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NYC Punk As Fuck

on February 28, 2008

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Joey Ramone Cranks Deviance Theory

In 2017, in the 3rd edition of McGraw Hill Education’s textbook Experience Sociology edited by David Croteau and William Hoynes , I was invited to contribute an essay profiling my own engagement in deviant music subcultures that celebrate alienation and marginality, especially punk. The Ramones openly celebrated the Wart Hog , the Cretin , Pinhead, Outsider , and the Time Bomb promoting an ethic of inclusion they practiced in song, deed and spirit. Their music lamented the permanent psychic damage sustained from systematic social rejection and humiliation and made us laugh. So it was my great joy to put Joey Ramone in a college textbook, honoring him as a hero of generations of outcasts worldwide. I imagined him chuckling, “Yeah Donna, a real textbook case.” The study of deviance is a great way to teach students fundamental sociological concepts—norms, mores, sanctions. But for me it’s been sweet revenge. Early on, labeling theorists such as Howard Becke...

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Betty Bradley was born in Brooklyn in 1920 under the sign of Sagittarius. An American singer in the swing era of the 1940s, the starting point of her career was an appearance on the Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour in 1932, a talent factory that launched stars such as Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire. Her first professional appearance came in 1939 with Gray Gordon and His TicToc Orchestra. But that contract was quickly aborted. After making faces at the music during a performance, she was summarily fired. Dismissing Gray Gordon’s music as too corny for her taste she immediately went to work as the featured vocalist in the Bob Chester Orchestra, more in line with her jazz and swing ambitions. Over the next few years Miss Bradley was constantly touring, performing in nightclubs and dance halls like New York's Latin Quarter, the Chicago Theater and the Earle in Philadelphia. Receiving positive reviews from relevant magazines such as Billboard, once in Hollywood she sat poolsi...

Night Rally: Youth and Fascism Today

In June 1986, I published my very first music essay, "Night Rally: Youth and Fascism Today" in Vol. 37 of Maximum Rock & Roll , a seminal punk scene zine out of the SF Bay area founded by Tim Yohanan. The late editor and founder of the famed Gilman Street venue was concerned about the rising violence at the Gilman shows between encroaching neo-fascist skinheads and anti-fascist left-leaning punks aka anti-racists skins. Slamming hard, the pit was turning red with the blood of angry youth. Scene schisms are turf wars, ideological and cultural conflicts, contested terrain, typical of oppositional youth music subcultures where politics, race, class, and tastes converge, collide and sometimes and explode. Often, these political and cultural convictions are foundational--the underpinnings of a particular scene. At the time, I was completing my Ph.D., and has been very involved in the early NYC punk scene. By the late '80' punk had morphed into an ed...

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