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DragKing is a group of people who make music together. Like many groups of people who get together to work on a common project, we argue about politics, philosophy, and idealism. We also try to act on our ideals. This section of our web site hopes to reflect that aspect of DragKing and show how our ideas have become part of our music. My name is Sluggo and I have tried to use these lines of HTML code to put DragKing, the band, into context. (Of course all this is mostly my own opinion, not the collective opinion of the band, but the former and the latter intersect frequently.)
All this contextualization is of course multi-layered. It moves from the general to the specific and from the theoretical to the practical. It involves questions like, what is art?, how do we tell good art from bad?, what is the best role for artists in a society based on injustice and oppression?, can art and/or artists survive in a capitalist society without being bought and sold?, is Punk a way out or a deadend?, and what can a punk band really do?
By way of an introduction let me offer four documents. After the release of Kill Yr Boss, Lavon Washington left for San Francisco(where he formed Kill) leaving DragKing without a drummer, unable (or just unwilling) to play live, and dependent on 'zine reviews and brief mentions in the Lumpen Times to publicize our debut CD. The first two of these documents date from that period, the summer of 1995.
The first is an interview which Kangr Kulpsky conducted with DragKing for the now defunct Nice Slacks. It was never published. However, it does a good job of explaining DragKing's politics, especially the band's ambivalence towards the possibilty of a punk band effecting meaningful political action. It's available here.
The second is a review of DragKing's Kill Yr Boss CD by Hob Pithers from the Journal of Popular Music(vol.XXI #8, 10/95). It deals as much with DragKing's music as it does with the history of the Paris Commune of 1871. It's available here.
The third document is an article from our friends at Arm the Spirit, the Toronto based autonomist/anti-imperialist information collective. It's a brief description of the German initiative, Kunst und Kampf (Art & Struggle), which was begun in the 1980s and tried to implement resistance culture as part of the political struggle.
The fourth document is an interview with Daraka from the Adjusters. Daraka is a committed political activist with the Young Democratic Socialists, a youth section of the Democratic Socialists of America, who has written for top-notch publications like Dissent. He has a lot to say about music and it's place in the political struggle. Here's some of it.
 Joseph Bueys, created political activism as art |
 |
 James Baldwin, always an inspiration, see our Destroy Amerikkka single |
Assumptions are dangerous things. To assume means to accept an idea without examining how true it is. Assumptions preclude a lot of fruitful experimentation. Many of our contemporaries who are actively making art shun any attempt to make an explicit political point as a crass degradation of their art. Art is for art's sake, they argue, not for making a point about the world we live in, and certainly not about trying to change it. Such artists assume that we cannot change the world we live in. They assume that we must accept as a given a society that rewards selfishness and greed. It is popular these days to be cynical. It is popular to write off our best impulses as naive and unrealistic. It is popular these days to disregard any solidarity with our fellow human beings and instead to pursue material success and individual success.
Such artists also assume a definition of art. But does anyone know what art is? Back in 1896 ole' Leo Tolstoy could pronounce art to be the transmission of an emotion felt by the artist to her audience. But that was 100 years ago and we all know better than to try to define art nowadays. In the fall of 1997 the N.Y. Times surveyed seventeen art world superstars and they all concurred. The philosopher Arthur Danto of the Nation said, "You can't say something's art or not art anymore. That's all finished". And Peter Hoekstra, the Republican congressman from Michigan who has helped lead the crusade to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, said, "Art is whatever people want to perceive it to be".
In the absence of any aesthetic guidelines, the measure of an artwork's quality is it's price tag. This is no surprise considering that we live in a capitalist society in which almost everything is commodified, bought and sold(the land, water, food, shelter, healthcare, childcare, our labor, our ideas, our time, broadcast frequencies, animals and even human beings). "Good art" therefore sells for lots of money, while "bad art" is given away for free. Sometimes a clever art dealer discovers "good art" being given away for free, perhaps in some distant "primitive" country, or by "naive" artists living at the periphery of our own society. Such a clever art dealer can make a lot of money by buying low and selling high on the art market.
To sell one's art at a high price, or in the case of the sucessful musician, to sell a large quantity of it at a standard price(to have a gold or platinum record), is to succeed. This success is a validation of one's art(it is expensive, therefore it is valued, or "good"), but also a validation of oneself. If you can make money at it must be worthwhile. So the myth of the artistic genius folds right into our economic system. A few people receive public confirmation of their most egotistical fantasies, they are "important" and rich artists, while most get nothing. The basis of this system is of course the willingness of everyone to buy into it, hoping that he or she will be the exception, the one to "make it", to receive some confirmation that he or she is important.
Even though punk tried to explode the myth of the genius rock star, that myth has survived. Everyone is familiar with the Horatio Alger stories of struggling working-class musicians who transform themselves into rich and important stars. Elvis, the Beatles, and even Punks like the Sex Pistols, and the Clash are examples of this. It is difficult to understand just how much of an exception these people really are, products of a specific time and place. Many musicans still hope that somehow they will be picked from the crowd and finally recognized and rewarded. Sometimes this hope can't even be acknowledged. But it's still there. Rock musicians just like other artists can easily end up selling themselves. Joe Carducci in his famous book, Rock & The Pop Narcotic, posits that this "ulterior" motivation "perverts its players' aesthetic impulse" and "compromises its attempts at art and so yields exploitation and finally, cynicism". This is of course not an absolute. We can judge some artwork to be more commercially motivated and some to be less. But then again, Carducci warns that this alone can not be our criteria for judging art, particularly rock music(For him the criteria has to be, "Does this Rock?"). We all have a criteria, conscious or not, for evaluating art and music, since we are always choosing some over others.
Despite much internal dissention, DragKing is still actively involved in trying to organize sounds which people will choose to listen to, and maybe even find meaning in. And this constitutes our primary activity, constructing sounds for other people to listen to. We try not to make music just to make ourselves feel important, (and we certainly aren't trying to make any money!) although we certainly find meaning in the noises we make. I think (And here I am probably speaking largely for myself) all music has a message, embedded in it's rhythms, textures, sounds, lyrics,etc. Often people can find their own meanings in what they hear. Listeners can reinterpret lyrics, reappropriate messages, and reinvent meanings. But if we want our audience to understand what we create in our own terms we have to prevent our work from becoming a commodity. We have to take responsibility for the messages intentionally in our work. But we also have to take responsibility for how our audience encounters our work. Is it a product to be sold and bought? Is it something different?
Different artists have tried to find solutions to the problem of making art in a capitalist society. Joseph Beuys, the central figure of post-WWII German art, started out making drawings to represent his ideas, but after being influenced by the ideas of the composer John Cage, he joined the Fluxus movement. He began to explore performance art. In one work he wrapped himself in thick rolls of felt and was locked in a glass room with wild wolves. He expanded his concept of art to break down the barriers between art and life. He tried to bring the intentionality of his artwork to the way he lived his life. He conceived of a "social sculpture" in which everyone was an artist. In 1967 he founded the German Student Party, and later helped to found the Green Party. His political activism became a kind of performance art. He once explained that he did "not want to take art into politics, but transform politics into art"(in Kandidat fuer die naechste Bundestagswahl Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger, 1976). I think that's a very interesting challenge, to transform political action into an artisitic performance. Within the context of Punk that becomes an even bigger challenge, but still seems possible(the punk percussion protests against apartheid organized by Positive Force at the South African Embassy in D.C. in the1980's come to mind as a possible prototype). The difficulty is in creating art which is not merely political propaganda, not merely didactic, but is able to engage people, as more than an artifact which can be bought and sold like a CD or a painting. Successful artwork of this kind would suggest a reconsideration of how we live. It would also argue that changing the way we live is possible. It would oppose the compromises and cynicism which Joe Carducci saw in commercialized rock music.
I think performers and creaters of music communicate ideas to their listeners, whether they acknowledge it or not. At the risk of sounding like a nostalgic folkie, here's a quote from Woody Guthrie:
I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week
just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther
and the ones that poke fun at you even more
and the ones that make you think you've not got any sense at all.
But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that.
The radio waves and your movies and your juke boxes and your songbooks
are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.
-Woody Guthrie
from "Born to Win",1965
If we can assume that music is a way of communicating to other people, at least for the sake of argument, what then can it communicate? Can music represent resistance? Can a small punk band from Chicago use music as a means of resistance to white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, U.S. imperialism, and capitalism? Or do such messages, even anti-capitalist messages, become just another stylisitic trapping, another marketing tool? There is a large amount of writing about culture as resistance, and specifically about musicians who have tried to use their music to fight against injustice.
Despite incredible odds people continue to come together to build their own alternatives. These tiny pockets of resistance, to use sub-Commandante Marcos' phrase, keep cropping up here,
here and
there. Sometimes that resistance sounds like music.
In the 1960's and 1970's many African American musicians used their music to express a new consciousness among African Americans. As James Brown put it, "Say it loud, I'm Black and I'm proud". Here in Chicago, Black Jazz musicians formed the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians with it's slogan of "Great Black Music", which continues to organize concerts, train young musicians and raise consciousness today. Free Jazz was an expression of African Americans' desire to be free. Professor Milford Graves, the multi-instrumental percussionist and teacher who has played in the New York Art Quartet, the Albert Ayler Quintet, and with such artists as Sonny Sharock, Pharoah Sanders and Famadou Don Moye, explained it in Music magazine (email:garym@bway.net),
"Free music at that particular time[1964-5] was dealing with major change in this country. When you say it was mostly Black Americans that were playing free music, it was because of this great desire for freedom. That's what was coming out in the music. It was tearing down all those structures. You would almost reject anything that came from a racist, oppressive element in this country. And we were playing for all those big revolutionary affairs uptown, rallies for all those political prisoners and everything else. At Rockland Palace one time we played for 15,000 people. Pharoah used to be there. Sun Ra would come up there - and when he would play, political people, revolutionaries would be up there. Black music has been one of the most organizing forces for Black people in this country, and people get nervous - and this is what happened to so-called Free Black Jazz."
The great Jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp said in 1968, "My alto is like the Viet Cong's machine gun". He saw his music as an act of solidarity with the Vietnamese people's struggle against U.S. Imperialism in far off Asia as well as representing the struggle against white supremacy right here in the United States.
For the descendents of the "white" settlers of the United States, popular music first became an explicitly political force in the 1930's when members of the Communist Party formed the Almanac Singers to perform the folk songs which expressed their leftist populism. And this never would have happened if not for Woody Guthrie. Guthrie had become politicized as he travelled around California by boxcar during the Great Depression. Rich and powerful agricultural land owners had hired their own armies, with the tacit approval of the local police, to keep the Okies and Mexican farm workers from organizing. Guthrie wrote his "Dust Bowl Ballads" about the people he met traveling.
Guthrie made a conscious decision to write songs which reflected his political views. He took the Carter Family's upbeat Baptist hymn, "This World Is Not My Home", which he felt advocated passivity in this world and hope for something better only in the next, with his own angry call to arms, "I Ain't Got No Home". Guthrie celebrated the release of the Communist political prisoner Tom Mooney, who had been jailed for almost twenty years, with the song, "Mr. Tom Mooney Is Free!" on his radio show on KFVD. The song ended with, "...and now let's free California too!". Woody Guthrie and other musician/activists travelled to migrant camps and places where workers were striking to support union organizing. He could write songs on the spot, which were then sung on picket lines by striking workers.
Based on Guthrie's success, folk music was used to build movements and publicize progressive causes by the Almanac Singers, Alan Lomax, Moe Asch, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Leadbelly, Aunt Molly Jackson, Irwin Silber, Pete Seeger and his group the Weavers (formed to bring this music to a wider audience). As the manifesto of their organization, People's Songs, stated, "The people are on the march and must have songs to sing". This tradition has reemerged from time to time.
In the late 1970's the Socialist Workers Party in Great Britian formed a potent alliance with early British Punk groups called "Rock Against Racism". Punks joined in the battle against the neo-facist National Front. Johnny Rotten is quoted saying, "The National Front put me on the cover of their magazine[Bulldog] and called me an albino nigger-excellent praise" in Beating Time: Riot n' Race n' Rock n' Roll by David Widgery. Paul Cook and Johnny Rotten and other less famous punks suffered knife attacks by National Front boys. Punks held huge concerts and demonstrations and forced British musicians at the time to chose sides, between the racist "Britain for the British" neo-facists and a open-ended multiculturalism.
Ice Cube has described Hip Hop as an inherently political music. He explains, "Four hundred years ago, when black slaves were brought to America, Africans who spoke the same language were separated from each other. What we're seeing today, with this insane campaign to intimidate rappers and rap music, is just another form of separating people that speak a common language. Chuck D of Public Enemy has called hip hop the black network we never had, and I believe it's true".
Music has been able to help activists build a culture of resistance, to reinforce pockets of resistance. There have been protest songs, from Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" to L7's "Wargasm", benefit concerts and propaganda. But some have also seen music not just as a means which can be used for political ends, but as the resistance itself. Youth subcultures, of which music is a central part, have been described by academics as systems of symbolic resistance. Everything from spiked hair styles to baggy pants have been described as "subversive". Such symbols of resistance have been celebrated in academia, perhaps because of the absence of authentic progressive movements among youth.
And therein lies the danger that we are settling for a set of symbols, in place of real resistance. The writer Greil Marcus has pointed out that, " A lot of the people in cultural studies these days kind of remind me of the FBI in the fifties: They find subversion everywhere". And, he might have added, especially in youth subcultures centered around music. There's a great paper by Chuck Kleinhans on the web called,
Cultural Appropriation and Subcultural Expression: The Dialectics of Cooptation and Resistance.
In Punk, Cultural Studies academics found the motherlode of this type of "resistance" and "subversion" . Punk was the great hope of academics like Dick Hebdige(who described it as "an oblique challenge to hegemony"). Simon Frith has written about how punk as a means to "undermine the...assumptions of transparency...to expose the subjective claims deeply embedded in all rock music". God is My Co-Pilot, the gay punk activists from New York threaten in their song, "We Signify", that they are "...co-opting rock, the language of sexism, to address gender identity on its own terms of complexity. We're here to instruct, not to distract. We won't take your attention without giving some back". Punk has been seen as the inheritor of Dada and other vangard art movements. Robert Christgau explains that Situationism's "penchant for deconstruction and provocation takes musical form with punk"(In his article, "Rah, Rah, Sis-Boom-Bah: The Secret Relationship between College Rock and the Communist Party", an excellent essay which appears in the book Microphone Fiends edited by Tricia Rose).
In light of all this, I think it is especially tempting for punk musicians to understand their creative work as political work. And here's the real danger: to neglect the less glamorous work of building and supporting movements in favoring of pushing their own careers, all the while believing that they are engaging in "symbolic resistance". This would ignore the fact that music has become a commodity. It would ignore the fact that the very symbols which early punks used to subvert the status quo have been commodified and sold back to the next generation as "pre-packaged rebellion". Tom Frank and his friends at The Baffler have written extensively about this. The argument that the symbols used in punk are somehow revolutionary, seems moot in light of the fact that these very symbols are so quickly reappropriated by the multinational corporations punk supposedly opposes. So if it's not spiked hair and torn shirts, just what is Punk? If DragKing is a punk band what does that mean?
For a discussion about what punk is let's continue over here, since I am running out of space on this page!
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