It's been a while since I've been motivated to write anything that wasn't "I play on this release, please buy it"
When three members of The Exploding Hearts lost their lives
when their van crashed driving home from a show in July 2003 many of my peers
could relate. We’d all been there; long drives late at night, desperate to get
home to our own beds, going back to work on two hours sleep after returning
from tour, pushing ourselves to physical limits.
With the news of the fire at Ghost Ship in Oakland and the –
at time of writing – death of 36 people in the space there is not one of my
friends, be they producer or consumer of culture, that doesn’t understand the
tragedy that’s occurred and hasn’t recast their own personal involvement in DIY
culture with new endless “what if…” and “it could have been any of us”.
It could have been any of us.
We’ve all been at the dangerously overcrowded post-fest show
in the local DIY space, unable to even go to the bathroom, suffering varying
degrees of anxiety attacks in our hard won inches of space, we’ve all been to a
venue that was a concrete underground bunker with one wooden staircase to
enter, those of us in bands have all loaded gear up the rusty fire escape – the
only way in or out – into the third floor apartment over the bike repair store,
and those of us not in bands have all been to that space, carefully edging our
way past smokers in Discharge shirts hanging out on that one rusty fire escape
we all have to use.
It could have been any of us.
But it wasn’t and let’s not take that away from the members
of our community that lost their lives in the tragedy last weekend in Oakland.
I’ve talked about this before, but as I get older my
interests in music and culture rarely lie strictly within genre lines anymore,
they lie within the methods we create, perform, reproduce, or consume culture.
My interests over the last few years have taken a sharp turn towards the
spatial, an aspect of culture I was always involved in, but went by largely
unnoticed or uncommented to me. It was a natural progression; how else do I
explain my continued interest in how culture is produced, whilst being
frequently disappointed with many of the cultural products that are produced?
How do I find ways to understand the necessity of punk when most punk means
little to me now? How do I frame the politics of punk when they’re barely
present in lyric sheets, when bands are regularly being called out, and when
the digital era makes the means of production and distribution something that
everyone does regardless of intent? Is there even any point in framing a
politics of punk in 2016?
To me the politics of punk that are consistent are the
politics of space, the politics of producing space, the politics of producing
culture within our spaces. These politics are not new and they are definitely
not exclusive to punk, they’re a facet of all cultures that are outside the
field of large-scale production, from Sound Systems that have their roots in
Jamaica in the 1950s, to late 80s UK Acid House culture, to the huge network of
squats and autonomous venues of Europe, to the warehouse scene of the Bay Area
and much more beyond these examples. Culture requires space, culture modifies
the space it is created within, space modifies how culture is created and
consumed, how culture is shared and participated.
So frankly, I don’t give a fuck if you don’t like the music
that was playing at Ghost Ship on December 2nd 2016, it’s not relevant;
these people were doing the same shit we do. They were regulars in our world too;
in 2016 there is significant overlap between cultural fields, that strict
separation is long gone. These are our people, our community, our politics, our
strategies, our tactics.
In times when cities promote competition and economic
entrepreneurship, and make decisions based on cost-benefit analysis and not
social need, when gentrification means barely anyone can afford to live in
cities, when development means there is a rental crisis, and our spaces to do anything beyond drink expensive
cocktails, buy refurbished driftwood coffee tables, or line up to buy artisanal
bread at the farmer’s market are gone how we create and experience culture
matters. How we work towards collaboration over competition, how we work
towards collective interests and not towards reinforcing the same atomized
individual experiences, how we pursue politics that don’t commodify individual
identities, these all matter. How we produce knowledge and culture matters. How
we promote alternative economic and social practices matters.
What is happening in Oakland is a tragedy on multiple
levels, this isn’t kids dying at a rave, this is not carefree hedonistic
millennials perpetually in search of the next high-risk, low responsibility
thrill.
This is one hundred fucking percent not that.
