Premise: Four Iowa punk friends in their early 20s agree to see 100 shows that year, while also dealing with the ins and outs of their own personal lives and the wild world of 1984.
Sorry, no story so far. Working on research. But I'll post writing exercises, research, outlines, and whatnot. You can read my long treatment at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kCeqaT1Ug3zuEgjTeTTCby-1IJcreATvtH5tyAklFVM/edit?usp=sharing. Feel free to comment or make any suggestions.
Taken in: United States / Ohio / Columbus / University Area Taken on: June 5, 2009 Sets appears in: • lotus fucker, nukkehammer, sacrifidelus, penis geyser @ 15th house 06.05.09
This is an edited version of a roundtable discussion between two members of the taqwacore or Muslim punk band, Kominas, a radio host and blogger who discusses Islam, and a reporter from Religion Dispatches.
Imagine standing in a copy shop, running off copies of a book you wrote. You have to distribute it yourself, and you cannot keep up with demand. Sometimes you get paid for the labor of copying and mailing. That was Michael Muhammad Knight before his novel The Taqwacores found a publisher. In 2003, Knight was pushing out an underground novel that spoke to a generation of Muslim-American youth who had no cultural home. There were pot-smoking, praying, Qur’an-reading Muslims, who would edit out sections of the Qur’an because they were “wrong” and no one could explain the text to them.
Playing with the Arabic word “taqwa” (God-consciousness) and the punk suffix “core,” Knight gave voice a segment of the Muslim-American community. He also earned the ire of large parts of the community who were in denial that these people existed, who felt their power threatened, or who could not deal with the confusion their decisions caused.
Following is a roundtable discussion on the Taqwacore scene among Basim Usmani and Shahjehan Khan (both members of the band the Kominas), Kaitlin Foley (radio host and erstwhile Islam blogger), and myself.
—Hussein Rashid
Q: When we consider that the contemporary Taqwacore scene was at least partly inspired by fiction, the fact that it exists in real life today becomes even more remarkable... How do you all think the fictional and virtual origins of Taqwacore have affected the development of the Taqwacore scene so far, and how might they influence its future development?
Basim Usmani: This is funny, originally I had conceived of an all-Desi punk band called the Kominas before I began jamming with Shahj and before I even knew who Mike Knight was. My impetus was the need to appropriate the cultures around me into something that could be my own. So I wouldn’t feel weird or self-conscious listening to, or reading, or exposing myself to non-Desi elements. I hated being graded for my Desi or Muslimness. The music was born out of frustration, because of dead-end jobs, no prospects, and a huge shadow cast over me from my parents that busted their balls to provide a life for me (which I still suck at). MMK’s work helped reconcile religion into the music, and really elaborated some of the beauty and iconoclasm inherent in Islam, which I wasn’t really comfortable writing about. I wanted a Punjabi Dropkick Murphys, Mike wanted a Qallandari Rancid. Thinking about it, I like the latter better as well. Everything begins as fiction in your head, mashing up concepts and understanding how ideas can fit is important. I think the use of the Internet, quick access to media played a part in that. Not MySpace...
Kaitlin Foley: ...I can’t say Mike Knight’s The Taqwacores was a genesis for me about Islam but it was an affirmation that self-publishing was a chance to throw out the rule book and create my own. I could play around with social media to find people and ask why a fictional punk scene fascinates kids then shared my own stories with Madison street punks. Some believed me, some didn’t care for hardcore. As far as conversations about TQ in the future, I hope they will be less about identity crises and big picture modern dilemmas and more on the actual music. Maybe the new sound should be deconstructed before social media tackles Islam, Taqwacore, and punk rock all at the same time.
Hussein Rashid: Thanks BU, for the clarification. I seem to recall meeting you and having this conversation before hearing about Mike Knight’s book, but it’s good to have that confirmation. I do think the aesthetic element of your work is often overlooked. One of my favorite tracks is “I Want a Handjob,” precisely because I think it has some of the qalandari element to it. It has reverence for the family of the Prophet, and includes elements of contemporary cultural references with a good dose of sexual language. Like a good South Asian or Persian lyric, it does not have to be devotional, but can incorporate those elements. Even prior to the emergence of Taqwacore I was hesitant to label things “Islamic.” It implies a level of religiosity that may not be present and obscures other intentions and meanings in the music. I much prefer Marshall Hodgson’s construction of “Islamicate,” for things that may be influenced by Islam, but are not necessarily religious. I am curious about KF’s point about identity crisis. I never heard your music in that way. To me, it is a declaration of the multiple identifications that make your identity. It is the opposite of a crisis; a resolution perhaps. SK you talk about being ten years older, but it is fast approaching that time since the music started. Do you think that time has made a difference?
BU: I think that’s a great observation, it isn’t identity crisis. Time has definitely made a difference in terms of being in a band and touring and actually meeting people that are interested in the music we play.
KF: Sure, HR, I’ll expand. What I meant by identity crisis was that Taqwacores resolved what I think is a normal teenage phase when they found people like themselves and some shared world in punk. Maybe BU would say his story would be a goth goes Taqwacore one instead but I think it’s the same either way around—that is, in the end it’s okay the stories are different and any message might evolve with new bands and music...
Q: ...Do you believe that TQ is having an impact outside of the United States? If so, what? Why do you think it is having an appeal? If not, why? Is it the music (the genre being very particular to the Anglophone world)? the underlying thought of treating “Muhammad as punk rocker?”
BU: What an ignorant question. Anglophone world? Punk is ten times bigger in Kuala Lampur than it ever will be in the UK, France, or Germany. Or America. No, the reason for forming the Dead Bhuttos, and the rush to put a single online was to show, at least cosmetically, that Pakistan was as capable of putting out punk rock as Turkey, Malaysia, Japan, and Lebanon. The USA is good to sell obscure Malaysian and Japanese records in, but it’s not a good place to play this kind of music. We’d do much better in South Eastern Asia, which yes, we get a lot of traffic from online. Tons of people from Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia add us. We’ve been covered in the major Malaysian music magazine. I think it makes more sense for us to play in Malaysia then it does to play in Europe.
Shahjehan Khan: Many things remain to be seen, but I think it would be a mistake to deny that Mike’s book is having some kind of impact in the world. We get messages frequently from bands/kids/music lovers/thinkers worldwide asking us when we are coming to their neck of the woods. If I’m not mistaken, outside of the US, our Facebook pages’ popularity has Pakistan next in line. Omar’s documentary is currently screening in the UK, so I don’t think anyone is really sure (and I’m not exactly certain how one would quantify this) who is reading, who is listening etc…
HR: Ouch. You are right BU, my question and it was poorly worded. Clearly I know the the popularity of punk, amongst other genres, outside the Anglophone world. I think Mike’s book clearly speaks to a lot of people, but as fiction there is a comfortable level of distance. You are actually making the music, and that’s really the tension I want to explore. It’s one thing to utilize the genre, it’s another to inject it with themes related to Islam. I will be honest and say that I am surprised at how well your lyrical content is taken in Muslim majority countries. With respect to Pakistan, CNN did a piece on Pakistani metal. It seemed to be a highly artificial scene, almost staged for the cameras. The concert footage in Pakistan seemed more organic. What is your sense of the music scene in Pakistan? How does it compare to South East Asia, for example?
BU: There is a much bigger music industry in Malaysia than Pakistan in a traditional sense. Pakistan probably has a lot of money and publicity in its artists, and its more likely there will be press following Pakistani artists around—but thousands and thousands of people attend concerts in Kuala Lampur, and there is already a Malaysian scene for “Western” music, you’ll find Malay skinheads, punks, metalheads, and rappers. Pakistan is mostly a place for ballads, and bhangra.
Q: Assuming international impact, are we seeing transnational connections being made? For example, the UK Asian Underground, the US/Indian Asian Massive [as the MIDIval PunditZ consider themselves to be part of Asian Massive], and the Indian Cyber Mehfil groups are all in communication with one another and often work together on projects. Is there something similar with TQ emerging?
BU: Not yet, just some contact with British Asian geezers like Asian Dub Foundation, Fun Da Mental and Alien Kulture. There are Taqwacore groups in Scotland and London, but no one has contacted us to do a tour. Most of them discourage us about setting foot in Bradford lest we become the biggest pariahs since Salman fucking Rushdie.
SK: See BU.
HR: Isn’t every good qalandar a pariah?
BU: True.
Q: Much is being made of TQ, but heavy metal, if not punk, have been a part of the musical politics of the Arab World for some time (for example, see here). What is different about TQ that it is generating such interest? Is it their origin is in the “West?” Is it South Asian?
BU: It’s the West. The media is having a circle jerk over this idea at the time, because the notion of “Muslim punk” is sexy to them. The way the racist media sees it, they can put MMK in every story as the great white grandfather to this scene of confused, destructive Muslims who’ve turned around from their ‘opressive’ culture. There’s plenty of revolutionary South Asian hip-hop out there. Humble the Poet’s father is a Sikh cab driver, and he writes about working-class life in Toronto, and remembering the 1984 golden temple massacre in India. But instead, CBC TV, the biggest broadcaster in Canada comes to us to cover us. The reason? A white man started all of it. At the same time, the music has been the most underserviced aspect of all the media on us. News stories mention the same songs, and make no note of what they sounds like. They still leave Arjun out of their writeups because he has a Hindu name, and Shahjehan Khan, our guitarist, is constantly referred to as our lead singer.
KF: In response to BU: I think the best approach for getting lost in the message and media circus surrounding Islam is to look at Taqwacore objectively as traditional news does. And many journalists do, usually getting tripped up on the exotica of talking about religion in a public way. This isn’t just a Taqwacore-specific issue, or even one with Islam, but also one of those longstanding ethical dilemmas for reporters and editors—one that makes traditional journalists crazy private about debating the issue and expect to keep doing so until the end of time. Punks and journalists have one similarity in that they are careful outside their respective circles not to lose the reputation and influence they’ve earned. So, there’s a mutual attraction and tension in Taqwacore coverage that leads to what Basim called a circle jerk.
SK: [Essentially] the same story has been circulating for a while, and it is up to us to change it now, to be responsible with this media attention. I think that the next year will be the true test of what TQ is really all about (if anything more than a group of friends). One would hope that more bands are started, I think we would all agree on that.
HR: There seems to be a long history of immigrant South Asians writing resistive poetry in the US and England. As you point out, this poetry gets very little attention. Do you really think it’s about MMK? I do notice he gets mentioned a lot in articles about the Kominas, but all of you associate together quite a bit. Although I am conscious of the myth of a “white savior” in a lot of redemption narrative, what makes you think it’s not an two-fer for the reporter? You are with MMK, so she gets to write about you and him.
BU: It’s likely a two-fer as well. I’m grateful for the association—though the scene, and the people who attend the concerts should be covered more heavily.
Q: What is the gender dynamic of TQ? Much is made of Secret Trial Five to show the gender openness of TQ, but punk is a strongly gendered-biased genre. Is TQ inheriting the liabilities of punk and patriarchal interpretations of Islam?
BU: Yes. Girls come to watch the bands but don’t play in them. It’s too bad.
SK: I don’t think it has much to do with “patriarchal interpretations of Islam,” more just the ‘reality on the ground’ if you will. We have a very sizeable female presence at our shows, but as to why there aren’t more bands, I don’t know… It’s only really been 3-4 years! I would be willing to bet that there are more out there that don’t care to publicize themselves in the way that perhaps we have.
KF: I’d agree with SK that there are more Taqwacore artists who are women out there. There’s a couple in Australia, for example. You just have to look for them because as Shahj said, they’re not talking about Taqwacore all the time. Then you also have artists like Micropixie who are part of the scene even if they don’t exactly label themselves Taqwacore.
HR: SK, my concern is that without pushing the gendered divisions early Taqwacore can inherit a lot of cultural baggage that quickly comes to define the system.
Q: In the MSM, TQ is often positioned as “Islamic Punk,” or “Muslim Punk.” While members of TQgroups are from Muslim backgrounds, are these useful labels? Is the music Islamic or Islamicate? Does the distinction mean anything? That is, does their religious identification become their identity, regardless of their own feelings on the matter? If so, why does hip-hop not get the same treatment, which also emerges from an Islamicate background?
BU: “Muslim Punk” is an awful term. I don’t believe in an afterlife, or any existence after you breathe your last breath. I think the Qur’an is man-made. But I think all art is divine, and that we men have invented these gods and written all these books. In our lyrics, there is a lot of what could be considered blasphemous content. That’s because we own these gods. We are these gods. That is what taqwacore is for me. It’s self-consciousness. It’s knowledge of self.
SK: One can’t get deny The Taqwacores being a novel about “Muslim Punks.” In the first years of the Kominas, Islam was something that we felt like writing about, but so was a Pakistani earthquake (Rabyah), or a Bollywood-style train robbery (Dishoom Bebe). I think that the term “Muslim Punk” may have been accurate initially (I would disagree with BU’s characterization as ‘awful’, seeing as we all used/abused the term to some degree), but has become more of a burden as time has gone on. Any label is usually exclusionary, and artists usually hate them. I most certainly believe in an afterlife, and would call myself a Muslim.
HR: This question of blasphemous content is so interesting, because there is such a long history of these types of lyrics and approaches in Islamicate literature. Iqbal’s Jawab-e Shikwa, while not as direct as some of your lyrics, speaks in the voice of God. That’s blasphemy. The literature of the malamati, the Sufis who sought blame for themselves, is all blasphemous. It is very much part of the tradition, although the form may change. I’m not sure blasphemous content, from a devotional perspective, is really meaningful anymore. It is most assuredly not a marker of belief. However, your declaration of (un)belief is far more important, BU and SK.
BU: I think its fair to say we draw from poetry by Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, and the Qur’an. There’s a lot of lyrics and music that appeal to me though.
She writes plays, directs and acts in comedy mime skits, moshes in punk pits and reads lips. Sabina England is a 20-something Midwest girl that fits no typecast. I stumbled across Sabina on twitter as the @DeafMuslim when all Taqwacore scenesters would retweet her plays and videos. I was already curious about the Deaf Desi community since meeting a few in DC, but was even more intrigued after checking out her site, her comedy skits and reading the stories and plays on her blog. How could I not be? I sat down (virtually) for a fascinating interview where she talks about acting as Helen Keller in a high school play, to having a Mohawk and wearing hijab, to prejudices against the deaf community by fellow Desis.
...So let’s talk about another community – the punk one. I kinda want to ask what your favorite punk band was growing up but not sure if that’s appropriate…
I loved The Clash, the Sex Pistols, and X Ray Spex. I listened to music with my hearing aids, but I was more attracted to the lyrics, to the visual elements of punk culture and the punk politics and gender issues along with it. I can hear music okay, but I can’t really make out the words. For other punks, they were in it for the music. Not me. For me, going to shows, it’s more about socializing and being with my friends and meeting other people, having a good time and bonding. it’s not really about the music for me at all, you know?
I was always a feminist, and I think being a feminist pushed me into punk rock at an early age. I liked the anger and the “fuck you” attitude of punk rock. I loved the independence and fierce attitude of punk females like punk vocalists in all male bands.
Right…who were you favorite female punks?
I was never a girly girl and I never liked girly girls at all. Poly Styrene from X Ray Spex and Siouxsie and Beki Bondage. I was also in love with strong female characters in films, like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 Judgment Day. I admired females in Hollywood such as Lucille Ball, who is still one of my biggest inspirations.
So did you have a lot of punk friends in England or the Midwest?
I got into punk rock when I lived in the Midwest. But as a child in England in the 80s and early 90s I had seen some punks around in London and other cities, and their style always attracted me. I knew it was something I wanted to be part of it.
And the Mohawk, when did that happen?
I had a Mohawk for 2 years, it wasn’t too long ago, about 3 years ago. It was cool, I’m gonna grow my hair long again so I can shave my sides and have a Mohawk again. It was so weird, though, I always got different reactions and treatments from people. So in a way, having a Mohawk taught me about people. I had hot pink hair once and my father was furious, he wouldn’t speak to me for 3 weeks. I told him to get over it. I can’t stand that patronizing bullshit from parents, especially Desi or Muslims. They are making judgmental remarks about people who dye their hair or get tattoos or wear revealing clothes. What the fuck does it matter to them? It’s their lives and their bodies, it doesn’t hurt anyone else.
I also used to wear hijab, too, you know. For about 3 years in the late 90s to early 2000s.
And then?
Well one day, I had a wake-up call from a goth girl who was sitting next to me. She was the only one in the entire college who was nice to me, while everyone else were extremely nasty toward me. I stared at her hair and her outfit and then I thought to myself, “what the fuck happened to me? I used to be a punk and now I’ve become this?” and then I realized how wearing the hijab is such an artificial thing to do. I don’t want to piss off any hijabis here. But I truly felt that wearing the hijab was a slap in the face for women’s individuality and their bodies. Someone once said that wearing hijab is saying “YES, we women are sex objects, so we HAVE to cover ourselves to protect ourselves from men’s lustful glances!”and when I sat next to the goth girl I thought about how some Muslims would call her a “whore” because she was wearing a short skirt. But she was such a nice girl. And I felt dirty. I felt like a hypocrite. I still wore hijab for 1 more year after that goth girl incident and then I took it off.
Sabina England talks about a lot more than just punk rock in this interview, and I recommend reading it. Quite fascinating. But for the sake of my research, I only included what she said about punk rock and punk culture here.
Krip-Hop Nation (KHN) - Hello I’m so glad you said yes to an interview! First of all your work is beautiful. Tell us you call yourself a Deaf Muslim Punk Playwright please explains.
Sabina England - ...Anyway, just so we are clear, I didn’t originally call myself a Deaf Muslim Punk Playwright. A Pakistani Muslim teenager in Norway who had followed my works online and was an admirer created the name of my Facebook public page.
So I was surprised to see a page about myself on there, and I became friends with her, and she talked to me about the Islamophobia, racism, xenophobia in Norway that a lot of Muslims, both immigrants and European-born youths, faced from other people. She was drawn to my works, to my anger and political awareness in my art, to my struggle existing as a Deaf South Asian Muslim woman of color immigrant punk rocker in a hearing white man’s world.
Eventually I took over the Facebook page. I like the name of the Facebook page, because it helps shows the world that I am: Deaf, Muslim, Punk, and Playwright. I wanted deaf people out there to see my name come up in results for “deaf” and see that there’s a working deaf artist who has a career in theatre, filmmaking and playwriting, these fields which are very difficult for deaf people to break into. I also wanted Muslims to find me in search results and see that there’s a Muslim woman filmmaker / artist / performer. I wanted other Muslim women to find me and enjoy my works.
And I wanted the world-- whether hearing, deaf, non-Muslim, or Muslim, to see that I am not a stereotypical “deaf and dumb” girl, or that I was NOT a “helpless / oppressed” Muslim girl who needed to be saved....
KHN – As an author you wrote and self-published your first novel, Urdustan (A Collection of Short Stories), a book of short stories about South Asians from all walks of life. Why did you think this book is important and tell us why you end up self-publishing it?
Sabina England – The book has many short stories and features characters from different backgrounds. There are Hindus and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis, punk rockers and deaf youths, Hasidic Jews and gay people. All the short stories were loosely inspired by true events in my life...
KHN - Your short videos are a mixture of politics, laughter, nature and such. Please give us a brief rundown on “Allah Save the Punk!”...
Sabina England – I made “Allah Save the Punk!” because I wanted to do a light comedy with a storyline using both punk rockers and religious extremists from a Muslim punk rock perspective. Growing up in Northern England in the 1980s, I always liked punk rock and I was just drawn to the subculture for its sheer anger and energy, but also for its political awareness. I just wanted to have fun and make other Muslims laugh at ourselves. Humor is the best medicine! We all know that one person in our community who’s a self-righteous, holier-than-thou person, and I wanted to create a self-righteous character that is so full of themselves and so extreme in their beliefs. I created the Mullah, who was so religious and holy, but somehow ended up with a punk rock daughter. That’s pretty funny, right?!
Also the title “Allah Save the Punk!” was inspired from “God Save the Queen” by Sex Pistols...
KHN - On your website it says you are apart of S.O.S Records, an underground Los Angeles streetpunk label, and have often been linked to the Taqwacores scene. Please explain.
Sabina England – I was a friend with Rob Chaos, the lead singer from Total Chaos, we became friends on MySpace in the mid 00s and stayed in touch. He liked some of my posts and liked my attitude so he asked me to be the face of S.O.S Records, they printed out promotional flyers with my face and put it up at punk shows everywhere! I was also asked to appear in Taqwacore (the documentary) and I said no because I had some problems at the time and I didn’t feel ready to do the project. So they used one of my photos (with my permission) and put it in the film. So ever since then a lot of people have associated me with both.
I have to admit that I haven't been able to verify if this is a real quote from Tom Petty.
Music is probably the one real magic I have encountered in my life. There's not some trick involved with it. It's pure and it's real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things.
Chicago was home to a number of underground music scenes in the ’70s and ’80s, but none perhaps more unruly than the emerging punk and hardcore scene in 1977. Inspiration came from the New York artists then playing Chicago, including Patti Smith, television, Lou Reed, and mostly, the Ramones. Its earliest hotspots were dance clubs, not concert venues. La Mere Vipere on Halsted Street was a gay bar that morphed into Chicago’s first great punk bar with an edge that would be reflected in some of the bands that eventually came out of Chicago – a mixture of British-influenced punk, art school vibe, New York new wave feel, and definitely not hippie contrariness with an antistyle style and plenty of attitude. La Mere was located on a stretch of Halsted Street south of Fullerton and it burned down under mysterious circumstances in April, 1978, only to be replaced by a liquor store. When saddened fans complained publicly to Patti Smith at her Park West show that “they burned it down,” she said, “So your club burned down. Start another one!” The punk/new wave DJ/dance clubs O’Banion’s, Lucky Number, Neo, and the Smart Bar followed.
Everyone was waiting for the Sex Pistols to hit town, and tickets to their 1977 New Year’s Eve show at the Ivanhoe Theater on Clark Street were printed and sold ($4 general admission). The band was famously falling to pieces in front of audiences across the country before they finally imploded on stage in San Francisco at the Winterland Ballroom. They never played Chicago.
The early Chicago punk/new wave bands were a mixture of inspirations and styles. Jim Skafish’s band Skafish was notable for its inventive musicality and the absolute eccentricity and unabashed ugliness of its lead singer/songwriter/musical genius, Skafish. Tutu and the Pirates were like crazed, fun-loving misfits from the ’70s basement rec room run amuck. The Immune System sported art school cool and minimalist aesthetics and Desmond carried working-class blues influences, but musically and theatrically it was dominated by the raging, roaming, intense vibe of its lead man, Jim Desmond. Plus there were The Dadistics. They could be heard at such places as Tuts, Gaspars, the Cabaret Metro (with the Smart Bar, Waves, and Stages all in the same space at different times), Misfit’s, Ruts, Medusa’s, C.O.D’s (which also burned down), and Exit.
Records could be found at Wax Trax on Lincoln north of Fullerton, and at Sounds Good on Ashland north of Belmont, which had a huge inventory of 45s, including Patti Smith’s “Hey Joe” backed with “Piss Factory.”
The shows were unpredictable and potentially explosive, even cathartic. They skirted the edges of chaos and good taste, and yes, they held a mirror up to society’s ugly underbelly, but mostly they were good, bratty fun, with city and suburban kids behaving badly and loving it. Stuffy, it wasn't; it was down and dirty. Dye your hair some shocking color and rip your stockings, honey. We’ll pogo til dawn.
There was something about Akron in the 1970s-80s that lit a spark for many local musicians and performers. The result was a particular sound and style that put the Rust Belt city on the global radar, at least for a little while. Maybe it was the younger generation’s distrust and discontent of the government born out of the nearby May 4 shootings at Kent State University. Perhaps it was the discovery of New York punk rock that changed local players’ perception of what they could create and what audiences wanted to hear. Maybe it was the grit, the bootstrapping and the surge of rebellious energy that tends to emerge from hard times. Maybe it was a combination of all those things, and more.
Calvin C. Rydbom, prolific archivist and Stow resident, aimed to not only explore the reasons Akron received international infamy through bands like Devo, The Bizarros and The Waitresses, but also encapsulate a very specific moment in the city’s history where creative folks were pioneering new sounds that attracted music fans and media well outside of the Rubber City.
Rydbom’s new book, “The Akron Sound: The Heyday of the Midwest’s Punk Capital,” is arguably the definitive resource for anyone looking to learn more about sounds coming out of Akron in the ‘70s and ‘80s....
“Wayne (Beck) was a mainstay in the party scene in the late ‘70s and ‘80s then went to LA professionally for many years, came back here and said, ‘You know, I think it would be cool to celebrate that time in Akron history,”...
Rydbom aims to define what exactly the “Akron Sound” is in his nonfiction book. It’s not necessarily New Wave, he writes. It’s not an actual sound like Seattle’s clearly identifiable grunge. It’s a little punk rock, but not every band evoked the sense of aggression and defiance common with the genre. Through his interviews with Akron Sound pioneers like Buzz Clic from the Rubber City Rebels and King Cobra and Chris Butler of Tin Huey, The Numbers Band, The Waitresses, Half Cleveland (and many other projects), there are jokes and guesses, but no one can really give a clear answer.
“Just different; it was just Akron,” Rydbom writes. “Just some really cool music by a bunch of young musicians who didn’t want to follow their folks into rubber factories.”
Out of the Basement: From Cheap Trick to DIY Punk in Rockford, Illinois, 1973-2005 is an autobiographical look at how the punk music scene started in David Ensminger’s hometown of Rockford, Illinois. It’s published by Microcosm Publishing, a Portland based co-operative press.
In the 1980s, Reaganomics ruled America. Taxes were raised 11 times during Reagan’s administration, and a chasm divided the wealthy and working class. Suburban families nestled comfortably on the outskirts of ‘dangerous’ cities, hoping to shield their children from the perils of crack cocaine and rampant violence. The political and cultural divide helped to bring punk rock, one of the most passionate and powerful genres of music, to the front of millions of conflicted teens’ minds and mouths. In Out of the Basement, author David A. Ensminger takes readers to the Illinois town of Rockford (home of the quintessential rock band Cheap Trick) and captures how important punk can be for those who are lost, awkward and pissed off.
Rockford, Illinois, is not a small town. Home to more than 150,000 people, and less than 100 miles west of Chicago, Rockford was designed to be an industrial hub and boasted huge economic development. However, as employment and production in the Rust Belt declined, the unemployment rate for blue collar workers in Rockford skyrocketed to nearly 26% in the 1980s. Segregation in the town prompted additional discord between residents. Those who made money and considered themselves above the working class attempted to keep their family on the “rich” side of town. Ensminger paints a portrait of the ‘80s in Rockford from his teen years playing punk music there: “Rockford was not just another bummed out Midwest town; it became one of the worst, replete with a withering economy and a moral austerity as well.”
For bored and disillusioned adolescents confronted by the sharp and sudden dilapidation of their city, a fierce rebellion arose in Rockford. Dozens of small punk bands formed and played wherever they could. On any given weekend, teens could go to the skating rink, 4H club, or almost any open garage and find a group of sweaty, awkward kids playing three chords with every ounce of energy they had. As punk became the blood that pumped through his veins, Ensminger spent nearly every waking moment devoted to music and his first band, Vital Signs.
Ensminger doesn’t assume his readers are punk philistines. He references some of the genre’s key members (Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Plasmatics) without sitting the reader down and explaining who these bands are. A bit of punk knowledge is required for this book, but for the local (often unsuccessful) Rockford bands, he interviews musicians and friends and accompanies these stories with old photos and concert flyers. Consider looking these bands up and listening to their music while reading, because these stories are only further amplified with song.
Not just a love note to punk music, Ensminger’s book is also an autobiography of how growing up in a dying town shaped his future. He discusses the conundrum of living in a town that’s close to two of the midwest’s biggest cities: Milwaukee and Chicago. Punks who stayed in Rockford either resent those for leaving or were jealous because they couldn’t find the resources to leave themselves. Because of this, the noise coming out of Rockford became louder and more aggressive, pushing against the mainstream bands of the ’80s ( Journey, Foreigner and Duran Duran). But with this uprising came a blend of genres. Punk became rock, rock became metal, metal became punk.
“This meant crowds became more inclusive, democratic, and youthful, less geared towards booze-fueled tirades and more fueled towards slam dancing and skate-til-death/skate-and-destroy mentalities. Soon, gigs were attracting hundreds of kids zooming in from every direction. The punk nucleus widened considerably.”
Without Ensminger’s collective narrative, it’s safe to say many of these stories of garage bands and punk-rock debauchery would never have reached an audience wider than Rockford itself. The book covers four decades of music and politics, yet the core of the punk movement remains firmly in the 1980s. After Ensminger left Rockford to see what the world had to offer him, he found other cities to call his home. He never tries to dig up those Rust Belt roots, and his age reflects the pride he finally feels in his town. “I left, went West in 1993…Still, I always know that others lived just as boldly, just as creatively, purposefully, and witty, back in Rockford…” And, while his story may mostly take place in this distant exurb of Chicago, its communal tales and universal sound will resonate with everyone.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Mike Skill (The Romantics, guitarist, bassist): The Romantics played with the Pigs and the Traitors, with Don Was. It was some place in Oak Park at the school where Don’s dad was the principal.
Don Was: Yeah, my dad was a counselor at the junior high in Oak Park. We got him to book the Traitors and the Romantics just to have a chance to get out and play somewhere. It was disastrous. We got to play, but it was a huge incident for my dad.
Chris Panackia: The Romantics eventually would play three nights at Bookie’s and sell out every night. They played the Silverbird on a Monday night and didn’t announce the show until just before doors. This was right when “Tell It to Carrie” was starting to hit and people were just waiting for them to explode. When they announced it on the radio, 6 Mile and Telegraph became a parking lot. There were probably a thousand people there that couldn’t get in outside.
Bill Kozy (Speedball, guitarist): I was real young, and my pals from Warren Avenue took me and to the Silverbird when the Romantics did a surprise show. Beers were 25 cents. It was this rowdy rock crowd, but things were different than that. The Romantics’ fans looked like late-seventies rock people.
Mike Murphy: People kept saying someone will discover Detroit at that time, like they did in New York and Los Angeles, and it never happened. Then the bands imploded or were erratic, and it was kind of strange that nothing ever happened out of that whole time, the first wave of punk rock. Bands were going to New York and playing shows and showcases.
Katy Hait (Sillies, vocalist, photographer): These bands from other cities would come in—Teenage Head from Toronto, Skafish from Chicago—and we were just as good as those bands. We joked about it because Detroit was such an underdog. Bands from LA and New York would become famous even though they weren’t that great.
Rock Band The Romantics Performing on Stage (Photo by Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Kay Young (photographer): The music was really good, but no one hit like the Ramones or the Cramps did because Detroit was not New York. There were no record label scouts here.
Jerry Vile (The Boners, vocalist, artist, editor, White Noise, Orbit): The whole Detroit punk thing—nobody made it, and there are a lot of reasons. The record covers always looked like shit.
Vince Bannon (Bookie’s, City Club promoter; Coldcock, Sillies, guitarist): The Romantics were the only ones to pull out of Detroit in that era with any kind of substantial deal. You know it’s interesting: Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads told me that all these bands rolled into New York City because there were so many clubs besides CBGB that they would play. They could actually afford to live in the East Village and build a buzz. So you’re an A&R guy in New York, and this band is playing various buildings, and there’s a big buzz. Same thing in LA. The thing you have to remember is, what big bands came out of LA? The first punk rock bands were all signed to independents. It was out of New York where at that time the record capital was, and if you were to make it, you had to go and live in New York and do it. Also, anybody who really made it—from the biggest pop star to the rock-and-roll guy you think is totally underground—their ambition is through the roof. A lot of these guys that were from Detroit, they lived at their parents’ house, they go and play a gig, they come home, and Mom would make them breakfast in the morning.
David Keeps (Destroy All Monsters, manager): Bands from Bookie’s didn’t break out. The bands that did do something had heavy management, people who were willing to invest money in them to get them out of Detroit, like the Romantics. Also in Detroit you didn’t have these bands with money or commitment. You had to have both, and many didn’t. I don’t think anyone was poor; I think that they were mostly suburban kids living in their parents’ houses and didn’t have jobs. They weren’t like dole kids. It wasn’t as if you went to Bookie’s and all these people were from the projects or got ADC. There were kids who wanted to move out of their parents’ and lived in shitty neighborhoods.
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.
Negative Approach playing the Freezer, Detroit, early 1982. Photo by Davo Scheich
Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB and these bands with the crazy names…and I told Jack [Tann, friend and local music producer] about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.
Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGB in ’75 or early ’76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo, she worked there for ages. And she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there’s this crazy guy from Detroit—he’s calling again.” I’d say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks. In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGB. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi at the time, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “none of these people have seen shit.’
Chris Panackia , aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie’s was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “look at them. They’re different.” “They’re expressing themselves.” Bookie’s became the place that you could play. Bookie’s had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren’t in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren’t. Bookie’s bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became. Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had…Bookie’s because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let’s do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people”? Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn’t another venue.
Tesco Vee (Meatmen, Blight, vocalist, editor, Touch and Go magazine): We’d go to see everyone at Bookie’s, like the Revillos, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, Gang of Four, the Effigies, and the Misfits many times. You know it’s funny—all the Detroit bands would warm up all those national acts—the Mutants, the Algebra Mothers, Flirt, the Cubes, the Sillies. We talked about them a lot in Touch and Go. It was like new wavy stuff, but still it was new music, and we covered new music, and it was probably just to fill up the pages. That’s not very nice is it?
Bookie's in Detroit
Steve McGuire (Traitors, bassist): When we hooked up with Don and they had this whole floor of an old Westinghouse factor at I-94 and Trumbull, with all this old equipment from United Sound and Sound Suite. It was our rehearsal place. I had quit high school and started living there and experimenting. When I first met Don I thought this was our ticket; we’re going to make it. I was so naive. There were blurbs of the Sex Pistols, and I thought the Traitors and the Sex Pistols were in a race, and whoever won would be kings.
Gary Reichel (Cinecyde, vocalist): They basically hired the bands and marched them down to one of the Birmingham salons to get the punk rock haircuts. They had a slick flyer to give to club owners. “And we’ll handle everything. The three bands will all tour. We’ll use the same equipment. You don’t have to worry about time between bands.” That’s how they were selling it. And they had bigger aspirations than that. They wanted to get them signed.
Mike Murphy (The Denizens, the Rushlw-King Combo, the Boners, Hysteric Narcotics): No band got famous out of that whole era except the Romantics, and that’s freaky. It’s not that the Romantics weren’t Detroit, but they were not representative of that scene at all. But maybe that’s why they did get signed. When they were first working they were getting on all the good bills and paid for a rehearsal space and they were on salary, which sure isn’t like the rest of the bands. We were poor. I was working at a 7-Eleven.
Bangs’ description was undoubtedly important. For NME’s Nick Kent, “the whole concept of punk was his.” For Clinton Heylin, in From The Velvets To The Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock, Bangs was “the godfather of punk journalism.” In 1975, Bangs wrote to a friend, admitting that he had “influenced a certain miniscule subculture of teenage misfits with rock’n’roll fanaticism and sometimes literary aspirations, who like to think of themselves as ‘punks.’”
However, in The MC5 review, Bangs didn’t use “punk” to call to mind a new spirit of rock’n’roll, but an old spirit of ill-informed journalistic excess... The Rolling Stone hype irritated him, and he paraphrased the earlier article, dismissing it with what would become his trademark sarcasm: “never mind that they came on like a bunch of sixteen-year-old punks on a meth power trip — these boys, so the line ran, could play their guitars like John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders played sax!”
The word also seemed to conjure up Bangs’ own life. He was still then working on an autobiographical novel that he had begun in his teens, which he called Drug Punk... He discussed passages from Hunter S. Thompson’s Hells Angels, which had used the word “punk” frequently, with the San Diego Hells Angels chapter who lived next door. His friend Robert Houghton remembered that We’re Only In It For The Money, with ‘Flower Punk,’ was one of their favourite records of 1968....
After that MC5 review, through 1970, “punk” became popular. critics said Jim Morrison had a “street punk-choir boy voice,” or that The Rolling Stones had “a punk craftiness and sneering narcissism.” In the Fort Lauderdale News, there was the “lowest point in bad taste: the rock band of young punks at a remodelled nightclub which hung a placard on the bass drum with a phrase containing a four-letter word.” There are two types of kids: good kids and punks,” the Detroit Free Press suggested, though now “the good kids and the punk kids all have long hair.” In July 1970, in Fusion, Nick Tosches wrote a cover story called ‘The Punk Muse.’ For perhaps the first time, “punk” became more than a throwaway reference. It was now a recognisable, fashionable style.
“The Punk Muse”, 1970 (Source: Fusion/The Independent)
At the end of 1970, Bangs wrote a long essay called ‘ Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program For Mass Liberation In The Form Of A Stooges Review. Or, Who’s The Fool?,’ published in two parts in 2. Bangs called Iggy Pop “that Stooge punk.” As with The MC5 review, the description was both influential and called to mind earlier journalism; the previous year, in the Los Angeles Times, John Mendelsohn had described The Stooges’ first album as a collection of “whiny adolescently repulsive and barely distinguishable street-punk anthems.” Before that, in Fusion in October 1969, Iggy himself had described some of his audience as “punks.”
Bangs’ “Stooge punk” was a little different to the other “punks” of the time. This punk was “a pre-eminently American kid,” he wrote, vulnerable even, someone the “smug post-hippie audience” thought was “a fucked-up punk.” This was personal for Bangs: “his lifestyle was nigh-identical to ours,” he wrote later. In the issue of Creem that carried the second half of his Stooges essay, Bangs signed another review “Punko Bangs.” A few months later, he wrote that he felt “like some self-important punk’s notion of God sitting up here arbitrating the efforts of bands.” The same year, he called himself a “pompous punk,” someone with “pube punk fantasies.” For the first time in a couple of generations, someone had taken on the word willingly.
By the end of 1970, in New York, Suicide were advertising their early gigs as “punk music,” apparently inspired by Bangs. “I got the word from Lester’s piece,” Alan Vega remembered, “never imagining that punk would become a style of music.”
Punk was fashionable again.
Advertisement for Suicide in the Village Voice, October 1970 (Source: From The Archives)
“If punk America is dying behind the curdled MSG-free dregs of Hip and all the corny Experiments in New Designs for Living,” Bangs wrote in 1971, “then THE LESSON OF ‘WILD THING’ WAS LOST ON ALL YOU STUPID FUCKERS.” Punk seemed to suggest a wider malaise that could be delineated by rock music. This “punk America” caused him to turn to nostalgic rock’n’roll: “you can talk about yer MC5 and yer Stooges,” he said, but they couldn’t compare to the “sneering punk snarl” of The Troggs.
This nostalgic usage was already common, particularly about fifties rock’n’roll. Ellen Willis had called Elvis a punk in 1969, and The Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran would all be punks over the next few years. They were seen as forefathers: in a 1970 article on violence in rock, Rob Partridge in Record Mirror drew the links between the “romantic” punks of the 1950s and The MC5.
However, as Bangs had hinted at, it was the punks of the 1960s who first coalesced into a genre. In March 1971, in Creem, Greg Shaw wrote about The Shadows of Knight’s “hard-edge punk sound.” In April, in Rolling Stone, he praised The Guess Who’s “good, not too imaginative, punk rock and roll.” The next month, Dave Marsh wrote his famous review of ? & The Mysterians, calling them a “a landmark exposition of punk rock.”
Both Marsh and Shaw felt they had originated the phrase “punk rock.” At the end of 1971, Shaw wrote about “what I have chosen to call ‘punk rock’ bands — white teenage hard rock of ’64–66,” and, according to the New York Daily News in 1976, he was “willing to take the credit for it even though he says he can’t remember the first time he used it.” Marsh remembered that, “culturally perverse from birth, I decided that this insult would be better construed as a compliment.” He was, he said, “happier every year” to receive the credit for “punk rock.”
However, despite their influence, neither Shaw nor Marsh was the first to use the phrase. A year before either of them, in March 1970 in the Chicago Tribune, Ed Sanders, formerly of The Fugs, described his first solo album as “punk rock — redneck sentimentality — my own past updated to present day reality.” (While working on the album in December 1969, he also recorded a song called ‘I’m Just a Tired, Lonesome Street Punk,’ or simply ‘Street Punk,’ which was only released in 2008.) “No one sent me a check for coming up with the term,” Sanders recalled.
Wherever it originated, this “quaint fanzine term,” as Shaw thought of it, was growing in importance. Bangs’ ‘Psychotic Reaction and Carburetor Dung: A Tale of These Times’ was published in Creem the month after Marsh’s Mysterians review, again praising mid-sixties punk rock, particularly The Count Five... He planned to use the article’s title for what the Detroit Free Press anticipated would “probably be the definitive book on punk rock,” though it was never published...
Both the word and the music spread further still when Lenny Kaye used the phrase in the liner notes to his 1972 Nuggets compilation of sixties garage rock . “The New Nostalgia is here,” proclaimed a Chicago Tribune review, “with an emphasis on a single genre: punk-rock.”... Bangs wrote that Nuggets “proves that psychedelia and punk zap are just as much a real cool time now as they were when we might have invested some emotional space-born significance in them.”... By the new year, some fans of Nuggets were calling themselves “punks.”
Before long, punk was used to describe contemporary music. “Punk-rock has become the favoured term of endearment,” Ellen Willis wrote in December 1972, for “the mythic crudity and crassness reputed to be at the heart of rock and roll.” Willis particularly liked what she called the “neo-punk sensibility” of Five Dollar Shoes, who she saw at the Mercer Arts Center in 1972, in one of the earliest references to underground New York rock as punk. (Lynn Van Matre had called Moogy And The Rhythm Kings “New York punk rock” in the Chicago Tribune that summer. Lillian Roxon also frequently praised a band called Street Punk, regulars at Max’s Kansas City.)
Although it was often used for artists that are now thought of as punk’s forebears — Lou Reed, The New York Dolls, Flamin’ Groovies —the word refused to be pinned down in the first half of the seventies, such was its ubiquity. Punk was used for a kind of “back to basics” blues rock.., heavy metal..., progressive rock..., and dozens of pop and rock acts with little else in common... The Monkees were “what punk rock is all about.” “Dion was the original punk,” according to Greg Shaw in Rolling Stone. For the Philadelphia Daily News, Connie Francis’ ‘Lipstick on My Collar’ “epitomized the adolescent worst of punk rock.”
“What Punk Rock Is All About”, 1973 (Source: Hartford Courant)
Soon, bands began to adopt the term. The Who included ‘The Punk and The Godfather’ on Quadrophenia in 1972. As well as Street Punk in New York, a band called The Punks formed in 1973 in Detroit. “Patrician rock is going down now,” Don McLean said that year, trying to shake off the success of ‘American Pie,’ “I like punk rock.” Brownsville Station released School Punks in 1974 and told journalists that they were “punk rock.” In 1975, Lowell George of Little Feat, once of The Standells and The Mothers of Invention, claimed that his current group, five albums in, were “just another punk band from L.A.” That year, The Tubes released ‘White Punks on Dope,’ reportedly about Jefferson Starship.
For much of the seventies, punk was often interchangeable with glam rock. For the New York Daily News, “punk rock” was a “subdivision” of “glitter rock” or “drag-rock.” Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Slade, and The Sweet were all called punk, and Roxy Music were “punk rock in space.” According to the Los Angeles Times in 1975, hitmakers Chinn and Chapman were “the masters of the English punk-rock sound,” but were “tired of the punk-rock wave that they rode to success in England.” In the British music weeklies, as Simon Reynolds observed in Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century, groups such as The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Heavy Metal Kids were “punk before punk.” One headline about Harvey suggested “Thou Shalt Have No Other Punk Before Me.”
Indeed, the word was used frequently in the British press. As early as 1972, Charles Shaar Murray had described The MC5 as “punks,” after quoting Lester Bangs’ Rolling Stone review. Mick Farren often used the word for 1950s rock’n’roll, or those influenced by it. By 1973, NME was writing about “rock ’n’ roll’s punk-junk revolution.” In 1974, Melody Maker discussed “these brash new Manhattan bands and their shameless punk rock,” and NME reported that record companies were actively searching for “punk.”
More than anyone else, Alice Cooper was the most high profile punk of the early seventies. He was “archetypal punk rock” for Grace Lichtenstein in The New York Times, and “mainstream punk raunch” in Rolling Stone. Punk was “a style that began and should have ended with Alice Cooper,” the Tampa Times argued. In Creem, Cooper won the new “Punk of the Year” category in the 1972 Readers’ Poll, with Lester Bangs placed in sixth. The next year, Billion Dollar Babies was “the Sgt. Pepper of punkdom.” After seeing a disappointing Alice Cooper show, a critic in Ontario wrote, probably for the first time, “punk rock is dead!”
Despite its popularity, punk still often betrayed the attitudes of those who used it, riddled with the problems of its etymology. In 1970, Huey P. Newton wrote to members of the Black Panthers, in a letter widely republished in the underground press, urging them to see the “women’s liberation” and “gay liberation” movements as allies, and that “the terms ‘faggot’ and ‘punk’ should be deleted from our vocabulary.” Even where the word had come to mean a delinquent, it still sometimes echoed with homophobia or misogyny; liner notes to a 1973 compilation of The Sonics suggested that “it’s like if delta blues oughta be played by old black men, and if fag rock oughta be played by real queers, then it stands to reason that punk-rock oughta be played by punks!” For Ellen Willis, in 1974, “nouveau punkism… became an excuse for blatant male chauvinism and nihilistic trashing of every value and aspiration beyond (male) orgams and (male) violence.” In 1975, Let It Rock noted that “the term punk is bandied about an awful lot these days, it seems to describe any rock performer who camps it up to any degree, on or off stage.”
Lester Bangs became sceptical about the term. In 1975, he wrote that “I try to completely dissociate myself” from people who think of themselves as “punks,” “because I don’t want to be the king of the punks or the king of the rock critics or any other such thing.” “This is punk?” he asked, when his friend Billy Altman took him to CBGBs for the first time, to see Talking Heads and Television. “This is just San Francisco all over again.”
“When there are no more punks,” Sid Vicious said, in January 1978, on the day of The Sex Pistols’ final concert, “that is when things are going to be okay.” The word had dogged the band, through tabloid controversy and critical admiration.
In America, the word had been attached to something recognisable as modern punk since at least Trixie A. Balm’s June 1975 review of The Dictators’ debut album in Creem, in which she praised their “punk aplomb” and “vinylized punk menace.” At first, calling The Sex Pistols “punk” was not to suggest they were new, but to compare them them to prevailing rock critical trends; in their first major review, in NME in February 1976, Neil Spencer said they played “60’s styled white punk rock as unselfconsciously as it’s possible to play it these days i.e. self-consciously. Punks? Springsteen Bruce and the rest of ’em would get shredded if they went up against these boys.” In May that year, Time Out described their set as “a mixture of Anglo-American teen/punk classics.” For Paul Morley, in his Out There fanzine, it was “controlled chaotic punk muzak.” Even for Greg Shaw, reviewing a gig at the 100 Club, “their sound is a straight blast of tortured punk rock.”
As Otto Wise exhaled, one night in the final few months of the nineteenth century, the smoke from his cigar curled towards the ceiling of B’nai B’rith Hall, San Francisco. Wise, a twenty-seven year old attorney, was “director” for that nights’ “smoker” at the fraternal lodge, encouraging attendees to do a turn for the entertainment of the two hundred other guests...
Wise turned next to Eugene Levy, a fellow attorney. Levy, who was thirty nine, sang as requested....
Whatever the song, it was bad. Before Levy could sit down, Wise mocked it. Wise was a consciously cultured man — he gave public lectures on Jewish literature and “the social life of the ghetto” — and this song, he thought, was so bad that it needed a new word, a word that probably hadn’t been used about music before, at least not in print, a noteworthy word, more noteworthy than the song itself. It was, he said that night in October 1899, “the most punk song ever heard in a hall.”
“The most punk song ever heard in a hall,” 1899 (Source: San Francisco Call)
Many punk historians have tried to capture the complexities of the word “punk.” “Ask forty punk rockers how they define punk and you’ll get forty different answers, and they’ll all be right,” Bob Stanley suggested in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. It is a “notoriously slippery term,” Nicholas Rombes wrote, in A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, “unstable, ambiguous, loaded with so many suggestions.” According to Richard Cabut, in an introduction to Jon Savage’s ‘Punk Etymology,’ in Cabut and Gallix’s Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night, “at the beginning — and at the end — is the word.”
If the story of punk’s etymology is told at all, it is normally told this way: at the very end of the sixties, and the very start of the seventies, the word bubbled up in rock criticism, most notably when Lester Bangs referred to The MC5 and Iggy Pop as “punks.” In 1971, they say, Creem editor Dave Marsh coined the term “punk rock,” in a review of ? And The Mysterians. The next year, the future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye used the phrase to describe Nuggets, his compilation of mid-sixties garage. By 1976, it was used for the bands who played at Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, via a New York magazine called Punk. The term re-crossed the Atlantic, and was used to describe London bands....
Those that mention any older history might suggest that Bangs got the word from William Burroughs — who is sometimes quoted to suggest punk meant “someone who took it up the ass” — or that Shakespeare used the word to mean “prostitute.” Any older musical history of “punk” is lost, with only faint smoke trails lingering, through forgotten journalists in regional newspapers, underappreciated female critics and rock crit faves, back to Otto Wise and his cigars, and further still, through centuries.
Lester Bangs and Lillian Roxon (Source: Robert Milliken, Lillian Roxon: The Mother of Rock)
Punk was already mean and ironic by the time Shakespeare used it. His punks were flashy and transgressive even at the end of the sixteenth century. “This punk is one of Cupid’s carriers,” he wrote, in The Merry Wives of Windsor around 1597. “She may be a punk;” Lucio says in Measure for Measure, “for many of them are neither maid, widow, nor wife.” In All’s Well That Ends Well, the Clown mentions a “taffeta punk” for whom the “French clown” would be “fit.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, punk was first printed in 1575, the year Shakespeare became a teenager. It appeared in a song, a ballad called ‘Simon The Old Kinge,’ or sometimes ‘Old Simon The King.’ The song’s narrator suggests that being drunk is “a sin, as it is to keep a punk.” It seems to be a joke, a drinking song disguised as a morality tale, or vice versa. The song was popular, and was reprinted often, becoming a standard for hundreds of years. According to one writer in 1776, it was played drunkenly in taverns, with “half a dozen fiddlers” playing “till themselves and their audience were tired.” Despite its “harsh and discordant tones,” “people thought it fine music.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a new meaning for punk grew, a meaning that had never been used in Britain: punk as rotting wood, used for tinder, and eventually other things that smoulder, like fuses and incense...
Eventually, the word became a standalone adjective, meaning poor quality, and was applied to the arts: there were “punk shows” in theatres in San Francisco by 1889. Newspapers speculated about the word’s origins... Some said it had come from “hoboes,” “passed along thousands of miles of railroad,” or from “our colored brethren,” or noted it was used by young people, complaining about “punk” plays with no “hot stuff in dem.” This seems to be the sense in which Otto Wise used the word in the B’nai B’rith Hall, earning cheap laughs in a well-to-do setting with a youthful, working class word.
Although it was used across America, it seems small-town Kansas was a particular hotbed for early references to “punk” music: there was a “punk orchestra” in Emporia in 1898; a “punky band” paraded down the street in Waverly in 1899, most likely a theatrical group in blackface; Iola had a “punk concert” in 1901, and Hutchinson had a “punk band” in 1902.
By 1901, according to the St Louis Republic, punk was “everyday twentieth century slang.” In 1907, the Los Angeles Times mentioned a campaign for “punk music by union men,” on its front page. In 1908, there was a “punk opera” in Nebraska. “Punk music” was played in New York, by “a man violinist and his wife accompanist,” and in Utah, by a “cross-eyed accordion player.” In 1913, according to the New York Evening Telegram, a woman “an inch deep in make-up and all swathed in violet chiffon veils and chinchilla” sailed across the Atlantic, “strumming on a guitar in the moonlight and humming French songs. Her voice was punk.” At least one vaudeville performer fought a critic over the word’s use. The first cinematic punk appeared in 1916, in Pedro The Punk Poet.
Advertisement for Pedro The Punk Poet, 1916 (Source: Hot Springs New Era)
The word was used so often, it began to sound like a genre in its own right. “It is little wonder that the managers send us punk music shows,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette grumbled in 1914. “These draw audiences of great size, while the sane and intelligent exercise of stage art goes unattended.” According to the Tampa Times in 1917, “the latest war song, ‘Send Me Away With A Smile,’ is very punk and therefore very popular.” “The popularity of a song depends upon its punkness,” the article suggested. “The demand of the day is ‘punk songs for punk people.’”
