In
its four decades, punk has meant many different things to many
different people. Its relationship to fascism, the specter of which has
stopped rattling its chains from history books and re-appeared in the
West, is one of the most complicated examples of how aesthetics and
philosophy can appeal to both anti-authoritarian and deeply repressive
positions. You can find it in punk’s beginnings, as a reaction to
the cultural forces of generations prior, the long shadow of World War
II among them. Ron Asheton of the Stooges collected and wore Nazi
memorabilia to signify his bond with his father, a former Marine Corps
pilot. Sid Vicious’ swastika was a fuck-you to his parents’ generation,
and largely orchestrated by the (Jewish) Malcolm McLaren. And the electric eels just wanted to piss everyone off equally.
Look no further than the formation of Rock Against Racism
(RAR) for a sub-story that contextualizes just how thin the line can be
when it comes to manipulating fascist symbolism. In response to a
growing National Front presence in England during the mid-’70s, RAR
united rock and reggae subcultures (and more importantly, black and
white folks). The organization was closely affiliated with the Anti-Nazi League, a public effort of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party; the strict party line embedded in its core philosophy felt suffocating to some. In the case of peace-punk band Crisis,
a RAR favorite, bassist Tony Wakeford (who had been a Socialist Workers
Party member) and guitarist Douglas Pearce (who had been involved with
the International Marxist Group)
began to feel so alienated that they formally split from RAR. Wakeford
and Pearce went on to form neofolk group Death in June, which began its
career playing with the aesthetics of paramilitary fascism (Nazism in
particular) as satire—stances that became much muddier from there.
Wakeford got the boot from the group in 1984 for his relationship at
that time with the National Front, which lasted less than a year; these
days, for his part, he is publicly critical of the far right. But Pearce, who keeps Death in June active still, continues to court controversy.
Similarly, the splintering of
both the UK and U.S. labor movements, under pressure from Thatcher and
Reagan during their tenures, brought about both racist skinheads and skinheads who reacted by speaking out against racism.
All this ongoing friction and subsequent reaction, embedded in punk’s
formation and carried through along multiple veins to the present, has
also created some of the best and most relevant music to directly
critique fascism in its many iterations. Here, we present just a few,
shying away from many of the more obvious and well-known choices here
(Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” Oi Polloi’s “Bash the Fash,” etc.)
Johannesburg, South Africa, 1977: National Wake, “International News”
Following the 1976 Soweto uprising,
in which students protesting apartheid were murdered by state police,
Ivan Kadey and brothers Gary and Punka Khoza did what countless others
have done when feeling helpless and frustrated, in need of a voice: they
started a punk band. They mixed Stooges-esque garage, the repurposed
disco structures and acerbic political analysis of bands like the Pop
Group and Gang of Four, two-tone ska, reggae, and African polyrhythms
into one heady setlist. But more on the rowdy and raw hard-rock end of
things, “International News” took aim at the role of the international
media in perpetuating both apartheid and the atrocities of the Angolan War of Independence
with sensationalistic reporting. Unsurprisingly, National Wake found
themselves the subject of state police surveillance and censorship,
making it difficult to secure spaces to play. The pressure eventually
split the band apart, but they hadn’t been forgotten; preserved through
tape trading and Kadey’s own record-keeping, their recorded material is
now available in its original, uncensored condition thanks to Light in the Attic.
Belgium, 1977: Basta, “Abortus Vrij de Vrouw Beslist!”
Those who have never had their
reproductive systems regulated by the government may wonder why a song
about abortion rights appears on a list of anti-fascist punk songs;
those who know the danger of electing Mike “Burial or Cremation for
Aborted and Miscarried Fetuses” Pence to one of the highest offices in
the land may not. This 7-inch was Basta’s only release, and one of the
first Belgian punk releases of any sort. Beyond this significance, the
song is incredibly catchy, with a saxophone line reminiscent of Lora
Logic’s dissonant contributions to X-Ray Spex and Essential Logic, and a
shouted chorus that was a common phrase at pro-choice protests (essentially meaning, “yes, abortion for women!”).
Belgium was actually one of the last countries to legalize abortion
(not until 1990!), which made Basta’s urgent-sounding record even more
significant: the sleeve listed clinics where abortions could safely be
obtained.
Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1978: The Rondos, “Which Side Will You Be On?”
The Rondos were Maoist punks, leftist militants who provoked everyone from the Dutch Communist CPN party to (closed-mindedly) Rastafarian culture to Crass, who held the Rondos at least partially responsible for the violence that often characterized Crass shows starting in 1979 (when the two bands played together) onward. From the Rondos’ own biography:
“Were we really communists? We assented to it half mockingly and half
seriously. In the beginning, our lyrics were non-political or generally
‘anti.’ Wayward, anyhow. Over time we became more serious about our
communist image. More fanatical too, due to pressure from the outside.”
They had their own magazine (Raket, or Rocket) and alternative bookshop (Raketbase), a hub for the early Dutch punk scene. “Which Side Will You Be On?” was an urgent pogo and a call to action to do something, rather than sitting around talking endlessly about strategy. One cannot, after all, fight fascism by words alone.
Austin, Texas, 1980: The Dicks, “The Dicks Hate the Police”
A blatantly Communist band fronted by an unapologetic fat gay man in Texas
released their first single, in which said singer barked in the voice
of a violent cop hell-bent on abusing his power against the
marginalized... to impress his parents. The song contained few words and
fewer chords, and yet, with an arch sneer, the singer—Gary Floyd, a
genuine punk hero deserving of recognition beyond the
underground—communicated the essence of state power deployed in its most
wretched everyday form. “The Dicks Hate the Police” is, at least to
this writer, one of the greatest songs of all time, punk or not.
Innumerable covers—chief among them Mudhoney’s most famous one—support this theory.
Essex, England, 1980: Poison Girls, “Bully Boys”
Over 40 and differing from the
traditionally attractive frontwoman archetype, Jewish refugee Vi
Subversa found herself beloved by Crass and friends upon starting up her
first punk band. Inspired by the wryness and hookiness of the
Buzzcocks, Subversa brought a delicate balance of thoughtful
consideration and pummeling ferocity to the burgeoning peace-punk
movement. Her history of real-world activism also helped to accomplish
some actual work against nuclear disarmament, among other causes. “Bully
Boys” was a remarkably catchy little ditty, all buzzsaw guitars,
throaty vocals, and punchy drums in service of implicating the role of
machismo in National Front violence. The band said
that the track, along with “The Bremen Song” (about the Holocaust), led
to racist skinheads attacking them at gigs and at home. Subversa’s
lyrics were less “the personal is political” in the sense of isolating
her experiences as being characteristic of grander political trends, and
more “the political is personal,” focusing on how political systems
manifest themselves in everyday life.
East Berlin, 1983: Namenlos, “Nazis Wieder in Ostberlin”
It’s unsurprising that East
Germans struggling through the stultified economic conditions of the
state-controlled Soviet German Democratic Republic found the crudest
impulses of anti-authoritarianism in punk aesthetics to be an effective
way of voicing their protest—and that the government responded to them
as a direct threat. State harassment, police beatings, and apartment
raids were regular parts of punk life, forcing many street kids into
churches for sanctuary, where they became politicized, mixing with
varying civil rights and environmental activist groups who also needed
that protected space to meet. Namenlos were among this newly,
ferociously politicized breed, employing wiry rock’n’roll riffage and
direct lyrics with appropriate seriousness given their environment. The
government doubled down on state repression rather than loosening it,
and “Nazis Wieder in Ostberlin” (“Nazis Again in East Berlin”) landed
three members of Namenlos behind bars. They were held in jail for six
months without full charges while being interrogated, and were
eventually sentenced to 18 additional months in Stasi prison for their
“anti-government lyrics.” Even public support for Namenlos could land punks in jail
for months on end. And yet the fire started by mixing disenfranchised
street kids and politically savvy strategists couldn’t be extinguished
once it’d been set: an organized youth protest movement, punks included,
was no small part of the political rebellion that eventually toppled
the Berlin Wall.
San Pedro, California, 1984: Minutemen, “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing”
So dig this big crux: Think
of Mike Watt and D. Boon as the blue-collar socialist punk versions of
Bert and Ernie. Friends since age 13, the duo’s oscillating heartbeat is
what makes Minutemen so beloved and still relevant today. While the
lyrics to this avant-garde punk classic are the least didactic on this
list, they are no less direct than any others, and no less evocative
(“Me, naked with textbook poems spout fountain against the Nazis”). How do
we assert our politics through song, Boon asks, making sincerity a
strength rather than a weakness. A crucial question for anyone who’s
ever made an impassioned argument and thought, “I must look like a dork”—particularly at a time when neo-Nazis rely on chaotic disdain for anyone who cares too much as provocation meant to disarm.
Santiago, Chile, 1984: Los Pinochet Boys, “La Música del General/Esto Es Pinochet Boys”
At the most repressive point of the Pinochet dictatorship,
Daniel Puente Encina formed an explicitly anti-fascist punk band with
his friends and called it Pinochet Boys. Their first single? “Music of
the General.” This was not the kind of punk danger most Americans are
familiar with; it was not even a Green Room-type scenario. This was treason against a fascist state.
With every show a secret, risking shut-down by military police,
Pinochet Boys gigs were places for young, emerging activists to meet and
strategize. The youth movement would become a crucial part of the
revolution that led to the Chilean national plebiscite in 1988,
a referendum that finally forced the Pinochet regime from power and
paved the road for democracy. “This machine kills fascists,”
indeed—though Encina and the other Boys were exiled in 1987. From a
purely musical standpoint, the song was half classic sing-along
punk-band-name-as-anthem and half bizarre, zippy new wave outer-space
transmission, one of the weirdest and coolest earworms around. Even if
it hadn’t played a historically documented and practical part in actually bringing down a 16-year dictatorship, it’d be worthy of inclusion here.
Mexico City, 1990: Massacre 68, “Sistema Podrido”
Named for those murdered in 1968 while peacefully protesting the repressive Díaz Ordaz government (as part of the Mexican Dirty War),
Massacre 68 were fairly straightforward thrashers with lyrics bluntly
critical of the government corruption and state violence surrounding
them. In 1988, a rigged election declared
the Institutional Revolutionary Party the new ruling party, though with
phenomenally low voter turnout due to a “crashed” system—a cover that
was later revealed to have been the result of corruption and burned
ballots. Massacre 68 directly critiqued this election in “Sistema
Podrido” (“Rotten System”), off their first LP, 1990’s No Estamos Conformes.
These are perhaps the most ripping solos committed to a record about
horrendously corrupt voter fraud. But stateside listeners didn’t get hip
to Massacre 68 until L.A. label Huarache Records re-released their
material in the early 2000s, right around the time documents were
finally revealed detailing the Mexican government’s role in both the ’68
murders and the ’88 election fraud.
