Great photos. It's so appropriate that they come out swinging with Alice Bag - the Bags were just the best.
I must have seen 50 shows at the Hong Kong - not so many at Madame Wongs, but I did see the 1st B52's LA show there (B52's would be Wongs prototypical band - more "new wave" than punk).
But EVERYBODY who was real played at the HK. You would get these fantastic lineups, like the Germs, Bags, Fear and Crowd all on the same bill. Early on, the GoGo's were more aligned with pure punk than pop, and so they played at the HK instead of MW's.
Won't get into everybody I saw at the HK (which would be, you know, everybody) but I did see Lydia Lunch and James White there - both from New York.
There's a video of a Dead Kennedys show at Mabuhay Gardens and at the end the owner or someone working for venue gets up on stage and, exasperated, tells people to go home even though the crowd is still wired.
X was my one of my dad's favorites growing up in LA, and I got to see them a couple years ago at The Fillmore with him and my brothers. Was a very good time, glad they're still out touring here and there.
I stupidly sold all my good albums in the late 90s in a final move to digital. A few years later my uncle gave me his best, and I was smart enough to keep them. So I have original Sgt. Pepper's and Dark Side of the Moon, etc.
Absolutely. I'm always a bit anxious because I haven't digitized most of my records (i.e. made backups of the music at least) but I can't imagine getting rid of the physical objects even once I have. It was such a huge part of my experience growing up. Luckily today most new records also come with free download codes so you get both at once!
the punks were certainly the most health-toxic sub-culture in post-hippy California.. definitely early pain-killer abusers, plus glue or extreme alcohol, etc. not uncommon to hear of deaths, treachery or jail.. SF Fab-Mab ruler Dirk was later found to be sexually using adolescents pretty regularly .. lead singer of Fang on America's Most Wanted national TV for killing a girl over heroin, things like that .. freedom has a price ! and if the songs regularly invoke violence and madness, guess what, it actually results in violence and madness.. who would have guessed
You might enjoy the positive messages purveyed by bands like Operation Ivy.
Edit: Freeze Up and Artificial Life are two tracks from the late 80s containing very prescient and IMO insightful commentary re: man, society, and technology that many on HN could probably appreciate.
It was really hard to resist just spamming the lyrics here but hopefully my description will resonate enough that some readers will check it out. They have something to say and get right to the point. It’s the complete opposite of vacuous.
I know right? I feel like Greg Graffin, Henry Rollins and some of the other guys from that Era of Cali-Punk made some pretty great points in between all the screaming and yelling.
I don't remember punk lyrics focusing on drugs and violence any more than mainstream rock did. (Which, admittedly, was also blamed for those things.) Which bands/songs are you thinking of? I'm assuming you have some in mind, and aren't just parroting stereotypes?
Also, are you sure you've got the cause-and-effect right way 'round? Delinquents do seem to like punk, but that doesn't mean that punk made them delinquent.
The way I read his comment, the music "invokes" the violence via live shows. If you've ever been to a punk show, there's a lot of violence going on in the audience/pit. I don't think it's a crazy leap to say that people who enjoy beating the crap out of each other in a sweaty pit might be disproportionately inclined towards beating people up outside that pit.
Huh, you think that's it? They're actually saying "mosh pits make you a violent druggie"?
That's...actually even sillier, honestly. I fuckin' loved a good mosh when I was a teen, and I was a kid who never, ever started a fight, and froze up when someone started one with me. I know the pit looks like a brawl, but at every show I went to it was more like a contact sport with no points where everyone wins. If someone fell down, everyone who saw it gathered to help them up and keep folks from tripping until they were back on their feet.
One time a flailing dude caught me in the face with an elbow so hard I staggered and saw stars. He immediately stopped, grabbed my shoulders, and yelled, "dude, are you okay?" He waited for me to nod before he smiled and went back to doing his thing. It was all good.
I know there's guys out there who jump in the pit throwing fists. I can't speak for every scene, but where I come from those guys got shoved out of the pit until they got the point. It's not about winning.
I read the post to suggest correlation, not causation.
To your other points, a close friend of mine loved to mosh as a younger man too, and at his last warped tour he tripped and fell. Unlike the shows you described, everyone who saw it kept jumping and smashing into each other for minutes while his companions struggled to get him to his feet. His head was beaten into the ground repeatedly by people's feet, fracturing his skull.
He's still physically scarred and cognitively not the same and years later it seems like that will linger forever. I wanted to share this counterpoint to your post because I think there is validity to your perspective but it is not fully reflective of reality.
Usual punk or metal mosh is full of adrenaline and sometimes too many uncoordinated drunk people, who can be dangerous, but I never experienced people intentionally hurting others.
I was shocked - shocked, I tell you! - to find out that people who wear razor blades on necklaces, get drunk, do front flips onto each other, scream about authority figures, and throw fists while they dance, might have attracted some anti-social people.
yes! I dont think many of these other "outraged" commentators have been sucker-punched or tripped hard at a Black Flag show !! its a complicated thing here, psychological mirror and projection (in the psycho-analytic sense), reinforcement in art, social peer pressures, set and setting, permission by default, enabling behaviors .. many factors.
For anyone who lives freedom (and survives it), it is all the more important to see clearly what is happening in the chains of cause-and-effect, dont you think? instead of romanticizing things, clinging to pure outrage or self-righteous statements, attacking a messenger, etc..
But if it is 'rap music' violence, madness, drug use, rape, etc. are fine, because if you say otherwise you are racist. Maybe it is racist to not hold all human beings to the same standard of decency?
Cool strawman mate. There's plenty of people who call out rap's shortcomings. Some of them are black. You can do it without being called a racist, I swear.
I don't know why people are calling you a racist, but I have some theories...
The key difference is that the Punk subculture sprung up around the music, where much of the 'rap music' was reflective (exaggerated and glamorized) of an existing situation and subculture. I think you can still argue that violent rap music incites or inspires crime though. I think you can generally criticize effects, but you skirt the line with racism when you start projecting that too broadly.
I don't see the difference. Rap music seems to go hand in hand with the subculture. If it wasn't glamorized, I doubt it'd exist, at least to the degree it does. Same with punk. If the punk lifestyle was not glamorized through the music, then the punk subculture would not exist.
My point is that it is racist to not hold all people to the same moral standard, because in effect we are saying those we do not hold accountable are not capable.
Hip hop is different than rap. Rap as a genre tends to glorify the violence, etc. Hip hop tends to glorify a particular culture. Of the latter I am a fan. Of the former, not very much, mostly because it has become pretty boring and repetitive and has lost the creativity, clever wordplay and fun rhythm. Instead, it just substitutes sex, drugs and violence to make up for lack of substance, and sells out the African American community for the entertainment of white rich kids.
That being said, a few of the newer rappers do have some poetic things to say.
Not that I think this is an interesting point to argue (and I'm not sure exactly what you're getting at) but yea every slave owner was bad because we're categorizing them based on the bad act: owning slaves. Not every German was a soldier let a lone a Nazi during WWII.
I think there's an Axiom of Choice joke in there somewhere.
I used to listen to loads of rap, gangsta rap and hip hop. The less it glorified the gang life the better it tended to be. I think the gang life glorification is just the lazy way of making content, like how people cuss when they don't have anything significant to say.
Please don't bring up the most irritating detail you encountered in an article. Discussions here are supposed to be driven by curiosity, and that's not curiosity. This is covered by the site guideline: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
This is especially important when there aren't any comments yet, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions.
You mean the phrase "intersection of Southeast Asian refugee identities and punk music"?
Are you seriously so angry about feminism that just looking at a word that resembles a word you associate with feminism makes you dismiss a whole article?
N.B. it has some confusing passages to people that doesn't know L.A. very well. e.g. "Chinese immigrants had started moving to suburban enclaves like the San Gabriel Valley, bypassing Chinatown and its businesses completely" and then proceed to tell an anecdote from a restaurant in the very heart of downtown chinatown.
But that was the point of the passage -- downtown Chinatown restaurants started renting out to punk concerts because the suburban migration was depriving them of customers.
