Ian Andrew Askew

SLAMDANCE is an ongoing project in music, video, and performance. In each stage, I relish in the absurdity that permeates the stories we tell to explain Black people’s participation in our own culture. For this latest iteration, I had the privilege of spending some time with archival materials from performances by The Black Rock Coalition at The Kitchen.

At the center of SLAMDANCE is Afropunk (Afro-Punk), a term that emerges from James Spooner’s 2003 film of the same name. I’m partial to the original title, Afro-Punk: The ‘Rock n Roll Nigger’ Experience. The reference to Patti Smith’s 1978 “Rock n Roll Nigger” and its lament, “outside of society, that’s where I want to be,” reminds us that the accusatory refrain of “black kids acting white” barely begins to address punk as a site of racial trespassing. Punk identity, at least in its conception, relies on white traitors attempting an imagined niggerdom. For the purposes of SLAMDANCE, Afropunk is not the community of Black punks that Spooner’s film brought together, nor the now-global annual music festival. Afropunk is instead taken as the amalgam of repeated attempts to define a Black punk identity. In order to wrap my mind and body around these repeated attempts to pin down that which perpetually squirms, I often return to the quote by Marlon Whitfield offered above. Whitfield’s admission illuminates the impulse to be Black, live free, and rock hard. But the impulse to organize (to create an Afropunk Festival or form a Black Rock Coalition) comes in response to particular cruelties, including ahistorical accusations of playing white music and industry relegation to an isolating oddball status.

I also look to Greg Tate’s phrase “anarchic signifiers of contrary negritude.” Tate, a co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition, recognized Afropunk in 2011’s “Of Afropunks and Other Anarchic Signifiers of Contrary Negritude” not as an aberration from within Great White Punk, but as one iteration in a long line of “discontents, malcontents, miscreants, and class traitors” who emerge from the Black American bourgeoisie and exhibit their “own peculiar set of behaviors around the thickets of racism, racial identity, Afrocentricity, class alienation, class privilege, class betrayal and interracial dating, black rage, black pleasure, and black feminism.” I’m most interested in attempts to define a Black punk identity that engage with these thickets as a daily presence in certain Black lives, and punk as a set of tools that may be used to address them.

Rock and roll, like practically every form of popular music across the globe, is Black music and we are its heirs. We, too, claim the right of creative freedom and access to American and International airwaves, audiences, markets, resources and compensations, irrespective of genre.

The BRC embraces the total spectrum of Black music. The BRC rejects the arcane perceptions and spurious demographics that claim our appeal is limited. The BRC rejects the demand for Black artists to tailor their music to fit into the creative straitjackets the industry has designed. We are individuals and will accept no less than full respect for our right to be conceptually independent.

-— From The Black Rock Coalition Manifesto