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Suburbia, 1983, Dir.Penelope Spheeris. Los Angeles, CA.
Beyond offering me an opening premise, I see Suburbia is a useful precedent for the project in it’s often unflattering depiction of these reprehensible attitudes while also genuinely conveying why the subculture could be so comforting to these lost kids in the first place
project concept exploration poster 001
Still from The Game the Game. Angela Wasko. Computer Game. 2016. Denver, COs
In Angelo Wasko’s The Game the Game, players are thrust into the world of pickup artists, seeing the experience through the eyes of a wome being harassed by then. While the subject matter is different, Wasko’ ability to engage an emotional response out of an aubsurd yet potentially violent community encourages me to think about all mediums in formulating this idea.
Proud Boys Incident Map 2016-2019. Samantha Kutner. 2016. Esri Webmap.
Samantha Kutner’s Proud Boys incident map over shows the reach of the far-right group across the united states. The Proud Boys, classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a men’s group of self identified “proud western chauvinists” formed by Gavin McInnes, who was one of the founding members of Vice magazine before becoming a popular figure in the Alt-Right. In Vice and later, McInnes made his name on couching offensive rhetoric in layers of irony and absurdity, and the Proud Boys employs the same technique. Despite an assortment of in-jokes and silly customs– the group is named in reference to a song from Disney’s Aladdin, they take a vow of no masturbation, one of the initiation steps is being punched while naming breakfast cereals– the group have been repeatedly involved in violent incidents over the last two years. By laying out the information plainly, Kutner helps visualize the expanse of a dangerous group that has been, at times, treated with ridicule rather than as a genuine threat.
Flight Jacket. Mishka NYC x Death in June. 2011. Photos from ShopBop resale listing.
Death in June is a British, multi-decade spanning “neo-folk” band with roots in the punks scene and a sizable fan base within certain subsets of the subcultures darker leaning corners. They also have a long messy relationship with fascism, specifically as it relates to the Third Reich. Despite originating from a leftwing punk band that used to plat on Rock against Racism shows, the band’s frontman and sole permanent member, Douglas Pierce has flirted with Nazism throughout the project's existence, making references to it in album names, song names, and referencing it liberally in the visual language of the project.
Given all this, I was surprised to see that a streetwear brand known primarily for putting out underground rap mixtapes would see an ideal collaborator in Pierce for a capsule collection of shirts and outerwear. It was immediately obvious, as well, that the brand wanted to highlight Pierce’s controversial image rather than sidestep it: the collection featured a militaristic flight jacket adorned with patches featuring the band’s notorious logo, the Totenkopf skull and bones worn by German SS officers, alongside the “Algis rune” a runic symbol appropriated by the Nazis and still popular with neo-nazi groups, a symbol which features prominently throughout Death in Junes work.
I wish I could say I was surprised- but to be honest I wasn’t. I don’t think Mishka are nazis or even nazi sympathizers, but I do think they courted the controversy and taboo nature of using this imagery to give them some kind of edge or sense of danger. This is often what Pierce himself claims- that the use of Third Reich imagery is provocation rather than proclamation - and who knows, maybe that's true- I certainly hoped it was for a long time, as a fan of the band myself for a long time- but I came to realize that intention can only get you so far. If you are putting out Nazi imagery and Nazis like your music, does it matter that you are supposedly only playing pretend?
Photograph, Syd Shelton, 1981, Rock Against Racism, pub. 2015
Photograph. Ian McKell. Approx 1979-80. from Dazed Magazine, 2012
Photographers Syd Shelton and Ian McKell both captured the UK punk movement in its early days, providing a window into the fluidity and complicated nuances of the subculture even then. Above in Shelton’s shot, three Black skinheads are shown enjoying a Specials show in Leeds. The concert was part of the Rock Against Racism series that had sprung up in opposition to the National Front’s Rock Against Communism (RAC) movement which promoted far-right “race rock” bands as champions of the working class. In McKell’s photo, a young women gets ready in her bedroom at a skinhead squat in London, her mirror adorned with National Front distributed nationalist propaganda sharing space with an ad for One Step Beyond, the debut album by Madness, a band inexplicably popular with the RAC crowd despite joining the Specials as labelmates on the explicitly anti-racist Two Tone record label.
ARA Flier, artist unknown, 1984, maximumrocknroll
To understand the relationship between far-right radicalization and extreme music, it's important to understand the opposition to it, especially noting the ways that they aesthetically influenced each other. Aesthetics are so important to subcultures, but rarely translate outside of them, so they often come off as frivolous, even though their impact is anything but. Taken from a 1989 interview Anti Racist Action members did with the punk magazine Maximumrocknroll.
and fucking gone (partial reconstruktion - 7.22.95). Banks Violette. 2002 drum hardware, polystyrene, polyester, epoxy, plywood, sterling sliver chain, and hand-cast pewter. Exhibited in Arroyo Grande 7.22.95 2002 at Team Gallery, New York, NY
Bank’s Violette’s 2002 installation Arroyo Grande 7.22.95 gets at something hard to express in this exploration. The installation is Inspired by a violent 1995 murder carried out by three teenage heavy metal fans in Arroyo Grande, CA and blamed in court on heavy metal lyrics, specifically the extreme metal band Slayer. Using two distinct areas, Violette builds out blackened fantasy world, a physical manifestation of the evil influence the perpetrators were supposedly under, contrasting it with a second fantasy world of filled with lightness, representing the young female victim. The didacticism conveys the absurdity of such simple cause and effect reasoning, but he also captures something honest snd chilling about the relationship between this male fantasy of aggression and real violence.
