When you’re black, you’re punk rock all the time.
[mashup of your favorite punk songs]
And that is the sound of punk.
Short, fast riffs. Lyrics pushing back against the mainstream mundane.
The original don’t-give-a-f*ck attitude. And a no-rules-allowed genre for self-identifying
misfits that emerged at a time where music was becoming maybe a little too clean.
But punks – or at least as I saw it, growing up – rarely looked like anything other than these guys.
Hey guys, I’m Sana.
This is AJ+ and today we’re gonna explore the very black history – and present – of punk music.
Now, there was a decent amount of women who led the movement:
Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Debbie Harry and Siouxsie Sioux.
And they all got major recognition.
But black or Latino or any other shade of punk? Not really.
That doesn’t sound weird if you’ve been taught the history of punk
as something that emerged from the working-class angst of young, white
English men. Think the Sex Pistols and The Clash.
But it is weird when you dig a bit deeper into the history
of punk and find that black and brown punks actually pioneered the movement.
Now, the most popular black American punk band is probably Bad Brains.
[awesome hardcore]
But first, I wanna talk about Death, the guys who helped pioneer punk without even trying or knowing.
['Keep on Knocking' by Death playing]
Death was the three Hackney brothers from Detroit.
Their music is what’s been called proto-punk – punk before we knew punk was punk.
['Politicians in My Eyes' playing]
Now, Death broke all the rules
They were three black men playing what was considered white people’s music
at a time when black Americans were known for playing things like Motown and R&B.
We felt natural doing it while we were
in our own quarters, but playing it out means that you
had to answer so many questions.
Yeah, we totally spoke to Death.
Now, the Hackney brothers did start off by playing R&B.
In fact, their band was originally called Rock Fire Funk Express.
But by 1973, they started playing rock and roll.
Well, we were just playing hard-driving rock and roll, man.
We were just really trying to be like the groups of the day that we loved,
like the MC5 and Alice Cooper and all those great rock-and-roll bands of the ’70s.
We really just kind of springboarded off of the sound that they was laying down,
but we were just doing it harder, faster and louder.
Despite their raw sound and unique, intimidating name –
which, by the way, was totally ahead of its time –
they didn’t last long as a band.
They just didn’t get the distribution that they needed, with some record labels
worried about how to market their name and their sound.
And so Death kind of disbanded, but the brothers continued making music.
And it was only 30 years later, in 2008, that Death was rediscovered and thrown onto people’s radar.
Now, even though Death didn’t go mainstream,
their music was known underground and by the most diehard punk fans.
Meaning, they had influence.
There really was no scene or community or culture to embrace them.
And suddenly, kind of in retrospect, people have realized
realized like, wow, these guys were making punk rock
rock out of their own inner creative compulsions in Detroit.
Now, while Death is a pioneering band in punk history,
they actually don’t necessarily see what they were doing at the time as punk –
– in fact, just plain old rock and roll.
We’ve never really considered ourselves a punk band.
I mean, back then, if you called somebody a punk, you know, you got into a fight.
We were playing what we conceived as hard-drive and Detroit rock and roll, man.
It’s also important to note, as writer and musician Greg Tate told me,
the difference in how white and black musicians in the same genre were marketed,
and how that had an impact on who got the credit and who got the fame.
The American music business is made up of gatekeepers on the corporate side, on the radio side.
They very much subscribe to the Jim Crow notions of racial separation and segregation
which defined American culture throughout most of the 20th century.
It meant that black artists, historically, for most of the 20th century, couldn't make
as much money playing their own music, didn't have access to the same audiences, the same opportunities.
Now, in the ’70s there was another black punk band that really changed the scene:
Bad Brains, considered one of the most influential punk bands ever.
[Bad Brains being awesome]
The group formed in 1976 in Washington, DC, getting its name from a Ramones song.
The punk band dominated in the ’80s with their mix of reggae and a very aggressive punk sound
known as hardcore.
[Really aggressive punk sound]
In fact, they – along with Minor Threat and Black Flag – are considered
the pioneers of hardcore, which is a genre of punk which is, well, pretty damn fast.
And DC was hardcore’s mecca, and also one of the most long-term influential punk scenes.
And there were also other black punk bands like Pure Hell, Fishbone
and the UK’s X-Ray Spex, whose lead vocalist was a woman.
It's worth noting that these bands weren’t segregated to some “black punk” category –
they influenced other bands, and vice versa.
Take reggae, for example. Numerous white punk bands used reggae
in their music in the UK throughout the ’70s, inspired by black punk bands’ use of it.
In my conversation with Tate, he mentioned how this idea that rock or punk as an all-white-boys’ club
didn’t really exist in the UK.
Black and brown punks were heavily influencing the scene.
Under the Thatcher government, there was a lot of disenfranchisement of white working class
youth, who were non-racist or anti-racist.
They kind of found their voice and their militancy through the political actions and the music
of their black and South Asian-born classmates and neighbors.
And just like their British counterparts, American punks also were really influenced by politics,
whether U.S. wars in Cambodia and Vietnam in the ’70s, or, well, Ronald Reagan’s
whole presidency throughout the ’80s.
But punk – especially black punk – isn’t a thing of the past. It’s still a live, budding cultural movement today.
I realized that, like, not only is rock and roll something
that is native to people like myself and to Honeychild, but it's almost like my birthright.
That’s Honeychild Coleman and Sacha Jenkins of the
punk band trio The 1865 --
and yes, their name is referencing exactly what you think it’s referencing.
The “1865” references America in 1865, when the Emancipation Proclamation
brought a lot of promise of change for black Americans – except the racists had other plans.
Soon after, organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, and other groups who weren't really fans
of people like myself and this young lady, got together and kind of made it their business
to get in our business and make it hard for us to live in America.
And so you look at the climate of where we are now –
I don't want to necessarily be so literal, but it feels like the same kinds of sentiments.
The 1865 makes music that looks at 1865 America from the lens of a runaway slave,
a white Southern soldier, a slave owner who felt no guilt.
The trio is part of a still growing and very visible black presence in the punk scene,
something that was highlighted in the 2003 documentary “Afropunk.”
The documentary really explored trials and good times faced by black youth
who were an intimate part of a cultural scene that has always been seen as white by outsiders.
The film ended up inspiring a bigger cultural movement, including a festival, started in 2005, by the same name.
The Afropunk festival, which was started in Brooklyn and now is international, basically is
about celebrating black artists, black creatives and black fans in the alternative scene.
Honeychild Coleman, Sacha Jenkins and Shawna Shawnté, who runs a black–brown punk festival
in Oakland, all say there’s nothing more punk than being black in America.
I'm not saying black people created punk rock. I'm saying we are punk rock, without even trying.
The foundations of what people do that creates punk culture, say, going on tour, booking your
your own tour through an underground network, that's what black musicians had to do
because we weren't allowed to play in clubs.
When we have been pushed to the margins
but we create in those margins,
it doesn't get more punk than that.
I knew that it was my legacy, and I never believed anyone
who told me I was trying to be white because I loved rock and I loved guitars.
But even though they all agree that there’s nothing more punk than being black, they
also raise the point of how different the experience is of being either white or black in the punk scene.
When you're black, you’re punk rock all the time, you're a target all the time.
And I can't change the color of my skin.
There is a level of privilege that goes with, “I'm going to put a safety pin through my
nose and paint my hair, dye my hair green for three years, and then I'm going to clean
up and put on a suit and get a corporate job.” We don't really have that luxury.
You also get cred for having punk years. But in my experience, working in the corporate world,
I can't let everybody know what I do outside of work because it could cost me my job.
And for Shawna, it remains super important to keep creating spaces that empower people on the margins.
I think it's important to see people who look like you making music and art.
It can feel very isolating and depressing, as a young person, when people are trying to
box you into one sort of identity and tell you how you have to be, based on your ethnicity or your class.
Punk is complicated, even though it’s just simple, raw music.
As a movement, it has this incredibly rich history that, like the people in it, is hard to box.
And if the black history of punk music tells us anything,
it’s how instrumental black musicians have been in the creation of an American pop culture.
Life-changing interview.
[Bemusedly strums guitar]
And then Sacha smashes the guitar through the door!
Right.
Hey guys! So we actually filmed this piece at 924 Gilman, which is the CBGB of the West Coast
And if you don't know what CBGB is, you should definitely look that up.
Let us what are some of the punk bands that you grew up listening to and don't forget to
like, share and subscribe and keep it punk.