Damaged

Musicality and Race in Early American Punk

Evan Rapport

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496831231
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Punk Music

Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk is the first book-length portrait of punk as a musical style with an emphasis on how punk developed in relation to changing ideas of race in American society from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Drawing on musical analysis, archival research, and new interviews, Damaged provides fresh interpretations of race and American society during this period and illuminates the contemporary importance of that era.Evan Rapport outlines the ways in which punk developed out of dramatic changes to America's cities and suburbs in the postwar era, especially with respect to race. The musical styles that led to punk included transformations to blues resources, experimental visions of the American musical past, and bold reworkings of the rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues sounds of the late 1950s and early 1960s, revealing a historically oriented approach to rock that is strikingly different from the common myths and conceptions about punk. Following these approaches, punk itself reflected new versions of older exchanges between the US and the UK, the changing environments of American suburbs and cities, and a shift from the expressions of older baby boomers to that of younger musicians belonging to Generation X. Throughout the book, Rapport also explores the discourses and contradictory narratives of punk history, which are often in direct conflict with the world that is captured in historical documents and revealed through musical analysis.

1

Intro: The Meanings of a Musical Style

On July 19, 2018, Mike Ness was accused of punching a fan during a show in Sacramento.¹ As Social Distortion’s frontman for forty years, Ness used his platform from the stage to express his frustrations with Donald Trump and his racist policies. Tim Hildebrand, a fan at the concert, said he yelled, “I paid for your music, not your politics,” and protested by giving the middle finger to the band for several songs. Ness eventually left the stage and engaged Hildebrand, resulting in an alleged physical confrontation and Ness repeatedly punching Hildebrand.

Ness’s fight with Hildebrand strikes me as a particularly fitting way to begin Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk, a book that attempts to do two related things: (1) present the first full-length portrait of American punk as a musical style, and (2) through this musical study of punk, provide a fresh understanding of American society and ideas of race during the long 1970s (roughly 1968 to 1981), a period that greatly impacts our current moment.² Punk is especially useful for thinking about contemporary formations of American whiteness, which during the writing of this book have circulated around Donald Trump and his slogan of “make America great again,” but which have been operating in American society for at least fifty years. Since its beginnings, punk musicians have directly confronted ideas of whiteness and have wrestled with America’s white supremacist history. And although the punk scene is less white than it has ever been, punk is still considered one of the whitest styles of music, and formations of whiteness are at the core of its history and its critique of American society.

For almost half a century, punk has been a forum for white people to explore, define, debate, and police their own whiteness. How does Mike Ness’s idea of a Social Distortion show, after forty years of creating a space to express his opinions (and known since the early days as “always ready for a fight”), and during a time of democratic crisis, differ from Hildebrand’s idea of the show as a paying consumer who expects to be entertained, and who decided to display his discontent with Ness in an unfriendly environment?³ What is the difference between the physical engagement of Ness and Hildebrand at this show, and the physical engagement in the “pit,” where one might become similarly injured? Why do some people assume hardcore or punk to be dominated by left-wing politics or anarchist ideas, and others by right-wing politics or even fascism? Is there anything about punk that actually supports Trump’s “make America great again” worldview, inviting Hildebrand’s presence, even as Ness intends to use punk to criticize xenophobic and racist nationalistic attitudes?

In contrast to most writers, I take the position in Damaged that punk’s music comes first and foremost. Punk is an extraordinarily powerful style of music, and its power comes from the particular ways in which musicians have approached American popular music resources and their associations. Punk is also an extraordinarily misunderstood music, mostly due to the media’s and general public’s never-ending thirst for sensationalist stories. Punk is an easy target, unconventional and provocative, and seen as a youth culture and thus manipulable, so it has been frequently scapegoated for society’s ills or seen as a symbol of Western civilization’s decline. Yet a close look at punk as a musical style and the circumstances out of which it emerged tells a very different story, one that sheds light on American society in the long 1970s much more generally, and one that shows punk to be one of the most meaningful and intense expressions of the race and class tensions at America’s core.

Damaged, of course, is only a story of punk, not the story. In this book I focus on race as the central axis around which early punk music revolves, and as the lens most appropriate for considering punk’s place in the long 1970s. Race is thoroughly intertwined with formations of class, gender, and sexuality; for example, punk’s relationships to queer sexuality are intimately connected to race, traceable to the term punk’s complex life in African American slang.⁴ Race, and a white/black racial binary in particular, has defined American music from its beginnings as a concept, just as race has defined the United States from its beginnings as a nation. As Haki Madhubuti once wrote: “It is not accurate or, for these times, bold enough to just say that America has a race problem. Without doubt or hesitation, I would say that America is a race problem.”⁵ For American music of the postwar era, the period Omi and Winant referred to as the “great transformation,” it should be impossible to avoid analyzing the impact of race on popular music, as well as the ways in which popular music has helped shape American whiteness and blackness.⁶

My analysis of punk music in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality also differs from many other interpretations in that I am not attempting to describe or reveal how punk is related to “identity,” especially white identity, as something like an individual’s personality. Nor is Damaged solely about how identity relates to representation in punk’s self-narrations. I am most interested in the ways in which punk is related to empirical aspects of whiteness and blackness, such as the relationship of racial formations (race understood as formed by sociohistorical processes, neither biological essence nor an illusion) to housing, mobility, wealth, legal rights, and ownership; how gender, sexuality, and class are inseparable from race; and identity as a symptom of historical circumstances and facts.⁷ The framework of intersectionality, for example, asks us to look not just at identity, but at how race and gender, or more specifically structural racism and sexism, impact discrimination and inequality. As Kimberlé Crenshaw reminded us two decades after writing her pivotal essay, “intersectionality is not just about identities but about the institutions that use identity to exclude and privilege.”⁸ In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, race dictated arguably every aspect of daily life in the United States, and race has been literally a matter of life and death in the country. In addition to the immediate examples of racial terrorism and the Great Migration, race determined where black people could perform, where black people could spend the night while touring, who could marry, and what schools black people could attend and the resources provided to and by those schools. Not much earlier, American racism determined who was a free human being and who could be enslaved. American society is still fundamentally connected to the idea and legacy of a white/black racial binary.

Fortunately, many scholars have produced excellent research on American music’s relationship to race. Recent books such as Just Around Midnight, The Sonic Color Line, and Segregating Sound continue a long line of publications exploring race in many periods and musical styles.⁹ And writing on punk, including scholarship, has frequently tackled issues of race head-on.¹⁰ However, when dealing with the history of white people in the United States (usually treated as racially unmarked), major historical events and social circumstances, especially with respect to race, too often still go unmentioned or unconnected to musical life. And the specific questions I aim to tackle in this book, such as the ways in which aspects of musical style directly relate to racial formations and historical events, remain wide open for future research. These research topics are still largely unexplored even in music that is explicitly engaged with race, and whiteness in particular, such as punk.

As outlined in this introduction, Damaged engages, sometimes supporting and sometimes refuting, several premises that are usually taken for granted: punk is a product of the suburbs, punk is white music, punk is simple threechord music, punk started as a response to the bloated or bland music of the 1970s, and punk is violent. But I also wish to emphasize that Damaged is not an attempt at an alternative or “secret” history of punk, as a book such as Lipstick Traces purports to be.¹¹ Revealing overlooked histories is imperative, especially if it amplifies suppressed and marginalized voices, but it can also create new problems if such alternative histories avoid or obscure inconvenient truths that continue to go unaddressed.¹² For example, the essential interventions into restoring the multiracial and multigender history of punk should be considered in relation to the music’s complicated history with whiteness and masculinity. In my research, only three African American women musicians, in obscure bands, figured in the American punk scene between the early 1970s and 1981—Amanda Jones of New York’s Stilettos (Deborah Harry’s group before forming Blondie), Karla “Mad Dog” Duplantier of LA’s Controllers, and Toni Young of DC’s Red C.¹³ This is an astonishingly low number given that African American women have been at the forefront of American popular music styles including blues, jazz, rock and roll, and R&B, and given the importance of African American “girl groups” as punk source material. Certainly, since the 1980s and especially in the past decade, African American women have been key players in many punk bands, but avoiding the remarkable absence of black women in punk’s early history runs the risk of obfuscating the structural racism to which punk was originally tied, and also gives a convenient escape route to those who wish to avoid acknowledging that racism.¹⁴ For another example, Asian Americans are similarly underrepresented in early punk, except for a very few exceptions, such as Dianne Chai of LA’s Alley Cats and Vale Hamanaka of Search and Destroy. In Damaged I reexamine punk’s well-known stories, myths, truths, and clichés in light of musical analysis and broader historical contexts, which often leads to a divergent, counterintuitive, or uncomfortable reading.

Punk and Suburban Whiteness

“Starting in the years immediately after World War II, millions of ordinary Americans, flush with the disposable income saved up during the war, longing for more space and, above all, a better life for their kids, began to move to the suburbs,” writes David Halberstam in his introduction to the revised edition of Bill Owens’s Suburbia, a collection of photographs from suburban California at the turn to the 1970s.¹⁵ Halberstam also draws the important connection between the suburbs, home ownership, and class. For many, moving to the suburbs was “the first venture, however tentative, into the great new American middle-class. Many were the children of people who had never owned a home and who had rented cold-water flats in the years before the war. As such, the suburban experience was more often than not an optimistic one.”¹⁶

What Halberstam’s language conceals, as is typical when writers describe the suburbs, is that these “ordinary Americans” were overwhelmingly white, due to the racist provisions of the government-subsidized loan system and redlining, as well as white suburbanites’ often racist and discriminatory impulses. Ninetyeight percent of federally underwritten home loans between 1933 and 1962 went to white homeowners, and most of the remaining housing was in segregated locations.¹⁷ Even as suburban housing opened up to previously excluded groups, African Americans remained explicitly discriminated against when attempting to buy homes in new developments and majority-white suburbs.¹⁸ The mass migration to suburbia, comprising of literally millions of white Americans, essentially amounted to government-supported segregation. As George Lipsitz reports, “by 1993, 86 percent of suburban whites still lived in places with a black population below 1 percent.”¹⁹

America’s racial geography was completely redefined after World War II. In the postwar period to the late 1960s, black Americans became increasingly associated with northern and West Coast cities such as New York, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and other sites of relocation during the postwar phase of the Great Migration, also called the Second Great Migration.²⁰ The black populations of these cities took hold during a rapid and dramatic transformation, the Great Migration constituting more of a forced migration to escape lynchings, white terrorism, and Jim Crow in the South than, as is commonly described, solely or even mainly a pursuit of work opportunities in the North.²¹ Into the early twentieth century, African Americans were mostly living in the rural South, and even in 1950, 68 percent of the African American population remained in the South.²² Meanwhile, Ashkenazic Jewish immigrants and Latin Americans were also newly moving in significant numbers to these northern and West Coast cities beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the nineteenth century in New York, for example, there were only small communities of Sephardic Jews, African Americans, and Latin Americans, and most immigrants were of Irish, Italian, German, and Chinese backgrounds.

It is no coincidence that these cities are also the main sites for punk’s beginnings. Punk emerged from the specific situation of those cities that were the main destinations for African Americans during the Great Migration and for European and Hispanic immigrants during the same time, as well as the suburbs surrounding these cities, which grew after World War II in racially discriminatory ways. As African Americans moved to northern and West Coast cities, white people—the category expanding to include European “ethnics” such as Irish, Italians, and Jews—dramatically moved out to the suburbs in what was already commonly referred to as “white flight,” and understood by the early 1950s as the “usual pattern” or “the classic response to Negro migration into new residential areas.”²³ After World War II, “in a very brief time, the nowfamiliar image of a black inner-city core surrounded by a white suburban ring emerged as the dominant pattern of American life. Thus did the ‘ghetto’ become dominant in scholarly and creative literature by the 1960s. The term ‘inner city’ became a virtual synonym for black people.”²⁴

Meanwhile, “if black became increasingly synonymous with urban during the war years and thereafter, suburban development after World War II sanctioned the formation of a new ‘white’ identity.”²⁵ Race was inseparable from class: “To be American had rapidly come to mean being ‘middle class’ and therefore white, as in the facile equation of ‘white’ with ‘middle-class.’ It was as though to be the one was automatically to be the other.”²⁶ The association of the suburbs with white people in contrast to black cities, according to America’s racial binary, also created a complex territory to navigate for those with marked ethnicities but historically variable racial status, including Italians, Jews, Latinos, and Asians. Especially for European American “ethnics,” the suburbs in many ways “helped turn Euro-Americans into ‘whites’ … but this ‘white’ unity rested on residential segregation, on shared access to housing and life chances largely unavailable to communities of color.”²⁷

So-called “white flight” was not a simple matter of black people moving in and white people moving out. White people moved to the suburbs not just for “more space” and a “better life for their kids,” but based on fears stoked during the Great Migration period by politicians and real estate developers, who told them that as African Americans moved to their neighborhoods, their quality of life would plummet and, if they owned homes, so would their property values.²⁸ And despite the pervasive images of America’s racial conflicts playing out in the South, the superficially diverse and cosmopolitan northern and West Coast cities were often sites of dramatic confrontation. Northern segregation has long been misconstrued as “de facto” segregation—even during my interviews, I regularly heard white people from northern backgrounds remember segregation as “just the way it was”—rather than a result of intentional discrimination, “deliberate actions taken by white Americans to isolate African Americans spatially, and thus marginalize them socially, economically, and politically.”²⁹ Detroit and Harlem were both sites of intense racial conflicts in 1943, and as Wayne Kramer of the MC5 reflected, “black people who came north for jobs and better living conditions found that Jim Crow’s northern cousin was alive and well in Detroit. Motor City racism was institutionalized from the top tiers of industry down to its poorest neighborhoods.”³⁰

And while segregation mostly took the form of geographic separation—spurred by FHA loans and housing discrimination, the growth of the automobile industry, increased access to cars for the middle class, and the destructive building of the interstate highway system—segregation persisted in institutional divisions in shared urban spaces, such as schools and public transportation.³¹ White New Yorkers were at the forefront of protesting school integration efforts in the 1950s and 1960s.³² White flight was also extremely wide-ranging. Los Angeles, for example, was transformed by the influx of white New Yorkers in the postwar era, represented in the popular imagination by Walter O’Malley moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to LA in 1957.³³ Discrimination continues to plague ostensibly diverse cities. New York’s schools, for example, remain among the country’s most segregated, suffering from “a system of segregation that is baked into the system and is just kind of accepted,” in the words of Richard Carranza, New York City’s schools chancellor in 2018.³⁴

The huge population shifts in the first half of the twentieth century can be followed musically. The influx of African Americans, Jewish Americans, and Latin Americans into New York led to the flourishing of Tin Pan Alley and the music of Bessie Smith, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and James Reese Europe (leader of the Harlem Hellfighters 369th Infantry Regiment band, for which after 1917 nearly half of whom were recruited from Puerto Rico, including the great Rafael Hernández).³⁵ Most important for this book, the Great Migration created the circumstances for modern blues and its offshoots, including rhythm and blues and rock and roll, as southern black musicians moved to northern cities during the 1940s and 1950s—John Lee Hooker from Mississippi to Detroit, Sister Rosetta Tharpe from Arkansas to Chicago and then New York, Muddy Waters ...