by John Beckman
Hardcore fulfilled the Dictators’ promise of unsafe, unclean, politically tainted fun. From 1979 to 1982, hardcore metastasized throughout America’s urban centers, growing its most pernicious cells up the East Coast’s I-95 corridor—from the turf of D.C.’s Minor Threat and Bad Brains to Boston’s Negative FX and Gang Green. Self-sufficient “scenes” cropped up around hardcore, much as they had around hippie “tribes.” Connected by word of mouth, DIY publications, and late-night shows on college radio stations, the hardcore explosion enthralled American youth with its virulent amateurism. Hardcore dropped all pretense of art. Anyone, it seemed, could throw together a band, write some deliberately terrible songs, and successfully enrage a crowd.
Punks hated money with all the fervor of the Diggers and Yippies. Crafting a barter-and-forage economy, they parasitized the system they scorned and lived bare lives of urban primitivism. They gathered their food, clothing, and furniture from curbs, dumpsters, and alleyways. If hippies “dropped out” and inhabited crash pads, punks went them one further and “squatted”—overtaking abandoned buildings where they “pirated” plumbing and electricity and burned indoor bonfires for heat. Often these “punk houses” assumed an identity—around a band, around a purifying belief system like veganism or “straight edge” (the refusal to drink or take drugs). Punk houses let the squatters form radically defined communities in the cracks of mainstream civil society. Punks were clannish like hippies had been, but their larger subculture wasn’t defined by psychedelia and peace-and-love “being.” Restless, irreverent, and violently pissed off by the stark incongruities of Reagan’s America (union busting, runaway unemployment, material excess, “trickle-down” economics), punks, for all their competing identities, were defined by the rage and blistering ironies expressed in their anti-rock-star music. To listen to their scorching diatribes, it is clear that hardcore punks, like their predecessors the Dictators, held hippies and other rockers in contempt. But for this reason, they showed a sneaking kinship with the Merry Pranksters, Diggers, and Yippies. Jello Biafra, the Dead Kennedys’ superlative frontman, recalls the band’s only Bill Graham show, when they opened for the Cramps and the Clash. Graham was still playing the hand-wringing chaperone. Biafra: “I did my usual swan dive in a crowd of about 3000 jocks, and when I emerged, the only clothes left on my body were my belt, shoes, and socks. I did the rest of the show nude while Bill Graham smoldered by the edge of the stage.”
An early 1980s mosh pit at Merlyn’s Club in Madison, Wisconsin. (Photograph © Hank Grebe.)
By the sociologist Ryan Moore’s interpretation, punk culture was an “exclamation point” on the sixties counterculture’s “decline into impotence.” Which is to say, the subcultures were syntactically linked—by rock, by rebellion, by DIY resistance. But like Z-Boys’ surfing and skating in the debris of California’s failed leisure class, hardcore punks gloried in the rot of the hippies’ flower-waving optimism. They grinned bloody grins of pessimism.
A hardcore punk show was frightening to witness. To cops, to parents, to the uninitiated, the mutual destruction between the stage and the crowd signaled the failure of civilization. The punk show was a rehearsal of raw social violence that flaunted its bloodshed and broken bones. And as the historian Lauraine Leblanc shows, hardcore punk’s mosh pit—Jello Biafra’s “3000 jocks”—was intensely masculine. The gender-inclusive art-punk scene of the late 1970s had given way to a physically aggressive arena where women were assaulted as freely as men (to this extent, the violence was democratic) but also, often, groped—a fact, however, that didn’t stop a rash of female hardcore bands from forming. The mosh pit wasn’t pretty. It was a consensual bloodsport for self-selecting thrashers. And yet, for this reason, it was the practice of anarchy, whose danger was as attractive to the leftist and pacifist as it was to the most divisive, racist skinhead. In the mosh pit these strangers could thrash like bosom enemies in spite of their ideological differences. To the uninitiated, the mosh pit looked mirthless, merciless, the polar opposite of fun, but for the willing and exhilarated participants—who dove back in, night after night, with the stamina of ring dancers on Congo Square—thrashing was the sheerest, funnest expression of all the outrage that made punk punk. Thrashing was the hardest-core way to show that you got (and could take) the big cosmic joke.
ONE MORE STORY. (One more joke.) America’s original punk allegory was published by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1831, four years before his “May-Pole of Merry Mount.” Now a staple in high school literature courses, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” tells the revolutionary-era tale of Robin, a “shrewd youth,” who comes to Boston from his home in the sticks expecting a break from his kinsman, the governor. As it turns out, Major Molineux is nowhere to be found. Robin starts asking around, and at first he is puzzled by the citizens’ coarse reactions. Shouldn’t his connections get him some respect? He is indignant toward the gentleman who offers to throw him in the stocks. Despite his Puritan upbringing, he feels warmth for the drinkers he finds conspiring in a tavern, and vows to join them when he has earned some money, but they turn hostile when he mentions his kinsman. Next, a pretty wench in a “scarlet petticoat” tries to drag him through her door, insisting his kinsman dwells within, but then a night watchman scorns their impropriety and prods Robin along, leaving him more frustrated than ever.
Long story short, he spends the night in the streets, bemoaning his outcast fate and listening to an approaching band of merrymakers. Talking with a stranger about this “multitude of rioters,” he proposes that they, too, should take their “share of the fun.” But when the musical procession rounds the corner, he is quickly intimidated by their savage democracy: some are “wild figures in the Indian dress,” others “fantastic shapes without model,” and all of them—both spectators and participants—raise “shrill voices of mirth or terror.” More to the point, at the head of their procession, carted along like an obscene punch line, is Major Molineux himself, “in tar-and-feather dignity.”
The crowd goes silent while Robin takes it in. The disgraced kinsman is pitiable, to say the least: “His whole frame was agitated by a quick, and continual tremor, which his pride strove to quell, even in those circumstances of overwhelming humiliation.” But then as Robin locks eyes with his elder, “a bewildering excitement” fills his head, and as the members of the crowd start to chuckle, then to laugh, the “contagion” of hilarity soon envelops Robin:
He sent forth a shout of laughter that echoed through the street; every man shook his sides, every man emptied his lungs, but Robin’s shout was the loudest there. The cloud-spirits peeped from their silvery islands, as the congregated mirth went roaring up the sky! The Man in the Moon heard the far bellow; “Oho,” quoth he, “the old Earth is frolicsome to-night!”
As in his tale of Merry Mount, Hawthorne seems ambivalent about all this fun. “On they went,” he continues, “in counterfeited pomp, in senseless uproar, in frenzied merriment, trampling all on an old man’s heart.” And in the orgy’s postcoital aftermath, Robin rather dejectedly wants to return home, but a crowd member urges him to stay on a few days, suggesting his participation in the “congregated mirth” may help him to “rise in the world, without the help of [his] kinsman, Major Molineux.” Robin has contracted the wild power of the people. In getting the joke, Hawthorne seems to say, he is on his way to becoming a citizen—a DIY citizen, of course.
The story’s “senseless uproar” and “frenzied merriment” pretty accurately depicts the seventeenth-century “rough music” with which colonists tarred and feathered outcasts. The fun was scary, one-sided, sadistic, and often it did the Puritan authority’s bidding. Rough music was in most cases glorified bullying, and it seldom advanced democratic virtues—even when it was employed during the Revolution to overthrow Royalists. But the governor’s humiliation is only part of the pleasure. Hawthorne tells us how to become an American citizen. You become a citizen by getting the people’s joke. In Robin’s case, the joke is complicated. He comes to t
own thinking he will cash in on the monarchy. But at the same time he develops a taste for the people’s joys—their taverns, their brothels, their riotous fun. So when it turns out that authority has fallen, and that the joke is on him, he finds himself laughing louder than anyone because self-rule is what he wanted all along. The rioters crack the joke, but Robin takes it best because it means most to him.
And so it has gone throughout American history. The “Merry, Merry Boyes” got Thomas Morton’s joke that Plymouth Plantation was a joyless prison—and that people were made for frolic and freedom. The American colonists got the Sons of Liberty’s joke that England didn’t have a clue—and that government should rise up from the streets. Antebellum blacks got Brother Rabbit’s joke that the master was himself a trickster, if a duller one—and that the purest freedom was in having fun. And the forty-niners got each other’s joke that the United States was turning stiff and stodgy—and that civility was only stifled by manners. All of these American citizenry-building jokes took aim at some humorless authority or other: if you laughed at the joke, you either got it or took it, or—as in Robin’s case—both. More powerful and personal than even ideology, these American jokes created steely citizens out of their most chest-racking pleasures. They hard-wired an electric sense of humor into the national character.
Their twentieth-century beneficiaries got the big American joke: that fun—especially fun in the midst of struggle—is the personal and communal experience of freedom. All it requires is a cavalier attitude toward killjoys, tyrants, limits, and timidity. In these terms, the 1920s and the 1960s were arguably the nation’s funnest decades. They were also decades of extreme upheaval. This is no coincidence. But while many Americans responded to upheaval (clashes in values, race-and-culture wars) with hardheaded resistance and bloody rioting, the ones who got the joke had the times of their lives. (It was like surfing in the rubble under the P.O.P. pier.) All the better if a square majority thought they could shut the rebels down—that was what made it a joke to begin with! That was what made it a laugh riot! Laughter, in these cases, is a powerful metaphor for how such citizens responded to struggle: with ebullience—dancing, capering, cracking jokes. Laughter, as such, is the perfection of citizenship. It is the joy of the one joining the joy of the many in a powerful wave of common purpose.
“Congregated mirth.” “Joyous revolt.” “Revolution for the hell of it.” These are fundamentally American phrases. They capture citizens being born of laughter at moments of widespread social struggle: the Revolution, the Jazz Age, and the sixties, respectively. Such snapshots of citizens coming of age, and recognizing their exhilarating power, have inspired Americans during the barren periods, when democracy itself can look like a joke, but these images may be more than inspiring snapshots. They may be the nation’s most enduring icons, alongside Old Glory and Lady Liberty. For as the post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon brilliantly argued, a nation’s “consciousness” and its most binding “culture” isn’t created during the easy times, the peaceful times, when it can seem as if the arts and the public flourish. They are created during the periods of highest struggle, when the people’s liberties are under attack and their identity is under reconstruction. So it is that Americans have embraced fun—the playful practice of threatened liberties—during the eras examined in this book. So it is, too, that the blackface minstrels and the Buffalo Bills who amused Americans during times of leisure simulated and packaged pure American fun. As these entertainers seemed to know, such wild acts of liberty and rebellion were among the nation’s great treasures, and audiences loved to kick back and relive them.
But nostalgia isn’t the same as fun. Nostalgia, a dreamy and passive pleasure, may even be the death of fun: it is the vicarious enjoyment of your ancestors’ fun. The pioneering youth of the 1970s showed a healthy sense of the past: They dismantled it. They made it useful in the moment. Funk artists cracked gunpowder from black culture’s firecrackers; they packed it into a big, fat space-age bomb. B-boys and B-girls used their parents’ records to jimmy a head-spinning street-corner art form. Z-Boys stripped the hotdogging from sixties surf culture and retrofitted it for their urban reality. And punks, inspired by primitive rock ’n’ roll, repurposed its native thrills and rebellion to suit their own fuck-you attitudes. Each of these classes of DIY pioneers spawned a billion-dollar industry that, left to its own devices, would have erased its humble origins. But the fun they invented was so pure, so raw, that it still hits the people where they live—not out of nostalgia, but in practice. The practices themselves have become global ambassadors for radical American fun. George Clinton’s P-Funk All Stars are as mad as ever, and they still inspire insanely grooving crowds. Skateboarding and its many extreme-sport spin-offs still inspire thrashers young and old to shred, carve, rail-slide, and fly. The heritage of punk is visible everywhere—from the mainstreaming of piercings and tattoos to the guerrilla distribution of music. And breakdance crews, taggers, MCs, and DJs have become unshakable institutions among the world’s youth; indeed, hip-hop (in its many cross-pollinating forms) has become the global instrument of celebration and protest. To be sure, hip-hop was the dominant cultural expression during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.
The legacy of these 1970s thrills raises an important question: Is it still fun if you’re paying for it? Is it still fun if you buy a Burton skateboard and carve the half-pipe at your local skatepark? The answer, of course, is yes. It’s a scream. Even wearing the regulation pads and a helmet, you can tear it up on your $200 deck, and you can hone your thrashing skills. But it isn’t the fun of DIY invention, urban exploration, physical danger, and civil disorder that the Z-Boys enjoyed in 1976. It is fun within serious limits, and for all of its thrills it is (by contrast) scripted. And rather obedient. The fact that there are public skateparks and high-performance skateboards signals progress: America has embraced this sport, as it did bicycles in the nineteenth century. Towns want to make skating safe and acceptable. The economy has more opportunity to grow. America is better off for all of this. Yet such government and commercial intervention in a sport that was born of radical liberty means that the fun itself has changed; it has become mediated. For the skaters who take pride in their flashy store-bought equipment have already missed the Z-Boys’ joke: Skating is a guerrilla activity. It’s the fun of beating, not supporting, the system.
P. T. Barnum said it himself: all of business is humbug. How else could business turn a profit, if it didn’t trick you with advertising? If it didn’t hook you with its product? This particular brand of humbug was perfected in the late 1960s, when merchandise was developed and marketed and sold to make Americans feel like rebels. Now, as then, customers always pay for this privilege, and purveyors keep it safe (and generally clean) to curb their liability. They can’t afford customers taking real risks. Plus it’s bad for business to encourage real rebellion. And yet, marketers know Americans love fun—they have known this for centuries. And they know that Americans, especially kids, crave autonomy and participation, so they simulate the DIY experience at franchises like the Build-A-Bear “workshops,” where kids construct teddy bears from limited options, or “DIY” restaurants, where customers pay to grill their own steaks, fry their own pancakes, make their own Bloody Marys. These pay-to-play stores and restaurants are, in a sense, more active, more “fun,” than their traditional competition: that’s their big selling point. But in both cases (as Barnum knew) the joke is still on you: the personalized bear is a standardized mishmash, the personalized food is often inedible. As Las Vegas knows, the house always wins.
In the history of radical American fun, pleasure comes from resistance, risk, and participation—the same virtues celebrated in the “Port Huron Statement” and the Digger Papers, in the flapper’s slang and the Pinkster Ode. In the history of commercial amusement, most pleasures for sale are by necessity passive. They curtail creativity and they limit participation (as they do, say, in a laser-tag arena) to a narrow range of calculated surpris
es, often amplified by dazzling technology. To this extent, TV and computer screens, from the tiny to the colossal, have become the scourge of American fun. The ubiquity of TV screens in public spaces (even in taxicabs and elevators) shows that such viewing isn’t amusement at all but rather an aggressive, ubiquitous distraction. Although a punky insurgency of heedless satire has stung the airwaves in recent decades—from equal-opportunity offenders like The Simpsons and South Park to Comedy Central’s rabble-rousing pundits, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert—the prevailing “fun” of commercial amusement puts minimal demands on citizens, besides their time and money. TV’s inherent ease seems to be its appeal, but it also sends a sobering, Jumbotron-sized message about the health of the public sphere.
Computer screens are more pernicious yet, since they seize on our native DIY desires. They offer narrow, fascinating involvement—in a safer, simpler, duller realm. In this age of iPhones, iPads, and so on, tiny screens shape our consciousness from early infancy—when babies have yet to find their footing in the risky, exciting world of things—and cleverly precede our 3-D reality with flashy, lifelike 2-D simulacra. Before we can draw or read or write, we swipe and tap and click like pros. After that, from early childhood to post-retirement, we learn to funnel our entire lived experience through chintzy hand-held pixillated screens—snapping photos, shooting videos, e-mailing, texting, tweeting, updating, mapping, Googling, Foursquaring, ad nauseam. Our free time (mealtime/playtime/facetime) is forever interrupted by “snack” entertainment: bite-size junk-food games and gifs and sugar-salty puffs of news. At night, our quiet and docile crowds resemble eerie blue candlelight vigils, but our downturned faces are staring at Facebook. And when Google has its way—coming soon!—all of us will see the world through the hyperreality of screen-colored glasses.