Interview on the South African 70s punk rock scene

 This is an edited version of an interview with the creators of a film about 70s South African punk. The rest of the interview talks more about how the film was made. I just stuck with the stuff about the punk scene.

Punk in Africa: 3 Chords, 3 Countries, 1 Revolution… and a Facebook Page

by Curt Hopkins

Punk in Africa

What is punk, and how did your understanding of it affect the way you made the film?

Punk is an attitude of showing a middle finger to everything that is deemed important to others. It is about doing things for yourself independently on your own terms. If you put a soundtrack to that approach to life, you have punk.

How did punk reach Africa? For instance it [arguably] reached the UK via the Ramones tour. Any similar event of that nature, or was it more a slow seepage?

There was no single event or incident that caused to punk to reach Africa – the birth of the punk movement was more of a process, a slow build-up against the stifling conformity of the times. In the early 70s, Southern Africa still remained the last bastion of colonialism and censorship and social disapproval of popular culture was rampant. At the time the changing socio-economic situation in the UK caused a last wave of immigration of skilled tradesmen to South Africa, where they were welcomed by the apartheid government of the time due their skin colour. This also brought with it certain cultural influences, including the NME which was sold in South Africa six weeks after publication. Punk provided a necessary release from the imposed boredom of the times.

What kind of venues were found and what kind of ecosystem existed, or developed, to nourish these bands – if any?

Punk developed at first separately in each of the three main South African cities – when the musicians from various places began to meet each other, a network of small venues and later fanzines developed. Most of the scene was rooted in live performances and few records were available. The first attempt to do a punk / New Wave tour took place in December 1979, with Wild Youth from Durban, National Wake from Johannesburg, and Housewife’s Choice and Safari Suits from Cape Town. Most of these bands also played in townships and did semi-legal downtown street gigs, as the venues that would host multi-racial gatherings were limited.

Did punks get arrested for the political aspects of either their lyrics or the default politics of two-tone bands existing?

The politics of maintaining a racially mixed band was even more difficult for them and the police essentially hounded them out of existence and more or less even out of the country, apart from banning their album, which should be as well known as The Clash or The Specials today were it not for the way the apartheid government banned their music

Actual arrests were rare, but police harassment was part and parcel of the entire scene. Bands were forced to change their lyrical content or remove songs from their releases – notably National Wake, whose lyric sheet was censored due to government interference. The politics of maintaining a racially mixed band was even more difficult for them and the police essentially hounded them out of existence and more or less even out of the country, apart from banning their album, which should be as well known as The Clash or The Specials today were it not for the way the apartheid government banned their music.

What were the audiences like? Mostly white, mostly black or mixed?

Punk was the second important multi-racial music scene in South Africa apart from jazz. Rock music is generally a mostly white audience everywhere but in Southern Africa racially mixed bands were present from the beginnings of punk. Punk also often takes on local roots and draws on local music forms, and so there was an African identity present in the lyrics, music and visual style in the punk movement in all three of the countries we looked at.

Was African punk political from the get-go – something in the structure of the societies you cover – or did it move that way during its lifespan?

It was totally political from the start. During the 1980s in South Africa, the early 90s in Mozambique or Zimbabwe today, being involved in the punk movement was already a political statement.

Who were the primary opponents of punk in Africa? Were they religious leaders, political leaders, the police?

Definitely the police and the state. The scene was too underground to really have an impact on religious society as a whole. The government were always suspicious of the punk scene in all of the three countries we cover, with security police around gigs and so on.

How was punk regarded by musicians from other genres at the time?

Southern Africa is extremely rich in musical heritage, and even most rock musicians are taken quite seriously. A lot of cross-pollination always took place between jazz, reggae and African bands and the punk scene. More African-oriented musicians such as Mac McKenzie from Cape Town viewed the punk scene of the 1980s as a vehicle to reach broader audiences and different people but retained their musical chops and brought real musical skill to the punk style.

The punk scene in Southern Africa always took a lot of influence from local indigenous music everywhere it appeared, so the bands are instantly recognisable as coming from a specific place due to their sound.

How did punk change from country-to-country as it responded to the specifics of the society, events and politics of each place?

The punk scene in Southern Africa always took a lot of influence from local indigenous music everywhere it appeared, so the bands are instantly recognisable as coming from a specific place due to their sound. The politics and DIY aesthetic of the scene remained fairly intact everywhere...

Was there a “capitol” of punk rock in Africa in the 70s and 80s?

This was split between Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, each of which had its own scene with its own specific influences. Johannesburg was always more innovative but the other places had strong punk movements in their own right, all with their own unique characteristics...

What kind of response did you get – from the musicians you featured, and from others – when you said you were making a documentary on punk in Africa?

In the beginning people were quite resistant as a lot of them were traumatised by their involvement and in some cases had even left the country. But on the whole people were generally supportive and keen to be of help – in the end we were able to speak to almost everyone we wanted to get into touch with, and most were extremely helpful and generous in terms of sharing their stories, lives and archival sources with the project.

How did the musicians you featured react to the finished film?

The reaction has been hugely favourable from all of the musicians featured. One striking comment has been that across the various generations, many have commented that they finally understand their place in the larger history of local music, which is of course very rewarding. Until now much of this was completely undocumented.

Read the complete article here.

Quora answers to "What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?"

This is just an edited version of a Quora post where someone asked, "What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?"...

What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?

What was it like to be transgender in the 1980s?

Did you have a vocabulary and concepts for your identity and who you were as trans? Who did you identify with? Who were your role models? How did the culture of the 1980s make your life easier or more difficult? What other aspects of the 1980s shaped your identity as trans? How do you think your experience then differed from the experience of people now who have greater internet access to support and visibility in the media?

Anonymous

I was in my 30’s during the 80’s and it was a fabulous time, the dawn of what I consider the modern era in popular culture. At that point, I could still pass for a gay boy in his mid-20’s, but my trans side was becoming harder to suppress. In the 70’s, glam-rock androgyny provided an easy cover for being femme and flashy. By the time the 80’s arrived, that trend had migrated out of gay subculture into the pretty boy new-wave scene and I did too. There were lots of drugs and sex as well, and I was a pretty promiscuous crossdresser. But one step I was not ready to take was transitioning for real, to admit to myself that I didn’t just want to dress like a girl and party.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that I really wanted to be female all along. But in the 80’s, that was too scary a prospect to deal with. I dreaded electrolysis, knew I could never pass, and was afraid I’d be alone forever. There was no trans movement, no internet to research, and nothing but contempt and ridicule for outed transsexuals. The 80’s were politically reactionary, with both feminists and fundamentalists raging with openly transphobic bigotry and judgmental psychiatrists who denied hormones and surgery to all but those who could act like prim and proper straight girls. I was a skinny punk bisexual freak who could not even caricature that kind of standard.

But the 80’s finally gave way to the 90’s, the emergence of gender activism and third-wave feminism. What really broke the ice was the increasingly public visibility of genderqueer dykes and trans men, unheard of in the 80’s. The jargon changed as well, with people openly identifying as queer and transgender, and the political formation of the LGBT alliance. While trans people were still marginalized in both straight and gay worlds, there was finally a queer alternative where you could transition without having to go full-time stealth in heteronormative mainstream culture.

Sarah Phillips, Woman of trans experience

It was hell.

I turned nine in 1980

I had no useful vocabulary to define what I was. I was different. I knew that, physically, I was not a girl. I knew I liked being around girls and doing things that girls did. I knew it would be ‘bad’ to share that with anyone.

I had a sterile dictionary definition of transsexual, no idea how I’d even heard of the word. I knew roughly what a transvestite was. I saw my body self destruct and I didn’t have words for it. My voice broke. My mother said I became quieter. I withdrew. I was unlike anyone else I knew.

Boy George and similar others were making music. I didn’t really notice them. I didn’t feel it was anything to do with me. I didn’t really notice that they were doing anything unusual, I filtered it out.

I identified with no-one. I had no role models. Whilst Caroline Cossey might have been publicly outed in 1981, that news missed me. My parents didn’t read The News Of The World. Apparently, neither did anyone else I know, or else they just weren’t talking about it. I could not have named a single transsexual in the 1980’s.

When I turned sixteen, I started to grow my hair. That was, at least vaguely, culturally acceptable. My mum accepted it. My dad made fun of me. My grandmother hated it and tried to bribe me to get a haircut. I started sixth form college and first met people who identified as gay. I looked at them, was indeed friends with them, but knew that I was not gay. They were different. They saw themselves as men and I did not.

In 1989, I turned eighteen and started university. There was the lesbian and gay society (became the LGB Soc in 1990 and, I assume, the LGBT society around 2000). I had decided I wasn’t gay so I didn’t sign up. That position became difficult soon after when I started being attracted to boys/men.

There was no publicly available internet. There were no “lifestyle” programmes, that I can recall. It was almost a vacuum. I did find an item in one book that said, and I paraphrase slightly, there was a man who got a sex change, lived as a woman, was raped and went back to living as a man again. It was not encouraging.

That was part of my problem. There was very little information about being transgender. What little there was was not encouraging. It was almost organised transphobia in the media, designed to keep me in line. I saw graffiti in public toilets either depicting scenes of men in lingerie performing sex acts on each other or, apparently, transvestites soliciting for sex. Either way it made me uncomfortable and wondering, “I this me? Is this what I’m going to become?”

Given how much negativity I was subjected to in the 80’s I’m amazed I ever transitioned at all and didn’t just give up and take my own life. Fortunately the 90’s gave me a lot more information, some of it even positive.

Anonymous

Seeking help. Small College town. There is a doctor that can help your son. Doctor is contacted. He says he charges $200.00 an hour to help me. My mother realizes she cannot afford it. This doctor is at the college, now a university.

The son goes to the local library. There is a book. It mentions Dr. Money. Speaks of how Dr. Money has treated children who are intersex, damaged from circumcision. How they are raised female. Also speaks of Transsexual. The first time he learns about people who live as the opposite sex.

Through reading, the young person learns that the testicles are the reason he has become so masculine. He then realizes it is time to stop the process and tried to amputate them. Ends up in and out of the hospital. Multiple amputation attempts.

Seeking any help she can, she try’s to find help for her son. He is suicidal and mutilating his genitals. To no avail. There just is no support for a young man who is in need of effective therapy. After all what is transgender? No one has ever herd the term in small town USA. He is then considered Gay. Never given the chance to be recognized accurately. He lives with the stigma of being a gay man who wants to be a girl.

He try’s to work. No insurance. Unable to hold down jobs he ends up back at mom’s house. His father lives on the other side of the country and has turned against him because he is a sinner. His son is a terrible child. His father is a reverend of a Pentecostal church in Arkansas. He abandons his son and never speaks to him again.

Now time goes on and mom dies. Eventually I transition, it is the 90’s.

Today I struggle from the memories of the lack of support in the 80’s. Mutilation and suicide attempts.

Life was hard. I was confused and reactive to the hormones bathing my brain and body. I felt like I was going insane. I have major scars and my mother and I were all alone against a system lacking is support.

I am alive. I survived. I have memories. I have scars.

Today, the support available is a miracle compared to what I didn’t have in the 80’s. I only hope it continues to improve. That any stigma or labels that are hateful and derogatory fade in time and we are no longer killed or treated as if we have no rights for being born the way we are.

The 80’s were a nightmare as a transgender person/woman. Thank goodness they are past.

Read the full post here.

Movie about a punk rocker who started a punk scene and punkhouse in Myanmar

As part of my research, I watched this movie about a guy in Myanmar who was trying to start a punk scene and running a punkhouse. They did your usual punk stuff. Some were in a band doing political music. They had a punkzine they were producing in their punkhouse. And they even were helping some others start a scene in another town.

It was interesting seeing how punk is practiced and interpreted in another part of the world.

From IMDB:

Kyaw Kyaw pursues the dream of seeing the punk scene take off in Myanmar, while raising awareness about persistent violations of human rights. His philosophy: A symbiosis of Buddhism and punk that rejects religious and political dogma.

From the Facebook page: 

Kyaw Kyaw, a 25-year-old Burmese punk, pursues the dream of seeing the punk scene take off in Myanmar. The former military dictatorship carried out a few democratic reforms, but he remains sceptical: In his opinion, the country hasn’t changed yet. Along with the members of his punk band, he tries to raise the awareness of his people about the persistent violation of human rights. By way of his music and the demonstrations in the streets, he criticizes the ongoing civil war and the persecutions of ethnic minorities. He travels across the country to promote his philosophy among the young generations: A symbiosis of Buddhism and punk that rejects religious dictates and political doctrine.

CLIPS, TRAILERS, AND RELATED VIDEOS
 

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mybuddhaispunk/

Labels: alternative scene, Asia, Asian punks, Asians in punk, documentaries, movies, My Buddha is Punk, Myanmar, punk Asians, punk in Asia, punk scene, punkhouses, punkzines, research

A public radio piece on punk flyers including some from Kansas City

This is an edited version of an article from WXPN, a public radio station, on punk flyers and people who are preserving them. 

A People’s History of Punk: Meet the local archivists working to preserve the past one flyer at a time

by Yoni Kroll

The show flyer occupies a weird space in DIY culture. At its most basic, it’s information: who’s playing, where the show is, and when things are going to kick off. And while you don’t need anything more than that, many flyers are of course highly decorated. They can be beautifully made – either by hand or on a computer, one is not inherently better than the other – or they can be downright ugly. But the thing is that no matter what they look like, flyers hold a special place in the culture. Not only are they an announcement and invitation but, when the music has long ended, they’re oftentimes the only documentation that will exist proving that the concert ever occurred.

Also, and this is important to point out, these are scraps of paper and almost all of them are going to end up in the trash.

If you polled a hundred punks – or really anyone involved in underground music – from different backgrounds, of different ages, from any corner of the world, you’d find that almost all of them have saved at least a few flyers from old shows. Maybe it was a gig with some big-name bands or bands that were legendary only to the few people who made it out that night. Maybe it’s that time they got to see their favorite. Maybe it’s something from a show that happened decades ago, well before they were even born.

These flyers are stored in shoe boxes, albums, framed behind glass, or just shoved haphazardly in a drawer somewhere, ripped and torn. Beyond the sense of history there’s a personal connection to the music and the scene that spawned it.

Anna Young | photo by Yoni Kroll

Anna Young from the West Philly two-piece band Hermit High Priestess has a collection of flyers going back to when she was a teenager in Kansas City, Missouri. Some of them are of shows she played, some she just attended, some she didn’t go to but thought it was important to hold on to the flyer. Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, not all of her memories associated with these pieces of paper are that positive.

“It’s strange I wanted to keep this stuff,” she admitted. “But I just couldn’t [throw it away].” The flyers are also the only real artifacts of the band she was in for many of those years, Toxic Shok, save for a handful of photos. Despite only being her personal archive – one she’s brought with her through multiple moves around the country over the past dozen years – it is very much a snapshot of the KCMO scene during the time she was involved....

While (OB, @eastbound2fkd on Instagram) very much has a collection now, he didn’t start off with that goal in mind. “Trying not to sound like an old man, but I started ‘collecting’ partly out of necessity,” he told The Key. “If I was at a show (or a record store) and picked up a flyer for a future gig I wanted to attend, I would keep the flyer in my room to remind me of the date, time, and location of the show.”...

Fast forward to July of 2014 and the realization that he had a “box of flyers in the attic doing nothing” and so, as he put it, “… it seemed like a good idea to post some pictures of them on Thursdays, as part of the #tbt hashtag that was popular at the time.” Though first he had to make sure they were all in chronological order, of course...

“I started collecting flyers when I first started going to punk/hardcore shows in 1995,” (Chris Delaware, @delaware90shc on Instagram) said. “At that time, I loved flyers. The artwork, the information, the band logos. Even shows that I knew I couldn’t attend, I still grabbed and held onto them.” He described himself as a “collector and hoarder of all things” including records, cassettes, VHS tapes of old shows, and other punk ephemera: “[I] really just have a habit of not throwing anything away.”

While he had already been posting video clips of old shows to his personal account, he started the @delaware90shc page in August of 2019 after realizing there was a greater interest in this sort of thing outside of the people he already knew. He also cited @eastbound2fkd as inspiration: “I started searching around and found OB’s page and thought, ‘Hey, this is a cool idea. I have a lot of these flyers too, but also a lot of others from the Newark/Wilmington Delaware scene that I was a part of.’”

Although there is an aspect of nostalgia to the project, Chris Delaware is also focused on the importance of historical documentation. As he explained, “… it’s all about the memories but [it’s] also a great way of documenting and archiving our DIY punk scene for sure. I’ve always loved hearing stories of shows from those older than me that I didn’t attend and also seeing old videos.”

That rings true for Young too but she also stressed the necessity for groups to be able to create their own historical narratives. “In general the history of people is changed and molded to fit whoever is writing it, whether that’s through the lens of white supremacy or through the lens of straightwashing,” she told The Key. “The people’s history is important. This stuff, these flyers, these shows, I don’t think that they’re that important to be honest with you. But it’s nice to be able to tell someone that they happened. And some of this art is amazing and some of it’s terrible but altogether it does make something big.”...

Taking a look at some of the posts, it’s easy to understand why they resonate with so many people. Not only are there bands represented that fans love and have a long history with – either from seeing them live or wanting to see them live – but the members of those groups are just as ever-present in the comments reminiscing about the show on the flyer pictured.

For Chris Delaware that’s one of the most crucial reasons he puts in the work. He brought up a house show in Bear, DE he helped put together as a teenager in 1998 for Dillinger Escape Plan, Boy Sets Fire, All Else Failed, and Burn The Priest (now known as Lamb Of God), bands that today fill huge venues all by themselves. When he posted the flyer and videos from the show he was able to hear from members of the bands two decades later and find out what it was like, as he put it, “from their point of view of playing a garage show for a bunch of kids.”

This speaks to the importance of the audience in music but also to the lack of a divide – at times literally and certainly always metaphorically – between audience and band in the DIY scene. Just focusing on the music alone doesn’t accurately give you the full picture of what happened in the past. Still images are oftentimes only of the bands, cutting out everyone else there and sometimes even identifiable aspects of the venues, and video footage is rare. But flyers and especially projects like these that give them cultural context very much help create a robust history by drawing connections between bands, spaces, promoters, and so on.

For Young, every single flyer she pulled out came with a story about that show or one of the bands or her experiences at the venue. “There’s some good memories in here and some really bad ones,” she said. “They definitely all make me feel complicated.” That’s certainly why she’s held on to this collection despite the fact that a good chunk of those stories are not particularly positive.

Although it might not be a full history of early aughts Kansas City, Missouri punk, it is her personal history and that’s a valid and necessary perspective when trying to get a better understanding of anything, especially when it comes to the arts. This is important whether you’re talking about punk in the Midwest or opera in Italy. Also, none of these scenes exist in a vacuum and so seeing what bands toured, where they toured, and who they played with is certainly significant.

While OB admitted to not curating the content he posts except to make sure that he’s posting shows that happened that day – “I just post any flyer I have that matches the date,” he said – he told The Key that by not only focusing on well-known bands or important shows it does give a greater sense of the scene. “I don’t consider myself a historian or archivist though, that sounds pretty academic,” he said. “I am just a punk rock enthusiast.”

Read the complete article here.

Labels: alternative scene, culture, flyers, history, Kansas City, Midwest, midwest punk scene, punk culture, punk scene, scene, WXPN

Interviews with a mid-80s Iowa alternative rock band

These are just some interviews with a mid- and late-80s Iowa alternative rock band that was quite popular, The Hollowmen. They give an idea of what the 80s central Iowa punk/alternative scene was like. I also included a couple of Hollowmen songs at the end.

Labels: 1984, 1985, 80s, alternative music, alternative scene, Des Moines, Hollowmen, Iowa, Iowa alternative scene, Iowa punk scene, music, music characters like, punk scene, research