AFROPUNK - What?

My band, The Scene: that's me on the right.

Back in 1983, I was a 16-year-old black girl playing bass guitar in a rock band. We were a trio of mixed-race mutts, and we had gigs at CBGB’s, the Pyramid Club, Danceteria, et al. One of our favorite bands was the Bad Brains, a tripped-out black hardcore punk band from Washington, DC. My personal hero was Poly Styrene, the brown girl lead singer of the British punk band X-Ray Spex. I also loved Annabella of Bow-Wow-Wow, and Pauline Black of Selector. In fact, the whole Two-Tone Records scene was my musical lifeblood for years. I also listened to a lot of not-black music that was labeled “punk”: the Clash, Buzzcocks, Jam, Stiff Little Fingers, even the ubiquitous Sex Pistols, whom I appreciate more now than I did then. In college I veered toward a funkier sound, from Fishbone, the (old) Red Hot Chili Peppers, Boogie Down Productions and De La Soul, then spun back to the blown out guitars of the Sub-Pop and Matador record labels.

So I’m struggling with this tag AFROPUNK. Is it a style? A movement? Is it claiming to be something new? 

Yesterday morning, my go-to NPR station announced that it is “supported by the Afropunk Music Festival. For details, go to Afropunk.com.” So I did. And the festival, which runs this weekend in Brooklyn, NY – a doable drive from my house – looks like my kind of music-centric party. Big, loud, and super-multicultural. I’m even tempted to take my young, dainty daughters to witness the spectacle of all those amped up concertgoers letting their freak flags fly.

But one of my girls would undoubtedly ask, “What’s Afropunk?” And I’d have to explain to  them that, from what I understand, Afropunk started out as an empowerment movement for disenfranchised African-American youth (what, mommy?) but that it seems to have mutated into a branding tool, labeling something old as if it’s new. It reads like a marketing ploy, the coopting of a subterranean youth movement. AND I HATE THAT SHIT!

I suppose “Afropunk” implies that these artists are out of the norm, or anti-establishment, or super-bold in their uniqueness. You know, like James Baldwin and Angela Davis were for my parents' generation. Talk about afropunks.

I can appreciate the feel-good embrace of claiming all of that good music as “ours.” 

But I don’t dig the racial branding of music. Especially now. When we claim to be working toward the abolition of race labels.

Even the (mixed race) filmmaker James Spooner, who is credited with launching “Afro-Punk” into the vernacular, has his doubts about the festival and its commercial expansion. 

In a past life, I worked for a number of large music festivals in an administrative role. And I much prefer a transparent corporate branding of an arts festival to the for-profit mask of a revolutionary movement.

As far as this old fart is concerned, the marketing gurus should leave afro- and punk-rock alone, and come up with an authentically multicultural name for their festival - something that references this century.