Music against Fascism: DIY Versus the Right Wing Safety Squad

ABSTRACT

Five days after the Ghost Ship fire killed 36 people in Oakland, CA, a group of 4-Chan users calling themselves the Right Wing Safety Squad began a campaign to shut down similar do-it-yourself venues that they saw as “hotbeds of liberal radicalism and degeneracy.” This essay argues that these venues were targeted not simply because of their politics but because the embodied practices of music-making that occur there—performing, dancing, singing along, applauding, and having fun—have the potential to create community across perceived differences. These kinds of communal connections are a threat to alt-right ideologies that leverage difference to keep people frightened of one another. Taking cues from cultural rhetorics, I embrace my identity as an old scene kid in order to share my relationship with underground music scenes, tell the story of the alt-right’s campaign, and discuss the significant role music-making practices play in creating underground communities

KEYWORDS:

• Alt-right
• cultural rhetorics
• do-it-yourself
• embodiment
• music

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kyle Allen, Sebastian Ivy, and Amber Lee for their help in the initial stages of this project; Caddie Alford, Alana Hatley, and Trevor Meyer for their feedback in the middle stages; and Jacqueline Rhodes and the two anonymous reviewers for their input in the final stages. This article would not have been possible without all of their contributions.

Notes

¹ I take a narrative approach throughout this essay, and my language tends to be casual and occasionally vulgar. This is a rhetorical choice based largely on work in cultural rhetorics that is intended to demonstrate something of my situatedness in do it yourself music culture, my background in rhetoric, and my embodied existence. I discuss this stylistic choice and its implications with more depth in the next section of the essay.

² In true white supremacist fashion, the Right Wing Safety Squad abbreviates their name as SS after the Nazi paramilitary organization. I am not going to do that here. Instead, I refer to the group as the Right Wing Safety Squad, the Safety Squad, or simply as alt-right fucks.

³ In this essay, I refer to the Right Wing Safety Squad as being composed of members of the alt-right, a term I discuss in more detail in the third section of this essay. However, as Stephanie L. Hartzell has noted, the term alt-right can potentially obfuscate the white supremacy at the core of the movement and may inadvertently help to normalize the group and their racist positions (“Alt-White”). Still, I think it is important in this analysis to acknowledge the difference between the Right Wing Safety Squad and traditional skinheads and neo-Nazis. For this reason, I think the term alt-right is most appropriate, though still problematic.

⁴ I am happy to report that shortly after this conversation with Kyle, the Flux Capacitor, in association with the Pikes Peak Library District, was able to reopen in a new location, though the operations seem to have changed in significant ways (Murphy). Similarly, both Rhinoceropolis and Glob were granted permission to re-open in 2019 after extensive remodeling to bring the spaces up to code (Harris).

⁵ While I think this claim is fairly axiomatic, those interested in the alt-right as a political force should read Kathleen Belew’s Bringing the War Home, Andrew Marantz’s Anti-Social, and David Neiwert’s Alt-America.

⁶ I use the phrase scene kid to refer to someone involved in their local music scene regardless of their music taste, fashion choices, or subcultural milieu; however, the term also refers to a specific subcultural esthetic popular in the early 2000s marked by chopped hair, skinny jeans, and bullet belts. I was most involved in my local music scene at this time, so I often conflate the two meanings of this term.

⁷ I use the term DIY or do it yourself to refer to the punk ethic of subverting the mainstream music industry by having bands and other people involved in the scene control the entire means of creating, producing, and distributing music. For me, the DIY ethic, while rooted in punk rock, is not exclusive to that genre or scene. Still, I want to separate this ethic from the commercial crafting ethos of creating household objects and decorations at home rather than buying them from a store—though I admire that ethos as well and in many cases there are overlaps between the two ways of thinking and being.

⁸ The idea of constellating is also prominent in the work of Byron Hawk, who argues for pedagogies that interweave students’ local experiences with broader spaces, issues, and conversations (Hawk, “Counter” 234–58). He argues against rigid and predictable pedagogies that predetermine relations and “pre-map” student thinking; instead, he advocates for pedagogies that create conditions of possibility for students to constellate themselves and map their own relations. Hawk provides two examples of such pedagogies in the work of Paul Kameen and Gregory Ulmer, both of whose pedagogies rely heavily on storytelling as a method of connecting students personal experiences to larger ecologies.

⁹ The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, a database of personal stories about literacy, is an excellent example in our field of the ways in which a collection of personal stories representing a diverse array of peoples, cultures, and time periods can create unique constellations that allow researchers to understand a topic in rich, diverse, and contextualized ways (Harker and McCorkle).

¹⁰ I also want to note that the style of this piece takes a lot of inspiration from the second chapter of Adam Banks’s Digital Griots, “Mix: Roles, Relationships, and Rhetorical Strategies in Community Engagement” and Jenny Rice‘s book Awful Archives.

¹¹ It is worth noting that while Bratta and Powell advocate for decolonial practices in cultural rhetorics scholarship, The Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab explicitly states that such practices are not a requirement. As the collective explains in their article, they are not creating a list of necessary characteristics for cultural rhetorics scholarship; instead, they are “visibilizing options and making those options available for others to use” (Act I, Scene 3).

¹² I use the acronym BIPOC to refer to Black, Indigenous and People of Color because it highlights how violence against Black and Indigenous people is foundational to the United States (Grady).

¹³ The National Front is a contemporary UK fascist party founded in 1967. Their youth outreach programs began in the late 1970s and helped to spread white supremacist skinhead music worldwide; however, the National Front has never won a seat in the British House of Commons or a significant local election, which puts into question the effectiveness of their programs.

¹⁴ Sketchy in this context refers to situations that are not completely legitimate and may be unsafe.

¹⁵ At the time of writing, Max Harris has been acquitted of all 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter. The judge declared a mistrial for Derick Almena due to a deadlocked jury; Almena was then released on bail due to COVID-19 (Guerrero).

¹⁶ Messages on 4Chan disappear shortly after publication, but much of this original discussion can still be read on the sister site 4plebs, which archives 4Chan content. I link to this archived discussion in the Works Cited (4plebs); however, much of it is difficult to read. For those interested in an overview of the discussion, I suggest Gabrielle Canon’s Vice article.

¹⁷ The word normie has been embraced by the alt-right as a condescending way to refer to those within mainstream culture, which is why I use it here; however, the word has a much richer history than many might expect with early instances being found in disabled communities and recovery communities (Merriam-Webster).

¹⁸ Djunah opened for Screaming Females at The Beat Kitchen that night.