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Dinosaur Jr.
Beyond + 17 albums free download
A straight shot west out of Boston on I-90 will carry you, in two hours or less, to Western Massachusetts, where the country still looks like it did twenty or even 40 years ago: college towns, I-91 tracing the same lazy ladder from Springfield up through Holyoke and Northampton, Amherst and Deerfield. Out there it's taken for granted that the houses will be drafty, the winters uniformly long, and that, on any given trip to the local supermarket, one might spot Thurston or Lou or Kim or J, on-and-off locals for more than twenty years. {audio}http://www.archive.org/download/DinosaurJrDrawings/07Drawerings_64kb.mp3{/audio} ... Drawerings Read More ...
Animal Collective
Album: Fall Be Kind + 9 albums free download
By way of decrying a society that left its citizens unbearably restrained, Edith Wharton describes how in New York in the 1870s, women would order dresses from their Paris dressmakers and then leave them in tissue paper at least two years before wearing them in public; the thought of showing them "in advance of the fashion" was unforgivably vulgar. Social life has changed, but cultural life seems just as restricted now – even Animal Collective are held back by trends that seem a couple of years old (and that they helped to invent). When I think back on 2009, I’ll first remember how our impoverished aesthetic generation repeatedly scraped the resin from the cultural trash barrel. Every second person is wearing neon leggings, and the ones who aren’t rock a ‘70s aesthetic, with high-waisted jeans and moccasins. Christmas sweaters are getting impossible to find at the thrift store. Ska revival. Garage rock revival. It never ends. Read More ...
Guapo
Elixirs
For just over 10 years, London's Guapo has been working in the world of avant and progressive rock. The band's past is a bit hard to track with its numerous lineup changes and guest musicians. The most recent change in roster was the resignation of Matthew Thompson, the founding member of Guapo, which occurred just before the release of 2005's Black Oni. The departure of Thompson has left Guapo with percussionist David Smith and multi-instrumentalist Daniel O'Sullivan. Though O'Sullivan is by no means a founding member of the band, but he was essential in honing the sound on Guapo's last two LPs: Five Suns and Black Oni. These two albums have been pivotal in building Guapo's following of fans, so it's hard not to credit O'Sullivan as an asset to the band.... {audio}http://www.neurotrecordings.com/artists/guapo/audio/Guapo-The%20Selenotrope.mp3 {/audio} ... The Selenotrope Read More ...
Basic Atari Teenage Riot iPhone app philosophy by Alec Empire + London gig+ 4CD, 1DVD free download
The free iPhone app features all ATR albums and songs, all videos, a photo archive, bio, news updates and also a ‘Riotsounds Produce Riots’ audioplayer. This audio player includes all the sounds/WAV files that ATR used at the May 1st 1999 demonstration (very low sub basses, square waves, noise sounds which trigger hysteria and panic within the audience) & would make them available to every political activisit out there. The idea being that you can hook up your iPhone to a speaker system if there is a rally: Apple/iTunes is arguing that they still need to investigate further, because it is legally a grey area and ATR has been indexed in Germany before (censored). Read More ...
The Swans - THIS IS NOT A REUNION - Message From Gira + free discography download (20 CDs)
Michael Gira's re-activated Swans will be undertaking their first U.S. performances in 13 years, celebrating the Fall release of the first new Swans album since Soundtracks For The Blind (1997). The album was recorded by Jason LeFarge at Seizure's Palace in Brooklyn and is currently be remixed by Gira with Bryce Goggin (Antony & The Johnsons, Akron/Family) at Trout Recordings. Read More ...
The Ex
Album: Singles. Period
The Ex are one of those rare bands that, despite being around for 25 years, have neither gone soft nor stagnated. The 23 tracks on this album all date from their first decade of existence (1980-1990), and if you compare it with recent milestones like Starter Alternator and Turn, you’ll see that while many of the Ex’s virtues are long standing, much has changed. The Ex grew out of Amsterdam’s once-fertile squatters’ subculture, and have always been politically conscious; Singles. Period. includes screeds that oppose American cultural hegemony, Dutch apathy, and eugenics. Their most recent album Turn likewise includes protests against globalization, consumerism, and cultural erosion, but its lyrics are quite nuanced and in touch with the grey areas of the issues when compared with the black and white prescription of 1981’s “Weapons For El Salvador”: ..............
{audio}http://www.theex.nl/mp3/The%20Ex%20-%20Trash.mp3{/audio} ... Trash Read More ...
Dirty HC Punk explosion - Bristol scene Rise up + Disorder 9 free CDs
From The Cortinas to Lunatic Fringe and Disorder, Bristol had a huge Punk scene that has influenced, affected and stimulated a vast range of artists that operate in the city. Many of these artists produce music that wouldn’t necessarily suggest a Punk heritage but scratch beneath the surface of a lot of the major players in the Bristol milieu and you will find a fondness for the times of `spikey barnets’, limited musical ability, a `F*** You’ attitude and disrespect for the music industry and its poseur hierarchy. Read More ...
Bastro
Album: Antlers + 4 albums download
A live album can be many things: a candid snapshot, a footnote to a scene, or even just a thrifty alternative to studio time. Antlers, a collection of live Bastro recordings from 1991, is the rarest kind of live album: it illuminates a side of the band that, in turn, casts their previous work in a new light as well.“1991 has been called the year that punk broke. Some of it broke into the mainstream, but some broke into more irregular shards.” David Grubbs’s observation, from the liner notes to Antlers, could also describe the varied musical paths that led from his former band Squirrel Bait to the disparate ’90s groups he and his ex-bandmates went on to found: Slint, Palace Brothers, King Kong, Bitch Magnet, the For Carnation, Tortoise, and of course, Bastro. Read More ...

Odd

Japan’s Annual Penis Festival – Celebrates Fertility
KOMAKI, Japan — It's springtime in Japan and that means one thing. Actually, two things. Penis festivals and vagina festivals. It may sound like a sophomoric gag. But these are folk rites going back at least 1,500 years, into Japan's agricultural past. They're held to ensure a good harvest and promote baby-making. Maybe they should hold more such festivals. Japan has one of the world's lowest birthrates (1.37 children per woman), which experts blame on stagnant incomes and changing gender relations. Read More ...
Rarest Fishes in the World
Aquatic Lifeforms You Never Caught While Fishing:
Black-lip Rattail ............ These sorts of rattails feed in the muddy seafloor by gliding along head down and tail up, powered by gentle undulations of a long fin under the tail. The triangular head has sensory cells underneath that help detect animals buried in the mud or sand. The common name comes from the black edges around the mouth. Read More ...
All world secret underground bases build for space travelers
The following material comes from people who know the Dulce (underground) base exists. They are people who worked in the labs; abductees taken to the base; people who assisted in the construction; intelligence personal (NSA,CIA,FBI ... ect.) and UFO / inner-earth researchers. This information is meant for those who are seriously interested in the dulce base. for your own protection be advised to “use caution” while investigating this complex.Does a strange world exist beneath our feet? Strange legends have persisted for centuries about the mysterious cavern world and the equally strange beings who inhabit it.  More UFOlogists have considered the possibility that UFOs may be emanating from subterranean bases, that UFO aliens have constructed these bases to carry out various missions involving Earth or humans. Read More ...
Our Digitally Undying Memories
"I forgot to remember to forget," Elvis Presley sang in 1955. I know that it was 1955 because I just Googled the title and clicked on the link to the Wikipedia entry for the song. How cool is that? Not long ago, I would have had to actually remember that Elvis recorded the song as part of his monumental Sun Records sessions that year. Then I would have had to flip through a set of histories of blues and country that sit on the shelf behind me. It might have taken five minutes to do what I did in five seconds. I almost don't need my own memory any more. That strikes many of us as a good thing: the costs low, the benefits high. We can be much more efficient and comprehensive now that a teeming collection of documents sits just a few keystrokes away. Read More ...
5 Ridiculous Economic Collapses
These days, with all the pundits preaching doom and the impending collapse of society into some kind of Mad Max style wasteland, it's easy for us to imagine that the economy is as unhealthy as it's ever been. But any historian would give you a hard backhanded smack for even saying that out loud. History is full of economic idiocy, and here are five economic collapses that make 2010 feel like the Renaissance. Read More ...
Island of Ghosts: Hashima Island - Japan’s rotting metropolis
Hashima, an island located in Nagasaki Bay, is better known as Warship Island (Gunkanshima). The island was inhabited until the end of the 19th century, when it was discovered that the ground below it held tons of coal. The island soon became a center of a major mining complex owned by Mitsubishi Corporation. As the complex expanded, rock brought out of the shafts was used to artificially expand the island. Seawalls created in this expansion turned Hashima into the monstrous looking Gunkanshima; its artificial appearance makes it looks more like a battleship than an island. Read More ...
Dreamachine - stroboscopic flicker device enter you to a hypnagogic state - try it right here in your browser
The dreamachine (or dream machine) is a stroboscopic  flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and William Burroughs's "systems adviser" Ian Sommerville created the dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter's book, The Living Brain. In its original form, a dreamachine is made from a cylinder with slits cut in the sides. The cylinder is placed on a record turntable and rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. A light bulb is suspended in the center of the cylinder and the rotation speed allows the light to come out from the holes at a constant frequency of between 8 and 13 pulses per second. This frequency range corresponds to alpha waves, electrical oscillations  normally present in the human brain while relaxing. Read More ...
The Peyote Way Church of God - believe that the Holy Sacrament Peyote can lead an individual toward a more spiritual life
The Peyote Way Church of God is a non-sectarian, multicultural, experiential, Peyotist organization located in southeastern Arizona, in the remote Aravaipa wilderness. It is not affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Native American Church, or any other religious organizations, though we do accept people from all faiths. Church membership is open to all races. We encourage individuals to create their own rituals as they become acquainted with the great mystery. We believe that the Holy Sacrament Peyote, when taken according to our sacramental procedure and combined with a holistic lifestyle (see Word of Wisdom), can lead an individual toward a more spiritual life. Peyote is currently listed as a controlled substance and its religious use is protected by Federal law only for Native American members of the Native American Church. Read More ...

Recent

The Marijuana Conspiracy - The Real Reason Hemp is Illegal
MARIJUANA is DANGEROUS. Pot is NOT harmful to the human body or mind. Marijuana does NOT pose a threat to the general public. Marijuana is very much a danger to the oil companies, alcohol, tobacco industries and a large number of chemical corporations. Various big businesses, with plenty of dollars and influence, have suppressed the truth from the people. The truth is if marijuana was utilized for its vast array of commercial products, it would create an industrial atomic bomb! Entrepreneurs have not been educated on the product potential of pot. The super rich have conspired to spread misinformation about an extremely versatile plant that, if used properly, would ruin their companies. Read More ...
Learn How to Pronounce the Iceland Volcano Eyjafjallajokull and remember; When He Erupted In 1821, it lasted 2 years
The last time Eyjafjallajökull erupted, it lasted 2 years stretching from 1821-1823. It also erupted in 920 and 1612. Eyjafjallajökull's eruption usually precedes an eruption for another Icelandic volcano called Katla, as it did in 1823. Katla's eruptions are usually more violent than Eyjafjallajökul's. Due to the second activity on Eyjafjallajökull volcano since April 14, there are thousands of flights have been cancelled not only in Europe but also some flights from Asia, America and other continents. More over, it was also reportedly more than ten thousands of air travelers still stranded after a plume of ash cloud spreading across thousands of miles. No need to repeat the same news in every single post, actually there’s an interesting thing from the Iceland volcano’s name Eyjafjallajokull. Pronunciation is so difficult for some of us. Even, many people still don’t know what’s the right pronunciation of Eyjafjallajokull volcano. Did you know that? Read More ...
The Drivers Of Tropical Deforestation Are Changing
A shift from poverty-driven to industry-driven deforestation threatens the world's tropical forests but offers new opportunities for conservation, according to an article coauthored by William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. "New Strategies for Conserving Tropical Forests" will be featured in the September issue of the leading journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Rhett Butler of Mongabay.com, a leading tropical-forest Web site, and Laurance argue that the sharp increase in deforestation by big corporations provides environmental lobby groups with clear, identifiable targets that can be pressured to be more responsive to environmental concerns. Read More ...
The CIA and the Nazis - Declassified archives document ties between CIA and Nazis - Where Is Hitler?!
The US national archives released some 27,000 pages of secret records documenting the CIA’s Cold War relations with former German Nazi Party members and officials. The files reveal numerous cases of German Nazis, some clearly guilty of war crimes, receiving funds, weapons and employment from the CIA. They also demonstrate that US intelligence agencies deliberately refrained from disclosing information about the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann in order to protect Washington’s allies in the post-war West German government headed by Christian Democratic leader Konrad Adenauer. Eichmann, who had sent millions to their deaths while coordinating the Nazis’ “final solution” campaign to exterminate European Jewry, went into hiding in Buenos Aires after the fall of the Third Reich. Read More ...
Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple
A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution. They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent. Read More ...
Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
The international community has come out in force to condemn and declare war on the Somali fishermen pirates, while discreetly protecting the illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fleets from around the world that have been poaching and dumping toxic waste in Somali waters since the fall of the Somali government eighteen years ago. In 1991, when the government of Somalia collapsed, foreign interests seized the opportunity to begin looting the country’s food supply and using the country’s unguarded waters as a dumping ground for nuclear and other toxic waste. Read More ...
Squatting - How to Squat in Abandoned Property
Squatting consists of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building, usually residential,  that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use. There are one billion squatters globally, that is, about one in every six people on the planet.  Yet, according to Kesia Reeve, "squatting is largely absent from policy and academic debate and is rarely conceptualized, as a problem, as a symptom, or as a social or housing movement. In many countries, squatting is in itself a crime; in others, it is only seen as a civil conflict between the owner and the occupants. "Squatters are usually portrayed as worthless scroungers hell-bent on disrupting society." Property law and the state have traditionally favored the property owner. However, in many cases where squatters had de facto  ownership, laws have been changed to legitimize their status. Read More ...
Top 5 Worst 9/11 Memorials

9/11 has inspired a myriad of memorials who are scattered all across America. Some of them are of questionable taste, others contain strange occult symbolism while others simply piss people off. Here’s the five most offensive. Read More ...

Science

The World's First Commercial Brain-Computer Interface + history of BCI
A brain–computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain–machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a brain and an external device. BCIs are often aimed at assisting, augmenting or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor functions. Research on BCIs began in the 1970s at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) under a grant from the National Science Foundation, followed by a contract from DARPA. The papers published after this research also mark the first appearance of the expression brain–computer interface in scientific literature. Read More ...
Seven theories of everything that pretend to describe the fundamental nature of the universe
We still don't have a theory that describes the fundamental nature of the universe, but there are plenty of candidates.
The "theory of everything" is one of the most cherished dreams of science. If it is ever discovered, it will describe the workings of the universe at the most fundamental level and thus encompass our entire understanding of nature. It would also answer such enduring puzzles as what dark matter is, the reason time flows in only one direction and how gravity works. Small wonder that Stephen Hawking famously said that such a theory would be "the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God". But theologians needn't lose too much sleep just yet. Despite decades of effort, progress has been slow. Rather than one or two rival theories whose merits can be judged against the evidence, there is a profusion of candidates and precious few clues as to which (if any) might turn out to be correct. Read More ...
The Secrets of Coral Castle and pyramids EXPLAINED by Leedskalnin's Magnetic Current theory
Coral Castle doesn't look much like a castle, but that hasn't discouraged generations of tourists from wanting to see it. That's because it was built by one man, Ed Leedskalnin, a Latvian immigrant who single-handedly and mysteriously excavated, carved, and erected over 2.2 million pounds of coral rock to build this place, even though he stood only five feet tall and weighed a mere 100 pounds. Ed was as secretive as he was misguided. He never told anyone how he carved and set into place the walls, gates, monoliths, and moon crescents that make up much of his Castle. Some of these blocks weigh as much as 30 tons. Ed often worked at night, by lantern light, so that no one could see him. He used only tools that he fashioned himself from wrecks in an auto junkyard. Read More ...
The T2K Experiment - From Tokai To Kamioka - Where is the anti-matter?
From the beginning of 2010, the T2K experiment will fire a beam of muon-neutrinos from Tokai on Japan's east coast, 300km accross the country to a detector at Kamioka. It hopes to investigate the phenomenon of "neutrino oscillations" by looking for "muon neutrinos" oscillating into "electron neutrinos".  A million pound detector has been built at the University of Warwick as part of a vital experiment to investigate fundamental particles - neutrinos. Read More ...
Meet ALICE - new CERNs giant detector
The giant ALICE detector is already underway at CERN, and researchers are scrambling to add an electromagnetic calorimeter to capture jet-quenching, the newest way to look inside the quark-gluon plasma — the hot, dense state of matter that filled the earliest universe, which the Large Hadron Collider will soon recreate by slamming lead nuclei into one another.  CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known mainly as the accelerator that will soon begin searching for the Higgs particle, and other new physics, in proton collisions at unprecedented energies — up to 14 TeV (14 trillion electron volts) at the center of mass — and with unprecedented beam intensities. But the same machine will also collide massive nuclei, specifically lead ions, to energies never achieved before in the laboratory. Read More ...
Vadim Chernobrov & Russian secrets experiments with time machines
A disturbing story in the March, 2005. 1 issue of Pravda suggests that the U. S. Government is working on the discovery of a mysterious point over the South Pole that may be a passageway backward in time. According to the article, some American and British scientists working in Antarctica on January 27, 1995, noticed a spinning gray fog in the sky over the pole. U. S. physicist Mariann McLein said at first they believed it to be some kind of sandstorm. But after a while they noticed that the fog did not change its form and did not move so they decided to investigate. Read More ...
Study: Happiness Is Experiences, Not Stuff
If you're trying to buy happiness, you'd be better off putting your money toward a tropical island get-away than a new computer, a new study suggests. The results show that people's satisfaction with their life-experience purchases — anything from seeing a movie to going on a vacation — tends to start out high and go up over time. On the other hand, although they might be initially happy with that shiny new iPhone or the latest in fashion, their satisfaction with these items wanes with time. The findings, based on eight separate studies, agree with previous research showing that experience-related buys lead to more happiness for the consumer. But the current work provides some insight into why. Read More ...
Faster Than Light - Was Einstein wrong?
It's not just a good idea, it's the law: 186,287 miles per second. The fact that sound waves travel at a finite speed--roughly 330 meters per second--has been known since ancient times. It's obvious, really, when you stand back a ways and observe the falling of a tree or the clapping of a pair of hands, and the sound arrives noticeably later than the sight itself. The fact that light waves also travel at finite speed is much harder to notice, because that speed is almost a million times faster. But by the end of the Renaissance, astronomers--viewing events much more distant than a few hundred meters--had begun to suspect the truth. Read More ...

Space

UFO's of Nazi Germany
Viktor Schauberger & UFO's of Nazi Germany
It was nearly the end of WWII. At that same time, scientist Viktor Schauberger worked on a secret project. Johannes Kepler, whose ideas Schauberger followed, had knowledge of the secret teachings of Pythagoras that had been adopted and kept secret. It was the knowledge of Implosion (in this case the utilization of the potential of the inner worlds in the outer world). Hitler knew - as did the Thule and Vril people - that the divine principle was always constructive. A technology however that is based on explosion and therefore is destructive runs against the divine principle. Thus they wanted to create a technology based on Implosion. Read More ...
The Size Of Our World or How Insignificant the Earth Really Is in the Universe
Compared to you and me, the Earth is really big. But compared to Jupiter and the Sun, the Earth is pretty tiny. There are many ways we can measure the size of the Earth. Let's look at how big the Earth is, and then compare it to other objects in the Solar System. The diameter of the Earth is 12,742 km. In other words, if you dug a hole down into the Earth, passed through the center of the Earth, and came out the other side, you would have dug a hole 12,742 km deep (on average). That's about 4 times longer than the diameter of the Moon. Read More ...
Strange Images from Space - Photos&videos of the Bizarre in Our Universe
Some weird and unusual objects are floating around in the cosmos. Space is always serving up something new, unusual, and unexpected. Here are images and explanations of obejcts that have amazed and delighted astronomers. Read More ...
Mysterious Radio Waves from Unknown Object in M82 Galaxy
There is something strange is lurking in the galactic neighborhood. An unknown object in galaxy M82 12 million light-years away has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before except perhaps by Ford Prefect. M82 is starburst galaxy five times as bright as the Milky Way and one hundred times as bright as our galaxy's center. "We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK. But its apparent sideways velocity is four times the speed of light. This "superluminal" motion occurs usually in high-speed jets of material bursting out by black holes. Read More ...
Unsettled Mechanism of Supernova Detonation Gets a New Twist
Type Ia supernovae, often used to calibrate cosmological measurements, may arise from merging white dwarfs, after all
When stellar cataclysms known as type Ia supernovae flare up far across the universe, their brightness and consistency allow astronomers to use them as so-called standard candles to measure cosmological distances. Just over a decade ago, two teams used the supernovae to show that the universe is accelerating in its expansion due to the influence of dark energy, a shocking discovery that thrust type Ia supernovae into the astrophysical limelight. But how exactly did these cosmic mileposts come to be? Read More ...
Black Prince, alien space probe, orbits Earth watching humans
Alexander Kazantsev, a Soviet author of sci-fi books, once said that a mysterious “unaccounted” satellite called Black Prince was spinning around Earth. The writer believed the object might be an alien probe, a messenger from extraterrestrial civilizations. Some people including scientists paid attention to the writer’s hypothesis.U.S. astrophysicist Ronald Bracewell was the first to take the hypothesis seriously. In 1960, he published a study to back his conclusions with data of practical radio engineering. Read More ...
Secret Robotic Space Plane Launched By US Air Force
The United States Air Force (USAF) has launched a secret space plane into orbit, carried in the nose of an Atlas 5 rocket. The USAF is not calling the X-37B a weapon or anything else, and the classified mission was broadcast live, but only for several minutes into the flight. The plane, built by Boeing, was originally part of a NASA programme but was later abandoned and turned over to a secretive USAF unit. There are no details on how much it costs or when it is coming back to earth, but when it does return the unmanned craft will land itself, using the onboard autopilot. Read More ...
Hubble telescope captures image of mysterious x-shaped object in space
Is that a smashed comet or an X-Wing fighter? Scientists are offering up their own theories as to what created the striking star-inspired image, which was captured by NASA's Hubble telescope in January. "Two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight," said principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. Read More ...
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1970s California punk videos + '80s hardcore punk scene

Domino Recording Company recently released Black Hole, a 26-track anthology of late 1970s California punk, curated by Jon Savage, a UK music writer.  Domino is proud to announce the release of Black Hole, a compilation celebrating the first wave of California Punk that briefly flourished between 1976 and 1980. Compiled by esteemed writer Jon Savage, Black Hole will be released on November 15th 2010. This compilation contains ideas, anti-establishment rants, sharp comments about the world, attempts at transcendence and plenty of savage wit. Featuring The Dead Kennedys, The Germs and The Zeros, the collection of tracks on this album sound as fresh as the day they were recorded.


Jon Savage is a leading UK based writer and cultural historian. He has written widely for British and American newspapers and magazines on music, pop culture and social history. His book England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1993) won the Ralph J. Gleason Book Award and his film and television credits include the BAFTA award-winning documentary The Brian Epstein Story (1998) and Joy Division (2007), a history of group, time and place.



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01. The Germs - Forming

02. The Dils - I Hate The Rich

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03. The Screamers - Peer Pressure

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04. Crime - Murder By Guitar

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05. The Zeros - WIMP

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06. The Avengers -- "We Are the One" (Studio recording)        

07. The Consumers - Anti Anti Anti

08. The Randoms - A-B-C-D

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09. Black Randy and the Metro Squad - Trouble at the Cup

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10. The Alleycats - Nothing Means Nothing Anymore

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11. The Weirdos - Solitary Confinement

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12. The Zeros -- "Beat Your Heart Out" (Studio recording)        

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13. X -- "We're Desperate" (From the documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization)        

14. The Offs - 624803

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15. The Sleepers - Seventh World

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16. The Middle Class - Situations

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17. The Bags -- "Survive" (Live in Portland, OR). After the jump, four videos of songs included on the album (I chose live performances when possible, rather than the studio recordings that actually appear on the album).       

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18. The Germs - Media Blitz

19. The Middle Class - Love Is Just a Tool

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20. The Flesheaters - Pony Dress

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21. Urinals - Black Hole

22. The Aurora Pushups - Victims of Terrorism

The Avengers - The American In Me
23. The Avengers - The American In Me

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24. Dead Kennedys -- "California Über Alles" (Mabuhay Gardens, San Francisco, CA 1979)

25. The Dils - The Sound of the Rain

26. The Sleepers - Los Gatos



PUNK ROCK - Historical Essay


by Jeff Goldthorpe ..................... This is a story about the American hardcore punk scene, but it does not begin "once upon a time." Its beginning is my own fascination with punk, my love of punk's exhilarating destruction and my own desire to let out a "barbarous yawp" after a long decade of suffocating political certainties. But the story also begins with my revulsion from punk, which was part of the fascination; a numbness, disgust or feeling of contemptuous distance which sometimes came over me, a feeling that the music was sick, not just a commentary on sickness. For example, there was Flipper's "Love Canal." Its painful, monotonous beat pounded you into the ground and the singing, equally painful and distorted, translated the Love Canal victims' horror at carcinogenic toxins penetrating "our every cell" into the band's own feeling of poisoning and corruption. Flipper was not sympathizing with the victims as much as presenting their suffering as a metaphor for being used, lied to, raped, corrupted and finally poisoned. This music was not about gaining purity as much as revelling in your sin.

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Greil Marcus located punk as son of Dada, the negationist art movement that took off from the rubble of World War I Europe (1982). But I wondered, as a bedraggled but still determined radical in the early eighties, what all this raging cynicism had to do with creating the new day of humankind. David James summarized the dilemma of punk's negation like this:

...punk's self-definition...made its attempt to produce itself outside of the entertainment business internally logical and indeed allowed its utopian aspiration, one form of which was the innovation of alternative modes of cultural production...Thus the increased audience participation in concerts with open passage through the stage and the flourishing of recording and record distribution outside corporate channels, as well as the constant formation and dissolution of bands and the do-it-yourself philosophy that allowed the typical producer/consumer proportions to be inverted--all were antithetical to capitalist social relations.



[But]...Having by definition no positive terms, and in the absence of any social movement that could supply them, punk was thus condemned not only to manifest itself purely as style, but condemned to manifest itself as a style that would always be in the process of pushing itself over into self-parody, to the point at which it would find itself only able to mimic its former gestures (1988, p. 168-9).

This captures two sides of punk and its ultimate dead end quite well. Yet it ignores the hopeful political currents which I was seeing punk unloose in the early eighties, even in the United States, "in the absence of any social movement" (the latter term to be redefined later). I have to 'fess up here that in the early eighties my hippie hopes were reborn and while I never really jumped whole hog into the hardcore punk scene, I desperately hoped that it might be a part of the subcultural cohesion of a new subversive social movement. Consequently, my particular aim in this essay, unlike most rock or academic writers, is to point out the political dimension of punk's idioms, gestures and repertoires of negation, despite the non-political context of their expression, and how these styles and gestures broke out in short-lived political actions. I want to explore how even the most cynical youth subculture carried utopian potentials in a negationist shell in a time of rampant political and cultural reaction.

The historical narrative here focuses on the Californian punk scene, primarily San Francisco and Los Angeles; how it originated in the seventies; how it grew, changed and fragmented in the early eighties and how by the mid-eighties two factions, peace punks and skinheads, went off in opposing political directions. Writing a history was not my original intent, but I found a theoretical analysis beyond me without some empirical sense of what happened first. My account is often dependent on "in-scene" materials like fanzines and fan books (like "Hardcore California," Belsito and Davis, 1983) that I have collected as an inquisitive fan over the years without this project in mind, supplemented by my own observations as a marginal participant and some interviewing. Social and political aspects of punk subculture are at the center of this study, although the punk scene was obviously musically centered. Music is discussed here as an articulation of feeling which the audience translates into behavior. Bands are emphasized for ways they typified an element of punk style, rather than how they shaped up in terms of some standard of musical excellence. Slight attention is paid to the production of music by bands in conjunction with club owners, record companies and radio stations; rather it is the consumption of music by audiences and subcultures which is emphasized. As for objectivity, its only possibility exists in my own conflicts and questions about punk, and careful pursuit of those questions, not in a "scientific method." I hope that the same doubts that made me an indecisive, overly cautious activist will make me a better historian. For those familiar with the white "new left," this book might best be understood as a contribution to the "hip vs. politico" debate which has simmered steadily since the late sixties and can be traced back even further.

While there is ample documentation of the scene in fanzines, on records, film and video tape, such accounts often have a false sense of neutrality akin to a news photograph (shot, selected, altered and laid out in such a context that provides silent meanings as the "transparent" record of an event). I persist in believing that the truth of a thing can only be seen in its connection to the whole, however full of holes that whole is. Thus my history of punk is interwoven with larger political and cultural histories and with theoretical questions about the specific forms and general potentials for social change. But I hope to avoid the reductionist account, which oversimplifies in the search for explanatory causes. I want this story to leave room for the other stories that remain to be told, as well as opening up the deeper questions about what it all meant. In addition to the authorial voice, I include personal accounts by three participants in the punk scene.

'77 PUNK: THE KIDS BEGIN TO FIND THEMSELVES

The Kid turned twenty one that year. Though the average age in the "new communist" formations was about thirty, there were a small number of youth in their early twenties who joined in. Another small cluster of misfits in their early twenties who hung around S.F.'s North Beach neighborhood (of late Beatnik notoriety) found their outlet in punk rock. The August 1976 Ramones gig played a catalytic role for the proto-punk scene in San Francisco: "In the backroom of the Savoy Tivoli on Upper Grant Avenue about thirty people had their ears blasted and their lives altered by the leather-jacketed boys from the East" (Erickson, 1985, p.11). The local detonator was a cabaret act performed by "Mary Monday and her Britches" at the Mabuhay Gardens, a Broadway restaurant-nightclub. Though Monday claimed to be an original, sporting green hair from the age of fourteen, her all-female troupe was in the pure punk mode, smashing "bottles, microphones , tables, props and costumes in a dangerous, spontaneously incited girl gang war .... the bug-eyed audience could not believe the real-life trashing, slugging and ripping of flesh. BY WOMEN!" Assisted by producer Dirk Dirksen and by an ambitious publicist Jerry Paulsen, bands and audiences were soon attracted by the commotion. By December 1976, the Nuns and the Dils played their first show at the Mabuhay (or Mab), leaving the 40 person audience in shock ("New Wave History in San Francisco...", 1977, p. 3).

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In 1977, the direct inspiration was clearly from Britain; the scene from "New York was too cool, too intellectual, too boring for the California set" (Lee and Shreader, p. 11). The historical accounts of scenes in both cities in Hardcore California stress the tremendous impetus given in spring 1977 by The Damned from Britain, playing non-stop half hour sets, as well as television documentaries on British punk which gave local scenesters a "new sense of style," and "made Punk a movement overnight..." In San Francisco, this documentary sent a local Eyewitless News team "scurrying for a story on local punks," at the Mab, taping a mock cat fight on stage as a feature on local punk violence. (Belsito and Davis, 1983, pp. 74-5 and p. 14) It was easy for some to dismiss the whole thing as a transplanted fad. But this is the wrong way to define authenticity in the era of global telecommunications. While the original generation of this style was by copying the Sex Pistols and other British bands, the impulse to slay the rock 'n' roll father and to scream out against the what Ellen Willis called the "smug consensus" of the Carter years was authentic, allowing for the emergence of a small American punk community.* If one's idea of authenticity hinges on direct experience, note that both the San Francisco and Los Angeles scenes were small face-to-face subcultures, at times surrounded by media attention and gawking spectators but quite small in themselves. "I knew everyone in the audience and I knew all the bands," says Penelope Houston, former lead singer of The Avengers in San Francisco (Tim, 1985 "Maximum Rock'n'Roll #27"). Four or five bands in Los Angeles were supported by "only a hundred hardcore punks" (Lee, 1981).

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By mid-1977 the shape of the scene for the next couple of years was set: a musically-centered subculture, inspired by records and publicity from the U.K., centered in live performance in small nightclubs in North Beach and Hollywood, neighborhoods laden with both bohemian/ counter culture traditions and commercial sleaze culture. Many people got jobs in the same areas, where bizarre looks or behavior had some market value. They had no set ethics or alternative values. In both scenes you found promoters, some idealistic, others into pure sales technique and shady practices with the money taken at the door. The bands were a mixed bag too; punk wanted to destroy rock but there was almost no independent record network to reach the young folk who alone could overthrow the old order. Bands aiming for contracts with major record companies coexisted with bands that never even thought of studio recording. Both scenes began with a great deal of cooperation among local bands, but in time mistrust, backbiting and competition became more prominent.

Consider this story: In April 1977, Mary Monday had a cabaret show with David Bowie, Iggy Pop and members of New York bands Television and Blondie in the audience. Afterward, according to Search and Destroy, "with true Punk Spontaneity, [their caps] Blondie's keyboard player kicked in the glass door of 'Art Hypocrite' Superjoel's 'exclusive' warehouse party for Bowie and Ig." ("New Wave History in San Francisco...", 1977, p. 3). Given the prosaic pop stardom which Blondie was then headed toward, was the keyboard player attacking the rock star/publicity cabal or was he trying to join the club? Surely he was doing both. Much of early punk's history is capsulized in that moment.

What about politics? These were really just music scenes, but San Francisco's always had a more political tone. The Hollywood punks, with their roots in glitter rock, "were not political activists," they preferred "instigating fashion anarchy and musical chaos" (Lee and Shreader, p. 11). A major reason for the more political tone coming out of S.F. was Search and Destroy. Launched in June 1977 by Vale and Violet Ray (the latter had been owner of North Beach's Icepick Gallery. Erickson, 1985, p. 14) it went far beyond the normal fanzine in style and content. Its graphic style was innovative, its photography excellent, including large pics of the local heartthrobs with properly wasted expressions, and its text was mainly long interviews with various musicians. At the same time the editors were familiar with anti-art artists from Dada to surrealism to situationism as well as having detailed knowledge on punk pioneers such as Iggy Pop or Captain Beefheart. Political discussion was woven throughout the interviews but there were also articles on punk politics in Britain, on European urban guerillas and even on the 1978 strike wave among American workers. San Francisco bands like the Dils and the Avengers had a more optimistic, political tone, similar to the Clash in the U.K. The Dils, hard line radicals as well as hard rockers, were originally from San Diego and initially played around the L.A. punk clubs. However they quickly moved to S.F., where the scene was more amenable to their political style. A cursory look at Search and Destroy also points to connections between the S.F. punk scene and North Beach's literary counter-culture. The magazine used Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookstore for a mailing address in its first issue, which also contained a short endorsement of the local scene by Allen Ginsberg, shown posing with the Nuns in a photo. The editors always showed a special affection for the writing of William Burroughs as well. Likewise, the Los Angeles scene showed an affinity with the poetry of lowlife bard Charles Bukowski. John Doe and Exene Cervenka, founders of X, one of the most popular LA bands met in a Venice poetry workshop.

In the S.F. scene generally, the influence of North Beach's population of poets, writers and artists was evident, particularly in the symbiotic relation between the Mabuhay and the nearby San Francisco Art Institute. Not only did several bands draw members from among SFAI students, but these bands brought visual and performance art into the scene (Irwin, 1982, p. 52). In a 1982 interview, promoter Dirk Dirksen bemoaned the loss of this early influence in graphics and in bands: ".... some of the earlier bands were into .... the total communication aspect .... because they had their roots in the Art Institute." (Dirk interview, MRR# 2, 1982). Video cameras became a ubiquitous presence at even small concerts. Target Video, which began in Oakland in the mid-seventies in reaction to the "esoteric ... dry, stagnant, closed off" New York style of performance video, specialized in documenting local punk performances. Target Video's San Francisco warehouse later became a space for punk music gigs.

The scenes in L.A. and S.F. are best understood within the urban bohemian/ artist tradition, (rather than in a model of simple class culture) in which politics is not activist and the social milieu is mainly young students and ex-students who've arrived in multicultural city centers from elsewhere, usually from suburban middle class and sometimes working class homes. This student-bohemian core drew all sorts of rebels, teenagers and misfits "recently released from universities or mental hospitals... transsexuals, derelicts and just plain weirdos ... whose median age must have been about 23," says S & D editor Vale about the S.F. scene (Erickson, 1985, p. 14).

The presence of art students in the punk scenes of New York, London, San Francisco and Los Angeles may seem almost too obvious to mention. The art school typically promotes a more open, experimental approach by the musicians than could normally exist in a purely commercial or a narrow ethnic/ neighborhood context. It provides a potential audience prepared for an outrageous, perhaps idiotic performance, which gives musicians experience and nerve to try new approaches constantly. And the modern art school often acquaints students with the subversive, deconstructive practices of earlier art movements such as Dada, Surrealism and art/politics syntheses like Situationism. For if we are living in an image-saturated world that pacifies and consumes us as we consume it, as the post-modern theories tell us, then creating open spaces where people can grapple, experiment with and deconstruct the new means of communication can be a crucial act of empowerment. As Simon Frith and Howard Horne write in Art Into Pop, "Postmodern culture makes possible post-modern politics; their very involvement in the pop process gives artists new opportunities for cultural intervention" (1987: p. 8).

TAKING A SLASH AT THE "ME GENERATION:" THE SEMANTICS OF PUNK

A punk is somebody who's taken himself hostage and is waiting for somebody to let him out.



---Andrei Codrescu (in Sukenick, 1987: p. 272)


Like most of their peers, first wave California punks grew up with rock and roll and sixties counter-culture. Punk style was both a ironic-celebratory funeral anthem for white youth's particular effort to change the world and an attempt to clear new symbolic space for an oppositional cultural stance. This space was impossible to create as long as the decaying, media-packaged sixties experience set the parameters of activity. Thus American punk can best be understood as an energetic annihilation of the leftover hippie-new age-liberal-stadium rock-symbolism:

I recall seeing the Bent play the Mabuhay.

They were theory in motion, very danceable.

Their cover of 'Love Me Do'--already rendered

of most emotional fat by the Beatles flat melody

and zombie vocals--pulled off an expert raid that

stripped the tune of what artifacts of sentiment and

culture it had left. As a coup de grace, Bent's last

number featured an inflated party doll to which the

lead singer crooned 'I Want Your Body.' Then he

punctured it and it flew about the stage, bleating

pathetically. At that instant, part of my vestigial

romanticism died forever." (Kester, 1982, p. 12).


In fact, early American punk is the only youth subculture to have defined itself mainly through the symbolic destruction of the previous era's youth subculture. Hippies may have sensed their distinctiveness from the beats, and heavy metal fans may be aware of their distance from sixties' hippies or greasers of the fifties, but neither of them have based their main rituals on symbolic negation of their predecessors. Let's look at the minute particulars of how this negation worked.

To begin with the obvious, there was punk's amateurist, anti-rock star performance style which sought to bridge the gap between band and audience. Drawing on the down-home suburban tradition of garage bands, and filtered through Bowie's recasting of rock as a dying religion and Iggy Pop's confrontational performance style, punk evolved against the rock model of the pouting, masterful macho singer/guitarist. It also violated the protected distance of rock stars, guarded by their layers of bodyguards and functionaries. Even a popular band like The Clash, by Lester Bangs' 1977 account, maintained an open door policy backstage, hanging out with fans, even inviting them back to their rooms afterward to talk and party with, not to fuck (1987, pp. 231-33). The punk phenomenon of bands beginning to perform without knowing how to play their instruments was repeated in California, although some, like the Mutants improved while others, like the Germs, never seemed to catch on. As for confrontational stances, musicians swooped into audiences, flipped over tables, spilled drinks and broke bottles. In turn the audience would throw back verbal insults and blows, toss objects (benign and lethal) at the band and on the less hostile side, might grab the mike to sing along.,

Another counter-culture tradition that early punk declared war on was "naturalness." Punk, denying any simple escape from our synthetic society, ironically embraced the plastic and the artificial consumer shlock so abhorred by the hippies: geeky-trashy clothes, garishly dyed hair, leopard skin pants, leather pants, fish-net stockings and any garish, clashing colors. People wore items, such as plastic trash bags fastened with tape, that were not even defined as clothes. Punk also appropriated the old show business convention of making patently artificial identities through name changes. Thus you had names connoting anonymous conformity-- John Doe, Jonathan Formula, commercial names slightly askew -- Lorna Doom, Tomata Du Plenty, pure unreadability -- Geza X, or mass media juxtaposition reducing all realities to spectacle --Jello Biafra. Rather than attempting to oppose kitsch with the "authentic", yielding names like Sunshine, Sweet Basil or Rosewoman, punk sought to overthrow established symbols of appearance by Dada collage and surrealist juxtaposition of estranged objects (the bricolage of Hebdige, 1979, p. 102-6). While the hippies also used bricolage, using military and marching band regelia and items out of grandma's attic, their typical sartorial statements centered on natural/rural/earth images: blue jeans and overalls, peasant blouses, Nehru jackets and other traditional designs from the "primitive" third world, the "cowboy" (fringe leather jackets and cowboy hats) and "Indian" motifs (headbands, moccasins) and a general proclivity toward soft, flowing natural cotton fabrics as opposed to the newer synthetic fibers. During the seventies the whole concept of "natural" was used to sell everything from hair dye and make up to Presidential candidates, such as down-home Jimmy Carter with matching redneck brother. As naturalness became a ideology separating the hip, intelligent middle class from the slovenly white bread-eating working class ( Ehrenreich 1989, pp. 238-41) punk style announced its disaffliation from middle class standards.

Against the new age concepts of benevolent human nature, punk explored the seamy side of life. Remember that with the rise of secularism, psychology had achieved an important place in general ideology and has reflected its times as well as shaping them. The earlier crash landing of the Woodstock Nation signaled by the Altamont concert murders, and the more recent arrival of a gloomy "stagflation" economy (high inflation combined with high unemployment) had weakened the foundation of the "human potential movement," leading to an ever more selfish, inward focus. Humanistic psychology had largely discredited the earlier Freudian model of "normality" and "maturity," replacing it with an assumption of unlimited "growth," yielding an ever more rewarding "self-actualization." "Do your own thing" was borrowed from a little homily by Gestalt therapy founder Fritz Perls, not the Beatles. But this psychology never faced the larger social structures and traditions that limited "self-actualization," discrediting itself when the road to happiness meandered off into the briar patch of real American life (Ehrenreich, 1984: pp. 88-98).

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Characteristically, punk reacted extremely, with ornaments signifying sadism, masochism and bondage: the spiked wrist bands, handcuffs, leather outfits and other S & M regalia. Some items blended the S & M insignias with the dailiness of dog collars, leashes, safety pins or other metal objects piercing the flesh in various "unnatural" ways. While X-Ray Spex famous song "Oh, Bondage, Up Yours" referred to S & M strictly to parody the normal masochism of the everyday, punk always played with the notion that dominance and submission were inherent to human relations. Tattooing, carrying connotations of working class-male-sexual-sailor-biker, also became a popular way to decorate the body, implying permanent deviancy (see punk features in Tattoo Time, Vol. 3 No. 1). Another common item connoting perversion and sexual kinkiness was the cruddy trenchcoat, under which lurked, who knows what? Again punk names symbolized threat-- Darren Peligro (Spanish for danger) or Darby Crash, the repulsive--Paul Rat, violence -- Hellin Killer, disease -- Dinah Cancer, and self-destruction--Will Shatter. Rather than a sartorial identification with a rural/natural/earth bound other (Native American, Asian, peasant) punk played urban outcast (derelict, sexual pervert, science fiction mutant). Early Dead Kennedys songs written from the viewpoint of madmen/murderers or Black Flag's Manson motif played with the same assumption of human corruption or toxicity. As usual, the degree of irony in these identifications was not always clear. But clearly these destructive, self-hating "others" are different than the emulated, heroic outsiders of the fifties (the mythic Negro jazz musician/ freewheeler of Kerouac or Mailer's imagination or the Marlon Brando biker, James Dean delinquent that thrilled white youth) or the sixties (the holy primitives of Native American tribes, the gurus of the Far East, at times the black militant or even the Hells Angels).

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As a mostly white youth scene, punks, like most white Americans, were dazzled by high visibility of blacks in music, sports local newscasting and situation comedies, believing that the civil rights movement had been brought to fruition, rather than aborted. On the other hand, as novice city dwellers S.F. punks encountered verbal harassment and physical confrontation from black and Latino youth, who didn't always dig punk style and had long lived with violence as an unavoidable part of their inner-city environment. So with a mediated perception that racist discrimination was past and direct encounters with normal urban race hatred, many punks discarded liberal guilt, along with most liberals:

Blacks are bigots/ it makes me sick

They scream equality/ but now it's a joke

Blacks are bigots/ they've gone middle class...

(refrain) Everyone's a bigot/ 'cause no one's perfect

Blacks are bigots/ the 22 bus [runs in S.F.'s black Fillmore-JG]

If you don't [be] careful/ They put you down

Blacks are bigots/ whites are bigots/ yellows are bigots

Reds are bigots/ Browns are bigots/ and you're all bigots


(Offs from Let Them Eat Jellybeans compilation, Alternative Tentacles).


The Offs' song was very catchy, its rhythms very herky-jerky funky/reggae, very un-punk, with horns blaring and sung out like a hickish hog call. Great stuff! The song's emotional impact though resided less on its refrain ("everyone's a bigot") than its complaint about blacks, who themselves are seen only racially, referred to as a lump (the young kids who hassled him on the bus standing in for all blacks). Even stranger, "The Offs were fronted by a charismatic vocalist Don Vinil, an ardent audiophile, who found his inspiration in Negro [?] spirituals and reggae" (Belsito and Davis, p. 82). While American punk did not posit a pure ideal of "whiteness," neither did it assume a symbolic solidarity with American blacks and their music as British punk did with the West Indians and their reggae music.





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