Punk and Brain Junk

Just a brain dump of random things I want to say about punk rock and race.

DC is one of the homes of punk rock inasmuch as any place can pretend it can say anything about the nature of a thing like punk. There are as many origin stories as there are people willing to tell you to fuck right off because you got the whole thing wrong.

Punk is fucked up and it's also a fuck you, which is what I've always liked about it.



I grew up in Washington, DC, between the suburbs and the city, when doing "white people shit" was a grave offense but we were all still influenced by each other.

Random Shit I Wrote

Back when magazines were a thing, I wrote a piece about Nirvana on the
“Nevermind was really the voice of that generation who didn’t buy what [President Ronald] Reagan had tried to sell,” says Laina Dawes, author of the upcoming book What Are You Doing Here? Black Women in Metal, Hardcore and Punk. “They didn’t want to become their parents, who they felt had sold their souls for a rigid conformity that the youth could see was a bullshit existence.”

Jack Davey, of Los Angeles-based alternative R&B/rock duo J*Davey (who released a stirring version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” earlier this year), cites “a kind of newfound independence” that defined the late ’80s and ’90s. “People who were teenagers at that time were kind of rebelling against a lot of the economic oppression,” she says. “There were a lot of conventions in the ’80s that were worth rebelling against.”

Random Shit Other People Wrote You Should Read