Obnox is maybe America’s leading Afro-punk right now, but he’s a lot more than that. In the two-LP Savage Raygun, he once again gathers all the offshoots of Black music—rock, soul, psychedelia, hip hop, punk, electronics and R&B—and brings them together in hazy visions that distill 2020’s smoking wreckage into pure sensation. It doesn’t feel like syncretism, either, but rather the pure force of the African American experience expressed through diverse languages and style. Even the sampled guitar riff from Neil Young’s “Southern Man” (in “Young Neezy”) sounds like it belongs to Nox here, supporting his point that this moment, volatile as it is, reaches back through American history all the way back.
In fact, if you’re looking for a song that encapsulates this summer’s violent energy — as COVID-19 and police brutality and massive protests collide and interact — let me suggest “Underground Timebomb” with its militant beat, its fist-raised chant of “Underground timebomb, below the street that I sit upon,” its ghostly wail of pedal-fucked psychedelic guitars. It’s Jimi Hendrix running into Curtis Mayfield at a punk fundraiser for Black Lives Matter and it could not be more now (or more five years ago or ten or 20, this stuff has been happening for a long time).
Nox rifles through the style book, with a couple of tracks booming and swaggering with early hip hop bravado (“Party Starter,” “How to Build a Bum,” the truly incendiary “Cut Me a Switch”), others floating like the ghosts of punk songs heard through abandoned concrete in abandoned buildings (“Supernatural”), still others essaying a soul falsetto over banged and blasted R&R soundscapes (“Heaven”). There are a few intervals that remind me a lot of Dilla in the way they balance jazz and soul and hip hop in short instrumental bits.
And yet, despite this diversity, Savage Raygun never sounds like a one of each, or a look what I can do kind of record. In fact, its power grows when you listen to it all end to end. It is one howl, one reminiscence, one statement of resilience all the way through. This is not just a good record or an enjoyable record, but a necessary one, the current murk of rage and hope and confusion distilled into blistering sounds.
honestly this thing that i hear people doing where they berate or bully poc and lgbt people out of counterculture spaces makes me so angry because like...especially in punk spaces they’ve always been there. poc and the queer community have been absolutely the backbone of any kind of movement that goes against “acceptable” societal norms. it was only after record executives decided it could be profitably marketed to the straight white capitalists that they began to come in and take over like kudzu. it’s especially ironic to hear about white people bullying poc out of these spaces because you know these are all the same white people who sing along with tupac and think that makes them black enough to use the n word. it just makes me mad. everyone is welcome in punk/goth/emo subcultures. everyone except homophobes and nazis.
check out these bands if you don’t believe poc have always existed in punk spaces: pure hell, bad brains, fishbone...pretty much anything in the afro-punk scene, though there are others for other marginalized groups.
check out these bands if you don’t believe that lgbt people have always existed in the punk scene: the dicks, tribe 8...pretty much anything in the queercore scene.
you want overlap? how about limp wrist? a band who exclusively call themselves a queer punk band and who have a latino frontman.
and never forget that bands even today carry on this tradition. i know personally that green day and halestorm have bisexual singers.
i do have to admit that i haven’t fully listened to some of these bands on this list. it was about history and making sure that everyone knows you are welcome here and you always have been. there would be no counterculture without you. i also want to encourage anyone to add their favorite punk/goth/emo/whatever bands that are in the poc or queer community. because the people in power only want to allow the bands to get big that they deem as not enough of a threat to their power structures, so we can’t allow the very bands that challenge that to go under the radar. this is an appreciation post. we hear you, and we’re with you.
(oh and also: fuck anyone who tells poc that certain types of music are “for white people”. you’re allowed to like and identify with what you like.)
