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CHAPTER 8

How to Forget (and Remember) ‘The Greatest Punk Rock Band in the World’: Bad Brains, Hardcore Punk and Black

Popular Culture

Tara Martin Lopez and Michael Mills

On 24 June 1979, an unknown punk band opened for British musicians, the Damned, at a small venue in Washington, DC.1 While the audience was expectantly waiting for the headliners, the frenetic and explosive opening act, Bad Brains, stole the show. One audience member remarked that the show was ‘an absolute benchmark’. Punk rock icon, Henry Rollins, went so far as to say, ‘Bad Brains blew the Damned with all their makeup and shit right off the stage.’2

What was even more remarkable about Bad Brains was that they were all Black musicians in what is commonly perceived as an all-White music genre. Band members Paul Hudson (or HR), Earl Hudson, Gary Miller (or Dr. Know) and Darryl Jenifer made Bad Brains central to the formation of American hardcore punk. Like first-wave punk, hardcore sought to define

T.M. Lopez (*) Department of Sociology, Peninsula College, Port Angeles, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

M. Mills Department of English, Peninsula College, Port Angeles, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2017 K. Gildart et al. (eds.), Youth Culture and Social Change, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52911-4_8

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itself in opposition to mainstream, feel good music, particularly pop, disco and stadium rock, with its perceived intricate musicianship, nine-minute songs, concept albums and bloated drum and guitar solos. Hardcore responded with short, fast, songs, simple chords and beats and biting lyrics that spoke to disaffected youth. The birth of hardcore was also the result of punks’ disgust with new wave and the record industry’s promotion of an inauthentic version of punk. The same punks harboured a certain degree of distrust for first-wave punk bands who inadvertently or otherwise brought punk to mainstream consciousness. While such bands remained heroes to many for their innovation in sound and attitude, hardcore punks found the Ramones’ lyrics lacking in substance and the Sex Pistols’ image to be excessively nihilistic.3 The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the conservative, neoliberal ascendancy throughout the 1980s, also created a sense of political urgency, especially in Washington, DC. Therefore, bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat made personal and social change central to their message. Consequently, the resulting music and subculture of hardcore thrived in the underground, operating with a ‘Do It Yourself’ (DIY) men- tality, progressive left-wing politics, and attempting to keep itself at arm’s length from popular culture and the music industry.4

Nevertheless, the images of bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag have emblazoned a specific visage of hardcore punk on collective memory, that of alienated White male youth. Some White punk musicians were the first to perpetuate this idea. When interviewed in 1979, for instance, Johnny Ramone from the Ramones asserted that they were ‘playing pure rock & roll with no blues or folk or any of that stuff in it’.5 That singular and isolated idea stuck, and in 1986 journalist Mykel Board proclaimed that ‘punk was the first white music since the 1960s psychedelic stuff’.6

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff critically summarises the overall shape of this hegemonic understanding of history when he writes: ‘Like many facets of pop culture, [punk’s] historical image has been whitewashed: when you think of punk’s history, it’s bands like the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones that spring to mind.’7

Despite the prevalence of this dominant image of punk, among musi- cians and fans, a powerful undercurrent of memory exists that attests to the undeniably formative influence of Bad Brains. Anthrax guitarist, Scott Ian, is frank when he states, ‘The Bad Brains invented hardcore, not Black Flag or Fear. Those bands ruled as well, but they didn’t have the density of the Bad Brains.’8 Obviously, the explosiveness of these upstart punks was not momentary, but for many, Bad Brains had an integral, transformative

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and long-lasting role in the creation of hardcore punk. Therefore, our aim is to situate Bad Brains in hardcore punk rock history not as an anomaly or a side note, but as an essential force.

More importantly, our study will look beyond the late 1970s and early 1980s to the present, and to the memory of Bad Brains and its importance to punks of colour. We will demonstrate that since 2000, a flood of texts, both written and visual, remembering Bad Brains and reclaiming their space in the hardcore punk rock pantheon have appeared. By analysing documentaries, books, zines and interviews, we will argue that these recent excavations represent George Lipsitz’s understanding of ‘counter-memory’. According to Lipsitz groups like women and African Americans have been ignored in dominant narratives of history. In order to defy such universalising forces that obliterate the traces of subordinate groups’ histories, such marginalised groups focus on their localised experiences and engage in a form of remem- bering that reconstructs history to re-incorporate into collective memory that which was previously obscured. By reassessing common understandings of hardcore punk, new avenues of possibility emerge, especially for punks of colour. As Lipsitz writes, ‘socially created divisions appear natural and inevi- table unless we can tell stories that illustrate the possibility of overcoming unjust divisions’.9 Hence, the history of hardcore punk as a White male institution has prevailed in collective memory. By contrast, we will demon- strate that using Bad Brains as a focal point of counter-memory creates possibilities of legacy and belonging within the American hardcore scene for Black punks and other punks of colour.

‘BIG TAKEOVER’ – THE MARGINALISATION OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN PUNK STUDIES

Maria Wiedlack has observed that ‘punk history writing continues the oblivion of representations and politics by people of color’.10 Such ‘obliv- ion of representations’ is especially indicative of the marginalisation of the Black experience generally, and Bad Brains’ role in the development of hardcore and punk specifically, which has proliferated throughout scho- larly accounts in punk studies.

Such erasures from academic studies appear in sweeping accounts of US social and cultural history. In Jefferson Cowie’s recent history of 1970s America, for example, he bemoans how, unlike punk in the UK, punk in the United States ‘lacked a conscious infusion of black musical

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traditions’.11 Even in accounts which recognise that traditions in Black culture shaped punk rock, mention of Black bands in the scene are con- spicuously absent. For instance, although Steven Taylor adamantly rejects the ‘absurd notion that punk is purely white music’ in his ethnography of punk, his chapter titled ‘Hardcore’ about the Washington, DC, hardcore scene, makes no mention of Bad Brains.12 Even more problematic are authors’ brief mentions of Bad Brains without addressing broader racia- lised, gendered and classed inequities that are reflected in punk. Many texts briefly note, or footnote, Bad Brains or include singular photographs of the band. When such authors frame the band as ‘four black guys in an all-white world’,13 the texts’ trivial treatment of the subject is essentially writing the Black presence out of punk rock. Their existence becomes a novelty or an eclectic addition to an institution assumed to be all-White.14

Such conspicuous omissions provide the academic foundation upon which more widespread myths of punk as ‘White music’ have been built.15

This chapter challenges such nonchalant dismissals. Not only does Bad Brains’ stature in punk refute such assertions, but erroneous claims that rock and punk are exclusively White forms restrict this space of cultural expression from Black musicians and fans. Mainstream collective memory embraced the idea that rock music was a White endeavour, admiring Elvis and the Beatles despite the fact that both acts readily recognised and often cited the debts they owned to Black musicians. As mainstream Whites assumed ownership of rock, many Blacks distanced themselves. Ike Willis, who played guitar and toured with Frank Zappa, notes the most perni- cious effects of such racially homogeneous portrayals of rock and punk. Willis reflects:

In the black community I became even more of an oddball as the years went on because of the fact that the images and the politics being perpetrated on television and radio and commercials and magazines as rock n roll becoming more and more perceived in the black community as a white thing.16

Willis echoes the effects of erasing Blacks from punk: rock and punk become inextricably intertwined with Whiteness. Using perceptions of Bad Brains as the starting point of our analysis, the facile depictions of the exclusively White origins of punk quickly reveal themselves to be inaccurate. The more troublesome fact remains that such perceptions serve to perpetuate racialised forms of exclusion in punk today. Therefore, the experiences of Black musicians and fans are central to our

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analysis, revealing that Black punks have a claim to the development of punk, both historically and in the present day.

While Black influences and the issue of race as a whole were sidelined in accounts of American punk, they were a central focus of research in British punk. In Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, he argued that reggae and race relations constituted a ‘present absence’ in punk. According to Hebdige the ‘rigid demarcation’ that developed between punk and reggae reflected broader divisions and tensions between Black British and White working-class culture.17 Gilroy further situated the rise of punk in 1970s Britain and asserted that Black dissent, like that of the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival riot, not only coincided with the rise of punk, but such an ‘uncompromising statement of black dissent’ became ‘a source of envy and of inspiration to a fledgling punk sensibility’.18

Therefore, in contrast to many American accounts of punk, Hebdige and Gilroy implied that the image at the heart of punk identity, that of the rebel, was inspired by Blacks in Britain, which is helpful in reaffirming our focus on the centrality of race relations and Black culture. Nevertheless, their focus on punk and reggae as two distinct entities reaffirms an association of Whiteness with one and Blackness with the other, sidelining those individuals who crossed the resulting imaginary borders. As Elizabeth Stinson concisely observes, such bifurcation, ‘hangs on fetishization of the black other and places punk in a production line of whiteness’.19

Furthermore, such accounts have also been criticised for ignoring forms of racism that were rooted in punk’s origins. Sabin, for instance, argues that British punk’s association with Rock Against Racism forever tied the image of punk to left-wing politics, when, in reality, very problematic forms of racism were deeply embedded in its music and subculture.20 In the United States, one of the most biting criticisms in this same vein came from Daniel Traber. In his work, he accuses Los Angeles punk of criti- quing forms of racial and class exclusion, while, in the process, becoming an ‘agent’ of such oppression and claims that ‘its rejection of the dominant culture relies on adopting the stereotypes of inferior, violent, and criminal nonwhites’.21

While such accounts have been important lines of criticism in illuminat- ing the limits of punk, the result, nevertheless, can be an essentialised understanding of White and Black popular culture and a lack of awareness of the dynamism of such forms of cultural expression. Hall notes the corrosive effects of such essentialism:

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The essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and de-historicizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic. The moment the signifier ‘black’ is torn from its historical, cultural, and political embedding … we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct.22

Hall emphasises that there are no intrinsic traits among these groups that create inviolable lines of ‘authentic’ cultural expression.23 Gilroy’s concept of ‘anti-anti-essentialism’, provides a force of theoretical equilibrium between the extremes of exceptionalism, which views punk as a force of absolute exclusion, and pluralism, which sees borders as more fluid. Gilroy specifically references Bad Brains in the terrain of this debate.

The brand of elitism which would, for example, advance the white noise of Washington D.C.’s Rasta thrash punk band the Bad Brains as the last word in black cultural expression is clearly itching to abandon the ground of the black vernacular entirely.24

While it is important to not impose limiting definitions of what is and is not Black cultural expression, that understanding must be tempered with an overarching understanding of the historical and contemporary exclu- sions and inequalities that are particular to Blacks in the United States, UK and Caribbean.

While re-incorporating the Black experience into narratives of punk, the invisibility of women in most of these accounts is also glaringly obvious. McRobbie was one of the first academics to criticise punk studies for its sole focus on men. McRobbie noted that women in subcultures were often seen in the role of girlfriend or groupie, ignoring the creative ways young women developed subcultural identities, oftentimes in domestic rather than public spaces.25 A concern for a gendered analysis further leads us to unpack other forms of invisibility. Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of intersectionality can frame the complexity of marginalisation and privilege Bad Brains experienced as a band. Instead of seeing race, class, gender and sexuality as separate hierarchies, intersectionality urges researchers to see how they all ‘mutually construct’ one another.26 Therefore, while we will argue that Bad Brains’ exclusion from dominant narratives was highly racialised, it is important that as an all-male band, Bad Brains were able to operate within a highly masculine and sometimes physically violent, male-dominated music scene.

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The efforts of academics have culminated in recent research that embraces a more complex understanding of the Black experience in punk and reveals the significance of Bad Brains. One the most notable is Duncombe and Tremblay’s White Riot: Punk and the Politics of Race, which interrogates hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality, while simultaneously high- lighting the crucial role Blacks, queers and women played in the development of punk, both as musicians and fans.27 Scholarly investigations of Bad Brains have also begun to appear. Maskell, for instance, has explored Bad Brains and the concept of memory. She contends that Bad Brains established their own identities as musicians through performances that simultaneously ‘forgot’ the association of punk with Whiteness and ‘reremember[ed] the sociohistorical roots of black rock’n’roll’.28 Duncombe, Tremblay and Maskell provide essential corrections to the dominant myth of a racially homogenous punk rock, while at the same time, challenging hierarchies intertwined in punk.

This chapter contributes to this literature by examining how Bad Brains were integral to the development of American hardcore punk. Therefore, part one of this chapter examines Bad Brains’ influence on hardcore in the United States and their relationship to British punk. While cognisant of the White, heterosexual and male-dominated nature of punk, we frame race, gender and class as social constructs that are powerful in resulting manifestations of solidarity and exclusion, but we reaffirm Bad Brains’ guitarist Darryl Jenifer’s assertion that punk ‘is black expression’.29 We establish the legacy of Bad Brains in hardcore and set forth how, especially since 2000, books and films have underlined the importance of Bad Brains to a wider audience. We focus on Black punks and how their counter- memory of Bad Brains has allowed them to re-imagine a space for them- selves in punk rock. We situate Bad Brains and their status as the ‘Greatest Punk Rock Band in the World’ in a twenty-first century context.

‘BANNED IN DC’ – BAD BRAINS IN 1970S WASHINGTON, DC AND BEYOND

Bad Brains’ singular genius reflected the distinctive character of Washington, DC at the time. Although other northern metropolitan areas with majority Black populations existed, the numbers in DC far surpassed those of its counterparts. While Gary, Indiana, was 53 per cent Black, and Newark, New Jersey, was 54 per cent Black in 1970, Blacks made up 71 per cent of the population of Washington, DC.30

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Hopkinson notes that its large population of Blacks earned DC the moniker ‘Chocolate City’ in the mid-1970s.31 The ‘middle-class flight’ in the DC area created ‘two different places in the nation’s capital’, one of a predominantly White, suburban class and another of urban, Black DC residents.32 Although 92 per cent of Whites in Washington, DC moved to the suburbs, the city also experienced the highest rate of Black suburbanisation in the United States. From 1970 to 1980, the Black population in Washington suburbs increased from 23 per cent to 46 per cent.33

Bad Brains emerged from this process of Black suburbanisation. Paul Hudson (HR), Bad Brains’ vocalist, and his brother, Earl Hudson, the band’s drummer, were raised in District Heights, a primarily Black suburb in Prince George’s County. The Hudsons’ father had retired from the Air Force by the time the family settled in District Heights, where they lived close to Gary Miller (Dr Know) and Darryl Jenifer, the future Bad Brains’ guitarist and bass player. The members of Bad Brains represented a marginal Black middle class that was a particularly distinct feature of the area.34

In the mid-1970s, DC was also a hotbed of musical creativity and the heart of the ‘go-go’ music movement. As a musical genre influenced by Caribbean music, ‘go-go’ has been compared to hip hop, funk and reggae.35 Darryl Jenifer described the members’ early interest in progres- sive jazz rock and later interest in punk: ‘We wanted to make our music progressive. It was the norm to do the funk and the “go-go”. For some reason, I didn’t want to be normal!’36 HR, Earl Hudson, Dr Know and Darryl Jenifer went in a different direction, forming a short-lived jazz- fusion band called ‘Mind Power’. Early band member, Sid McCray, is credited with introducing the other members to punk records. With a focus on becoming a punk band, the four musicians formed Bad Brains in 1977.37

Most punk music was loud, fast and relatively simple. It was not uncommon for untrained musicians to pick up instruments for the first time and start bands. By comparison, Dr Know, Earl Hudson and Darryl Jenifer were technically accomplished musicians, and HR had an astonish- ing vocal range. Kory Grow of Spin magazine writes, ‘Add to that almost- Buddhist, life-is-suffering worldview the fact that Bad Brains could actu- ally play their instruments virtuosically – anathema to the punk spirit of the time – and you had a band operating on a previously unexplored plane.’38

With these skills they took the attitude and anti-pop sentiment of bands

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like the Sex Pistols, the Dead Boys and the Damned and honed their own resulting style with faster, tighter, more technically complex songs. They innovated the form further by blending punk and reggae songs into one coherent stage experience. With HR engaging the audience by rolling on the floor, doing backflips and tackling audience members, fans who were drawn to already wild behaviour and music at punk shows knew instantly that they had never seen anything like Bad Brains.39

According to Crossley, physical, creative and emotional spaces were central to the evolution of punk.40 Bad Brains played significant roles in elements of punk space, particularly in two major hardcore scenes: DC and New York, where they lived briefly after being ‘banned’ by clubs in DC. Maskell argues that this ban was enough to push the band into under- ground venues: house parties and abandoned buildings, which ultimately resulted in furthering their engaging performance style and attitude due to the lack of a stage to separate the musicians from the audience.41 Their kinetic stage presence changed the physical experience of punk shows, as evidenced by Henry Rollins’ quote, ‘that was the start of my life’ referring to seeing Bad Brains open for The Damned, when HR pinned Rollins to the ground and sang in his face.42 Their performances became so infamous by 1982, that journalist Greg Tate stated, ‘virtually anybody who cares will tell you that Chocolate City’s hardcore scene begins with the Brains’.43

As Crossley suggests, emotional space was also an important ingredient for evolving punk scenes. Arguably, Bad Brains had a major impact on the emotional space of the DC and New York scenes. While the band’s early live performances seem, at first, to be even more violent than those of first- wave punk bands like the Sex Pistols or the Ramones, upon closer inspec- tion, the band’s struggle for positive change, and specifically their empha- sis on ‘PMA’, or ‘Positive Mental Attitude’, are a logical precursor to one of the largest splinter subcultures within punk: straightedge, which hap- pened to be founded by Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat, one of the young DC punks HR referred to as ‘my undergraduates’.44 Whereas the Sex Pistols’ message was ‘No Future’, DC punk was built on the premise that music could make a difference. As one journalist reflected in the 1980s on the influence of Bad Brains’ Rastafarianism: ‘The straight-edge punk of early DC mates Minor Threat was the Protestant mirror of the Brains’ Rastafarianism and each band articulated a hard ass conviction with more than a touch of the puritan zealot.’45 ‘PMA’ eventually began to instill in hardcore a distinctive DIY ethos that shaped the way fans viewed punk. John Joseph from Cro-Mags notes that he was initially drawn to

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punk because, ‘it was about getting fucked up and breaking shit up’, but for Joseph, ‘Bad Brains were someone who could provide spiritual insight to the music without being preachy’.46 Maria Wiedlack asserts that this was the crucial component of Bad Brains’ significance. According to Wiedlack, Bad Brains ‘established the cultural meaning [of] punk rock as a political act’.47

Marginalisation within both the White and Black communities con- stricted Bad Brains’ claim to such space. In addition to the association of the term ‘punk’ with homosexuality in the Black community, Bad Brains also became outcasts because they were associated with ‘White’ music and subculture. Neither did White audiences fully accept them. At the first show they played, Bad Brains endured racial epithets and threats.48 HR remembers, ‘Because of their stereotypes, sometimes smart alecks would come to the shows and be saying “Aww, get these niggers off the stage. They don’t know what the hell they are doing.” And they’d throw beer bottles at us and spit on us.’49 Aaron Thompson suggests that being ostracised from so many social settings made Bad Brains ‘doubly punk’ because they ‘were not traditionally accepted by many African-Americans as sufficiently Black because of their music, style, and image, yet their blackness prevented them from being accepted as fully punk in some circles’.50 Therefore, marginalisation from both within and outside the punk rock scene limited entry into the fertile ground of freedom and creativity that punk rock could provide.

Bad Brains’ struggle for space can also be seen as transcending national boundaries. Gilroy posits that Black British culture cannot be seen in isolation, but the connections among Black British, Black American and African Caribbean cultures must be seen as, ‘an intricate web of cultural and political connections [that] bind[s] blacks here [in the UK] to blacks elsewhere. At the same time, they are linked to the social relations in this country’.51 Therefore, Bad Brains can be seen in this broader geographical and cultural space, which reflects the ‘intricate web’ Gilroy refers to as ‘the black Atlantic’.52

Bad Brains’ musical trajectory mirrored wider transatlantic currents of punk, but did so in ways that were distinctive in a ‘Black Atlantic’ context. American punk bands like the Dead Boys and the Ramones were pivotal to the band’s transition from jazz-rock to punk. Nevertheless, British punk was a key catalyst. HR said of their time in Mind Power, ‘We wanted to innovate… We wanted to be part of something new and different and real. And then I saw the Sex Pistols album, and I said, “BOOM! This is it!”’53

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British punk also influenced Bad Brains’ performances. The anti-racist Rock Against Racism festivals in the UK, for instance, featuring bands like X-Ray Spex and the Clash, inspired HR to use Bad Brains’ music and performance as a sonic assault with a social purpose. He wanted ‘punk rockers to step out of the embrace of the downtown art scene and take it to the streets’. This concept was realised in September 1979 with their own Rock Against Racism show in the middle of the Valley Green housing project in Washington Highlands, one of the poorest parts of the DC area. Such confident expressions of this PMA or DIY attitude, once again, reveal the profound way that Bad Brains affected the ethos of hardcore. One audience member said about this specific performance: ‘The very fact that these shows happened at all changed the memories, and in some small and large ways the lives, of some of the people who witnessed them. A small seed can grow strong in the heart of a young person.’54

The band’s eventual embrace of Rastafarianism deepened such trans- national connections. While it was the Clash that first exposed Bad Brains to reggae, it was attending a Bob Marley concert in 1982 that proved transformative.55 For Bad Brains, reggae was the anti-racist combination of the musical styles of reggae and punk, ‘one that’s African and one that’s American, the two of them revolutionary’.56

Despite hardcore fans’ negative and/or lukewarm response to Bad Brains’ reggae, the band continued to play punk shows and retained a devoted following. A review of Bad Brains’ 1982 album in the Damaged Goods zine is indicative of the begrudging acceptance punks gave to the band’s reggae.

Their music sounds powerful, coming across better than it does live. The songs are short and to the point leaving little room for self-indulgence. The only real indulgence is in the reggae, which (thankfully) [is] kept short, except for, ‘I Love Jah.’ The reggae sounds fine, but it comes across as inferior to the rest of the music.57

Bad Brains’ mark on UK punk is unclear. After Bad Brains’ explosive opening for the Damned, they invited Bad Brains to tour with them throughout the UK. That plan did not succeed, because, on arrival at Heathrow, customs searched the band and their crew and found an empty vial of cocaine on one of the techs, and they were then forced to return to the United States.58

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Bad Brains were eventually able to tour the UK. During an interview with Black American punk, Aaron Thompson, in 2016, he noted that it was his British ex-girlfriend who originally exposed him to Bad Brains’ music.59 British filmmaker and DJ Don Letts was also aware of Bad Brains, but in a distinctly American context. Letts asserts: ‘Bad Brains are the Sex Pistols of America. What the Sex Pistols did for the UK scene, Bad Brains undoubtedly did for the American scene.’60

In many ways it was Bad Brains’ influence that, in part, made hardcore, in the words of Henry Rollins, ‘as American as fake wars, apple pies, and baseball’.61 It was especially the DIY ethos, upon which Bad Brains made such a profound mark, that set hardcore apart and ‘reimagined British punk rock’.62 When Bad Brains left jazz to embrace punk, the band members designed clothes. HR notes, ‘That was the thing that was so great about punk when we first discovered it. You made your music, you made your clothes, you created your whole thing.’63

In addition to creating sites of independent creativity, Bad Brains and others infused their music with a message that saw punk as a serious conduit of social change. In Bad Brains’ song ‘Supertouch’, this sense of efficacy is tangible. Their development was steeped in a broader socio- political context that was limited by factors such as race and class. Nevertheless, the site of energy and creativity that punk provided allowed Bad Brains to flourish and play a transformative role in American hardcore.

‘RIGHT BRIGADE’ – THE LEGACY OF BAD BRAINS While dominant narratives have neglected punks of colour like Bad Brains through a shared assumption that hardcore was inherently a White, middle-class endeavour, from roughly 2000, members of the hardcore scene took a more active role in publicising their own history. This is a history in which Bad Brains existed not as a footnote, but as a foundational element. Lending their voices to a number of books, doc- umentary films, articles and academic works, well-known figures in inde- pendent music have forced a wider audience to reconsider generally accepted views of punk.

One of the first thorough accounts to reaffirm the presence of Blacks in the punk rock scene by documenting the importance of Bad Brains’ influence emerged in a very punk rock way: through a zine. James Porter and Jake Austen’s series of articles about the influence of Blacks in punk, new wave and hardcore emerged in 2002. They note how ‘punk rock

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might have represented another wave of ethnic cleansing in Rock & Roll’. They argued that Blacks did play a transformative role in the development of punk. In particular, they note how Bad Brains was ‘perhaps the most important hardcore band ever’.64

Documentaries such as Bad Brains: A Band in D.C., released in 2012, began to echo this same message. In the film, Henry Rollins directly speaks to the issue of memory, while pointing to the significance of Bad Brains. About the album, Black Dots, Rollins noted:

The record was never a record in those days. Had the Bad Brains pressed 1,000 LPs of that tape, that single album would have been determinant in what’s known as American hardcore music and American independent music, and it wouldn’t have taken until the new century for a documentary on that band to come out.65

One of the key histories of the DC hardcore scene, written by Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins, Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital, also underlines the significance of Bad Brains in the development of American hardcore. In addition to dedicating a significant amount of content to Bad Brains, their music, their performance and their impact on punk, both editions of this book feature the band on their covers. In the 2001 and 2003 editions, three of the most prominent DC punk bands are pictured together: Bad Brains, Fugazi and Bikini Kill. On the cover of the 2009 edition, however, a picture of HR from Bad Brains provides the entire backdrop to the title of the book.

From 2001, with the publication of three editions of Dance of Days, each of which prominently feature Bad Brains, three key currents can be observed. Firstly, Andersen and Perkins focus on negative aspects of Bad Brains’ experience in punk, detailing the hostile reception they met in the scene for being Black.66 Secondly, in an overall movement of counter- memory, the timing of the publication of the book in 2001 coincides with the broader current of work to remember Bad Brains’ contributions to American hardcore. Finally, the increasing centrality of Bad Brains on the cover art for the various editions of the book, underscores what we will later observe as an intensified movement to reclaim their position in punk.

In a 2013 book of photographs of the early DC punk rock scene by Washington Post photographer Lucian Perkins, a picture of Bad Brains is featured on the cover. The book, Hard Art, not only represents this push

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to account for punk rock history, but also by placing a photo of them on the cover, provides a visual representation of counter-memory that re- establishes Bad Brains’ importance. The collection of photographs chroni- cles three shows in 1979 and one in early 1980 and includes photographs of four bands: Trenchmouth, the Slickee Boys, Bad Brains and the Teen Idles. Of its roughly 72 featured photographs, 25 are of Bad Brains, 25 are of the other bands combined and 22 are of audience members.67

Increased academic attention to punk, and to Bad Brains in particular, also began to intensify after 2000. One of the most notable works was Duncombe and Tremblay’s White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race. The anthology looks beyond facile representations, and sets out to illuminate not only the racialised, classed and gendered limits of punk, but also how punks of colour provided an essential contribution to the scene. Duncombe and Tremblay assert, ‘[b]lack musical and cultural forms, whether embraced or rejected, have been part of punk since its beginnings’.68

The text acknowledges diversity within punk history, while the cover of the book counterposes a picture of HR appearing to sing almost exclusively to a White, female audience member. By contrast, the cover of Hard Art shows HR singing to a mixed audience, directly in front of a White youth. Ironically, both are photographs by Lucian Perkins of the same performance. The choice of covers reveal that while the authors of Dance of Days are attempting to document a comprehensive and racially and gender inclusive history of hardcore, the editors accom- plish this goal, but also problematise the racial dynamics of punk and hardcore.

In 2014, the first history of the band emerged with Prato’s self-pub- lished, Punk! Hardcore! Reggae! PMA! Bad Brains! This account primar- ily focuses on Bad Brains’ history, including interviews with musicians who attest to the band’s influence. The fact that the book was self-published attests to the continuing struggle of Bad Brains to fully ascend to the heights of punk rock notoriety. The majority of the musicians interviewed for the book were White males, which inadvertently reaffirms punk’s association with Whiteness, even in a text devoted to Black musicians.69

Overall, in contrast to the dominant memory of punk, musicians like Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins, filmmakers like Mandy Stein and authors like Andersen and Prato represent Lipsitz’s ‘counter-memory’ as a new understanding of punk emergence by reclaiming Bad Brains in the twenty- first century.

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‘I AGAINST I’ – COUNTER-MEMORY AND BLACK SPACE IN HARDCORE PUNK

The recent focus on Bad Brains is not just trivia to add to scenesters’ punk rock points or fuel for academic scholarship, but it represents a deeper significance as counter-memory for punks of colour. While Black punks’ counter-memory brings about an awareness of exclusions and erasures, it also allows them to ‘illumine opportunities’70 of belonging, space and identification with the subculture. Punk, as a site of emotional and creative acceptance continues to be of particular struggle and significance for Blacks. Tasha Fierce observes:

The idea of punk rock as some kind of beacon of open-mindedness is bullshit. Most white punk rockers like to consider themselves absolved of their privilege simply because they publicly denounce racism and don’t attend weekly KKK meetings.71

Fierce identifies with punk, but illustrates the contours of experience for those subcultural participants or fans who cross these lines. When she does cross into this predominantly White space, race continues to shape how others see her and her place in the scene. Zinester and punk, Osa Atoe, describes a similar sense of frustration when at different shows, in different cities, she was mistaken for other Black punks. She writes: ‘We all don’t look alike… Thanks everyone for making me feel completely not at home in my community.’72

Therefore, if, as punk and zinester, Yumii Thecato, writes, it is incum- bent upon Black punks to ‘separate punk from whiteness’,73 the counter- memory of Bad Brains allows for this process to occur, and Whiteness can begin to be decoupled from punk. Their effect on a generation of Black musicians began to appear in the 1980s and 90s. Angelo Moore, the lead singer of Fishbone, reflects:

Originally, I was a hip-hop kid with a Jheri curl, a green metallic suit from Merry-Go-Round. I had appeared as a dancer in the movie Breakin’. When I first heard the Bad Brains, I thought, ‘Those White boys are bad!’ When I found out they were black, my world just stopped.74

Remembering Bad Brains in the history of punk and hardcore has been especially important for Black punks. In the 2010 zine A terrible,

HOW TO FORGET (AND REMEMBER) ‘THE GREATEST PUNK ROCK BAND . . . 189

horrible, no good, very bad life # 2, author Kisha Hope reflects on her own connection to the band:

The first band I fell in love with was Bad Brains. Bad Brains blew my mind because they played hard, they played fast, and they looked just like me. … HR is a creepy homophobic jerk and I don’t really care for his politics, but those early records seriously changed my life, and I cannot ever deny that.75

Hope demonstrates how a claim to Bad Brains allows her to re-remember punk rock in a manner in which she can fully see herself as a part of the subculture.

Tasha Hairston, aka ‘Tasha Fierce’, who wrote zines about punk as a teenager, is more reticent in her acclaim for Bad Brains. As she devel- oped a punk identity, she knew about Bad Brains, but did not listen to them because she preferred female singers. When listening to male singers, she reflected, ‘What are you revolting against?’ She explains further: ‘Even though, Bad Brains, I know that they’re not white dudes, I like having space for women. There are no black women at all.’76

Hairston reminds us that the counter-memory of Bad Brains must be seen through Patricia Hill Collins’ intersectional lens: while Bad Brains creates space for Blacks in punk rock, the band’s presence makes the absence of Black women in many punk scenes all the more conspicuous.77

Although Black punks of both sexes were substantially fewer in number than their White counterparts, they have always been a part of the scene. While mainstream collective memory may overlook their experiences and contributions, the Black punk community has turned a critical eye to the Whitewashing of punk history since 2000. One of the most notable examples of this is the 2003 documentary, Afro-Punk. The documentary follows the lives of four Black punk rockers and includes a multitude of interviews. The film also features performances by acts like Cipher, Tamar Kali and Bad Brains.78 James Spooner, the director of Afro-Punk and organiser of the annual Afro-Punk festival, expresses his own personal struggle with dualities as a ‘biracial kid’ and a punk: ‘That day I was asked to make a choice: punk or black. I’m biracial, black and white; I was born into duality.’79 In his search to negotiate these dualities, Spooner is also part of a larger movement

190 T.M. LOPEZ AND M. MILLS

to reconcile issues of racism and identity. In the process of staking claim to this counter-memory, a space for his own identity emerges: ‘In 2001, I picked up a camera and I talked with every black punk in pre-social-network America I could find. I found eighty, and I found myself.’80

His documentary follows a similar trajectory of what he calls ‘self- validation’.81 Forty-five minutes into the film, a segment on Bad Brains appears where Black punks emphasise the crucial importance of the band, not only to the development of punk and hardcore, but, more importantly, to creating a sense of belonging for punks of colour. The interviewees express a sense of awe at Bad Brains’ talent. EWOLF, says, ‘Bad Brains was probably the best punk band to ever exist.’ Another interviewee, Ryan Bland, excitedly proclaims, ‘It [Bad Brains] was the angriest, most violent punk shit I’ve ever heard.’82

Underlying all of this is an apparent force of counter-memory. Several interviewees express how the presence of Bad Brains in punk made their place in the scene all the more legitimate. Scottie asserts that, ‘We’re definitely important to it because a lot of us started some of the ground breaking stuff, like we’ve got Bad Brains… you know.’ Djinji Brown notes, ‘[h]aving the Bad Brains … That shit made me feel like, yeah, I’m supposed to be here.’83

Scottie and Brown powerfully pinpoint a central current of developing a counter-memory of punk rock through the lens of Bad Brains. Lipsitz argues that counter-memory ‘focuses on localized experiences with oppression, using them to reframe and refocus dominant narratives pur- porting to represent universal experience’.84 These interviews challenge the universalising assumptions of hardcore punk as all White and, instead, reveal a force of counter-memory that refocuses and reimagines punk as something more inclusive.

Spooner’s film, Afro-Punk, ends by asking AfricanAmerican punks to name bands with Black members. It is both an ironic and a poignant moment in the film, as the interviewees seem momentarily stumped. Watching this, initially a viewer might believe that the dominant narrative is accurate. But then something wonderful happens, and the punks begin to list musicians and bands, finally rattling off a long list, including: Pure Hell, the Dead Kennedys, Fishbone, Burn, No Redeeming Social Value, Suicidal Tendencies, Cro-mags and, tellingly, one of only a small handful of bands that is mentioned more than once, the Bad Brains.

HOW TO FORGET (AND REMEMBER) ‘THE GREATEST PUNK ROCK BAND . . . 191

‘SALIN’ ON’ – THE GREATEST PUNK ROCK BAND IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Almost forty years after Bad Brains made their explosive debut in 1979, much about the world from which they emerged has changed, yet much has remained the same. The DC metro area still ranks as one of the most highly segregated areas in the United States85 despite the fact that segre- gation there has decreased somewhat since the 1970s, and Blacks now make up only 49 per cent of the population and Whites 38 per cent.86

Coates points out that Bad Brains’ suburban home of Prince George’s County continued to be ‘a great enclave of black people’.87 Although DC has maintained its importance as a centre of vibrant Black culture, collec- tive memory surrounding Bad Brains’ importance has continued to evolve.

Yet, despite increased academic and popular interest in the band, Bad Brains remain stranded at the economic margins of hardcore punk. As vociferously as Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins attest to Bad Brains’ genius and influence, MacKaye has a reported approximate net worth of $5 million88 and Rollins is worth roughly $13 million.89 Many punk musicians can be found on the same celebrity net worth database: Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys and Mike Muir of Suicidal Tendencies, for example, are on the lower end of the spectrum and are of comparable stature to Bad Brains in terms of punk rock history. Yet none of the members of Bad Brains even appear on the database. Earlier this year, the band began crowdsourcing funds for their bandmate, Gary Miller, who suffered a heart attack. The funds were necessary because he did not have medical insurance.90

Such stark economic indicators, nevertheless, do not negate the impor- tance of Bad Brains as a catalyst for counter-memory. Bad Brains’ role in the development of hardcore punk challenges not only the supposed ‘authentic Whiteness’ of this music and subculture, but also raises ques- tions of ‘authentic’ Black cultural expression. As bell hooks reminds us, the process of challenging essentialism:

allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supre- macy. This discourse created the idea of the ‘primitive’ and promoted the notion of an ‘authentic’ experience, seeing as ‘natural’ those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre-existing pattern or stereotype.91

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Hooks’ observation resonates strongly with how Black punks have used Bad Brains as a prism through which to defy such one-dimensional repre- sentations. Furthermore, it underlines the power of Lipsitz’s counter- memory to ‘draw upon the oppositional cultural practice’92 of Bad Brains’ music to carve out a rightful place for the band in the history of hardcore.

Darryl Jenifer for decades has asserted that punk was ‘black expres- sion’.93 We have argued that in the effort to establish a counter-memory of American hardcore punk from 2000 to 2015, Jenifer’s insight has come to fruition for a generation of punks of colour. In May of 2016, the Washington Post reported a revival of the hardcore scene in DC. Journalist Chris Richards described this new manifestation as ‘pioneered by Bad Brains and popularized by Minor Threat’, but with a more inclu- sive attitude towards punks of colour. Rob Watson, one current hardcore musician, describes how he felt comfortable in the scene when he saw that he was not the only Black person in the room. He also notes, ‘now there are all these bands with queer people, women and people of color, and they’re making music for people like them’.94

Bad Brains’ fierce originality, their spasmodic and serene stage pre- sence, their struggle to promote positive social change and their refusal to see musical styles as necessitating racial delineation, have had far-reach- ing impacts on generations of fans, punks and musicians. As a seminal hardcore band, they are collectively remembered from within the punk subculture, particularly since 2000, in a way that has radiated out with ever higher frequency, aimed not only at punk rock collective memory, but also toward the collective memory of the mainstream. As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the birth of American hardcore, the subculture itself is seizing agency and writing its own history through digital and print publications, radio, television and film. Counter-memory surround- ing Bad Brains is only one example of this expanding historical perspective of race in punk.

Bad Brains are far from the only example of people of colour in punk subculture, or even in hardcore, yet they remain one of the most recog- nisable and influential examples. Ideally, counter-memory surrounding Bad Brains and other punks of colour could destroy the chimera of punk as a White invention and a strictly White, male, middle-class endeavor. Punk as a subculture today still attracts self-identified misfits, rebels and others who are at odds with mainstream life and social expectations. However, the common perception that punk is for one race or another

HOW TO FORGET (AND REMEMBER) ‘THE GREATEST PUNK ROCK BAND . . . 193

should continue to be challenged not only within punk, but also within mainstream culture.

As Angelo Moore, the lead singer of Black punk band Fishbone power- fully notes: ‘No longer do I have to listen when some [people] come up and say, “You’re just playing that white boy shit!’’’ To this he replies: ‘Man, listen to some Bad Brains, motherfucker.’95

NOTES 1. The title of this chapter refers to the first gig poster for Bad Brains, which

billed them as ‘the greatest punk rock band in the world’. See D. Jenifer, ‘Play like a white boy: Hard dancing in the city of chocolate’, in S. Duncombe and M. Tremblay (eds.), White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race (London, 2011), p. 210 (Jenifer 2011).

2. M. Andersen and M. Jenkins, Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital (New York, 2009), pp. 40–41 (Andersen and Jenkins 2009).

3. American Hardcore: The History of American Punk Rock 1980–86, directed by Paul Rachman (AHC Productions, 2006) DVD.

4. S. Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Los Angeles, 2001), p. 72 (Blush 2001).

5. T. White, ‘The importance of being a Ramone’, Rolling Stone, 8 February 1979, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-importance-of-being-a- ramone-19790208?page=5 [accessed 3 March 2017] (White 1979).

6. M. Board, Maximumrocknroll Magazine, Issue 34, 1986. Quoted in S. Maskell, ‘Performing punk: Bad Brains and the construction of identity’, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 21(4) (2009), 413 (Maskell 2009).

7. C. Brinkhurst-Cuff, ‘Why is the history of punk music so white?: True punk rebellion has always existed in black culture, and continues to exist today’, Dazed, November 2015, http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/ 28372/1/why-is-the-history-of-punk-music-so-white [accessed 3 March 2017] (Brinkhurst-Cuff 2015).

8. Interview with Scott Ian, quoted in G. Prato, Punk! Hardcore! Reggae! PMA! Bad Brains! (Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2014), p. 36 (Prato 2014).

9. G. Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis, 2001), p. 212 (Lipsitz 2001).

10. M. K. Wiedlack, ‘“We’re punk as fuck and fuck like punks”: Queer–feminist Counter-cultures, Punk Music and the Anti-social Turn in Queer Theory’ (Unpublished DPhil. dissertation, Universitat Wien, 2013), p. 208 (Wiedlack 2013).

194 T.M. LOPEZ AND M. MILLS

11. J. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York, 2010), p. 325 (Cowie 2010). See also: B. Osgerby, ‘“Chewing out a rhythm on my bubble gum”: The teenage aesthetic and genealogies of American punk’, in R. Sabin (ed.), Punk Rock: So What?: The Cultural Legacy of Punk (London, 2009), pp. 154–69 (Osgerby 2009).

12. S. Taylor, False Prophet: Fieldnotes from the Punk Underground (Middletown, 2003), p. 54 (Taylor 2003).

13. Blush, American Hardcore, 116. 14. R. Moore, Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis

(New York, 2010) (Moore 2010). 15. Although referring to British punk, Simonelli refers to punk as ‘the white

version of Rastafarian ideology’, thereby, reaffirming punk as ‘White’ music. D. Simonelli, ‘Anarchy, pop, and violence: Punk rock subculture and the rhetoric of class’, Contemporary British History, 16(2) (Summer 2002), 121–44 (Simonelli 2002).

16. Ike Willis, Interview by Andy Holliden, 11 November 2009, ‘Reclaiming the right to rock collection’, Archives of African American Music and Culture, Indiana University Media Collections Online.

17. D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1979), p. 68 (Hebdige 1979).

18. P. Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London, 1987), p. 163 (Gilroy 1987).

19. E. Stinson, ‘Means of detection: A critical archiving of black feminism and punk performance’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 22 (2–3) (2012), pp. 284–5 (Stinson 2012).

20. R. Sabin, ‘“I won’t let that dago by”: Rethinking punk and racism’, in Duncombe and Tremblay (eds.), White Riot, pp. 57–68.

21. D. Traber, ‘L.A.’s ‘white minority’: Punk and the contradictions of self- marginalization’, Cultural Critique, 48 (2001), 49 (Traber 2001).

22. S. Hall, ‘What is “black” in black popular culture?’, in J. Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Harlow, 2009), p. 380 (Hall 2009).

23. For an exploration of race as a social construct in the United States, see: M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York, 2015) (Omi and Winant 2015).

24. P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 100–1 (Gilroy 1994).

25. A. McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’ (Boston, 1991) (McRobbie 1991).

26. P. Hill Collins, ‘It’s all in the family: Intersections of gender, race, and nation’, Hypatia, 13(3) (1998), 62–82 (Hill Collins 1998).

27. Duncombe and Tremblay, White Riot. 28. Maskell, ‘Performing punk’, 411–26.

HOW TO FORGET (AND REMEMBER) ‘THE GREATEST PUNK ROCK BAND . . . 195

29. Interview with Darryl Jenifer in Dave Maher, ‘Bad Brains interview’, Pitchfork.com, 29 October 2015, http://pitchfork.com/features/inter view/6663-bad-brains/ [accessed 3 March 2017].

30. D. Massey and N. A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, 1993), p. 45 (Massey 1993).

31. N. Hopkinson, Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City (Durham, 2012) (Hopkinson 2012).

32. Ibid. 33. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, p. 70. 34. G. Tate, ‘Hardcore of darkness: Bad Brains’, in Duncombe and Tremblay

(eds.), White Riot, p. 214. 35. Hopkinson, Go-Go Live, p. 146. 36. ‘Darryl Jenifer of Bad Brains: “I want to be the soldier of my music”’,

Ultimate-Guitar.com (2007): https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/ interviews/darryl_jenifer_of_bad_brains_i_want_to_be_the_soldier_of_ my_music.html?no_takeover [accessed 3 March 2017].

37. Andersen and Jenkins, Dance of Days, pp. 27–9. 38. K. Grow, ‘Hardcore mettle: Bad Brains’ strange survival tale’, Spin (29

November 2012): http://www.spin.com/2012/11/bad-brains-strange- survival-tale/2/ [accessed 3 March 2017] (Grow 2012).

39. Maskell, ‘Performing punk’, p. 414. 40. N. Crossley, Networks, Sound, Style, and Subversion: The Punk and Post-

Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool, and Sheffield, 1975–80 (Manchester, 2015), p. 36 (Crossley 2015).

41. Maskell, ‘Performing punk’, 415. 42. Bad Brains: A Band in D.C., directed by Mandy Stein and Ben Logan (Plain

Jane Productions, 2012). 43. Tate, ‘Hardcore of darkness’, p. 214. 44. Blush, American Hardcore. 45. E. Davis, ‘The last apostles’, The Voice, 10 October 1989, DC Punk

Archive/Mark Andersen Collection, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, DC.

46. Blush, American Hardcore, p. 117. 47. Wiedlack, ‘We are punk as fuck’, p. 222. 48. Andersen, Dance of Days, p. 37. 49. G. Prato, Punk! Hardcore! Reggae!, p. 9. 50. T. A. Lee. ‘From Bad Brains to afro-punk: An analysis of identity, consciousness,

and liberation through punk rock from 1977–2010’ (Unpublished MA thesis, Cornell University, 2010), p. 18 (Lee 2010).

51. Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, p. 205. 52. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 7.

196 T.M. LOPEZ AND M. MILLS

53. D. Howland, ‘Bad Brains’, Trouser Press Magazine, 1983. 54. L. Perkins, Hard Art: DC 1979 (New York, 2013), p. 13 (Perkins 2013). 55. Blush, American Hardcore, p. 124. 56. Interview with Bad Brains in Now What? No. 0, 1981, Series 1, Box 1,

Folder 98, D.C. Punk and Indie Fanzine Collection, Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

57. ‘Review Bad Brains – LP Length Cassette (ROIR)’, Damaged Goods, 2 (8) (February 1982), Series 2, Box 4, Folder 34. D.C. Punk and Indie Fanzine Collection, Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

58. Blush, American Hardcore, p. 122. 59. Interview with Aaron Thompson by Tara Martin Lopez, 18 April 2016. 60. Interview with Don Letts in Bad Brains: A Band in DC Hulu (Web), 29

October 2015. 61. PUNK: Attitude, directed by Don Letts (3DD Productions, 2005). 62. L. Bakare, ‘From Bad Brains to Cerebral Ballzy: Why hardcore will never die’,

The Guardian (20 November 2014): https://www.theguardian.com/music/ 2014/nov/20/hardcore-music-hard-fast-us-punk-rock [accessed 3 March 2017] (Bakare 2014).

63. Andersen and Jenkins, Dance of Days, p. 34. 64. J. Porter and J. Austen, ‘Black punk time, blacks in punk, new wave, and

hardcore, 1976–1983’, Roctober, 32 (2002), 43 (Great Lakes Underground Press Collection, Box 6, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University, Chicago, IL) (Porter and Austen 2002).

65. Interview with Henry Rollins in Bad Brains: A Band in D.C. 66. Andersen and Jenkins, Dance of Days, p. 37. 67. Perkins, Hard Art: DC 1979; C. Connolly, L. Clague and S. Cheslow,

Banned in D.C.: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground, 79–85 (Washington, 2013) features not only many of Lucian Perkins’ photos of Bad Brains, but the title of the book is a direct reference to Bad Brains’ ‘Banned In D.C.’ (Connolly 2013).

68. Duncombe and Tremblay, White Riot, p. 206. 69. Prato, Punk! Hardcore! Reggae! 70. Lipsitz, Time Passages, pp. 212–213. 71. T. Fierce, ‘Black invisibility and racism in punk rock’, Bitchcore 1999, in

Duncombe and Tremblay, White Riot, p. 283. 72. O. Atoe, ‘Shotgun seamstress’, 1 August 2006 in Shotgun Seamstress: Zine

Collection, A Zine By and For Black Punks (Tacoma, 2012), p. 21. 73. Y. Thecato, Slash They Ass Up: A Black Punk Manifesto (Chicago, 2013)

(Thecato 2013).

HOW TO FORGET (AND REMEMBER) ‘THE GREATEST PUNK ROCK BAND . . . 197

74. Interview with Angelo Moore in Michael Gonzalez, ‘Afropunk before afro- punk’, Ebony (29 August 2014): http://www.ebony.com/entertainment- culture/afropunk-before-afropunk-232#axzz430seTBES [accessed 3 March 2017].

75. Quoted in Wiedlack, ‘We are punk as fuck’, p. 223. 76. Tasha Hairston, interview by Tara Martin Lopez, 13 May 2016. 77. Hill Collins, ‘It’s all in the family’. 78. Afro-Punk, directed by James Spooner (Afro-Punk, 2003). 79. J. Spooner, ‘Foreword’, in Duncombe and Tremblay, White Riot, p. xiii. 80. Ibid, p. xvi. 81. Onome, ‘Filmmaker James Spooner goes in-depth with afro-punk: The

“rock ‘n’ roll nigger” experience’, A Gathering of Tribes (31 October 2006): http://www.tribes.org/web/2006/10/31/filmmaker-james-spoo ner-goes-in-depth-with-afro-punk-the-rock-n-roll-nigger-experience [accessed 3 March 2017].

82. Afro-Punk. 83. Ibid. 84. Lipsitz, Time Passages, p. 213. 85. J. Logan and B. Stults, The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New

Findings from the 2010 Census, 24 March 2011: http://www.s4.brown. edu/us2010/Data/Report/report2.pdf [accessed 3 March 2017] (Logan and Stults 2011).

86. ‘Quick facts – District of Columbia’, U.S. Census Bureau 2015. https:// www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/11 [accessed 3 March 2017].

87. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York, 2015), pp. 52–3 (Coates 2015).

88. ‘Celebrity net worth: Ian MacKaye net worth’, http://www.celebritynet worth.com/richest-celebrities/singers/ian-mackaye-net-worth-2/ [accessed 3 March 2017].

89. ‘Celebrity net worth: Henry Rollins net worth’, http://www.celebritynet worth.com/richest-celebrities/henry-rollins-net-worth/ [accessed 3 March 2017].

90. M. Cohen, ‘Bad Brains raising funds to help support Dr. Know after his near-death illness’, Washington City Paper (10 March 2016): http://www. washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/music/2016/03/10/after- nearly-dying-bad-brains-raising-funds-to-help-support-dr-know/ [accessed 3 March 2017] (Cohen 2016).

91. bell hooks, ‘Postmodern blackness’, in J. Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Harlow, 2009), p. 392 (hooks 2009).

92. Lipsitz, Time Passages, p. 231. 93. Mahr, ‘Bad Brains interview.’

198 T.M. LOPEZ AND M. MILLS

94. C. Richards, ‘This is hardcore: A new generation is making Washington’s punk dialect its own – while It can’, The Washington Post (12 May 2016): http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2016/05/12/how-d-c-hard core-is-being-revitalized-by-a-new-generation-of-bands/ [accessed 3 March 2017] (Richards 2016).

95. Interview with Angelo Moore, Afro-Punk.

REFERENCES M. Andersen and M. Jenkins, Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s

Capital (New York, 2009), pp. 40–1. “Bad Brains: A Band in D.C.,” Directed by Mandy Stein and Ben Logan. Plain

Jane Productions, 2012. L. Bakare, ‘From Bad Brains to Cerebral Ballzy: Why Hardcore Will Never Die’,

The Guardian, November 20, 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/music/ 2014/nov/20/hardcore-music-hard-fast-us-punk-rock.

S. Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Los Angeles, 2001), p. 72. C. Brinkhurst-Cuff, ‘Why is the History of Punk Music so White?: True Punk

Rebellion has Always Existed in Black Culture, and Continues to Exist Today’, Dazed, November 2015, http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/ 28372/1/why-is-the-history-of-punk-music-so-white [accessed 3 March 2017].

M. Cohen, ‘Bad Brains Raising Funds to Help Support Dr. Know After His Near- Death Illness’, Washington City Paper, 10 March 2016: http://www.washing toncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/music/2016/03/10/after-nearly-dying- bad-brains-raising-funds-to-help-support-dr-know/.

C. Connolly, L. Clague, and S. Cheslow, Banned in D.C.: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground, 79–85 (Washington, 2013).

J. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York, 2010), p. 325.

N. Crossley, Networks, Sound, Style, and Subversion: The Punk and Post-Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool, and Sheffield, 1975–80 (Manchester, 2015), p. 36.

D. Jenifer in Dave Maher, ‘Bad Brains Interview’, Pitchfork.com, 29 October 2015, http://pitchfork.com/features/interview/6663-bad-brains/.

P. Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London, 1987), p. 163. P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge,

1994), pp. 100–1. K. Grow, ‘Hardcore Mettle: Bad Brains’ Strange Survival Tale’ Spin, November

29, 2012: http://www.spin.com/2012/11/bad-brains-strange-survival- tale/2/.

HOW TO FORGET (AND REMEMBER) ‘THE GREATEST PUNK ROCK BAND . . . 199

S. Hall, ‘What is “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’, in J. Storey (ed) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Harlow, 2009), p. 380.

D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1979), p. 68. P. Hill Collins, ‘It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation’,

Hypatia, 13, 3 (1998), 62–82. bell hooks, ‘Postmodern Blackness’, in J. Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and

Popular Culture: A Reader (Harlow, 2009), p. 392. N. Hopkinson, Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City

(Durham, 2012). D. Jenifer, ‘Play Like a White Boy: Hard Dancing in the City of Chocolate’, in S.

Duncombe and M. Tremblay (eds.), White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race (London, 2011), p. 210.

A. Thompson. ‘From Bad Brains to Afro-Punk: An Analysis of Identity, Consciousness, and Liberation Through Punk Rock From 1977–2010’ (Unpublished MA Thesis, Cornell University, 2010), p. 18.

G. Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis, 2001), pp. 212–13.

J. Logan and B. Stults, The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New Findings from the 2010 Census, 24 March 2011: http://www.s4.brown.edu/ us2010/Data/Report/report2.pdf.

S. Maskell, ‘Performing Punk: Bad Brains and the Construction of Identity’, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 21, 4 (2009), 413.

D. Massey and N. A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, 1993), p. 45.

A. McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’ (Boston, 1991).

R. Moore, Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis (New York, 2010).

M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York, 2015). B. Osgerby, ‘“Chewing Out a Rhythm on My Bubble Gum”: The Teenage

Aesthetic and Genealogies of American Punk’, in R. Sabin (ed) Punk Rock: So What?: The Cultural Legacy of Punk (London, 2009), pp. 154–69.

G. Prato, Punk! Hardcore! Reggae! PMA! Bad Brains! (Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2014), p. 36.

L. Perkins, Hard Art: DC 1979 (New York, 2013), p. 13. J. Porter and J. Austen, ‘Black Punk Time, Blacks in Punk, New Wave, and

Hardcore, 1976–1983’, Roctober, 32 (2002), 43. C. Richards, ‘This is Hardcore: A New Generation is Making Washington’s Punk

Dialect Its Own – While It Can’, The Washington Post, 12 May 2016: http:// www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2016/05/12/how-d-c-hardcore-is- being-revitalized-by-a-new-generation-of-bands/.

200 T.M. LOPEZ AND M. MILLS

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E. Stinson, ‘Means of Detection: A Critical Archiving of Black Feminism and Punk Performance’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 22, 2–3 (2012) 283–4.

S. Taylor, False Prophet: Fieldnotes from the Punk Underground (Middletown, 2003), p. 54.

D. Traber, ‘L.A.’s “White Minority”: Punk and the Contradictions of Self- Marginalization’, Cultural Critique, 48 (2001), 49.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York, 2015), pp. 52–3. Y. Thecato, Slash They Ass Up: A Black Punk Manifesto (Chicago, 2013). M. K. Wiedlack, ‘“We’re Punk as Fuck and Fuck Like Punks”: Queer-Feminist

Counter-Cultures, Punk Music and the Anti-Social Turn in Queer Theory’ (Unpublished DPhil. dissertation, Universitat Wien, 2013), p. 208.

T. White, ‘The Importance of Being a Ramone’, Rolling Stone, February 8, 1979, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-importance-of-being-a- ramone-19790208?page=5.

Tara Martin Lopez is a professor of sociology at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, WA, USA. She specializes in gender stratification and working class women’s activism and recently published The Winter of Discontent: Myth, Memory, and History with Liverpool University Press. Martin Lopez has broa- dened the scope of her research and is currently interested in the role women and people of colour play in subcultures and social movements. In particular, her next project will examine the role of both conservative and progressive Latinx move- ments in the 2016 Presidential campaign.

Michael Mills is Associate Faculty of English at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, WA, USA, where he is the faculty advisor for Tidepools magazine. A writer of short fiction, essays and plays, his work has appeared in Short Story, Tales from the South, Weird Tales and other journals and magazines. His research interests include: popular culture, counterculture, creative writing theory and writing pedagogy. A musician, he played in punk rock bands in Eureka, California and Little Rock, Arkansas.

HOW TO FORGET (AND REMEMBER) ‘THE GREATEST PUNK ROCK BAND . . . 201