TO MAKE PUNK ROCK: PART II, section 2

[This is the third installment of TO MAKE PUNK ROCK, an ARTNOISE manifesto. The first installment, containing the preface and introduction, was posted on 08/02/09 (available here). The second installment, containing "What is Punk Rock?" and "Nihilism," was posted on 10/03/09 (available here) - germ]

Lemon! Vanilla! Cherry! Mango!
Water ice! Water ice! Water iiiiiice!

-”Water ice,” Rizzo Machine

Punk rock is people art. It’s shit that anybody can make. Punk rock is stupid, raw, loud, noisy, un-tuned, broken down, and totally fucked up. Punk rock is screaming like a lunatic while rolling on the floor. Punk rock is laying bare every idiot thought and impulse, and profoundly asserting them as if they were the most meaningful sage truth. Punk rock is a beautiful practice where kids that never properly learned to make art are convulsed and overtaken by an urgency towards expression that overcomes all their understood limitations. Punk rock is a talent-less, deranged medium that summons forth its existence not from studied, learned technique but from a simple recognition that all human beings are capable of transcendence—into revelation about the essential substance of their existence, into revelation about things larger than themselves, into beauty, creation, love, truth, poetry, the electrical rush of connection, etc.

Democracy—the practice of recognizing everyone’s capacity for creation and the necessity for everyone’s collaboration in order to create—is another means through which punk rock wages war against alienation.(6) Through alienating society, people get told over and over and over again that they are powerless to engage their lives or the world in a way that changes things or allows them to actually manifest their real needs and desires. Folks wake up, go to work, and waste their creative powers doing shit they have little control over, and very little personal stake in. Creativity is regularly pulverized into routine production—a thing done by isolated experts or technicians, repeated infinitely with only minor substantial changes, and carried out in the proper place under the proper conditions. Even though all the elements of society are made possible through people’s work and activity (if one day all the workers called in sick, society would grind to a halt), people in society are simply expected to follow orders and play out their assigned position—whether that position has them making car parts, cappuccinos, babies, or simply making customers happy.

(more…)

TO MAKE PUNK ROCK (PART II, section 1)

[This is the second installment of TO MAKE PUNK ROCK, an ARTNOISE manifesto. The Preface and Introduction were posted on August 2, and are available here. - germ]

The project of resurrecting a living punk rock movement begins with a game of connect the dots. This is where we gather up all the disjointed pieces that have been left for us from before and start to put together the fucked up form of exactly what it is we are trying to shake to life.

We’re already abundantly versed in the stupidest conceptions of what punk rock is and what it represents. On one side, corporations have literally spent millions hacking images into our brains of moody, self-destructive consumer-kids clad in tight pants, tough-guy leather jackets, and porcupine haircuts. On the other side, we have all the nostalgic ramblings of washed-up scenesters that like to peg punk rock as a thing that happened when they were young that either no longer exists or just exists in some bubble around them and their friends like some mythical city in the mist. Clearly for our purposes, both of these stories are total horse shit, but at least they can give us some insight into how our understanding of punk rock must develop along a radically different line than this junk.
(more…)

An Open Letter To West Philly

This email was sent to a number of radical Philadelphia listservs by a member of The Defenestrator, a local anarchist newspaper.

I have reposted this on ARTNOISE because, as an outlet that primarily serves the city’s “radical artistic community,” I felt that his words might be particularly relevant to the experience of much of our audience. While this might not be how I would frame all of these issues, I absolutely agree with what I understand his larger point here to be.

White West Philly radicals often pride ourselves on our political commitments and our appreciation of “the community.” Time after time, I think that we prove our politics to be hollow or that our commitment to community extends only as far as our own privileged little subcultural enclaves.

By and large, we are not working to defend our neighbors. By and large, we are not working to organize ourselves as a force that can be an ally to other local residents with more history in the neighborhoods we consider to be “ours.” Really, on a lot of fronts, we are not doing anything… except for maybe putting on our shows, socializing, being hip.

I take his letter as a firm kick in the ass. Privileged white folks of any political stripe should not move into historically black neighborhoods unless they are willing to be accountable to the life, the past, the present, and the future of those neighborhoods. And for me, that means doing work, real work. That means real work to defend our neighbors from foreclosure, real work to fight development schemes don’t give a shit about the real lives of people, real work to know and talk with our neighbors, and real work to put control over our communities into all of our hands.

That’s the real price tag on cheap rent in West Philly. And I think it’s more than time for us to pay up. – germ ross

By A Concerned Relation

I got a email invite last week for the offices of the State representative network. I stopped by and slide down to Clark park as well, here is some thoughts.

So, now that the brew pub is open at 50th and baltimore it had occured to me that maybe now was the right time to write this letter. When you go and sit around all day outside the satellite coffee shop, do you ever think about your role in gentrification? I cannot help but ask this question because sometimes I pass by and I see what to my eye looks like a white settler occupation beachhead down there across from cedar park, with an increasing number of white homeowners within a one block radius and perhaps more disturbingly, Penn students/employees buying houses up to 52nd street with school subsidies.

I remember a time not that long ago when it seemed like there was a conversation going on in West Philly about gentrification and how to organize against what was about to go down… and then people seemed to stop being engaged, maybe they got busy or something. Well, while you were having fun and going to dance parties, guess what happened? THERES A BREW PUB AT 50th and Baltimore, and a YOGA STUDIO and a COFFEE SHOP. HELLO.

Now I am not one to argue that everything is black and white and that those things plus a bunch of white folks moving into a neighborhood simply equals gentrification, but in this case its really hard to see it as anything else. I suppose partly because nobody seems to give a shit and ya’ll are going on with your hipster lifestyles. I mean christ, the brew pub is open and nobody broke the fucking windows yet. It was bad enough when trader joes got a compactor and nobody sabotaged it. IS THIS WEST PHILLY OR WHAT? Aren’t ya’ll supposed to be anarchists or something? If shit gets to a certain point don’t you need to take direct action if you failed to engage in the process that could have stopped it? A bunch of you are white homeowners, you could have been at the neighborhood meetings, you could have stopped that shit. And what’s with letting these snot-nosed hipster fucks move into the neighborhood so they can look cool? Are you really just going to accept this manifest destiny bullshit or are you going to take responsibility for where you live and for what you have helped happen. Silence equals consent remember? People fight and organize around gentrification in places like New York, Miami and San Francisco and win their battles against much fiercer odds. Penn is not an unstoppable juggernaught and neither are developers, ya’ll just gotta get down with the neighborhood and start building some people power, have concrete demands, know where to put pressure and have an alternate plan. Organizing is not rocket science, and at a certain point white guilt builds into not doing anything and playing a part in the white agenda – don’t get caught up in that shit, its just as bad as not acknowledging your privilege in the first place, in fact its worse. Are you just turning into liberals as you get older?

Maybe if ya’ll got your act together in the neighborhood we could start working on city-wide issues again, like how the cops have declared open season on black folks the past couple years, or about how they’re building prisons and condos while there’s homeless folks on the streets and people are hungry and there’s no health care and there’s no jobs. If you were a bunch of socialists you would have done something by now and there would be an organization and a program. This is a kick in the butt. Don’t get so comfortable in your urban cool lifestyles, push yourselves, get back into politics and be part of organizing and action or move out – we don’t need you if your just going to play your part in the developer agenda.

…what does the rich versus poor really mean? psychologically it means you gotta pick your team. – KRS-ONE

AFROPICK // FRIDAY JUNE 6TH 8PM // THE ROTUNDA

[This article was written for ARTNOISE by the Afropick organizing crew, with some minor editing on our part.

Normally, everything that's printed in this webzine is exclusively written by our staff members. I've decided to make an exception with this piece because I feel that Afropick embodies in practice many of the ideals that we support in our writing—challenging white supremacy in and outside of punk rock, and understanding true artistic creation as fundamentally revolutionary and opposed to dehumanizing systems of power. ARTNOISE supports Afropick and urges you and all of our neighbors in this city to do likewise. These people are doing great work. - germ ross, 5/25/07]

On Friday June 6th at 8 p.m., Afropick (myspace.com/afropickmusic) will host their sixth show at the Rotunda (4014 Walnut). This show will be hosted by former Black Panther political prisoner Ashanti Alston and it will be a fundraiser for the Human Rights Coalition, featuring performances by McRad, Imani Uzuri Rock Quartet, and Purple Rhinestone Eagle.

Afropick began as a one time show. In October 2004, Maori Karmael Holmes (independent filmmaker of the hip hop documentary Scene Not Heard and activist), Chante Brown (lead singer for the black girl metal band Roullette) and Walidah Imarisha (poet, member of the Puerto Punx band/collective Ricanstruction) planned a one time Black Rock show to be part of a series going on around Philadelphia. The idea was to show people of color doing hard alternative music with a political edge. The response was overwhelming. Almost 200 people showed up, mostly young people of color. Everyone asked when the next show would be. It was supposed to be a one time event, but as Walidah Imarisha explained “we quickly realized that there was a significant dearth of venues for people of color rock/punk/hard bands to play, especially all ages spaces. So the show was conceived to be a quarterly show, and renamed Afropick.”

Over 700 people are estimated to have come to the five Afropick shows that have occurred. They are a very large mix of folks, but are majority young people of color.

The organizers realized that the act of being people of color playing (and in the cases of black folks reclaiming) rock in all its forms, of getting loud on stage, of letting out the rage and anger and frustration in positive and creative and inspiring ways, was a political act. Recognizing the politics of identity that were manifesting, the organizers also wanted to have politics that were about a larger change in the world. So the Afropick collective decided to make the show a fundraiser for the Human Rights Coalition, a prisoner family organizing group with chapters in Philadelphia, Chester and Pittsburgh (www.hrcoalition.com), as a way of linking the politics in more solidly to the show.

Ashanti Alston, former Black Panther/Black Liberation Army political prisoner and current anarchist anti-prison organizer, hosts the shows. Ashanti showed many of the people in the collective, all of whom are in their early to late twenties, that you can be dedicated to the struggle and to the cause of change, and still have fun. As he said at the Halloween Afropick, “We can get down and still be loud enough to bring down any type of walls, even prison walls.”

Each Afropick event is co-sponsored by a number of organizations and businesses who provide the support possible to provide this free fundraising show. This time Afropick is sponsored by The Rotunda, The Wooden Shoe, Books Through Bars and South Street Sounds.

Ultimately, Afropick is about building community, in as many different ways as possible. As Walidah explained “we want to create a space for people of color to be loud, to be angry, to be themselves wholly. We want to link up folks who feel fragmented and isolated, because of their politics or their identities. We want to create a space where folks can explore different styles and genres of music. We want to link politics to art, and know that we as artists can create powerful inspiring revolutionary art that can still move minds and asses. We want to make sure that prison organizations, which disproportionately affect communities of color, have the funding to go on. We want to introduce folks to issues they may not be familiar with, and highlight work being done on them that the mainstream wants to ignore. We want to honor our elders, and make sure they know they always have a place and a voice in whatever the younger generation creates. Mostly we want to fully embody the motto Afropick has adopted from the beginning: Brown, Loud and Proud!”

on the ford motors’ layoffs

Yesterday, the CEO of Ford Motors announced that his company will be laying off some 30,000 workers as they close down 14 auto factories across the USA.

Now as far as I’m aware, my family has never really had much of a tradition of industrial labor—I was born into a recent line of teachers and professionals, and stretching before that my kin mostly came from Midwest farms and rural open country. As an outcome of history and class privilege, not only have I never worked in a factory but I was born in such circumstances that I never particularly considered it an option. When I talk about the industrial proletariat in this country, I can only talk in terms of concept, for there is as little palpable reality in that term as there are in casualty statistics on the news.

For example, I cannot immediately grasp the full significance of 30,000 workers taken off the assembly line, or 14 fully functioning factories transformed into decaying, rusting corpses in the American landscape. I cannot fully fathom the process by which tens of thousands of families are wrenched from a situation of comfort and normalcy, and placed into a life in which housing, food, and basic medical care become commodities that must be struggled for, or in some cases abandoned. I cannot hope to appreciate the feeling of knowing yourself by your work, of spending your day on a line, of devoting your life to a process of mechanical repetition, and to then suddenly find yourself spit out from the machine like spent fuel or a gear whose teeth have been worn down to nothing. I cannot know these things, but I suspect that the layoffs announced yesterday amount to a great tragedy; that this predictable catastrophe is the type of collapse that can break one’s heart, soul, and body. I suspect that families will fall apart, that once proud workers will lose themselves and their confidence, that in the course of the next few years people and whole communities will disintegrate because of what has been decided by professionals in suits.

As in all great cataclysms, there is obviously potential in this that exceeds the petty concerns of market confidence and the profitability of Ford Motors. In collective dissatisfaction and heartache, there is the possibility of collective change and self-assertion, but that is a future dream which feels detached from our present nightmare. It is a dream whose realization demands a consciousness and a confidence which has become even more scarce in this country than the dying embers of manufacturing industry itself.

While we all need to all start thinking long and hard about the future and what we can realistically do to seize control of it, in events like this, I can only find a place for mourning. Whether we’ve stood inside the factory walls or not, this loss is a loss to us all. Today, we must appreciate exactly how much has been taken from us, and we must also ask ourselves how much more we’re willing to see let go.

fuckers…

As I have some hope for us all, I still hold out that bombs are antithetical to what it is to be human and that all explosions damn and diminish us. It is said that it was fire that separated us from the beasts and yet I will not accept that fire is all we are. Fire spreads, contains its own logic, its own peculiar imperatives to ignite and to transform all creation to ash and smoke. Despite the actions of governments, corporations, terrorist cells, and all other cowards willing to reduce innocent lives to simple ammunition, I believe that there is still the possibility for better things, that human existence can be greater than fire, that in the end we may yet escape from fire itself.

Every bomb represents a crime that cannot be undone, an offense for which no punishment is either adequate or appropriate. All lost lives must be mourned as our own (for we will surely be next). It may be that the only hope that we have left is to declare in the clear, coherent language of our popular resistance that terrorism in all forms is true evil, that it is neither worthy of our toleration nor participation. We must no longer be content to remain the hostages of fuckers and WMD, we must disarm all hostage-takers, we must destroy all their instruments of power.

In that we have failed thus far to redeem ourselves, in that we have failed to stop this fucking war, in that explosions have ripped apart London like they have ripped apart New York City, Madrid, Baghdad, Kabul, and Fallujah, today is a day of mourning. God bless the people of London. God bless the dead. God bless the survivors. God bless whatever hope is still left to us.