fugazi 1–8, 12, 36, 93, 104, 106, 113, 136 Funck, Bryan 70 G7 Welcoming Committee Records 146, 152–3, 157, 211 Gainesville, FL 65, 70 Gatekeeping 16–18, 26, 59–60, 91 Gender 39–44, 49–51 Generation X 132 Germs 39, 132–3 Gessen, Masha 118 Gilman Street 11, 105 Ginn, Greg 135, 211 Ginoli, Jon 45, 47, 136, 147 Ginsberg, Allen 163 Girl Germs 172 Girly Mag 172 God Damn Doo Wop Band 11, 104 God Is My Co-Pilot 45 Good Vibrations 75, 132 Gordon, Kim 89 Gorilla Biscuits 48 Gorsky Press 189–90

INDEX

Gosling, Tim 211–12 Gottlieb, Joanne 172–4 Graham, Alastair 76 Gramsci, Antonio 104, 110, 128–9 Grave Mistake Records 143 Graves, Michael 18 Grazian, David 71 Green Day 9, 11, 45, 83, 104–5, 117, 135–7, 136 n.28 Grossberg, Lawrence 63, 92, 139–40 Grrrl Trouble 173 Grubacic, Andrej 204 Grunge 114 Guattari, Félix 99, 208 Guerrilla Girls 118 Gunderloy, Mike 222 Gurewitz, Greg 136 Habitus 33–6, 59, 66, 71, 109 Hachette Livre 190 Haenfler, Ross 49–51, 113 Halabura, Michal 78, 154–5 Halliday, Ayun 162 Hangnail 173 Hanna, Kathleen 41–3, 41 n.4, 52–3, 105, 115 Hardot, Pierre 227 Hardt, Michael 98, 128 Hare Krishna 49 Harp Bar 75 HarperCollins 190 Harris, Keith 64–6, 109, 122 Harron, Mary 97, 112 Harry, Debby 39 Heavens to Betsy 42, 45, 173 Heavy metal 29, 55–6, 67, 83–4, 92, 105, 109, 122, 152, 167, 207–8, 222 Hebdige, Dick 16, 19–20, 37–8, 53–4, 64, 165 Hegde, Radha 116, 120–1 Hegemony 104–5, 110–11, 124, 128 Hellcat Records 136, 139 Hermosa Beach, CA 40, 89 Herzainak 61 Hip-hop 29, 114 Hogue, Derek 146, 152–3 Hole 140 Holmstrom, John 13, 165–6, 170

255

Holytitclamps 45, 161 Homeless Dawg 95 Homocore 45–6 Homophobia 22, 44–8, 88, 175, 226 Homosexuality 39, 44–8, 221 Hook, Peter 112 Hooley, Terri 75 Hot Topic 11, 26, 186, 220 Houston, Penelope 39 Huggy Bear 39, 42 Huntington Beach, CA 34 Hurchalla, George 23, 135 Hynde, Chrissie 98 I Wanna Be Your Dog 169 I.C.H. 58–9 Iggy and the Stooges 29, 31, 68; see also Iggy Pop Ignorant, Steve 200 Imperial Can 58, 200 Independent Label Collective (ILC ) 153 Independent Press Association 184–5 Independent’s Day Media 182–3, 189 Indieglobalization 110–11, 158 Indonesia 25–6, 33, 49, 58–9, 63, 81–4, 92–5, 105, 108, 110, 119–21, 123, 137, 151, 180, 192, 207–8, 217, 226–7 Indy Press Newsstand Services 184 Informal circuits of exchange 84, 98–100, 105–11, 121, 192, 194, 205 Insted 48 Instigate Records 142, 157 Instigate, Andy 142, 157 Insurgent, Dave 202 Intentionally bad capitalists 155–8, 178–81, 189–90 Interpunk 154 IRA 73–5 Islam 9–10, 10 n.1, 32, 36, 49, 81–4, 92, 117, 119–21, 226 Israel 116, 195 iTunes 18, 90, 151 Ivanchikova, Alla 117–18 J-Lemonade 144, 146 Jabber 115

256

INDEX

Jacksonville, FL 28–32, 64, 67, 85, 113, 125 Jaded 173 Jakarta 69, 83–4, 93–4, 120, 125, 142, 151, 192, 217 Jam 132 Jammy Dodgers 221 Jawbreaker 26, 100, 100 n.1 JD 44–5 Jennings, Tom 45–6 Jigsaw 52 John, Elton 129 Jones, G.B. 44–5, 91 Jones, Mick 139 Jordan, Pete (see Dishwasher Pete) Joy Division 32 Kansalaistottelemattomuus 204 Karrer, Neal 31–2 Kennedy, Sarah 176 Kerouac, Jack 163 Kinko’s 172 Kiss Of Death Records 157 Klein, Naomi 54 Knife the Sympathy 147 Knight, Michael Muhammed 9–10, 10 n.1, 18 Kontra Sosial 93 Kortatu 61–2, 91 Krass Kepala 93 Kropotkin, Peter 201 Kruse, Holly 33 La Polla Records 61 LaBruce, Bruce 44–5, 91 Lacey, Anita 99–100 Laibach 79–80 Laing, Dave 122–3 Lärm 49 Larry-Bob 45, 161 Last Resort 94 Last, Bob 129–30 Latterman 89 Laughey, Dan 19 Le Tigre 115, 118, 172 Leblanc, Lauraine 40 Led Zeppelin 12, 100 Lee, Craig 39–40

Lemuria 55, 108, 149 Lentini, Pete 112 Leo, Ted 183 Leonard, Marion 100 LGBT community 39, 44–8, 85, 118; see also Queercore Lifestyle anarchism 204, 217–21 Lima, Perus 97 Limp Wrist 45 Lippincott, Bryon 157 Little magazines 163–4, 179, 191–2 Livid Records 157 London 2, 10–11, 27, 33, 37, 44 48, 54, 59, 63, 65 n.12, 67–9, 73, 75, 97–8, 101, 107, 112, 130, 167, 169, 191–4, 206, 215 London’s Burning 169 London’s Outrage 167 Long Island, NY 21, 65, 89–90, 89 n.17, 111–12, 137 Lookout! Records 103–4, 135, 136 n.28, 144, 147, 213 Los Angeles, CA 2, 34, 39–40, 44, 48–9, 65 n.12, 68–9, 72–3, 65, 89, 91, 97, 112, 132, 156, 164, 166, 169, 181, 185–6, 192 Los Muertos de Cristo 200, 202 Los Saicos 97 Lost ID 173 Love Bunny Press 189 Low Culture 146 Lumberjack Mordam 153, 153 n.31, 156 Luna 173 Lynn, Richard 157 MacKaye, Ian 1–8, 48, 63, 65, 106, 136, 139, 211–12, 225 MacLeod, Dewar 27–8, 64, 65 n.12 Mad Goat 95 Magon, Ricardo Flores 201 Makhno, Nestor 201 Malatesta, Enricos 201 Malaysia 109, 116, 192–3, 195 Malheureusement 169 Manchester 32, 39, 48, 67–8, 112, 125 Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall 32, 112

INDEX

Manitoba, Dick 44 Mannett, Martin 112 Manumission 180 Marcus, Greil 54 Marika 173 Marjinal 83, 217 Martin, Gavin 77 Martinez, Alex 36, 115 Marx, Karl 27, 64 Masculinity 34, 40–1, 49, 55, 69, 163, 221 Mason, Chris 146, 155 Maximumrocknroll (MRR ) 26, 31, 44–5, 108, 114, 134, 137–8, 181–4, 186 n.38, 188–9, 192, 194, 202 Mays, Lorne 32–3 MC 5 68, 98 McClard, Kent 154 MCD 61 McDonald, Henry 76 McKelvey, Ray 28–32 McLaren, Malcolm 16, 98, 139 McLoone, Martin 74–6 McNeil, Legs 65 n.12, 72, 165 MCR 142, 150–1 McRobbie, Angela 39 Melucci, Alberto 88 Mexico 63, 69, 109, 125, 200–1 Microcosm Press 189 Middle East 36, 63, 84, 125, 177 Minor Threat 1–8, 32, 48, 93, 113, 137, 212 Minutemen 113, 135 Miro, Jennifer 41 Miss America 176 Mitchell, Tony 124–5 Modern Method Records 134 Monroe, Alexei 79, 81 Montreal 68 Moore, Anne Elizabeth 41, 162, 177–8, 178 n.35, 184–5, 195 Moore, Ryan 37 Mordam Records 137, 140, 153, 256; see also Lumberjack Mordam Morello, Tom 140 n.29 Morley, Paul 112 Morrison, Patricia 39 Morrissey 112

257

Moscow 59, 117 MTV 102, 135 Multitude 98 Mute Records 128 Naked Raygun 72, 137 Naylor, Liz 39, 45 Negri, Antonio 98, 128 Neithercut, Roddy 33, 201, 212 Neo-Nazism 18, 36, 54–5, 209–10, 215, 225 Neon Christ 31 Neuman, Molly 41 Nevada, the girl from 29, 159 New Hormones Records 130 New Orleans, LA 67, 69–70, 125, 144 New Red Archives 148 New York City 2, 10–11, 13, 27, 37, 41, 44, 48, 54, 63, 65, 65 n.12, 72, 97–8, 107, 112, 162, 164–5, 167, 191–2, 206 New York Dolls 68, 98 New York Rocker 165, 169 Newbury Comics 134 NewsCorp 190 Newsweek 52, 54, 159 Nickt Nic Nie Wie (NNNW ) 78, 154–5 Nieuwe Koekrand 169 Nihilson, Deke 45 Nike 129, 140, 216 Nirvana 5, 83, 93, 104, 117, 135–6 No For An Anwer 48 No Idea Records 70, 153–4, 156 NOFX 25, 86, 136, 146, 195 Nolan, David 32 Nolan, Jerry 98 NoMeansNo 200 Non-profit tax status 110, 184, 186–9, 186 n.38 NoName 125 Northern Ireland 73–7, 75 n.14, 88, 112 Nothing Nice To Say 26, 59 Nuns 41 O! Kult 79 O’Brien, Lucy 39–40

258

INDEX

O’Connor, Alan 66, 69, 107, 109, 109 n.22, 125, 128, 155 O’Hara, Craig 18, 37 Obscenefest 87, 90 Obscenely Loud 87 Occupy Wall Street 38, 128 Offspring 136 Oi Polloi 38, 200, 202–3, 214, 221–2, 225 Olson, Mark 65 On the Might of Princes 137 On The Rag Records 143, 156–7 Opozicion 125 Oppositional identities 9, 28, 32–6, 38–51, 54–61, 225 Oslo, Norway 21, 207–8 Ost, David 78 Otroci Socializma 79 Our Band Could Be Your Life 113–14, 135 Outcasts 76 Outpunk (zine) 45, 144 Outpunk Records 45, 144–5 Ozzella, Sheena 149 Paine, Thomas 163 Pandora 151 Pankrti 79 Pansy Division 45, 45 n.6, 47, 136, 147 Paris Commune 201 Park, Mike 142, 146, 149, 158 Party Mix 173 Patterson, Fred 165–6 Pearson Books 190 Pearson, Justin 143, 146–7 Penguin Random House 190 Penguin Suit Records 146 Perry, Mark 15, 167–8, 170 Pezzati, Jeff 72 Phillips, Dan 153–4 Phillips, Frankie 31–2 Phillips, Sam 129 Phratry Records 147 Picciotto, Guy 36 Piche, John Xerxes 179 Pickles, Joanna 83–4 Pink House (Asheville, NC ) 90

Plan-It X Records 58, 70–1, 71 n.13, 157, 200, 202, 211 Ploeg, Joshua 47–8 Ploy, Marty 89, 107 Plugz 135 Poland 49, 77–8, 116, 200, 207 Political disobedience, theory of 38, 57, 62 Politics, high versus low 15–19 Pollitt, Tessa 10, 112 Polydor Records 132 Poopy Pants 33 Pop, Iggy 31, 98, 165; see also Iggy and the Stooges Portland, OR 35, 106, 115 Postsuburbia 27–8 Pouget, Emile 201 Pretenders 98 Prince, Liz 16–17 Problem? Records 211–12 Profane Existence (zine) 108, 165, 192, 205, 211 Profane Existence Records 200, 205, 211 Propagandhi 146, 200 Protex 76 Proudhon, Pierre 201 Public Image Ltd (PiL) 139 Punk 13, 97, 165–7, 169–70 Punk literary presses 189–90 Punk Planet (zine) 15, 37–8, 137, 177, 182–6, 188–9, 194 Punk Planet Books 189 PunkNews 188 Punks Before Profits Records 146, 154 Punktat 120 Punkvoter 86 Puppen 83 Pussy Riot 59, 109, 117–20, 118 n.25 Put Some Pussy in Your Punk 156 Putin, Vladimir 117–18 Queer identity 44–8, 57, 117, 144, 162, 173 Queercore 44–8, 45 n.6, 50, 57, 91, 175, 198, 226 Quit Whining 172

INDEX

Racism 18, 37, 42, 88, 226 Rage Against The Machine 140, 140 n.29 Raincoats 10–11, 39–40 Ramones 2, 4, 10, 12, 28, 32–3, 99 n.19, 101, 107, 112, 137, 139, 141, 165–7, 181 Ramones, Johnny 18, 141 Rancid 9, 136 Random House 189–90 Rape 173 Ray, Daniel 144 Razorcake (zine) 15, 102, 114, 140, 185–9, 192 Razorcake Records 147, 157 RCA Records 138–9 Reach and Rich Records 93 Reagan Youth 202 Reagan, Ronald 18, 30, 86 RealPunkRadio 156 Recess Records 146, 227 Record contracts 114, 132, 135, 145–9, 199 RED 128, 152 Red Army 30, 113 n.24 Redeye Distribution 153 Reed Elsevier 190 Reesucknotoz, Adith 94, 123 Refill Records 130 Regev, Motti 123–4 Reggae 10, 29, 98 Reilly, Doug 161 Reinstein, Erika 41 n.4, 43, 51–2, 172, 176 Replacements 113, 135 Reprise Records 135–6 Revelation Distribution 152 n.30, 153–4 Revelation Records 48, 137 Rezillos 132 Rhia, Donna 39 Rhizome 99–100 Richardson, Sam 143 Rimbaud, Penny 199–200 Riot Grrrl DC 41–2, 41 n.4, 172 Riot Grrrl NYC 41–2 Riot Grrrl Olympia 41–3, 41 n.4 Riot Grrrl Press 43 n.5, 53, 172–7, 195

259

Riot Grrrl zine 41–2 Riot Grrrls 20, 39–44, 43 n.5, 50–4, 58–9, 67, 100, 105, 114–21, 156, 170–9, 194–5, 198, 226 Riotic Records/Distro 83 Ripped & Torn 169 Rock Against Bush 86, 195 Rocket Records 129 Rodent Popsicle Records 144 Roderick, John 16–19 Rodrigue, Greg 144 Rodriguez, Sixto 100–1 ROIR 134 Rolling Stone 159, 180 Rolling Stones 12, 113 Rolling Stones Records 129 Rollins, Henry 89, 106, 138 Rotten, Johnny 13, 16, 65 n.12, 75–6, 102, 137–9, 197 Rotz Distribution 182, 185 Rough Trade 130–2, 169 Rudi 75–7 Rusk, Corey 4 Russo, Peter 48 n.8 Rutherford, Will 146 Saefullah, Hikmawan 84 Salt Lake City, UT 49 Samizdat 164 Samutsevich, Yekaterina 117 San Francisco, CA 31, 40–1, 44, 48, 65, 65 n.12, 113, 169, 181, 184, 193–4; see also Bay Area Sanctions 146 Sassen, Saskia 116 Satan Wears a Bra 172 Savage, Jon 65 n.12, 167 Scene, fragility 91–5 Scene, political implications 21, 73–91 Scene, theories about 63–73 Schwartz, Ruth 137, 140–1 Science fiction fanzines 161–5 Screamers 34 Screws 34 Scritti Politti 14–15 Search and Destroy 165, 169 Searching For Sugar Man 100–1 Seconds, Kevin 4

260

INDEX

Secretly Canadian Records 128 Sepultura 122 Seventeen 52, 54, 115 Sex Pistols 2, 4, 10–11, 13, 16, 28, 32, 37, 82, 97–8, 112, 130, 132, 137–9, 167, 169, 196, 197 Sexism 22–3, 43, 88, 75, 226 Sham 69 132 Shanghai River 18 Shariah Law 81–2 Sharkey, Feargal 76 Shaw, Greg 132, 164–5 Shellac 32, 72, 138 Shellshock Rock 75 Shit Creek 18 Shock & Awe 193 Sideburns 14, 169 Simon & Schuster 190 Sin Dios 200, 202 Sinker, Dan 15, 37–8, 182–5, 189 Sioux, Siouxsie 39, 132 Siouxsie and the Banshees 39–40, 132 Sire Records 137 Situationist International 54, 164 Ska 10, 67, 144, 228 Skankin’ Pickle 142 Skarpretter 54–5, 201–4, 213, 216–17 Skiffle 13 Skrewdriver 18, 54, 225 SKUC (Ljubanja student cultural center) 80–1 Skunks 67 Slash (zine) 132, 165, 169 Slash Records 132, 169 Sleater-Kinney 45, 114–15, 118 Slits 10–11, 28, 39–40, 104, 112, 227 Slovenia 79–81, 125 Small Wonder Records 131, 211 Smith, Jen 41 Smith, Mark E. 112 Smiths 32 Snakepit, Ben 15, 18 SNFU 31 Sniffin’ Glue 15, 165, 167–8, 170 Socrates 227 Sonic Youth 31, 83, 89, 113, 135 Sony Music Entertainment 102, 127–8, 139; see also Sony/BMG

Sony/BMG 93, 128, 138, 152 South Africa 15, 21, 25, 63, 87, 90, 100, 195 South Korea 105, 107 Spencer, Amy 13, 47, 160, 162, 165 Spiderleg Records 212 Spin 51–2, 54, 114, 180 Spiral Scratch 130–1 Spokenest 55 Spotify 151 Sprouse, Martin 158 Squat Køpi 207 Squat Milada 206–7 Squats, squatting 70, 108, 199, 202, 205–10, 206 n.41, 217 SS -20 77–8; see also Dezerter SSD 48 SST Records 135, 144, 211–13 Stalag 17 76 Star Gang 173 Step Forward Records 130 Stevie Stiletto [and the Switchblades] 28–32, 29 n.3, 113, 113 n.24 Stiff Little Fingers 76, 88, 132 Stiff Records 130 Stiletto, Stevie Ray (see Ray McKelvey) Stirner, Max 201 Stokes, Martin 65 Storey, John 16 Straight edge 48–51, 48 n.8, 144, 198 Stranglers 132 Straw, Will 64, 71–2, 122 Street, John 15–16, 19 Strummer, Joe 35, 111 n.23, 112, 139 Sub Pop Records 128 Subculture, theories of 37, 53, 57–8, 64–5 Subhmans (UK ) 212 Suharto 82–4, 92, 95 Suicidal Tendencies 156 Summer, May 41 n.4, 41 n.5, 43, 51, 170 n.33, 172–6, 195 Sumner, Bernard 112 Sun Records 129 Super Secret Records 157 Superman Is Dead 83, 93 Szemere, Anna 123

INDEX

Taqwacores 9–10 Taylor, Timothy 121 Taylor, Todd 15, 102, 140, 147, 185–6, 185 n.36 Team Dresch 42, 45, 118 Teen Idles 1–8, 135, 212 Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ ) 90–1, 209–10, 218 Tenzenmen Records 150 Tenzenmen, Shaun 150 Tesco Vee 4 Thatcher, Margaret 18 Them Martyrs 107 Thetic, Pat 36, 139, 148 This Bike is a Pipe Bomb 104, 200 Thompson, Stacy 36 Thomson/Reuters 190 Three.One.G. Records 143, 146–7 Thunders, Johnny 98 Tijuana No! 109 n.22 Tilt (Poland) 77 Tolokonnikova, Nadya 117 Tonpress 78–9 Toronto 27, 48, 65, 91, 221 Touch and Go (zine) 165 Touch and Go Records 213 Toys That Kill 146, 227 Transculturation 121–5 Tribe 8 42, 45 Troubles, The 73–7 Trustkill Records 128 TSOL 34, 156 Tucker, Corin 41 n.4, 52 Tully, Seanna 176 Turkey 125 Turning Point 48 Turtle Jr. 83 Ucay 93 Undertones 12, 76, 132 Ungdomshuset 209, 216–17 United Artists 132 Universal Music Group 102, 127–8, 138, 141, 152 Upslut 173 Vagrant Records 128 Vale, V. 169

261

Velvet Underground 98 Verbal Assault 48 Vibrators 132 Vicious Circle 34 Victory Records 128, 186 Vincent, Gene 97 Violators 67 Virgin Oi! 120 Virtual scenes, theory of 66–7 VLHS 89 Vogrinc, Joze 81 Voogt, Robert 49–50, 144 Vorkuta, Russia 85 Wal-Mart 18, 90, 128, 152 Wald, Gayle 172–4 Wallach, Jeremy 57–8, 105, 110, 120, 158 Waller, Don 166–7 Warbird Entertainment 147, 157 Warner Music Group 102, 127–8, 152 Warzone 48 Washington, DC 2–8, 41, 43, 48, 65, 65 n.12, 107, 112, 125, 135, 143, 172, 176 Wasler, Robert 55–6 Weasel, Ben 18 Weinbender, Tony 70 Weirdos 34, 104, 133 Werle, Dan 180 Wertham, Frederic 161–2 Westwood, Vivienne 12, 39 What? Records 132 White Pride 54 Who 12 Wildman, Lisa 41 Williams, Leonard 202–4, 222 Williams, Paul 164 Wilson, Tony 112, 129–30 Wobensmith, Matt 45, 144 Wolfe, Allison 41, 41 n.4 Wolters Kluwer 190 Women 39–44, 43 n.5, 58–9, 67, 100, 105, 114–21, 156–7, 170–9, 194–5, 198, 226; see also Riot Grrrl and Sexism Wrecking Ball 173

262

INDEX

X 39, 133 X-Ray Spex 10–11, 39–40

Youth houses 199, 202, 205–10, 214, 216–17 Youth of Today 48–9 YouTube 117, 119, 185 Yumikes 142, 150–1

Yes L.A. 133 Yohannan, Tim 19, 194 Young, Brian 75, 77 Youth Crew 48 Youth culture, theories 19–21

Zeros 34 Zines, history of 162–70 Zinn, Howard 184 Zižek, Slavoj 79, 81 Zudas Krust 33, 142

Wright, Fred 160–1 Wroclaw squat 207, 209

263

264