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NYC Punk As Fuck

on February 28, 2008

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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...

Sacred and Profane Winter Reading List: New Books to Love in 2023

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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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