Punk and woke

Via Carrie Brownstein

I’m trying to write more and more often this year. My two main strategies are (a) put things out even if I think they aren’t that great or insulated against objections and (b) be willing to just riff on whatever I’m reading. Both strategies employed in this post. My other strategy is to have a soft target of uploading one thing on this blog per week, whatever that may turn out to mean, so maybe you will be seeing more of me in your inboxes? Anyway, hope you enjoy this.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with Carrie Brownstein’s 2015 autobiography Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, which I’ve been looking for for a while and finally found a copy of yesterday. (Say what you will about Waterstones, but the one on Sauchiehall Street never disappoints me.) Brownstein is an incredibly sharp analyst of her own music: she writes frankly and incisively about what made Sleater-Kinney work, with a good ear and a deep understanding of what she and Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss were doing, and without romanticism or bullshit or self-mythologising.¹ This is doubly rare—it’s uncommon for a great musician to understand their own work deeply, but it’s also shockingly rare for anyone to be able write intelligently about Sleater-Kinney in particular. They’re a band who are so deeply underrated partly because few people have written clearly about what works so well in their music; fans often don’t have the resources to explain to an interested but disinterested outsider what makes them exceptional, not merely good. But Brownstein offers a lot of those resources here.

Anyway. Sleater-Kinney are also a band who get talked about a lot as ‘political’ or ‘feminist’, which is obviously entirely fair enough and true, even if it grates on me that this dimension is played up too often to the exclusion of the music itself.² Brownstein’s autobiography touches on the politics from time to time, but not always in the most sophisticated way. At the time, the New York Times’ critic John Williams said that Brownstein’s writing takes on a ‘bumper-sticker register’ when she gets on to politics, and there’s some truth in that. Not that this is necessarily a problem: most people’s expressions of their politics are not incredibly sophisticated, Brownstein does not have an obligation to be a great political theorist as well as a great musician, and writing compelling political songs requires almost an opposite set of skills to making cogent and subtle political arguments. Not everyone can be like D. Boon and Mike Watt.³

But one political passage stood out to me for its sophistication and insight. It comes as Brownstein’s band Excuse 17 are supporting Corin Tucker’s band Heavens to Betsy on tour, before Sleater-Kinney formed. I’ll just quote it in full:

For me, that tour, the music, the whole punk scene felt very made up as it went along. There was a malleability to it as we vacillated between, experimented with, or claimed identities. If someone didn’t feel included, if someone felt marginalized, they would form their own band, write their own fanzine, or just call you out on what they deemed racist or classist, sizeist, sexist, body-ableist. For a movement that professed to grant one a sense of belonging and solidarity, we were often made aware of our differences. In the span of a single show, or in the reading of a fanzine or the lyric sheet of an album, one’s own experiences could be publicly validated in one instant and then invalidated the very next. There was a real power struggle to find a coalescence and to acknowledge commonalities in our disparities. We wanted to protect one another, to be inoffensive, inclusive, aware of our own shortcomings and faults, to improve and evolve, to make radical changes. Yet there was so much pressure on this single indie and punk movement, one that clearly couldn’t address all forms of personhood and inequality. (p.70 in my paperback copy. See also pp.114–115 for a similar argument.)

The ambiguity of Brownstein’s argument here is part of what’s so compelling about it. She doesn’t betray any resentful, reactionary frustration at the practice of ‘calling out’, even though I have no doubt she was often on the receiving end of it. She has clearly personally experienced the deep importance of what she calls ‘validation’,⁴ and understands that feeling validated can legitimately require calling out other people.

But she observes that the same factors that gave people their own space (a band, a zine) in which to seek validation, often also contributed to invalidation in others. If you started to feel your differences from others in the scene, you reacted by doubling down on those differences, calling those others out or creating something that highlighted your distance from them. Later on in the book, Brownstein describes the process of being ‘zined’, ‘the term for devoting pages of a fanzine to a person’s perceived racist, sexist, classist, ageist, transphobic, whatever-ist behavior’. The overall tendency was centrifugal.⁵

I don’t think it’s unimportant that Brownstein echoes J. S. Mill in the word ‘experimented’ (though it was almost certainly unintentional). The proliferation of bands and zines and ‘call-outs’ did two things: it gave people room to explore themselves and take part in the experiments in living that Mill lauded, and it contributed to the kind of moralising invalidation he hated. Mill couldn’t foresee this combination because he assumed social pressure is homogenising. Brownstein’s point is that social pressure can also be heterogenising.

At this point, the reactionary would sigh and tut and mutter about how this was inevitable: identity politics always leads to such fracturing, it’s quixotic to seek validation in the first place. But again, Brownstein’s smarter than that. It is very much possible for people to ‘improve and evolve’, to find some (maybe uneasy) ‘coalescence’ and equilibrium that can tame the centrifugal force. If people don’t so often feel invalidated to begin with, they might not come to feel that being validated would involve calling out others, in ways that (in turn) can be invalidating. This doesn’t require the total overcoming of classism, racism, or sexism. But it is nonetheless not an easy matter, or one that comes naturally even to those with an inclusive and respectful disposition. It is, fundamentally, a matter of political judgment and understanding, coalition building, and hard slog—a ‘power struggle’.⁶

Brownstein is entirely right to say that her music scene simply could not bear the weight of that struggle. The quixotic thing about punk is that it often thinks that it can bear it, that its DIY ethos or sense of solidarity or emphasis on individual authenticity could bootstrap punks all the way to a fully inclusive scene where everyone felt like they belonged. The myths of punk, and of rock more generally, are just that: myths, which can be productive and inspiring but which ultimately don’t reflect prosaic reality.⁷

But—and here you may think I am be reading too much into the argument—I think Brownstein’s judgment is sharper than just this point about punk, which (while important for a lot of punks to hear) is incredibly obvious to outsiders. Her reasoning also tells that no ethic or ethos would be able to bear that weight on its own. Being respectful or kind or self-critical, or being inclined towards solidarity and inclusiveness, is (of course) essential, but it is not enough: we’ve all come across ‘well-meaning racism’ in our time. This is why Brownstein highlights the fact that validation and invalidation could appear side-by-side on the same pages. In the punk scene, invalidation was not the result of individual rudeness or disrespect, but of a lack of understanding and coordination—a lack of coalescence, as she put it.

Coalescence is about having specific sympathetic understanding of the differences you’ll encounter.⁸ And it’s also about moving towards an equilibrium where that understanding is common knowledge, in a relatively technical sense: everyone can safely assume understanding on the part of everyone else, and nobody feels at risk of invalidation. But building such an equilibrium, even at the level of a subculture, requires the tools of politics: building a sympathetic coalition, exercising good judgment, managing conflict, accepting loss. There is always a struggle to be understood, and for the terms of that understanding to be both validating and at least vaguely coherent. It’s important that Brownstein doesn’t just call this a ‘struggle’; she says ‘power struggle’, because power is important here.

If you try to ‘acknowledge commonalities’ without thinking in political terms, Brownstein’s right that you’ll just be making it up as you go along, responding ad hoc to the challenges you face. You might have some victories, through good judgment and luck: maybe you’ll provide validation to some young musicians who will go on to achieve greatness. But there’s no strategic vision—no politics—that might achieve anything bigger.

Thirty years after the tour, the culture that Brownstein encountered in the immediate post–riot grrrl punk scene has spread; we’re all familiar with it, and ‘woke’ is as good a name for it as any. It involves the same kind of heterogenising social pressure, arising out of demands for validation from those who have (often justifiably) felt excluded and invalidated. Being ‘zined’ sounds just like today’s cancellation. But where 90s American punk sought only to build a validating scene (at least in the first instance), today the focus is first and foremost social change; making it up as you go along isn’t an option.

In the internet age the centripetal forces towards ‘coalescence’ have weakened, and the centrifugal tendencies are stronger: you no longer need to put in the work to start your own zine when you can just quote-tweet. And the fundamental problem remains, that wokeness too often tries to load weight onto norms and culture that can only really be borne by politics: we have all experienced people framing their political demands as if they just involved the bare minimum of respect and kindness, or the bare minimum of education. (I have done this myself, and I have no doubt I will do it again in future.)

Brownstein’s good sense, personal experiences, and sympathy protected her from the reactionary view that would dismiss the need for validation altogether, out of some combination of the perversity and jeopardy theses. But she was smart enough to recognise a potential problem when it was in front of her. In the years since she wrote about this, and certainly in the years since she experienced it, the risks have only increased as the culture that seeks validation has become more widespread and (consequently) the stakes have gotten higher.

Maybe woke has already peaked, and its window of opportunity to achieve major political change has closed. If so, surely this is partly because the structure of the internet and the temptation to personalise political problems were too strong—because, in other words, the challenge that Brownstein described was never confronted.

1. The book has a lot of self-mythologising in it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s kept largely separate from the sober musical analysis.

2. Brownstein herself offers fun takedowns of some of the most egregious (and indeed sexist) pieces like this in the book.

3. And perhaps, as well, most people shouldn’t be: as much as I see a lot of myself in stories of Boon and Watt’s unending, quasi-heated arguments over the particularities of their different brands of socialism, it doesn’t always sound like they were great fun to be around.

4. I’m not a huge fan of Brownstein’s terminology of ‘validation’, it’s quite / very / exceedingly vague; but I’ll stick with it for this post.

5. Pace the common caricature of Iris Marion Young, the fact that the punks saw their differences as fluid and relational—that they vacillated and experimented with their identities—was not enough in itself to render the differences politically productive or liberatory.

6. I try to avoid mentioning Patchen Markell, since I find him infuriating in a lot of ways. But I should probably nod to the fact that Bound by Recognition touches on some of what I’m getting at here, though I think Markell is wrong about a whole lot and obscure and pretentious about a whole lot.

7. Again, punk’s most politically insightful practitioners could see this clearly. Mike Watt got D. Boon to sing that ‘punk rock changed our lives’, sure, but this wasn’t because punk represented a deep essential truth. It was just that the scene was vibrant and nearby:

Where were the gigs happening? Where were the records coming out? It was all the punk scene… [W]e weren’t like a lot of punk bands, but we were a punk band because we were in the punk scene. I don’t know what else to call it. (Mike Watt, quoted in Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life, p.78 in my paperback copy.)

8. Henry Shevlin suggested on Twitter that there may be a moral obligation for British people to be able to understand certain accents, in the sense that we Brits think there’s a distinctly ethical valence to interactions like this one. That’s the kind of thing I’m getting at here. (I cannot now find his tweet, but it was definitely him!)