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May 29, 2004, 9:57 a.m.

In the months since my last entry, I've presented a few papers, given a number of talks (three in the last three weeks), completed three chapters of the dissertation, another column and one essay on queer fandom, filed the dissertation, graduated and found a position as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I've also gone to a lot of good shows, bought a lot of cheap earrings and dresses from thrift stores, and discovered a new penchant for boots.

This website will undergo some radical revision and editing as it's become far too unwieldy. The archive in particular will be streamlined. This site will probably not emerge as a regular blog again, but hey, stranger things have happened.

 

October 5, 2003, 10:44 p.m.

Since a number of friends have mentioned seeing this film recently, I thought I'd post my next Punk Planet column about Afro-Punk: The "Rock and Roll Nigger" Experience early. (It should be in issue 58, Nov/Dec 2003.)

In a series of blurred, multiple-exposure photographs, New York City filmmaker James Spooner (with photographer Pauline St. Denis and stylist Christine Baker) recreates iconoclastic punk rock images but replaces their white subjects with black punk rockers from his documentary film Afro-Punk: The "Rock and Roll Nigger" Experience. The resulting photographs are not faithful reproductions, and the substitution of black bodies is not a mere corrective or additive. Instead, the fascination lies elsewhere, in the haunting dissonance of seeing these familiar images made unfamiliar. Does the image of a black man, rather than the Clash's Joe Strummer, caught in the act of smashing his guitar, forcefully change the meaning of his rage? If it is a black woman and not a youthful Ian McKaye who holds his head in weariness? Does the hooded figure in the white face paint evoke the skeletal logo of the Misfits, but also black filmmakers the Hughes brothers' Dead Presidents? And the bare-chested black woman, slouching in a white tuxedo jacket, open beer bottle in one hand? Yeah, she belongs to a different world.

The photographs are all cases of mistaken identity. Threatening to unravel the abstractions of punk rock, these photographs call into question the socially coded nature of punk rock's histories, identities, icons, values, and meanings. Sid Vicious' sickly pallor and his appetite for self-destruction written in the track marks and the razor cuts criss-crossing his wasted body, are part of what cemented this image in punk's historical archive. But what often passes in punk (and other avant-gardes, other modernisms) for a romance with danger when a British white boy plays the addict is not available to the black woman in America. The staged photograph of a black female "as" Sid Vicious then is part of a strategy that reveals visual images -- like this and the other iconoclastic punk images-- to be part of a complex of representations that produce "punk rock" as a contingent identity. That is, these photographs offer a privileged opportunity to examine the subterranean politics of the "original," including the historical racial hegemony of punk rock.

Afro-punk is James Spooner's 70-minute documentary about blackness and punk rock and, like the photographs he staged for a magazine spread, the film approaches the troubled relationship of race and punk rock with a critical eye for its possibilities and its problematics. Scores of interviews with black punks, filmed over the course of several cross-country road trips, are intercut with photographs and footage of live performances and set to a soundtrack of punk rock. Beginning with a series of origin stories, the kids in the picture (ranging in actual age from teenage to mid-life) tell remarkably similar narratives about their initial forays into punk rock. Many were the only black children growing up in white neighborhoods, and punk -- with its contrary aesthetic and attitude-- seemed to fit their psychological and corporeal alienation. It answered a need for expression and individuality, for a political framework and social community, and we hear, at least once, "[Punk] saved my life."

But these stories become more complicated and convoluted in the clash of contradictions and underlying tensions involved in turning to a subculture marked by white (boy) hegemony for "community" and other relationships. The feeling of having to prove oneself worthy, to be more punk than the white kids, is echoed here as Spooner's interviewees count on one hand the number of black punks in their local scenes (sometimes all is required is a thumb). What emerges is a sometimes contradictory, but always complicated, patchwork of emotions -- self-loathing, sadness, frustration, anger, resentment, loneliness and conviction. A poignant sequence relating a familiar dilemma for black punk rockers -- what to do with hair that does not spike naturally -- leaves a deep impression and a series of difficult questions about the racial politics of punk rock aesthetics.

Culled from his interviews, Spooner chose four individuals (all of whom are involved in either performing or promoting) to provide focus in some of the more personal segments and highlight the differences in their responses: Brooklyn's fierce Tamar Kali, easygoing Matt Davis from Iowa City, Long Island's dedicated black revolutionary Moe Mitchell, and quiet Southern Californian Mariko Jones. They represent a range of reactions and approaches to the question of integrating -or not -- racial identity with their chosen subcultural affiliation.

Biracial Mariko Jones insists she is glad her friends tell her, "You don't act like a black person, you don't act like an Asian person. You're just Mariko." Because no one has ever called her "nigger" or barred her from a show, she doesn't seem to believe that race or racism has an impact on her interactions in punk, and says, a bit reproachfully, "I feel like the ones complaining are the ones who aren't doing anything." But her sentiments are contradicted in a series of cuts to interviews that powerfully (in both quality and quantity) argue otherwise. A young woman outside a club notes, "A lot of white people put black people in categories, like the safe black person." Laughing, she continues, "A lot of people mistake me for that safe black person." As one subject notes, while punk rock answered for a part of his alienation, it highlighted another aspect -- being black in a white-dominated scene. The interviewees testify to the range of racisms reinforcing punk rock silence about race. Many mentioned former friends who believed that every other black person except him or her qualified as a "nigger." With palpable disgust, another targets the color-blindness of righteous punk rockers, "anarchists [who tell me] their politics transcend race and gender." And Chicagoan Rachel sums up this frustration with punk rock's racial politics: "People are not trying to have a dialogue with you, but they do want to tokenize you. People want a multicultural vision of punk rock, and they want to showcase you, 'Look at all the Negros!' But at the same time they don't want to deal with you as a person who experiences race."

In perhaps the film's most pointed scene, Mitchell's band Cipher performs punk rock black power for a cramped room full of white boys. Members of the audience wind-mill, floor-punch, and grab the microphone away from Mitchell to scream incoherently. Spooner draws out the footage of this performance to underscore a swelling sense of discomfort and the hardcore dissonance embedded in its multiple contradictions -- Mitchell's lyrics about the historical rape, pillage and enslavement of African peoples by Europeans and Americans, drowned out by the shouts of slamming white punk rockers. (This was the most painful scene for me for other reasons too. Watching these boys "dance" was like watching a primitive tooth extraction or root canal. Give me head-nodding over this machismo.) Interviewed outside the club, a series of white boys admit they don't know what the lyrics were about -- slavery, maybe? One offers the vague answer, "I guess they're about their beliefs," but pronounces "their" as if referring to an alien race of beings.

But the film is not only critical of white punks' negligence or unacknowledged privilege. Accused of "trying to be white," the interviewees maintain that much of the animosity and alienation -- made worse because of a higher degree of investment both emotional and historical -- has come from their families and black peers. There are plenty of stories here about being stuffed into garbage cans, being jumped for wearing punk gear, being spat upon and generally despised by other black kids in high school. And in another of the more powerful sequences here, the interviewees discuss their complicated responses to seeing other black punks at shows or on the streets. Laughing, some of them report feelings that the other black person is "trespassing" on their territory: "I'm supposed to be the only black person here!" Others debate the desire to speak to every other black person at a show because of the isolation. And one woman, sitting outside a club in a puff-sleeved shirt, gestures ruefully as she explains her dilemma -- excitement at seeing another black person or person of color in the same venue, and a weird shame for being "discovered" in a scene that excitement at such a surprising appearance would be possible. But it is the film's willingness to embrace such contradictions and complexity in mapping the trials and tribulations of being black and being punk (along with the pleasures and the joys) that leaves an imprint, long after the credits have rolled.

Two years in the making, Spooner is clear about his priorities -- first and foremost, this is a film about black subculture for black people. Having once sported a mohawk himself, he says, "I wanted to make the movie that I wished I had as a kid." (At the bottom of his list of priorities, is reiterating to white punk rock audiences the critical nature of race and racism in everyday life, and the privileges they maintain even as punks.) The film has garnered some mainstream black press and so far the warm reception has been rewarding. For Spooner, this success confirms the importance of this attempt to make black punk rockers intelligible to black audiences who, as the interviewees relate, might have once scorned these outsiders as "white wannabes," "devil worshippers," or "fags." "The thing that keeps me going," he relates, "is what happens when I go out to promote the film. I always have flyers with me for the film and when I see black kids into something weird, I'll go up to them and talk to them about the documentary. And they get all shy, especially when they're with white people. It's like they think,  'Why are you calling me out? It's taken this long for them to forget that I'm black!' And I think I know what that feels that, so maybe they'll recognize and see themselves in the other people in the film." And as Spooner and most of his black subjects note, rock 'n' roll was an invention of African Americans. Mounting a fierce attack on the belief that rock is a "white thing," the subjects cite a long, semi-buried history of black innovation in guitar-based music being reconstructed by Detroit's Mick Collins (The Gories, The Dirtbombs) and Lisa Kekaula (The Bellrays) and more mainstream black artists like Mos Def and Wyclef Jean. As one interviewee suggests, "Check out Jimi."

Spooner offers no set resolution or fixed relation of race to punk rock, but does suggest that in the final tally, blackness is nonetheless policed in ways that a mohawk is not. An interviewee tells a story familiar to black men in America -- being pulled over by police officers while out for a walk. "There's no question, I don't have to say, 'Am I a part of the black community?' I walk out and I figured out all black people are part of the black community. You don't have to do anything, you're black. That was comforting." The film fades to black to the sounds of his wry laughter.

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Afro-Punk: The "Rock and Roll Nigger" Experience is currently being screened at independent film festivals and other venues across the North American contingent. For more information about filmmaker James Spooner, the film itself, and its upcoming screening schedule, please check:http://www.afropunk.com. There is also a community messageboard at the website for further discussion and dialogue about the issues raised in the film. Unfortunately, Matt Davis, who appears as one of the four main interviewees in the film, died on August 10, 2003. There is a on-line memorial for him at: http://www.ten-grand.com. James can be reached at james@afropunk.com, and would love to bring the documentary to a screening near you. He is not as lazy as I am, because I will not be going on tour with the compilation zine Race Riot 2, unlike James, any time soon. Still, you can get a copy of the zine from Pander Zine Distro (http://www.panderzinedistro)' and it will come to you. For other resources, check out the article on the history of black punks (1976-1983) in Roctober 32, written by James Porter and Jake Austen. And you can always get in touch with me at: Mimi Nguyen / POB 11906 / Berkeley, CA 94712-2906, or slander13@mindspring.com.