It’s never just about the music. It starts with the music, the music gets inside you, hot flashes of noise rushing through your veins, but next thing you know you’re living inside of it, wearing it like a jacket. It starts with the music, but then it’s the dirty bathrooms of bars, the sun rising all peachgold as seen from your best friend’s apartment; it’s the smoke and the sweat, the rails of drugs and the rail drinks, the salty lips of all the boys and girls you’ve kissed. There may come a day when you stop going to as many shows, a day when your record collection has grown to include other kinds of music, but you can’t shed it that easily. Because it started with the music, but became your whole life—and you can stop the girl from going to Kenosha, but you can’t take the Kenocore out of the grrrl.
Over the course of this month I’m gonna be making a series of posts over on Substack, all revolving around southeastern Wisconsin. The first three will be previously published pieces (which have either only appeared in print publications or were on websites that are now defunct); the fourth will be a brand new piece for paid subscribers only. The first one, about my involvement with the punk scene in Kenosha, was originally published at Witchsong in 2015.
Forgive all the typos. I wrote this issue entirely on typewriters, then pasted it up and Xeroxed it without editing. These days, I edit relentlessly, and my writing is technically better but has maybe lost some of that raw, free spark.
I'm the same as I ever was when it comes to end-of-the-summer melancholy. I love autumn but the end of summer makes me sad. As Vita Sackville-West wrote: "Not that I have any objection to autumn as a season, full of its own beauty; but I just cannot bear to see another summer go, and I recoil from what the first hint of autumn means."
The encounter with the two boys in K-Mart really happened. Yes, I really said "I don't need your dick to fuck," like that line from the Bikini Kill song "Don't Need You." For a while I wondered if that line was transmisogynist, but I really don't think it is. The song is addressed to sexist, misogynist, straight cis boys.
I'm fucking screaming at my description of the Punk Piknik. "I felt so fucking old school," haha. And I was right--16 years later, I'm in my thirties and have a kid, and I'm still into punk. However, I don't go to shows as much anymore, because a. having kids makes it hard! and b. I don't really like being around drunk people getting in fights anymore, because I'm old and boring. Oh, and I blanked out the name of the boy who gave me beer because a couple years later he became a bigger part of my life--and not in a good way.
Once upon a January night, I drank all the whiskey in Kenosha and almost punched three dudes.
The evening began with me donning babe-layers, black denim jacket layered in patches (Punk’s Not Dead, We Just Smell That Way) over hoodie over t-shirt, tight pants, boots; the weather was cold as shit but I wasn’t gonna wear a heavy winter coat, cos you can’t dance in a heavy winter coat. Then a slick of red lipstick, and off I went. South down Highway 32 to Kenowhere, snow falling fast from the sky and the wind blowing it across the road in swirls, me shouting ragged-voiced along with Naked Raygun: what poor gods we do make. I grabbed Beagan, and we headed to Hattrix. Hattrix is one of the focal points of the punk scene in Kenosha; it has been for years, even back when it was called The Cavern. I’d never been there before, despite the fact that I’ve been going to punk shows in Kenosha for half my life.
Hattrix is still sorta like a cave, with walls made to look like red rock, and it was chilly, damp, voices echoed and bounced through the near-empty bar. Not many people showed up, the weather was bitter-wind and snow, but there were some of us true believers there. Punx from colder climes are way more hardcore than our cousins from warmer lands, cos we have to brave polar vortexes and snow-covered streets to go out to the show. The crowd was small, but most of the people there were rad as fuck. Most of the people there, I wanted to hug or high-five - not counting those three dudes I almost punched. I got my first drink, doublewhiskeycoke (with ice, sorry), and the bartender was an old friend of mine, so he poured the double more like a triple. First drink all sweaty in my hand, a few sips in, I was feeling good, and shitty dude number one walked up to us. He squeezed Beagan’s breasts by way of greeting. He’s someone we’ve both known for years; he’s a gay guy and he thinks it’s okay to grope women and people he perceives as women because when he does it, it’s not ‘sexual.’ Unwanted touching is assault, dude, whether you mean it in a sexual way or not; I’ve tried to tell him that and he’s never listened, and I was not gonna put up with it that night. You grope my best friend and I’ll fucking drop you. Beagan grimace-smiled and backed away, someone else he knew entered the bar, and he walked away to talk to them before I had the opportunity to break his nose. I sipped some whiskey’n’coke, said ‘hey’ to some familiar faces, was about to go watch the first musician, then some punk rock fuckboy spotted my Against Me! button and made a transmisogynistic comment about Laura Jane Grace, and yeah, I wanted to break his nose, too, but instead, I said: “You’re just jealous cos she’s into girls, and you know you could never get a woman as hot or talented as she is, cis or trans.” I hadn’t even been there an hour, hell, I wasn’t even drunk yet, and I’d already wanted to fight twice, ugh. Bartender, gimme another triple-double, I’m gonna go listen to the music.
On the stage stood a solo kid from Chicago, with the ubiquitous midwest punk look: silly hairdo (half-shaved, floppy, mint green) half-hidden under a black Carhartt stocking cap, plaid flannel shirt, dirty black jeans, scuffed black steel-toe boots. They were super cute, and though I only caught the last few songs of their set, I loved the music: stripped-down, plugged-in yet kinda folky-punk, Billy Bragg-style; raw and open-hearted. I’ve become disillusioned with folkpunk as A Thing, but when I first heard folkpunk I said it was more punk than straight-up punk and I still have a deep love for us solo punx (cos I’m one of ‘em): when we get up there on stage, whether we play electric or acoustic, whether we play guitar or accordion or a fucking pickle-tub drum, it’s just us and our instruments and our voices and our hearts that we’ve made into jackets and if we fuck up everyone hears it cos we don’t have a band to back us up or distract from us and we are so vulnerable and so brave and we do it because we have to, we so need to play music that we’ll do it even without a band.
Between bands, another drink, I started feeling the whiskey and it was good, good to be whiskey-drunk, fuel and grease loosening my limbs. Going outside to smoke, collars up against the wind and hands cupped around flickering flames. Inside, talking to old familiars and new faces. I talked with the solo mint-haired punk, told them I liked their music; we talked about Chicago, turned out they live in one of the neighborhoods I used to live in. Then there was the third dude who came close to having my fist in his face - another guy I’ve known forever. He’s a decent dude when he’s sober, but when he’s fucked up he gets stupid, and that night he was drunk and on some kind of pill-high; he tried to hit on both me and Beagan and didn’t back off even when we told him we weren’t interested, and I was getting annoyed. He was saved from my wrath cos he got distracted by another old friend of ours, and he stumbled away.
The second band, I couldn’t get into. The frontman was trying so hard to be a funny, cool rockstar, and the music wasn’t my bag, so I concentrated on drinking. More rounds of drinks, rounds and round and round, more cigarettes. Then Republicans on Welfare. They were great, reminiscent of all my old favorite Kenocore bands but not totally derivative. Good, raging hardcore with a side of garage-y punk. I danced up front for most of their set, and the pit (such as it was, there were too few people for it to truly be a pit) was mostly made up of girls. A couple dudes bounced in and out, but most of the time it was us girls slamming, skanking, pogoing. I’d run to where Beagan sat, have a sip of my drink, run back up, dance, fist in the air. I picked up the words to choruses on the fly and shouted along. Toward the end of their set, they did a blistering cover of “Blank Generation” and then I really shouted along. I love anytime a band covers that song; it was written, what, like 40 years ago and is forever the perfect anthem for anyone disaffected. I was sayin’ “let me outta here” before I was even born… It’s such a gamble when you get a face. Everything was great, the gals in the pit were so welcoming, though none of them knew me. “I love your jacket,” they said, or, “your hair kicks ass,” and we threw our arms around each other and did high-kicks like some kind of punk rock chorus line. But then, this one girl who’d been standing in the back came up near the stage to take some pictures, and she started giving me death glares. She looked at me like she thought I was trying to get with one of the band members, like she thought I had my eye on the same fella she did. I wanted to reassure her that wasn’t the case, that I was there to sing, to slam, to sweat the winter blues away. I wanted to say: “Honey, we can both do so much better than any of these boys. Let’s forget them, join forces, and smash the patriarchy.” I couldn’t shout all that over the noise from the PA, so I smiled at her, hoping that would convey my message, but that made her glare harder. It bummed me out, so, for the last couple songs of the Repubs’ set, I returned to Beagan and my booze.
When the music ended, we stayed on a while longer, drank more, stood outside smoking more cigarettes. I was drunk enough by that point that the biting wind didn’t faze me at all. I talked with this cute punk kid (mussed-up hair, striped shirt, Army-issue jacket covered in patches). He flirted with me, all: “I haven’t seen you around here before.” “Well,” I said, “I’ve never been to this bar before, but I’ve been coming to punk shows in Kenosha since 1998.” He said: “Uh, I wasn’t going to punk shows back then. I was eight.” We talked about music; I scoped the patches on his jacket and nodded at the bands I know and like. I was curious about his backpatch: “Who’s that one for?” -“Mouth Sewn Shut.” I didn’t know who that was, he told me it was the singer from Toxic Narcotic, I got stoked cos I used to love Toxic Narcotic and I didn’t even know he had a more recent band. We talked about where we were from, where we’d lived. I said I was born in Lansing, Michigan, and he said: “Oh, the Crucifucks are from Lansing. Did you ever see them back then?” -“Dude, how old do you think I am? I know I’m older than you are, but fuck. The Crucifucks broke up when I was, like, six!” He blushed and said: “I didn’t mean you were old, I’m sorry, I just, I didn’t know when they broke up, I wasn’t thinking about that!” I told him it was cool, I knew he didn’t mean anything by it.
Beagan and I went back to her apartment, stayed up until four a.m. drinking and talking. Five hours of fitful sleep later, I found my way back north. A week or so before, I’d been feeling bleak about where I was living, that old feeling that comes on when I’m unhappy with my life, like Maybe life would be better elsewhere. Maybe I should move back to a bigger city, or leave the midwest for good. What’s that one pop punk song about hating your hometown but knowing you’ll never escape it? That’s how I’d felt a week before. But that Saturday morning, driving up Highway 32, on the icy roads, along the frozen lake, I felt a deep and abiding love for southeastern Wisconsin. I thought about Highway 32, that road I’ve spent more of my time on than any other road in the world, and how I want a stick&poke tattoo of the highway sign, and how I’d like to write a whole mini-zine about that road. I thought about Kenocore, and how I’ve been thinking of writing a zine-book about the history of Kenocore for over a decade now. I thought about a conversation Beagan and I’d had the night before. We were talking about someone we knew from Kenosha who moved to Chicago several years ago and now says he’s from Chicago, as though all his years in southeastern Wisconsin never happened. “Why be ashamed of where you come from?” she asked. “I agree,” I said. “Besides, it’s more impressive when someone from a little town or mid-sized city like Racine or Kenosha does something cool. Why pretend you’re from Chicago? There are a million cool people in Chicago, but not so many in Kenosha.” I thought about the previous night’s show, and how, to paraphrase World/Inferno, the kids do still sing and dance, drink and fuck, smash it up. It’s my homeland.
—Jessie Lynn McMains, originally appeared in Reckless Chants #21 (autumn 2014), in slightly different form
This is fun!!!!! I am so excited for the future witb these guy's!!! #warplot #kenocore #kenoshaartist #badreligion #tiktok #drummer #kenocorepunks #punkhardcore #hard-core #conquertheworld (at Tattoos by Kyle) https://www.instagram.com/p/CT9OoZ6luwR/?utm_medium=tumblr
