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"Close the Sky" March, 2022

on April 06, 2022

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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

Readers love to read especially when it’s cold and wet outside. There’s nothing better to warm the heart than a new book. If you’re iced in, snowed in, or looking for something fresh, here’s my greatest hits list for Winter 2023 Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop by Danyel Smith. “Dazzling” critics have declared, the gorgeous cover alone will raise your serotonin-- orange, the color of the second chakra, Svadhishthana, the seat of life---so let’s bring on the joy. Danyel Smith shines too, mixing up a deeply emotional Gen X memoir with the hidden history of Black women and their under-acknowledged foundational role in American popular music. Smith is a novelist, award-winning journo, host of Spotify’s Black Girl Songbook , former editor at Billboard, Time , editor in chief at Vibe and so much more. As of Spring Semester 2023, Shine Bright will grace my syllabus for “Protest Music in History.” ...

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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