Politics As Unusual: Washington, D.C
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Abstract Title of Dissertation: POLITICS AS UNUSUAL: WASHINGTON, D.C. HARDCORE PUNK 1979-1983 AND THE POLITICS OF SOUND Shayna L Maskell, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Nancy Struna, Chair, Department of American Studies During the creative and influential years between 1979 and 1983, hardcore punk was not only born — a mutated sonic stepchild of rock n’ roll, British and American punk — but also evolved into a uncompromising and resounding paradigm of and for DC youth. Through the revelatory music of DC hardcore bands like Bad Brains, Teen Idles, Minor Threat, State of Alert, Government Issue and Faith a new formulation of sound, and a new articulation of youth, arose: one that was angry, loud, fast, and minimalistic. With a total of only ten albums between all five bands in a mere five years, DC hardcore cemented a small yet significant subculture and scene. This project considers two major components of this music: aesthetics and the social politics that stem from those aesthetics. By examining the way music communicates — facets like timbre, melody, rhythm, pitch, volume and dissonance — while simultaneously incorporating an analysis of hardcore’s social context — including the history of music’s cultural canons, as well as the specific socioeconomic, racial and gendered milieu in which music is generated, communicated and responded to —this dissertation attempts to understand how hardcore punk conveys messages of social and cultural politics, expressly representations of race, class and gender. In doing so, this project looks at how DC hardcore (re)contextualizes and (re)imagines the social and political meanings created by and from sound. POLITICS AS UNUSUAL: WASHINGTON, D.C. HARDCORE 1979-1983 AND THE POLITICS OF SOUND by Shayna L Maskell Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2014 Advisory Committee: Professor Nancy Struna, Chair Professor Psyche Williams-Forson Professor Christina Hanhardt Professor Patrick Warfield Professor David Freund TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction Me and Music. Me and Punk: Positioning Myself in the Dissertation 1 What is Punk? What is Politics? Research Questions and Theoretical Frameworks 2 Sources, Methods and Methodologies 10 What I Mean Is: Defining Terms and Constructing Parameters 20 The Field: Scholarly Positioning within Popular Music Studies 23 The Road Map: Chapter Outline 26 Chapter Two: Punk Rock Evolving and the Scene in Washington, DC Before There Was Hardcore: Punk’s Musical Predecessors 33 Before There was Punk in DC: Music in Washington pre-1978 51 The Sound of Hardcore 53 Washington D.C.: Politics, Place, Race and Space 69 Chapter Three: Bad Brains and the Musical Aesthetics of Race in Bad Brains The Sound of Bad Brains 79 Instrument(s) of Race: The (Re) Racing of Punk 97 The Performance of Blackness in DC Hardcore Punk Identity 108 Chapter Four: The Sounds of Stratification: Teen Idles, Minor Threat 125 and the Contradictions of Class The Sound of Hardcore Punk as a (Paradoxical) Performance of Class 125 Chapter Five: Music as Masculinity: State of Alert, Government Issue, 176 and Faith and the Implications of Gender State Of Alert, Government Issue and Faith: Hardcore’s Sonic Masculinity 177 Chapter Six: The Transformation of Hardcore: DC Punk post-1983 227 Hardcore Unraveled: The Times, They Were A’Changin’ 227 Hardcore, Revisited: The (Sociopolitical) Evolution of Sound 232 The Last Days of Summer: The Remnants of DC Hardcore 278 Chapter Seven: Play it Again, Sam: Conclusion(s) 283 Primary Sources 297 Secondary Sources 305 Appendix A 312 Appendix B 317 ii Chapter One: Introduction Me and Music. Me and Punk: Positioning Myself in the Dissertation I was already 25 when I saw my first hardcore punk show. Old, I know. But an hour outside of Los Angeles, there they were — the Dead Kennedys, sans Jello Biafra — shredding their instruments, shouting for Nazi punks to fuck off, bouncing, slamming, swaying across the stage, and catapulting into the audience. By the end of the two-hour sweat-soaked, debauch of a concert I had bruised ribs, a possibly-broken toe, ringing eardrums, and a stomach full of enthrallment. I’d been to innumerable concerts and festivals — as any good white, upper-middle class music fanatic had — so I was familiar with the poignant merging of crowd and musician, the sense of unity and the unnamable temporal release and rush of consolation, hope and exhilaration that comes with the performance. It was the same at the Dead Kennedys show. But it was also different. It was men. Lots and lots of men. White men. And it was barking, hollering, smashing, blasting, praying, pommeling, stamping, vibrating and singing. It was anger, frustration, joy, umbrage, euphoria, pain, possibility and solidarity. It was hardcore. As old as I was, though, I was still too young to have been involved in the hardcore scene growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. I missed Bad Brains being banned from the 9:30 club; I was still teething when Minor Threat first shrieked that they had better things to do than snort white shit up their noses, thereby igniting a straightedge lifestyle; I never did see John Stabb shave his head on stage at a Government Issue show; and by the time I had entered elementary school, Faith and State of Alert had already broken up. That didn’t mean, however, that I didn’t know all about it. Ian 1 MacKaye’s name was treasured in my high school music circles and proximity to the famed Dischord House was translated into subcultural coolness points. I didn’t think of us as a music town. DC wasn’t Nashville or Detroit or New York. But, oh, we wouldn’t want such mainstream popular genres. No, we had hardcore, an underground punk legacy. And even before I knew what hardcore was, even before I had heard the name HR or Henry Rollins, even before I understood with an “X” tattooed on a neck or a rib or a hand meant, there was always my music. Twirling in my bedroom to Dire Straits, laboriously crafting mix tapes for boyfriends of Lou Reed and David Bowie, spinning records of Diana Ross and Otis Redding, falling asleep to the harmonies of Peter, Paul and Mary, sitting front row at Elvis Costello — music was how I identified myself and the world around me. Music crafted, and still crafts, a sense of time, of place, and of myself and of others. It is this power, and this pleasure, that music affords, which spurred the concept of this project. In exploring the explosive, subversive, but still somewhat unfamiliar, music of DC hardcore, I want to link the sound of this punk with the politics of this punk. My dissertation surveys the definitive bands and albums of DC hardcore’s halcyon days (1978-1983) in order to understand how sound creates, limits and reimagines political and cultural meaning within this city. Moreover, I look to how these sonic meanings not only connect to the politics of the past but also act as a gendered, raced and classed identity, both individual and collective, for the members of the DC s hardcore scene. What is Punk? What is Politics? Research Questions and Theoretical Frameworks 2 This project aims to delineate, describe, explore and examine the hardcore punk scene in Washington, DC during its zenith of both impact and innovation, 1978-1983. During these indispensably creative and influential years in DC music, hardcore punk was not only simply born — a mutated sonic stepchild of rock n’ roll, British and American punk — but also evolved into a uncompromising and resounding paradigm of and for DC youth. Through the revelatory music of DC hardcore bands Bad Brains, Teen Idles, Minor Threat, State of Alert, Government Issue and Faith, a new formulation of sound, and a new articulation of youth, arose: one that was angry, loud, fast, and minimalistic. With a total of only ten albums between all five bands in a mere five years, DC hardcore cemented a small yet significant subculture and scene. More specifically, my analysis considers two major components inherent, yet frequently overlooked, in any genre of popular music: aesthetics and the social politics that stem from those aesthetics. This project considers, then, the way music communicates, its structure — facets like timbre, melody, rhythm, pitch, volume, dissonance — while simultaneously dissecting how these features communicate messages of social and cultural politics, expressly representations of race, class and gender. Attending to sound, therefore, is attending to self; this dissertation intends to challenge and understand how the performance of music is also a performance of self, constructing distinctive, though frequently complicated and contradictory, representations of race, gender and class. Moreover, essential to the investigation and evaluation of aesthetics, and the accompanying (or, more precisely, consequential) cultural politics is an assessment of the unique sociohistorical circumstances of place. That is, how the particulars of the city — including racial and socioeconomic histories and current demographics, political 3 predilections both locally and nationally, the musical milieu, and individual upbringing — work to (re)contextualize and (re)imagine the meanings created by and from sound. Therefore, my major research questions fall within three explicit, though unmistakably intersecting and contingent, categories: musical aesthetics, sociocultural politics, and place. Musical Aesthetics