A Message to Persons Unknown

or: on punk rock and social change

When I was nineteen, I spent awhile squatting in the suburbs of Baltimore, in a town called Towson (now famous as the birthplace of Luigi). This isn’t where I’m from… I had met some crustpunks in philly and started traveling with them. We wound up in Towson, living in abandoned buildings or crawl spaces or bushes. We organized against war and we dumpstered and we shoplifted and we got run off by the cops several times a day.

There’s this moment I remember clearly, despite the large quantity of malt liquor I’d likely consumed: I remember being in a basement in Baltimore itself, probably one of the Food Not Bombs houses, while punk bands played. Everyone was wearing all black with white-ink patches on their clothes, sewn together with dental floss. Floor joists were perilously perched above our heads. We did ourselves some permanent hearing damage in that basement.

The punk band had two singers, both women. It was called 2AM Revolution. During the chorus, everyone sang along as the singer screamed about how if she saw a Nazi she would “break my fucking 40 on his motherfucking face!”

And just like that, in that basement screaming along, I understood punk.

Because the thing is, those of us in that basement meant what we said about revolution. Our venues were collective houses that doubled as mutual aid kitchens. The singers of the band marched alongside us at antiwar and alterglobalization protests. When a bus load of Nazis passed through town, the local punks working with Anti-Racist Action partnered with local gangs to ambush the fascists, smashing out the bus windows, pepperspraying inside, and jumping every nazi as they emerged. Then everyone disappeared back through the alleys into the Maryland night.

A car full of antifascists showed up late and were carted off to jail, and the punk scene raised the money for their criminal defense. We meant what we said in our lyrics.

I understood punk in that basement because it wasn’t just a show, it wasn’t just a fashion, it was, for however long, a movement.

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This week for my history podcast I’ve been reading about the band that more or less started anarcho-punk as a genre, subculture, and counterculture, Crass. Crass was a band from 1977-1984. It got going when a young punk kid was hanging out with some older avant garde hippie musicians and they all decided to start a band together.

There’s a bit of a “big man of history” problem with Crass—they were absolutely foundational, and they were absolutely the most influential of the early anarcho-punk bands. But one band and their fans isn’t a movement. Anarcho-punk probably owes about as much to Poison Girls, fronted by a middle-aged anarchist mom. And it owes plenty more to all the organizers and squatters and activists and musicians who built that movement.

When people think about Crass and anarcho-punk today, they mostly talk about it as, you know, a band. A genre. I like some Crass songs, sure. I like their attitude and I respect the aesthetic sensibilities they pioneered that have drifted down through punk generations. But what I hadn’t realized before I’d started deep-diving them was just how influential they were.

They were a completely underground band, more or less without radio play or mainstream coverage, yet they outsold AC/DC. They fundamentally threatened the monopoly on popular music held by the record companies, and they did it with, well, angry avant garde punk rock cussing and blasphemy and anarchist pacifism.

But I’m less concerned, personally, with how they impacted the music world and more concerned with how punk impacted culture and politics. Crass themselves shook the halls of power. During the Falklands War of 1983, opposition MPs were writing Crass, not the other way around, and Crass’s tirades against Margaret Thatcher (“How does if feel to be the mother of a thousand dead?”) had the Tories rattled.

Punk had a “heyday” in the musical spotlight between 1976-1978, but it was once it left that spotlight and political punks stepped onto the scene that punk started really impacting culture. The DIY nature of it was revolutionary, and spread across the globe—“developing” nations have probably the most vibrant punk scenes in the world today.

Anarcho-punk popularized political graffiti and squatted social centers. It was a Poison Girls and Crass split single that funded the Autonomy Centre, London’s first anarchist social center of the modern era.

Then in 1983, punks built a coalition with the peace movement to change protest culture forever. The Stop the City protests they organized aimed to shut down the financial center of London, to bring nuclear disarmament protests away from the rural military bases and right to the halls of power. These protests were organized horizontally, designed to maximize the autonomy of the individual protesters, and essentially became the proof of concept for the horizontal coalitions and leaderless protests of the 21st century.

Yet all along, and ever since, people have tried to disparage the movement as just about fashion.

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I can barely say I was a teenaged punk rocker, because I got into it after I dropped out of college. All through high school, I was sort of a generic weirdo. By the time I was in college, I was properly a goth. Punk hadn’t really appealed to me as much, aesthetically or musically, and I’m still more likely to put on Sisters of Mercy than Crass (though I would argue that culturally and politically, Sisters of Mercy aren’t the farthest thing from anarcho-punk).

But then I discovered 2AM Revolution, I discovered Wake Up On Fire. I discovered people who sang about revolution and meant it, who really fucking meant it. (Falling into punk is probably why I cuss so much, to be honest.)

It’s like I fell through the looking glass, or stepped through the mists of Avalon. A whole world underneath the terrible, banal, mainstream world opened up to me and swallowed me, and I let it.

So I will always love punk.

But the thing is, this story I’m telling about punk, you could tell the same story about so many cultures, subcultures, and countercultures. Hiphop serves the same purpose for so many people, and in America at least it has always been a more important and revolutionary culture than punk.

When I came up in anarchism, the punk influence was inescapable. A slight majority of the anarchists I know my age came up through punk. These days, I’m glad to say, this isn’t the case as much—anarachism isn’t tied to this or that aesthetic culture to the same degree anymore.

Because there was always this critique that rang true to me: a social movement can’t be built on a subculture, nor even a counterculture. It can’t be built on a single culture or aesthetic. A revolution cannot be one thing for one group of people. It’s got to be woven together with many strands.

Some people offered that critique of punk to say that punk ought to be rejected outright. Some people said that in order to reach “the masses” punks had to take off their vests and stop patching their pants so that they could blend in. This has always been a garbage plan, one that is condescending to “the masses” it claims to want to reach.

It’s not that anarchism and political movements can’t be subcultural, it’s that they must be multicultural. You don’t become multicultural by abandoning culture but by embracing the diversity of cultures. We ought to embrace the radical potential of every subculture we can find.

If you’re going to be a punk, you should be politically radical. If you’re going to be politically radical, though, you don’t need to be a punk.

It would also be strange to stick too strictly to subcultural boundaries. The way to keep the spirit of anarcho-punk alive isn’t to cosplay as 1970s British punk rockers, nor early-aughts Baltimore crust punks.

Or, as Crass put it:

Be exactly who you want to be, do what you want to do
I am he and she is she but you're the only you
No one else has got your eyes, can see the things you see
It's up to you to change your life and my life's up to me

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If I were to list off the traits I identify with in order of priority, punk would be near the bottom of the list. I’m still more one for melancholy than anger. But subculture isn’t a membership club.

My friend Unwoman and I were once talking about subculture and its genre labels. She said, and I paraphrase here, that people make a mistake of thinking that subculture and genre are “categories,” where you have to pick one and be sorted. She preferred to think of them as tags.

It’s hard right now to really believe in the power of culture, subculture, and counterculture (three terms with three meanings that people who aren’t me like to argue about the difference between). But as mainstream society meets even fewer of our needs, we’ll be coming together more and more to meet our needs with each other, and by doing that, we’ll be creating subcultures. They might not be centered around music, but they’ll be real.

There’s a certain power to subculture, one that is good and bad an equal measure. When people split off from the mainstream, they’re able to form a sort of echo chamber as they bounce ideas off of each other instead of the broad culture. This is a necessary process for experimentation, but it’s very easy to take it too far, to become so removed from the rest of society that you’re incapable of impacting that society except as outsiders. It’s echo chambers that bring us cults and “high control groups.” A little bit of echoing is useful. A lot is poison.

Most of the critiques I’ve read of the anarcho-punk culture of the 80s and 90s call it “puritan.” Steve Ignorant from Crass himself called it “square.” Arguments about whether or not it’s ethical to smoke, or put milk in your tea, or do this or that specific thing, turned people away from the culture. This is a pattern that’s familiar today with online “discourse” (I put that word in scare quotes because “talking about ideas” is good, but what’s called “discourse” online seems to mostly be people trying to develop the One True, Pure ideology and ethics that ought to be universally applied to everyone).

In some ways, social media feels like a distillation of subculture down to its worst parts. We’re left with the ability to critique one another, to look for ways that each of us has failed. We’re left with the negative effects of the echo chamber, and we’re able to spin off new echo chambers at fantastic speed. But social media isn’t a punk show, or a reading group, or a food not bombs feeding. It’s not an interwoven community that is trying to develop its ethical standards… it’s all standards, no community.

This isn’t to say “kids today are lost and don’t have what we had” or any nonsense like that. Subculture is alive and well, doing all the best and worst things that it can do. Some of it even happens online, though that’s a more precarious space to develop community. I can’t say subculture is dead when furry hackers just leaked a bunch of police documents, after all.

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The Baltimore scene took a dark turn at some point, a bit after I left. I could point a few different directions as to what happened: the opiod crisis and oxycontin take maybe most of the blame, and it was always a substance-positive culture. I lost friends to drinking and driving, to suicide, to overdose, to asyphixiation.

Maybe this is misguided, but I think as the politics ebbed, the substances flowed. When the alterglobalization movement and the antiwar movement waned, people held onto each other as best they could but there wasn’t the same political underpinning.

People also just age out of youth subculture, and for the most part, my friends there aged out of the subculture but not the politics. An anarchist infoshop inspired a collective cafe and bookstore that became the seed of a growing and vibrant worker-ownership scene.

Subcultures ebb and flow. You can still go to a show, somewhere, where you can be part of something real. It might have fiddles and it might have rappers and it might have EDM producers and it might have angry screaming punks. It might not be a show at all. It might be a knitting circle or a painting class or a DIY after school program. You can get together with people and work towards making the world better and work towards making the world weirder.

You can be a punk, even, if you want. Anarcho-punk was started by outsiders and moms. You can be a punk, and it won’t be all you are.

As Poison Girls put it, in a song they wrote to benefit anarchist prisoners (when the singer was 46 years old in 1981):

This is a message to persons unknown
Persons in hiding. Persons unknown
Survival in silence
Isn't good enough no more.