take the skinheads bowling
8 Jan 2008 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigou[all posts stemming from the original ‘dear author’ post are tagged with bright lights big city.]
I was listening to the radio yesterday and trying to ignore the semi-obnoxious deejay -- who has to be just out of college, given the comments -- blathering on about the days of “punk rockers”.
I really, really, really hate that label.
Now, there are ‘punk rock’ bands -- I’d say the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Replacements, that ilk, would be at the top of the recognizable-names list. That’s punk, certainly -- often Brit, songs with a punk delivery but under that rough-edged veneer it was really just more three-four time basic rock. I wasn’t a punk rocker, and I was just as offended as my friends if we were called ‘punk rockers’... that was a derogatory term and only tolerable when used as an affectionate insult among friends. Anything else was close to fighting words, an implication that you were ‘just’ a punk rocker, that you were all flash and no substance.
Being called a ‘new waver’ was even worse, though, no matter how good Bowie’s music might’ve been. New Wave meant hair like Flock of Seagulls or Thompson Twins (both semi-pop bands but hello, that hair) -- bleached and permed and dyed manic-panic color (if not several colors at once) -- not to mention the spandex, sometimes ripped and torn, the oversized jackets with sleeves pushed up, and all in bright colors... and it seemed a bigger thing in NYC and LA than anywhere I hung. We didn’t have a lot of new-wavers in the city by the time I came around. The few we had, either had shaded into punk rockers at the edges of the hardcore scene, or were stepping sideways into the proto-goth world (and I don’t mean Evanescence-style neo-goth, but early Cure what-is-this-goth-you-speak-of whiteface and smeared lipstick).
I was hardcore, not punk rock. I never heard anyone call it ‘hardcore punk,’ either -- it was just plain hardcore.
Hardcore had a very basic kind of dress/style, grunge before it was grunge, without the flashy colors of new wave or the glitz-and-studs of punk rock -- that was the visual style, at least. Peg a punk rocker by looking for military surplus jackets painted with some album cover across the back, studs lining the sleeves and epaulets, and somewhere around the person you’d find a holdover/crossover from New Wave’s studded-belts -- those stupid extra-long wrap things transformed into studded-leather wrapped around booted ankles, or twice around the waist, or trimmed down to fit neck and/or wrists.
Hardcore, in contrast, was hard-wearing and designed for both city comfort and city hiding, in a sense: darker, more somber clothing, with a heavy lean towards standard blue jeans and sturdy boots, simple t-shirts and a plaid or plain overshirt, with a worn olive-green surplus jacket. Outside in line before a show, one wore all layers; inside, the overshirt came off to be tied around the waist, while the jacket either stayed on or was draped over a girlfriend’s shoulders. Any studs, spikes, straps, or belts were foremost for practical use, and only secondly for show, if ‘show’ was even considered. Looking back, I’d call hardcore the politically-aware working class element in the generally middle-class punk rock scene: darker, simpler dress that looked just as at home at a hardware store or high school as it did when night fell on the crowd waiting for the club doors to open. I met a few ‘punk rockers’ who glammed themselves up to go out at night; every hardcore I met went to shows wearing pretty much what they’d worn to school or work.
Musically, hardcore was much harder-driving than punk, which had a definite melodic element under the thrashed guitars, if you listened close enough. I think of hardcore bands, I think of SNFU, I think of Seven Seconds, I think of Dag Nasty (the era of Can I Say / Wig Out at Denko’s, not the post-Baker California years), I think of All (the pre-All Descendents are more South-Cali-punk), and of course, Minor Threat, Teen Idles, Bad Brains, Government Issue, Kingface, and Marginal Man... along with imports, like GBH and the Cockney Rejects.
Two things really made hardcore stand out from punk rock. One was that there were no breaks between songs (and it wasn’t until listening to early Grateful Dead, years later, that I came across a musical predecessor in that sense) -- one song led immediately into the next, which sort of blurred the lines and covered the fact that most of these songs were maybe two minutes in length. Second was that the songs themselves -- while sometimes verging on melodic (All/Descendents, SNFU, Dag Nasty) -- were still mostly shout-sung. And maybe most importantly, the song topics weren’t about finding or losing love, most of the time, but about the political arena, about corrupt politicians, about making a difference in the world in a political sense, about dissatisfaction with the depressed economy and lack of jobs and lack of opportunities, about anger over the screwed-up and static and stulifying whitebread world that refused to see the injustices and unfairness, about evil that existed in the act of refusing to see that the world isn’t a frickin’ cup of cherries but a trashbin full of pits and that it’s time we do something about it.
[To clarify, though: the British punk (not the South-Cali style) was quite political, cf the Clash's London Calling. In some ways, Britain-punk in the 70s was the predecessor to the US-version, as hardcore, in the 80s -- they got Thatcherized and we got Reaganized, and ain't no one much happy who had to actually work for a living. When I say punk wasn't nearly as political as hardcore, I'm speaking more specifically about the trailing ends of punk that, sadly, did form the bulk of punk rock. Outside the big names, and the Oi school of punk, the politics were mostly focused on football games and cheating girlfriends. It was like Nashville meets Est.]
I suppose I should remind younger readers that hardcore was hitting the scene at the beginning of the Reagan era and stretched across the breadth of those eight years -- with the economy at the worst since the Great Depression. If you think the hardcore scene and its musicians and voices were fooled by the trickledown theory, you’d be wrong; the musicians (and artists and any other luxury-related creative mindsets like writers and zine editors/publishers etc) were fully aware that there wasn’t much of jack trickling down at all. In 1981, buying a house with 14% interest rate was considered a damn good deal, if that tells you what it was like -- and while punk rock railed on being yourself and making a statement of Being Against the System, hardcore outright criticized the system.
Society asks, What’re you protesting, Johnny?
Punk rock answers, What’ve yout got?
Hardcore says, here’s a definitive list.
Possibly with footnotes.
The punk rock scene may have immortalized “God Save the Queen” with a certain amount of sarcasm, but it was the hardcore scene that made the phrase “Ed Meese is a Pig” into a classic. The Sex Pistols may've cried for anarchy in the UK, but in the US-led hardcore scene(s), the fringe's reply was no longer, "fuck you, fuck this, let's blow it all up," but "you're fucking it up, someone's got to fix this, let me back in so I can."
If it’s bolded, I’ve seen it live. There’s my obligatory cred.
I mention this because there are are a few things that bother me in fiction when it comes to musical sub-cultures. One is that authors will gloss, and if there’s any place you can miscalculate, it’s when you gloss. A hollywood movie that shows some kid (who wasn’t even born when I was in college, for crying out loud) wearing a Sex Pistols shirt -- and yet the kid/character is politically aware and active -- tells me that the writers/directors went for the simple gloss over actual comprehension of the subculture being appropriated. (Why is it always the Sex Pistols? Why never Suicidal Tendencies?) You want to underscore the kid’s mindset based on his musical influences, you’ll need to have a better grasp on those musical influences than just “oh, this was loud and obnoxious and involved people wearing black and being socially unacceptable” -- in that case, just freaking MAKE SOMETHING UP.
That’s right. Make up that gun-model, and then I can’t sit here steaming because you put a seventeen-round magazine in a 1911. Make up that car, and I can’t fuss because I know as a good mechanic that there’s no way that stupid Detroit Steel mobile would ever manage a corner that sharp, let alone pop a tight bitch. Make up that band name, and you won’t risk any of a number of things. You won’t date yourself by making the characters all agog about going to see 9353 -- a band that broke up in ‘85. Unless you’re going for a retro-element to your story (a world in which there are no cell phones, MTV was only broadcast in three cities, pagers are the sole province of the businessworld, and car alarms are rare and expensive), it’s probably going to backfire on you.
It’ll also backfire if your perception of a band varies from the reader’s; I don’t care if you honestly believe that “the cool kids” listen to In Sync or Avril “No, really, I’m a skate rocker” Lavigne, if you try to tell me that the kids at the clubs, or hanging on the street, are listening to this top-40 radio-driven mtv-promoted tripe, I’m going to laugh at your story and proceed to ridicule it for the remainder of any pages I’m willing to suffer. Kids, adults, pretty much any fringe group (musically or economically) can be pretty particular about their tastes when it comes to a means of self-identification with a group, and top-40 pop is most definitely identified in the US with “white middle class mall-hoppers”.
If you try to give a character street-cred by naming bands from a decade ago (during the character’s former time-on-the-fringe), it’s just as iffy. You could write that the kids met up at a show for Reverb Motherfuckers, or Urge Overkill, and if I recognize those bandnames, I will have a definite perception of your character -- and there’s a good chance it won’t be your intended one. (Think really bad thrash bands; the shows I attended for each band, I was the only person of either gender who had that didn’t go past the shoulders -- oh, and wasn’t aqua-netted into the next century, at that.)
You could name a band you really doubt anyone outside a small circle might know, just to establish city-cred -- like the Slickee Boys, or Murphy’s Law -- but I wouldn’t really recommend that, either, unless you really know what you’re doing (and I mean that in terms of your authoritatively-writer skills, not as a music-fan). I’ve read my share of “set in the here and now” stories of a variety of genres, where a band or DJ is named and the author mistakes snobbery for authoritative. I don’t consider myself that highly versed in all forms of subculture music, and certainly less so since I stopped working a college radio station [censored] years ago, but I don’t consider myself completely ignorant, either. I have some basic grasp of the genres and the bigger names, and I don’t like being authorly wink-wink-nudge-nudge crap, that sensation as a reader that the author is saying, intentionally or not, “hey, if you get this in-joke, you’re one of the cool kids, too!”
In other words, if you riff off an existing band name -- like saying the character’s local scene worships the Ancestors (instead of the Descendents) -- it’s a real turn-off when this mild tweak-cum-injoke has a tone of self-awareness. Whether you realize it or not, readers can peg when an author is aware of his/her own jokes and finds them amusing. It’s annoying. It’s like a comedian who laughs the loudest at his jokes. It’s not funny. Humor works best when you deliver it with a straight face; injokes work best when you deliver them in such a way as to leave open the question as to whether it’s an injoke at all -- otherwise you make it clear that those not-laughing are those on the outside of your delineated joke.
I much prefer to read stories in which the author makes an effort to include me in any jokes. Come on, the point of fiction (at least for me) is to enter, be absorbed into, almost become a part of, the author’s world. Injokes are just one more way to remind me that I’m on the outside, even when I understand those injokes... because even then, I’m aware that not everyone will.
This is part of the reason I dislike much of China Mievile’s work, for all that I adore his grasp of language. Whether he realizes it or not, his tone in mentioning London-based subculture invariably comes across as a snobbish “if you don’t recognize this, then clearly you’re not nearly as cool as the characters in this story, who are in the know.” King Rat was a particularly egregious example of this, even though as far as I can tell, the majority of the DJ/music named in the novel was made up (or is just so damn obscure even the net is sketchy on info). He sure laid on thick the veneer of “the cool kids know what I mean,” so rather than feel good about being in the hands of an authoritative writer, I felt uncomfortable and cranky about being in the hands of a writer making such effort to keep me out of the inner circle of a piece of fiction, for crying out loud -- the one place I expect as a reader to be on the inside.
Make up a band name, and then you won’t have your own mis/perceptions coloring the tone -- unconscious and/or opaque it might be to you, some readers will pick up on it -- and instead you can set the characters’ expectations and interpretations of that band/music as you like. You won’t have to worry about whether I know jack about guns or fashion houses or cars or trance DJs or punk bands. If I’ve never heard of a Riley 745-E handgun before, then I accept your explanation of it as the authority; if I don’t know a shotgun from a staplegun, I’ll be taking you as authority regardless. If you’re going to tell me it’s a Smith & Wesson, then I expect you to do your homework and have some bloody clue, instead of glossing and bullshitting. You do that in a simple area like naming bands, locations, or tools, and I’m going to distrust you on the bigger topics, as well.
You don’t get selective distrust, from readers, and I’m no different. Show me you’re clueless in one area, and I’m going to start carrying a good-sized salt lick for all other facts you hand me.
While we’re at it, the same “you’re a writer, frickin’ make it up!” advice goes for subculture labels. It’s hardly the majority that’d recognize the label “hardcore,” but I suspect the minority is still possibly larger than we realize. (How do you measure that cultural knowledge, anyway?) There are skinheads, straight edges, skaters, punk rockers, new wavers, ravers, phishheads and deadheads, and the last two aren’t necessarily the same as “hippy” nor do all hippies listen to the Dead or any of its stylistic inheritors. Not all skinheads are pro-nazi, and plenty of pro-nazi aren’t skinheads, either; you can be straight edge in almost any time of musical scene these days.
When I say “rude boys” to CP, he thinks immediately of Rastafarians, while I think of skinheads who listen to ska (which was usually a different group-set than those who listened to Oi) -- ska is a more cheerful, upbeat, dance-y style, while Oi is strongly influenced by the British socialist/labour working-class mindset, and often scathing in its political critiques buried in its lyrics. Someone else, hearing “rude boys,” might not even think of a musical style/culture at all.
Mods in Britain are a very different thing -- I’m told the Avengers (TV show) are a top example of mod -- compared to mods in the US in the past twenty years, where a mod was someone who dressed mostly in black (with some contrasting white), and listened to ska (that is, like hardcore, "mod" defined both one's style of dress and thus one's choice in music; eg, one saw a group of mods on the sidewalk and automatically assumed the club was hosting ska bands that night). Mods retained their connotation of “highly stylish,” to the point of still being the scene’s fashion plates, but plenty a mod I knew could pass for goth if you changed the music (and plenty did, it was still all-black ensemble, basically).
The last detail about music within fiction is that music is not a separate, easily-divisible aspect of a character’s life. We don’t just judge another, however accurately or unfairly, based on a quick glimpse of his/herrecord CD collection or radio settings. We also, often, pick and choose our listening pasttimes based on our own perception of a musical style/setting with an eye towards how this defines us. I wouldn’t say most people stand in the music store and say, “I want to be seen as an open-minded, fun-loving soul who also has politically socially-liberal leanings,” and therefore pick up Pet Shop Boys and Erasure solely for the statement it makes (although some CDs do get bought for the statement they make on the shelf, granted, this is rarely true of every CD one owns). But if you’re in an urban area and your CD stack is nothing but Dolly Parton and collections of Appalachian bluegrass, you’re going to expect a certain reaction when any friends discover your tastes. In some cases, the character may even hide certain albums as secret/guilty pleasures; I know I did, myself, with my copy of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons whenever it was my turn to drive to a show.
You cannot just mad-lib the musical trends in your characters' environment. Oh, you can, but the results will be hollow, and will probably leave your readers wondering -- when it's brought to their attention, true, but still -- "just why did the author bother to mention the type of music, at all? Because it didn't seem to have any real bearing on the overall story: it could've as easily been a trend of Indian ragas or Japanese koto, for all the value it added."
Getting back to the aspect of musical taste as a personal statement, I guess what bugs me about “and this character likes X type of music” is that so often this seems to get plugged in with all the weight of “the character’s favorite color is blue” -- which is why I began with an explanation of the differences in punk rock and hardcore, at the start of this post. Punk rock’s general dissatisfaction with the Me Generation’s hedonistic disco-ing carried over into generation X, when hardcore raised its fists against the corrupt and greedy politicians draining the country dry of resources only to pour all that stripped wealth into the pockets of the rich.
Greed is good, intoned Hollywood, with a soundtrack of poppy hits just as bubblegum as the previous four decades, but it was the fringe’s response -- typified in the musical stream that characterized that period -- that differs from the previous generations; then again, each generation answers in its own way the superficial “this is who you are” packages we’re told to buy, and buy into, as faceless consumers. And, to the issue of characterization, it was the fringe’s response to the mass culture that is clarified and expanded in the music... and not the other way around.
My point, buried in all this, is that within fiction set in a city, and more specifically fiction set within/around a musical scene, that music is not just something we listen to because we like to hum along. We pay to see (or go through the effort of sneaking in to see) certain bands and groups because, in some way, what they say reflects a general, broader understanding of our own. There’s a reason I liked Seven Seconds, and it wasn’t just because I thought Kevin Seconds was, well, hotter than sliced bread.
Or, in terms of my city's own problems, there were voices like Bad Brains, and what a friend once called their ‘the righteous fury’:
If you want to provide an edgy, musical-flavored element to the story, look at how your characters’ environment sees itself. Only then will you really understand the type of lyrics, music, mindset, self-perception and presentation the subculture will create, emulate, and encourage.
Maybe this is the reason I get so freaking bored at the nonstop love affair that some urban fantasy authors have with writing characters in an Irish music band. Bad enough that if you go listen to live music in Dublin, my sister’s reported, that you won’t be hearing no reels and jigs like you would in Scotland, where the music scene is more geared towards dancing. Bands in Ireland may riff on traditional music just as much as American bands will lift chorus, verse, or vamp from bluegrass or blues, but I sure wouldn’t classify most current radio-popular music as “traditional bluegrass” by any stretch. I say “bad enough” because in some ways, writing a story where the characters’ musical skills/tastes are supposedly attractive or interesting falls flat for me when this skill/taste is, for lack of a better word, nostalgic. I have a hard time seeing anything as hip when the place it’s emulating has, itself, cast off that traditional and begun exploring derivations and variations, evolving away from the static original. I mean, if you went to Moscow and someone said, “we’re going to see a local band that plays American music,” and you then spent the night listening to covers (no matter how good) of the Supremes or the Guess Who, would you really be that enamoured of the results? It’d be more like visiting your old high school or something. Amusing for an evening, but hardly inspiring on a major scale.
It’s just one more example of the romanticization of a culture (and in this case, its musical output) that isn’t ours, but in some ways, worse, because it says so very little about the characters, and what little it does say, ain’t that complimentary. Where I remain uncertain is whether this uncomplimentary element is for the characterization or for the author him/herself. That is, a character who gleefully specializes in another culture’s traditional music is one with a romantic/idealized mindset, and a character isolated from any greater fringe/cultural environment. These are (usually) supposed to be fringe characters, playing along the line between mainstream and fey/other/fringe, and their predominate creative reaction to the mainstream is in someone else’s music from a hundred years ago? Hell, it doesn’t always have to be a ‘reaction’ to the mainstream so much as a counter-statement of the fringe’s purpose/goals/perceptions, but still, if one’s counter-statement consists of “we want to ignore the development of electrical guitars and embrace a time when people danced in soft-shoes on wooden floors to a fiddle instead of twitching and thrashing like roadkill with feedback soundtrack,” I’m not really sure where the ‘urban’ went in the ‘urban fantasy’.
Honestly, if your fringe’s response to the urban/mainstream is to embrace an almost-luddite musical perception, then frickin’ move your characters to the countryside and get them the hell out of my city: because it’s not really a likely fringe-response. It’s certainly not one I could ever see being created, let alone encouraged, by a fringe population shoved to the side by the mainstream: it’s a dreamer’s romantic notion, yes, but this assumes that people on the fringe have time to dream (and I think I’ve mostly covered that, already). Sure, if you grew up with regular healthcare and don’t think twice about the fact that six years of orthodontia and early innoculations have helped you be, and look, healthy -- so of course it’d be romantic to emulate/model your fringe-environment on the romantic ‘simpler-life’ of an earlier time. If, though, you’ve just spent a winter battling the flu because you can’t afford antibiotics and couldn’t miss work and scrounged a few old penicillin from a friend and hoped that’d do the trick, the last thing you really want is an escape to a time when your life would probably only get worse. At least in these times you can go spend a cold city day in the public library, where the heat’s turned up to the highest and the librarians have learned to look the other way when a scruffy-looking person falls asleep, over a book picked for show, in the reading room.
In fact, most fringe areas that I’ve ever seen don’t express their counter-statement as withdrawal, or as a wish for avoidance -- because you’re already avoided by the mainstream, and you know full well the mainstream would withdraw further if it could, or throw you even further away. It’s already at a distance. The most likely human reaction at being disenfranchised, cast aside, ignored, or isolated isn’t “oh, well, let’s go back an earlier time when music/life was simpler,” but, “fuck you and your goddamned army.”
Then again, maybe post-Katrina there was a huge resurgance in black minstrel music among the evacuees, and I just missed it. Could be.
Or maybe it’s just that the trope hiding in the “he’s in a band that plays celtic music!” is the contrast of “simpler time / predominantly agricultural world / non-electric instruments” with the urban concrete impersonal high-tech post/modern world. As far as I’m concerned, it’s both unrealistic -- for all the reasons I’ve listed and implied above, about fringe reactions to the mainstream -- and, more importantly, it’s freaking boring. It’s like a story in which a rich boy falls for a girl on the other side of the tracks: cross-class romance isn’t nearly as shocking now as it was even fifty years ago. The so-called ‘urban’ contemporary fantasy has been so inundated by certain Big Names’ adoration of Irish music (for whatever reason) that it seems authors too-easily ignore that a) the correlation of “old music” and “old myths” against “new world” has been done, and done, and done, and b) that there is a reason for every musical evolution and expression by a culture, be it main or fringe. There is a reason bluegrass developed, with its mores and chords and favorite topics, just as did blues, or country, or gospel-infused elvis-led rock, and that reason did not exist in a vacuum, anymore than hardcore just ‘happened’ to develop out of punk.
Speaking as someone who actually adores bluegrass, I’d still like a moratorium on all fiddles in urban fantasy, at least until any authors arrive who are willing to contemplate, and incorporate, a solid reason for a fringe environment to embrace a greater distance between itself and the mainstream, rather than the more likely wish of usurpation or at least recognition. And to qualify, I wouldn’t lift that moratorium for any author who seeks to justify the musically-expressed greater distance as a metaphor of “old versus new,” because, hello, DONE.
all the parts ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part I ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part II ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part III ▪ permanent record, pt I: edginess, and street fighting ▪ permanent record, pt II: guns, knives, and making it hurt
I was listening to the radio yesterday and trying to ignore the semi-obnoxious deejay -- who has to be just out of college, given the comments -- blathering on about the days of “punk rockers”.
I really, really, really hate that label.
Now, there are ‘punk rock’ bands -- I’d say the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Replacements, that ilk, would be at the top of the recognizable-names list. That’s punk, certainly -- often Brit, songs with a punk delivery but under that rough-edged veneer it was really just more three-four time basic rock. I wasn’t a punk rocker, and I was just as offended as my friends if we were called ‘punk rockers’... that was a derogatory term and only tolerable when used as an affectionate insult among friends. Anything else was close to fighting words, an implication that you were ‘just’ a punk rocker, that you were all flash and no substance.
Being called a ‘new waver’ was even worse, though, no matter how good Bowie’s music might’ve been. New Wave meant hair like Flock of Seagulls or Thompson Twins (both semi-pop bands but hello, that hair) -- bleached and permed and dyed manic-panic color (if not several colors at once) -- not to mention the spandex, sometimes ripped and torn, the oversized jackets with sleeves pushed up, and all in bright colors... and it seemed a bigger thing in NYC and LA than anywhere I hung. We didn’t have a lot of new-wavers in the city by the time I came around. The few we had, either had shaded into punk rockers at the edges of the hardcore scene, or were stepping sideways into the proto-goth world (and I don’t mean Evanescence-style neo-goth, but early Cure what-is-this-goth-you-speak-of whiteface and smeared lipstick).
I was hardcore, not punk rock. I never heard anyone call it ‘hardcore punk,’ either -- it was just plain hardcore.
Hardcore had a very basic kind of dress/style, grunge before it was grunge, without the flashy colors of new wave or the glitz-and-studs of punk rock -- that was the visual style, at least. Peg a punk rocker by looking for military surplus jackets painted with some album cover across the back, studs lining the sleeves and epaulets, and somewhere around the person you’d find a holdover/crossover from New Wave’s studded-belts -- those stupid extra-long wrap things transformed into studded-leather wrapped around booted ankles, or twice around the waist, or trimmed down to fit neck and/or wrists.
Hardcore, in contrast, was hard-wearing and designed for both city comfort and city hiding, in a sense: darker, more somber clothing, with a heavy lean towards standard blue jeans and sturdy boots, simple t-shirts and a plaid or plain overshirt, with a worn olive-green surplus jacket. Outside in line before a show, one wore all layers; inside, the overshirt came off to be tied around the waist, while the jacket either stayed on or was draped over a girlfriend’s shoulders. Any studs, spikes, straps, or belts were foremost for practical use, and only secondly for show, if ‘show’ was even considered. Looking back, I’d call hardcore the politically-aware working class element in the generally middle-class punk rock scene: darker, simpler dress that looked just as at home at a hardware store or high school as it did when night fell on the crowd waiting for the club doors to open. I met a few ‘punk rockers’ who glammed themselves up to go out at night; every hardcore I met went to shows wearing pretty much what they’d worn to school or work.
Musically, hardcore was much harder-driving than punk, which had a definite melodic element under the thrashed guitars, if you listened close enough. I think of hardcore bands, I think of SNFU, I think of Seven Seconds, I think of Dag Nasty (the era of Can I Say / Wig Out at Denko’s, not the post-Baker California years), I think of All (the pre-All Descendents are more South-Cali-punk), and of course, Minor Threat, Teen Idles, Bad Brains, Government Issue, Kingface, and Marginal Man... along with imports, like GBH and the Cockney Rejects.
Two things really made hardcore stand out from punk rock. One was that there were no breaks between songs (and it wasn’t until listening to early Grateful Dead, years later, that I came across a musical predecessor in that sense) -- one song led immediately into the next, which sort of blurred the lines and covered the fact that most of these songs were maybe two minutes in length. Second was that the songs themselves -- while sometimes verging on melodic (All/Descendents, SNFU, Dag Nasty) -- were still mostly shout-sung. And maybe most importantly, the song topics weren’t about finding or losing love, most of the time, but about the political arena, about corrupt politicians, about making a difference in the world in a political sense, about dissatisfaction with the depressed economy and lack of jobs and lack of opportunities, about anger over the screwed-up and static and stulifying whitebread world that refused to see the injustices and unfairness, about evil that existed in the act of refusing to see that the world isn’t a frickin’ cup of cherries but a trashbin full of pits and that it’s time we do something about it.
[To clarify, though: the British punk (not the South-Cali style) was quite political, cf the Clash's London Calling. In some ways, Britain-punk in the 70s was the predecessor to the US-version, as hardcore, in the 80s -- they got Thatcherized and we got Reaganized, and ain't no one much happy who had to actually work for a living. When I say punk wasn't nearly as political as hardcore, I'm speaking more specifically about the trailing ends of punk that, sadly, did form the bulk of punk rock. Outside the big names, and the Oi school of punk, the politics were mostly focused on football games and cheating girlfriends. It was like Nashville meets Est.]
I suppose I should remind younger readers that hardcore was hitting the scene at the beginning of the Reagan era and stretched across the breadth of those eight years -- with the economy at the worst since the Great Depression. If you think the hardcore scene and its musicians and voices were fooled by the trickledown theory, you’d be wrong; the musicians (and artists and any other luxury-related creative mindsets like writers and zine editors/publishers etc) were fully aware that there wasn’t much of jack trickling down at all. In 1981, buying a house with 14% interest rate was considered a damn good deal, if that tells you what it was like -- and while punk rock railed on being yourself and making a statement of Being Against the System, hardcore outright criticized the system.
Society asks, What’re you protesting, Johnny?
Punk rock answers, What’ve yout got?
Hardcore says, here’s a definitive list.
Possibly with footnotes.
The punk rock scene may have immortalized “God Save the Queen” with a certain amount of sarcasm, but it was the hardcore scene that made the phrase “Ed Meese is a Pig” into a classic. The Sex Pistols may've cried for anarchy in the UK, but in the US-led hardcore scene(s), the fringe's reply was no longer, "fuck you, fuck this, let's blow it all up," but "you're fucking it up, someone's got to fix this, let me back in so I can."
If it’s bolded, I’ve seen it live. There’s my obligatory cred.
I mention this because there are are a few things that bother me in fiction when it comes to musical sub-cultures. One is that authors will gloss, and if there’s any place you can miscalculate, it’s when you gloss. A hollywood movie that shows some kid (who wasn’t even born when I was in college, for crying out loud) wearing a Sex Pistols shirt -- and yet the kid/character is politically aware and active -- tells me that the writers/directors went for the simple gloss over actual comprehension of the subculture being appropriated. (Why is it always the Sex Pistols? Why never Suicidal Tendencies?) You want to underscore the kid’s mindset based on his musical influences, you’ll need to have a better grasp on those musical influences than just “oh, this was loud and obnoxious and involved people wearing black and being socially unacceptable” -- in that case, just freaking MAKE SOMETHING UP.
That’s right. Make up that gun-model, and then I can’t sit here steaming because you put a seventeen-round magazine in a 1911. Make up that car, and I can’t fuss because I know as a good mechanic that there’s no way that stupid Detroit Steel mobile would ever manage a corner that sharp, let alone pop a tight bitch. Make up that band name, and you won’t risk any of a number of things. You won’t date yourself by making the characters all agog about going to see 9353 -- a band that broke up in ‘85. Unless you’re going for a retro-element to your story (a world in which there are no cell phones, MTV was only broadcast in three cities, pagers are the sole province of the businessworld, and car alarms are rare and expensive), it’s probably going to backfire on you.
It’ll also backfire if your perception of a band varies from the reader’s; I don’t care if you honestly believe that “the cool kids” listen to In Sync or Avril “No, really, I’m a skate rocker” Lavigne, if you try to tell me that the kids at the clubs, or hanging on the street, are listening to this top-40 radio-driven mtv-promoted tripe, I’m going to laugh at your story and proceed to ridicule it for the remainder of any pages I’m willing to suffer. Kids, adults, pretty much any fringe group (musically or economically) can be pretty particular about their tastes when it comes to a means of self-identification with a group, and top-40 pop is most definitely identified in the US with “white middle class mall-hoppers”.
If you try to give a character street-cred by naming bands from a decade ago (during the character’s former time-on-the-fringe), it’s just as iffy. You could write that the kids met up at a show for Reverb Motherfuckers, or Urge Overkill, and if I recognize those bandnames, I will have a definite perception of your character -- and there’s a good chance it won’t be your intended one. (Think really bad thrash bands; the shows I attended for each band, I was the only person of either gender who had that didn’t go past the shoulders -- oh, and wasn’t aqua-netted into the next century, at that.)
You could name a band you really doubt anyone outside a small circle might know, just to establish city-cred -- like the Slickee Boys, or Murphy’s Law -- but I wouldn’t really recommend that, either, unless you really know what you’re doing (and I mean that in terms of your authoritatively-writer skills, not as a music-fan). I’ve read my share of “set in the here and now” stories of a variety of genres, where a band or DJ is named and the author mistakes snobbery for authoritative. I don’t consider myself that highly versed in all forms of subculture music, and certainly less so since I stopped working a college radio station [censored] years ago, but I don’t consider myself completely ignorant, either. I have some basic grasp of the genres and the bigger names, and I don’t like being authorly wink-wink-nudge-nudge crap, that sensation as a reader that the author is saying, intentionally or not, “hey, if you get this in-joke, you’re one of the cool kids, too!”
In other words, if you riff off an existing band name -- like saying the character’s local scene worships the Ancestors (instead of the Descendents) -- it’s a real turn-off when this mild tweak-cum-injoke has a tone of self-awareness. Whether you realize it or not, readers can peg when an author is aware of his/her own jokes and finds them amusing. It’s annoying. It’s like a comedian who laughs the loudest at his jokes. It’s not funny. Humor works best when you deliver it with a straight face; injokes work best when you deliver them in such a way as to leave open the question as to whether it’s an injoke at all -- otherwise you make it clear that those not-laughing are those on the outside of your delineated joke.
I much prefer to read stories in which the author makes an effort to include me in any jokes. Come on, the point of fiction (at least for me) is to enter, be absorbed into, almost become a part of, the author’s world. Injokes are just one more way to remind me that I’m on the outside, even when I understand those injokes... because even then, I’m aware that not everyone will.
This is part of the reason I dislike much of China Mievile’s work, for all that I adore his grasp of language. Whether he realizes it or not, his tone in mentioning London-based subculture invariably comes across as a snobbish “if you don’t recognize this, then clearly you’re not nearly as cool as the characters in this story, who are in the know.” King Rat was a particularly egregious example of this, even though as far as I can tell, the majority of the DJ/music named in the novel was made up (or is just so damn obscure even the net is sketchy on info). He sure laid on thick the veneer of “the cool kids know what I mean,” so rather than feel good about being in the hands of an authoritative writer, I felt uncomfortable and cranky about being in the hands of a writer making such effort to keep me out of the inner circle of a piece of fiction, for crying out loud -- the one place I expect as a reader to be on the inside.
Make up a band name, and then you won’t have your own mis/perceptions coloring the tone -- unconscious and/or opaque it might be to you, some readers will pick up on it -- and instead you can set the characters’ expectations and interpretations of that band/music as you like. You won’t have to worry about whether I know jack about guns or fashion houses or cars or trance DJs or punk bands. If I’ve never heard of a Riley 745-E handgun before, then I accept your explanation of it as the authority; if I don’t know a shotgun from a staplegun, I’ll be taking you as authority regardless. If you’re going to tell me it’s a Smith & Wesson, then I expect you to do your homework and have some bloody clue, instead of glossing and bullshitting. You do that in a simple area like naming bands, locations, or tools, and I’m going to distrust you on the bigger topics, as well.
You don’t get selective distrust, from readers, and I’m no different. Show me you’re clueless in one area, and I’m going to start carrying a good-sized salt lick for all other facts you hand me.
While we’re at it, the same “you’re a writer, frickin’ make it up!” advice goes for subculture labels. It’s hardly the majority that’d recognize the label “hardcore,” but I suspect the minority is still possibly larger than we realize. (How do you measure that cultural knowledge, anyway?) There are skinheads, straight edges, skaters, punk rockers, new wavers, ravers, phishheads and deadheads, and the last two aren’t necessarily the same as “hippy” nor do all hippies listen to the Dead or any of its stylistic inheritors. Not all skinheads are pro-nazi, and plenty of pro-nazi aren’t skinheads, either; you can be straight edge in almost any time of musical scene these days.
When I say “rude boys” to CP, he thinks immediately of Rastafarians, while I think of skinheads who listen to ska (which was usually a different group-set than those who listened to Oi) -- ska is a more cheerful, upbeat, dance-y style, while Oi is strongly influenced by the British socialist/labour working-class mindset, and often scathing in its political critiques buried in its lyrics. Someone else, hearing “rude boys,” might not even think of a musical style/culture at all.
Mods in Britain are a very different thing -- I’m told the Avengers (TV show) are a top example of mod -- compared to mods in the US in the past twenty years, where a mod was someone who dressed mostly in black (with some contrasting white), and listened to ska (that is, like hardcore, "mod" defined both one's style of dress and thus one's choice in music; eg, one saw a group of mods on the sidewalk and automatically assumed the club was hosting ska bands that night). Mods retained their connotation of “highly stylish,” to the point of still being the scene’s fashion plates, but plenty a mod I knew could pass for goth if you changed the music (and plenty did, it was still all-black ensemble, basically).
The last detail about music within fiction is that music is not a separate, easily-divisible aspect of a character’s life. We don’t just judge another, however accurately or unfairly, based on a quick glimpse of his/her
You cannot just mad-lib the musical trends in your characters' environment. Oh, you can, but the results will be hollow, and will probably leave your readers wondering -- when it's brought to their attention, true, but still -- "just why did the author bother to mention the type of music, at all? Because it didn't seem to have any real bearing on the overall story: it could've as easily been a trend of Indian ragas or Japanese koto, for all the value it added."
Getting back to the aspect of musical taste as a personal statement, I guess what bugs me about “and this character likes X type of music” is that so often this seems to get plugged in with all the weight of “the character’s favorite color is blue” -- which is why I began with an explanation of the differences in punk rock and hardcore, at the start of this post. Punk rock’s general dissatisfaction with the Me Generation’s hedonistic disco-ing carried over into generation X, when hardcore raised its fists against the corrupt and greedy politicians draining the country dry of resources only to pour all that stripped wealth into the pockets of the rich.
Greed is good, intoned Hollywood, with a soundtrack of poppy hits just as bubblegum as the previous four decades, but it was the fringe’s response -- typified in the musical stream that characterized that period -- that differs from the previous generations; then again, each generation answers in its own way the superficial “this is who you are” packages we’re told to buy, and buy into, as faceless consumers. And, to the issue of characterization, it was the fringe’s response to the mass culture that is clarified and expanded in the music... and not the other way around.
My point, buried in all this, is that within fiction set in a city, and more specifically fiction set within/around a musical scene, that music is not just something we listen to because we like to hum along. We pay to see (or go through the effort of sneaking in to see) certain bands and groups because, in some way, what they say reflects a general, broader understanding of our own. There’s a reason I liked Seven Seconds, and it wasn’t just because I thought Kevin Seconds was, well, hotter than sliced bread.
Man you gotta problem, who made you fucking’ king,Although I can name only one or two all-women punk/hardcore bands, and a handful more with women members, I can recall a number of songs like that one. Subtle to blunt, it revealed a sort of proto-feminism among the male lyricists/musicians -- recognizing that in our non-mainstream world, that women contributed just as much as any guy, and had the right to celebrate it, as well.
a macho pig with nothing in your head
No girls around you, their place is not at gigs
Don’t want them on the dance floor, cos they’re weak
A woman’s place, the kitchen, on her back.
It’s time to change that attitude and quick.
Showing us your phobias, cos you're scared to see ‘em think
You’d rather dress them up in pretty lace, all nice and colored pink
You feel so fucking threatened when they stand out in front
A stupid passive piece of meat is all you want
But it’s not just boys' fun!
There’s girls who put out fanzines and others put on shows,
yet they’re not allowed to get out on the floor.
Some make the music, well, that you can accept.
Hell, maybe then you’ll see some tits and ass
You fucking moron, your brains have run amuck;
a girl’s only role in life is not just to fuck.
Or, in terms of my city's own problems, there were voices like Bad Brains, and what a friend once called their ‘the righteous fury’:
in the quest for the test to fulfill an achievement, everybody’s only in it for themselvesIf you’re going to wrap music up in your characters and your storyline, then the musical preferences and tastes (especially if centered on home-grown, local-based music scene in your story) don’t happen in a bubble. These shared tastes evolve from the subculture’s perceptions of its place against/outside the mainstream. Just as the Grateful Dead’s music and message couldn’t have flourished without the subculture that birthed it, neither could the hardcore savvy or even the grunge/neo-hardcore apathy have developed without their respective crucibles.
when the fact of the matter is they just don’t care to extend a helping hand to anyone else
so tell me why, did you have to lie and try to make me all confused about the U.S.A.
when the fact of the matter is you just don’t care to comprehend or understand a single word I say
I don’t want to have I go against I
Oh, let me tell you the same old story, no factual glory
and I say I don’t like it, and I know I don’t want it...
I said who’s gonna tell the youth about the drugs, about the drugs, mugs, bugs, and the police thugs
about the rotten stinkin’ rackets and the fantasies around the nation, around the nations.
Oh, baby what you gonna do? I tell you, the truth is looking straight at you.
I got a brass continental with a 300Z, two color TVs, now a video too.
I got a rest home in Jamaica for my fantasty, for my family.
Around the nation, around the nations, what you gonna do?
If you want to provide an edgy, musical-flavored element to the story, look at how your characters’ environment sees itself. Only then will you really understand the type of lyrics, music, mindset, self-perception and presentation the subculture will create, emulate, and encourage.
Maybe this is the reason I get so freaking bored at the nonstop love affair that some urban fantasy authors have with writing characters in an Irish music band. Bad enough that if you go listen to live music in Dublin, my sister’s reported, that you won’t be hearing no reels and jigs like you would in Scotland, where the music scene is more geared towards dancing. Bands in Ireland may riff on traditional music just as much as American bands will lift chorus, verse, or vamp from bluegrass or blues, but I sure wouldn’t classify most current radio-popular music as “traditional bluegrass” by any stretch. I say “bad enough” because in some ways, writing a story where the characters’ musical skills/tastes are supposedly attractive or interesting falls flat for me when this skill/taste is, for lack of a better word, nostalgic. I have a hard time seeing anything as hip when the place it’s emulating has, itself, cast off that traditional and begun exploring derivations and variations, evolving away from the static original. I mean, if you went to Moscow and someone said, “we’re going to see a local band that plays American music,” and you then spent the night listening to covers (no matter how good) of the Supremes or the Guess Who, would you really be that enamoured of the results? It’d be more like visiting your old high school or something. Amusing for an evening, but hardly inspiring on a major scale.
It’s just one more example of the romanticization of a culture (and in this case, its musical output) that isn’t ours, but in some ways, worse, because it says so very little about the characters, and what little it does say, ain’t that complimentary. Where I remain uncertain is whether this uncomplimentary element is for the characterization or for the author him/herself. That is, a character who gleefully specializes in another culture’s traditional music is one with a romantic/idealized mindset, and a character isolated from any greater fringe/cultural environment. These are (usually) supposed to be fringe characters, playing along the line between mainstream and fey/other/fringe, and their predominate creative reaction to the mainstream is in someone else’s music from a hundred years ago? Hell, it doesn’t always have to be a ‘reaction’ to the mainstream so much as a counter-statement of the fringe’s purpose/goals/perceptions, but still, if one’s counter-statement consists of “we want to ignore the development of electrical guitars and embrace a time when people danced in soft-shoes on wooden floors to a fiddle instead of twitching and thrashing like roadkill with feedback soundtrack,” I’m not really sure where the ‘urban’ went in the ‘urban fantasy’.
Honestly, if your fringe’s response to the urban/mainstream is to embrace an almost-luddite musical perception, then frickin’ move your characters to the countryside and get them the hell out of my city: because it’s not really a likely fringe-response. It’s certainly not one I could ever see being created, let alone encouraged, by a fringe population shoved to the side by the mainstream: it’s a dreamer’s romantic notion, yes, but this assumes that people on the fringe have time to dream (and I think I’ve mostly covered that, already). Sure, if you grew up with regular healthcare and don’t think twice about the fact that six years of orthodontia and early innoculations have helped you be, and look, healthy -- so of course it’d be romantic to emulate/model your fringe-environment on the romantic ‘simpler-life’ of an earlier time. If, though, you’ve just spent a winter battling the flu because you can’t afford antibiotics and couldn’t miss work and scrounged a few old penicillin from a friend and hoped that’d do the trick, the last thing you really want is an escape to a time when your life would probably only get worse. At least in these times you can go spend a cold city day in the public library, where the heat’s turned up to the highest and the librarians have learned to look the other way when a scruffy-looking person falls asleep, over a book picked for show, in the reading room.
In fact, most fringe areas that I’ve ever seen don’t express their counter-statement as withdrawal, or as a wish for avoidance -- because you’re already avoided by the mainstream, and you know full well the mainstream would withdraw further if it could, or throw you even further away. It’s already at a distance. The most likely human reaction at being disenfranchised, cast aside, ignored, or isolated isn’t “oh, well, let’s go back an earlier time when music/life was simpler,” but, “fuck you and your goddamned army.”
Then again, maybe post-Katrina there was a huge resurgance in black minstrel music among the evacuees, and I just missed it. Could be.
Or maybe it’s just that the trope hiding in the “he’s in a band that plays celtic music!” is the contrast of “simpler time / predominantly agricultural world / non-electric instruments” with the urban concrete impersonal high-tech post/modern world. As far as I’m concerned, it’s both unrealistic -- for all the reasons I’ve listed and implied above, about fringe reactions to the mainstream -- and, more importantly, it’s freaking boring. It’s like a story in which a rich boy falls for a girl on the other side of the tracks: cross-class romance isn’t nearly as shocking now as it was even fifty years ago. The so-called ‘urban’ contemporary fantasy has been so inundated by certain Big Names’ adoration of Irish music (for whatever reason) that it seems authors too-easily ignore that a) the correlation of “old music” and “old myths” against “new world” has been done, and done, and done, and b) that there is a reason for every musical evolution and expression by a culture, be it main or fringe. There is a reason bluegrass developed, with its mores and chords and favorite topics, just as did blues, or country, or gospel-infused elvis-led rock, and that reason did not exist in a vacuum, anymore than hardcore just ‘happened’ to develop out of punk.
Speaking as someone who actually adores bluegrass, I’d still like a moratorium on all fiddles in urban fantasy, at least until any authors arrive who are willing to contemplate, and incorporate, a solid reason for a fringe environment to embrace a greater distance between itself and the mainstream, rather than the more likely wish of usurpation or at least recognition. And to qualify, I wouldn’t lift that moratorium for any author who seeks to justify the musically-expressed greater distance as a metaphor of “old versus new,” because, hello, DONE.
all the parts ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part I ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part II ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part III ▪ permanent record, pt I: edginess, and street fighting ▪ permanent record, pt II: guns, knives, and making it hurt
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Date: 15 Jan 2008 06:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 18 Jan 2008 10:05 pm (UTC)Personally, I do like the well-placed 'local name' band-dropping, if for no reason than as a nod to anyone from the region who'd get a kick out of the reference. It's when it's used as a sort of "if you don't know it..." prove-your-cred snobbery that I get irked. (Although some of the indie-type names are just awesomely quirky sometimes, IMO.)