“Freakin’ Out”: Remaking Masculinity through Punk Rock in Detroit

Abstract

Detroit, as a birthplace for some of the earliest forms of punk rock, had a unique set of political and social conditions that made it ripe for the negotiation of race, sexuality, and gender within punk. One band of four Black brothers named “Death” navigated the space between their parent community and the world of what was perceived as “white” music. By performing a refusal to enact any one sense of “self,” Death performed a transgression, which was key to their own straightforward aesthetic. This transgression ostracized them from white and Black communities alike. Death forces us to reexamine the white-dominated narrative of punk music, which was thoroughly influenced by Black cultural modes from the outset. Early white punk bands MC5 and the Stooges had ready access to Black music and political activity; they performed new masculine identities based on an admiration for Black culture, as well as Black stereotypes. Paradoxically, as young Black men playing an early form of punk music, Death was unable to break into the world of white rock and was generally misunderstood in their local Black music community. Rather than concern themselves with an aesthetic style, Death pushed boundaries through their imaginative musical and political visions.

Keywords:

• punk rock music
• Death
• Detroit
• Black masculinity
• whiteness
• cultural appropriation
• MC5
• Iggy Pop
• Stooges

Notes

1. This essay originated as a Master's thesis in conclusion of my degree from the Women's and Gender History program at Sarah Lawrence College. Sarah Lawrence's Women's History Month Conference “The Message Is In the Music: Hip Hop Feminism, Riot Grrrl, Latina Music & More” (in 2010) prompted me to begin this inquiry of Detroit punk – that is, of course, in conjunction with seeing Death live later that year. “Freakin’ Out” is influenced and informed by Mimi Thi Nguyen's work on punk and race (including her plenary presentation at said conference), as well as that of the many punks and scholars of color mentioned herein. Many thanks are in order: first to Women & Performance editors Beth Stinson and Fiona Ngô for their tireless support and feedback throughout the many rewrites of this essay. As well, to Mimi Thi Nguyen and Maxwell Tremblay for their thoughtful and essential comments and edits. Thanks too to Drs. Lyde Sizer and Priscilla Murolo for their initial prodding and support during the very first iterations of “Freakin’ Out.” I worked through many of these concepts on a ground level with For the Birds Feminist Collective, and perhaps even more so through my collaborations with Daniela Capistrano and the People of Color Zine Project; I am humbled and gracious to have had the pleasure of working with you all. Thank you.

2. Tate (2011, 212–16); I capitalize “Black” to indicate a respect for Black nationalism versus the lower-case “white” as merely a descriptor.

3. I use the terms “punk” and “punk rock” loosely to discuss low-fidelity, scrappy rock bands from the early-mid 1970s, specifically those which directly influenced or interacted with the first generation of self-proclaimed punk musicians. At this time, “punk” was more of a sensibility rather than a stable genre. Death originally formed as “Rock Fire Funk Express” in 1970, though they did not play rock music until after seeing the Stooges live in 1973; see “Death: An interview with the Hackney brothers,” Retrophobic.com. For more information on the inception of punk rock in New York and Detroit see McNeil and McCain (1996).

4. Duncombe and Tremblay (2011, 44–5).

5. Jenifer (2011, 209).

6. See Mallott and Peña (2004); Kristiansen et al. (2010); and Traber (2007).

7. The Ramones (a band from New York that popularized the first mainstream cultural images of punk rock around 1977) were influenced by rock’n’roll, including Black artists like Jimi Hendrix and Chuck Berry. See Ramone (2000, 27); and McNeil and McCain (1996, 206). Sociologists Curry Mallott and Milagros Peña make this influence of Black musicians on punk music visible in their study Punk Rockers’ Revolution: A Pedagogy of Race, Class, and Gender, stating: “In white middle- and working-class communities, punk rock was… largely influenced by African American rock and roll … Punk in this light, served in part to revitalize ‘lost legions of past popular music,’” see Mallott and Peña (2004, 50). Similarly, Greil Marcus made this connection in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century; Duncombe and Tremblay's White Riot collection is centered on teasing out these and many other aspects of race in the punk continuum.

8. While women of all races have crucially contributed to the punk spectrum, I will only be discussing men in punk for the purposes of this essay.

9. “Death: An interview,” Retrophobic. In this interview David is listed at age 12, Dannis at age 10, and Bobby age 8 on February 9, 1964.

10. Ibid.

11. Many punk historical narratives focus on white men, but I will keep the list relatively short: Marcus (1989); Beeber, though his is specifically a study of the Jewish roots of punk (2006); Traber (2007); and Kristiansen et al. (2010).

12. Ruiz and DuBois (2000, xv).

13. I use the word “scramble” because although many historians have noticed a “masculinity crisis” concerning American men, I concur with cultural historian Gail Bederman, who asserts that, “… to imply that masculinity was in crisis suggests that manhood is a transhistorical category or fixed essence… rather than an ideological construct which is constantly being remade.” The term “scramble,” on the other hand, implies an intentional, albeit frantic, effort to create and recreate masculinity over time. See Bederman (1995, 11).

14. In Manliness and Civilization, Gail Bederman explains: “as white middle-class men actively worked to reinforce male power, their race became a factor which was crucial to their gender” (1995, 5). White middle-class men harnessed their supposed civility, which stemmed from the Victorian era, as well as the perceived “primitiveness” of men of color and the working class. It is a similar obsession with the primitive, and the working class, that informed much of the recreation of punk masculinity in the early 1970s.

15. I use the terms “scene” and “subculture” interchangeably. There has been some significant debate about these words: “We use the term ‘scene’… rather than ‘subculture’ because the latter term presumes that a society has one commonly shared culture from which the subculture is deviant,” write Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson in Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Both “scene” and “subculture” imply a shared community of art and culture-makers, as well as their dress, music, and a sense of collective identity. For further explanation, see Bennett and Peterson (2004).

16. Historian Isabel Wilkerson discusses the effect of the Great Migration on American music in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2011, 529); Wilkerson defines the Great Migration as having occurred from around 1910 to around 1970 (2011, 9–10).

17. McNeil and McCain (1996, 35–6); and, see Thompson (2011).

18. McNeil and McCain, 36–7.

19. For a somewhat more in-depth description of the dark side of Warhol's Factory and the Max's Kansas City scene, see McNeil and McCain (1996, 14–17).

20. Rather than explicitly referring to political issues the way that Death did, Iggy Pop used references to cultural artifacts like the Atom bomb and napalm to illustrate his own inner turmoil.

21. “Death: An interview,” Retrophobic.

22. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself was killed in 1968 while participating in a strike of Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee; Georgakas and Surkin (1998, ix).

23. Sugrue (2006, 259). The New York Times reported on the subject, stating that the riots were sparked by the arrest of a burglary suspect; see Flint (1967); Associated Press (wire reports) 1967.

24. United Press International (UPI) (1967).

25. Ibid.; Flint (1967).

26. Associated Press (1967).

27. Thompson (2010).

28. Tate (2011, 216).

29. McNeil and McCain (1996, 35–6).

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., 35.

32. Marcus (2004, 31–2).

33. Ibid.

34. Waksman (2011, 30–6).

35. Hale (2002, 127–35).

36. McNeil and McCain (1996, 45).

37. Ibid., 46.

38. Hale (2002, 142).

39. Mailer (2008, 142).

40. Waksman (2011, 31).

41. McNeil and McCain (1996, 36–7).

42. Ibid., 37.

43. This remains a prevailing theme in punk to this day. As Mimi Nguyen wrote in 1998: “Take the way in which travel gets talked about in punk… [it] is almost always about leisure, self-discovery, ‘freedom,’ and rarely ever about immigration, refugee movement, or exile. It's never about how some people – white, heterosexual, middle-class, male – often travel in more comfort than others –nonwhite, queer, poor, female).” Nguyen (2010).

44. Strongman (2007, 33).

45. McNeil and McCain (1996, 37).

46. Ibid., 37–8.

47. In Please Kill Me, Pop describes the music of Velvet Underground (a New York band he admired) as “so cheap” and “yet so good,” solidifying the D.I.Y. and low-fidelity sounds that would pave the way for punk rock. McNeil and McCain (1996, 48–49).

48. See Miles (2009).

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Bobby Hackney, e-mail message to author, April 15, 2011.

52. Thompson (2010).

53. Glickman (2010, 72).

54. Thompson (2010).

55. Alexander (2006, 74, 77).

56. Ibid., 75–7.

57. Jenifer (2011, 212).

58. Ibid.

59. “Death,” Retrophobic; Death, … For the Whole World to See.

60. “Death,” Retrophobic; Thompson (2010). Don Davis has no relationship to Clive Davis. A “45” is a 7-inch vinyl record single, and is nicknamed as such due to the speed at which the record plays.

61. West (1999, 208).

62. Holland (2000, 2).

63. All tracks listed in this article are from Death's first official release, … For the Whole World to See. Any of Death's lyrics or song titles that have been reprinted in this article are by David and Bobby Hackney, copyright 1975, Elect Music Publishing, BMI. Lyrics reprinted courtesy of Death and Drag City Inc.

64. Kimmel (2006, 174–6).

65. “Death: An interview,” Retrophobic.

66. Nguyen (2010).

67. While punk has proliferated to a small extent in the academy since Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), recent publications from 2011 onward include Duncombe and Tremblay's White Riot (2011), as well as Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower edited by Zack Furness (2012), and this special issue of Women & Performance, entitled “Punk Anteriors” (2012).

68. Glickman (2010, 74).