In Trump's America, you might have to bury your collection of first-press Dangerhouse singles in your aunt's backyard like it was kiddie porn, but there's no question some great songs would be written about what would be a terrible four years for the country.
Sign In Create Account. This story is over 5 years old. In the s, all you needed to be a hardcore band was two chords, an attitude, and a drawing of Ronald Reagan with a Hitler mustache. By , Black Flag had broken up after years of their experiments with metal and free jazz had alienated much of their fan base.
Boon unexpectedly died in a car accident. The music industry rebounded by the middle of the decade — its representatives had become savvier, its marketing sneakier and more insidious. Punk was always struggling to overcome its isolation. The hippies emerged from a time when movements were on the ascendancy.
The movements of the s, however — against nukes, against racism, against American intervention abroad — were increasingly embattled. A new generation of hard-core bands adopted outwardly macho, misogynistic postures, often with a dose of lunkheaded patriotism mixed in. Jello Biafra. This was in the context of an increasing focus in Washington on the content of music. Biafra and label general manager Michael Bonanno were charged with distributing harmful material to minors.
Their three-week trial in August of ended in a hung jury in favor of acquittal. It was a victory, but a Pyrrhic one. Alternative Tentacles was nearly bankrupted, and the overall burden contributed to the breakup of the Dead Kennedys the previous year. This was the first time in American history that an artist had been prosecuted over the content of an album.
There is another matter unaddressed in the book, far trickier to untangle. That each genre had notably more backing from the music industry than punk did during these years is uncontroversial.
But this did not fully neutralise the possibility more mainstream genres could provide a language of opposition, even radical subjectivity. Disco in the late s was one of the few artistic spaces that featured women, people of color, and the LGBT community taking leading artistic roles. Synthpop, too at least its more serious iterations , provided the space for critique and alterity, albeit far more mediated than in punk. Devo, mentioned by some in the book as pinnacle MTV sellouts, is a band whose entire aesthetic is built around parody of American consumerism.
It leaves unanswered the question of how an insurgent art movement might overtake the mainstream. A veteran of the s, he blamed the hippies and yippies and other cultural radicals for the backlash that elected Richard Nixon. Not only had Crawford ignored the civil rights and Black liberation movements, Richman argued, but he had dismissed the role of art and anger in exposing people to new worldviews.
But then again, so does Crawford. By that same token, a political strategy that dismisses the importance of culture and aesthetics merely abandons them to the enemy. We only need to look at how successfully corporate America employs aesthetics to make its ruthless exploitation attractive, or how the alt-right uses them to mobilise anger and disaffection, to see how this bears out. You can help by participating in our "I Support" program, allowing us to keep offering readers access to our incisive coverage of local news, food and culture with no paywalls.
Nick Lucchesi. Contact: Nick Lucchesi. Don't Miss Out. Join Today. Sign Up. I Support Learn More. He played in bands, wrote for zines, and became politically active, helping to cofound the organization Positive Force.
She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives.
Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature.
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