Moderator: Kimberly Mack, University of Illinois
Marcus Clayton, “On the Big White Screen: Interrogating Punk Fashion as a Millennial Black Punk”
The mainstream view of punk fashion is incredibly white and predicated on the idea that the
punk ethos means voluntary abnormality by white suburban youth. In truth, fashion is a symptom
of punk and not requirement. Instead, punk’s foundation is a search for individuality despite
societal norms and a retention of community despite attempted extinction by authority figures
and gatekeepers – ideologies closer to how punks of color see the genre’s mission. The whiteness
of punk, upon even closer inspection, thrives on fashioning the historical usurpation of Black
style, art, and music into a kitsch for white youths who are simply bored of suburban life; styles
that stemmed from Black and brown DIY culture and protest music. This idea is exemplified by
the conversation between Norman Mailer and James Baldwin on “the white negro,” and further
amplified by the punk song “Guilty of Being White” by Minor Threat, whose lead singer I had a
personal disagreement with on the song and how one interprets racialization – blackness in
countercultural communities becomes a costume for white folk that can be taken off when the
going gets tough. In continuing the visceral argumentation of this personal interaction, I offer
this paper though narrative: an exploration of a biracial millennial’s interpretation of punk
fashion, how it feeds into representation and execution in contemporary society, how whiteness
in countercultural movements hinder POC aesthetics. Exploring this narrative through my
personal viewings of the film SLC Punk!, Bad Brain’s Live at CBGB’s 1982 DVD, and through
the 1990 independent film, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I wish to deconstruct the “fashion” of
punk, revealing aesthetics that do no celebrate culture and community, rather steals from POC
activism for the sake of gatekeeping oppression within the musical genre.
Michael Yosef Jimenez, “Functions of Style: Constructing the Cloak in Black Hardcore Punk”
How does a music genre constructed by Black musicians in scenes later reimagined to be
inherently white treat and construct the cover of its Blackness? How has the style of such a genre
reconciled with its unique position—faced unavoidably against the popular Black fashions of its
time while simultaneously being forced against the styles of a surrounding white background?
How does it create, through an alteration of style, clothing, and materials, its own cloak to further
its purposes? Black hardcore punk, as traced throughout early punk history in the outlines of
Bad Brains, X-Ray Spex, and Pure Hell, is in the tradition of constant sonic cloaking: amplifying
a sound which is simultaneously deafening and unmissable and, yet, constructed to be
completely unintelligible to many failing to understand it. Living here, on the borders of the
intelligibility of sound and noise, it finds proliferation and sustenance, creating an archive of its
own style which seems to understand what music critic and theorist Daphne Brooks describes as
the ability of archives to stand “in for and as the memory of a people.” In its own visual
appearance, Black hardcore punk performs something unique: its style allows it the privilege to
concurrently blend in, stand out, and recall its own memories of Black stylistic tradition. For
what exact purpose do these proliferators of early Black hardcore punk transform, repurpose, and
reuse the styles of their time? How can Bad Brains’ rastafarian aesthetic, Poly Styrene’s
checkered dresses and fur coats, and Kenny Gordon’s boots “made for walking,” repurposed
from that of Nancy Sinatra, all aid in the construction of this cloak? Why, as Pierce Jordan of
modern Black hardcore band Soul Glo has noted, isn’t there “anybody who’s Black in a punk
band with gold teeth”?
Jordan Brown, “Aesthetics of the Underground: Sapphic Blackness, Posthumanism, and Alternative Culture”
This paper investigates the sonic mapping of Black queer femme underground spaces. I
will use house shows as a case study encompassing Black music and underground politics.
Whether it be DJ Kool Herc’s Bronx house show that birthed hip-hop, the notorious basement
shows of the punk scene, or the late-night disc jockeying of house music, the house show
connects the musical with the political to create an informal community of like-minded people
(Kittler). I propose that the aesthetic regime of the house show, based in underground political
activism and grassroots movement, operates as a posthumanist-political intervention
temporarily absolving its attendees of the hegemonic structures of the “above-world”
(Rancière; Ortiz). As such, the house show curates a safe space for Black queer-femmeness by
relieving the intersectional weight of oppressive colonial structures from their shoulders
(Foucault). Capturing the true essence of this community can be an elusive endeavor, as the
oppressive capitalist forces that have overtaken LGBTQ spaces at the turn of the twenty-first
century have replaced the spirit of queer grassroots organizing with persuasive marketing that
conflates the consumption of queer merchandising with true “acceptance” (Adeyemi). Using
writings from Matthew D. Morrison’s Blacksound (2024), Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg
Manifesto (1984), and W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and music from
Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer (2018), I describe how the usage of aesthetic and sonic
opacity has safeguarded the Black queer femme community from Western hegemony. Under
the guise of Jean Bernabé et. al.'s Creolité, I will prove that the house show is an environment
evocative of the true anti nature of both the punk and Black communities. Forming an
underground railroad of sorts, Black alternative music brings coded Black queer femmeness to
the fore, masking its true intentions to outsiders and revealing its secrets to those who desire it.
