When Old Punks Go Racist
BY CURT HOPKINS
Most of the old punk rockers I love still play for freedom, fearlessness, inclusion, and anti-authorianism. These are the things I love them for. These are the things that give me hope. These are the things I can dance to! But some have become just about as sad as fuck.
Punks and musicians are people, so they get old, their opinions get dumber and more calcified, and they mistake change for disintegration, at the same rate as the societies in which they operate. But it’s still sadder than when it happens to your dad.
There have always been assholes in the scene, racists like Morrissey and Johnny Ramone, who are arguably closer to older racist assholes like Clapton than to their peers. (Neo-nazi bands have always been marginal to an already-marginal scene, but their little foot soldiers were prevalent enough to warrant Mark Arm jumping off the stage and beating their asses and the creation of an anthem celebrating their failure.) Sadly, it’s not as unusual as it should be to see old punk rockers get locked up for criminal activities, especially, like Handsome Dick Manitoba, on domestic violence charges.
But to see someone like Exene Cervenka gibber like a poisoned bat that every mass shooting is a false flag operation is absolutely heartbreaking.
The conspiracy nuts in the scene come out of a tainted strain of the normally healthy tendency to question received wisdom. Some of the late-stage racism and right-wing reductionism, like that of John Lydon and Glenn Danzig, comes out of a simplistic understanding of free speech and the urge to shock without the balancing element of an obligation to attack the powerful and defend the oppressed, not the other way around.
Thank God we still have ladies, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and queers like The Linda Lindas and Fuck U Pay Us, who recognize punk as a language with a purity of expression that they can ride above all the nasty bullshit of life, including the garbage that floats around in the scene itself.
The Linda Lindas – “Racist, Sexist Boy” (Live at LA Public Library)
Curt Hopkins is a San Francisco-based writer and the author of THE DOG WATCHES AND OTHER POEMS. Follow him on Twitter @curthopkins.
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