"No Gods, No Masters You Sing, But You Sure Love Playing Police": Drug Church, Punk, Punishment, and Life During Culture Wartime
In which I take a very long road to talk about how much I like a band
Note: This started as one thing, it was just me talking about a band I like and why I like them and why, based on the response to my last piece, other people would like them but transformed into something much more personal than I intended. It’s much longer than I had planned at the outset, maybe a bit longer than people understandably have the interest in reading, maybe it should be two things, but I also really like it as one piece. The second part really doesn’t work without the first, and the first is just too self indulgent for me to not be going somewhere. If you’re willing to stick with me through it, I appreciate it, if not, I understand. Brevity is the soul of wit and I am an empty vessel.
I detest the term “cancel culture”. It feels like one of those terms like “military aged males” “unhoused” or “officer involved shooting”, little turns of phrase adopted by the people who do such things as a means to sanitize, trivialize and obscure the grim reality of things. Cancel Culture, at its’ heart is a moral panic, public humiliation, and vigilantism, things that the oh so virtuous know are bad, but are either too dishonest to admit or too stupid to realize. I also hate writing about it, I know by this point I’m gonna be 0 for 2 as far as writing about anything else, one of the strengths of the pro cancel cult is that they’ve made it that so even acknowledging it negatively immediately feels lame and exhausting. But this cultural moment I also feel like has strangled so much of the life out of art, out of interpersonal relationships, the culture war front line is now everywhere, there is no dignity to be found in any of this but goddammit I want to go out on my feet.
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If Cancel Culture originated on tumblr and college campuses, it ran clinical trials in the Punk and Punk adjacent music scenes, long before DEI inquisitions and Metoo hysteria, the Punk scene was culling its’ ranks with more or less the same tactics that would eventually become a staple of the larger culture. In retrospect it’s not that surprising, Punk is reactionary by nature, it’s why it attracts and works as a pipeline for so many different stripes of reactionaries from Anarchists to Krishna nutcases to Neo Nazis. Even if the popular conception doesn’t share aesthetics or ideology with what is currently considered reactionary, that vein will always run through the movement. Progressive politics have always had a place there since the early days of The Clash, Third Wave Feminism developed alongside Riot Grrrl, the history is long and there’s been plenty of writing about it. It’s a youth movement rooted in incredibly binary thinking with a very strong social component, to say it was fertile ground for early Cancel Culture would be an understatement. It’s also an epicenter for the true believers, even as the public humiliation spectacles are at least becoming slightly less intense, the Cancel ideology still has such a stranglehold on that scene that it feels like a hegemony. And it wasn’t until a recent release from a band that I could even conceptualize it changing.
I grew up a Punk and Hardcore kid. I spent nearly every spare minute and dollar of my life as a young person, playing shows, listening to every piece of music I could get my hands on, writing as much music as I possibly could. I am covered in tattoo tributes to the bands that I love, every scar and broken bone I’ve ever had can be traced to a concert. A great deal of my world view, including the politics that I outlined in the last piece were shaped by bands like Against Me!, Anti-Flag, Rise Against, Strike Anywhere, the rolodex of bands goes on forever and I’m doing my best to not just turn this into a list. Human Dignity, Privacy, Civil Rights, Free Speech, Anti-Authoritianism were things I cared about, I still care about, and at least at the time, the bands I was into cared about. An unwavering belief in Due Process was so strong, outrage about the West Memphis Three and Guantanamo Bay were common place. I owe both the best and worst experiences of my life to that scene, and I still love it, even if it doesn’t particularly love me and my kind anymore.
Which is why it was so strange and difficult to see it turn into what it is now, to see bands I once loved for their principles go along with, even participate in the new hysteria. Maybe it was the neutralizing force of Obama era optimism, the belief that the good guys had won and would always win meant we had to look for internal threats. The Trump era definitely kicked things into high gear, now that “Democracy Itself” was at stake we had to enact some kind of social war powers act, we simply didn’t have time for any of those pesky principles anymore given the looming threat. We had a President who was significantly less Authoritarian than Bush/Cheney, but he was mean, and Punk was nice now, so nice that the “nice” people would have to employ a scorched earth policy on anyone who disagreed with any of their hardline and often in relationship to most everyone else, fringe positions. A scene that had been built by and for freaks and outcasts still insisted on its’ counter cultural status while maintaining a moral panopticon indistinguishable from Disney HR. The rising popularity of Anti-Police and Anti-Carceral sentiments in popular culture existed in the scene, but so did the demand that the Police and the Judicial System be more or less entirely replaced by self appointed internet tribunals to play Judge, Jury and Executioner, and shockingly they were incapable of finding anyone not guilty.
All of a sudden every band needed to have a message, and it needed to be the same message. We had to be constantly DOING something, it was not enough for us to simply live and enjoy art, we had to be PRODUCTIVE. The unending tide of American injustice was going to be undone by middling early 00s emo bands way past a prime they never reached writing forgettable songs about bodies and spaces instead of wanting to hit their ex girlfriend over the head with a shovel. A lot of elder statesman left, run out or burnt out, some I’m sure just went along to get along, you’ve got hand tattoos and how else are you gonna pay the bills when you’re on the wrong side of 30 and spent the 15 years everyone else your age had spent building careers and lives and the only thing notable thing you can put on your resume is a mastery of peeing in a Gatorade bottle in a speeding van. And I’m sure some of them were true believers, like me.
Yes dear reader, I hate to say it, I’d love to report that I held my principles through it all, but somewhere in between my political awakening in my early teens where all my principles formed, and young adulthood I lost the plot. I got caught up in a moment, I bought in to the cancel worldview, I know the appeal of the torch and pitchfork, the call outs were coming from inside the house, I played my own small part in creating this world I fucking hate. I am unfortunately Saul of Tarsus in this story, better to come out with it now so you can unsubscribe before I get delusional and start asking for a subscription fee. I’d like to say I thought I was doing the right thing, some part of me did, at least the part of your brain that provides cover for your anti-social actions and plays at your empathy. I’m also simply not as smart or non conformist as I thought I was (a major flaw in all punks), I saw people I knew and respected going that way, people who had influenced my original principled views, and I figured they must know what’s what. There’s also a part of me that wanted to punish, to hurt, to for once in my life be the one in control, you don’t get into Punk and Hardcore because you had a great time in Junior High and High School, and no amount of intellectualizing and moralizing will change the fact that locked deep inside every cell in my body is an ape that simply wants to smash the skull of every other ape that it finds strange, annoying, or threatening. I was also incredibly mentally ill, something that I wouldn’t be diagnosed with, let alone treated for, long after the damage was done. There’s nothing more dangerous than someone with serious mental illness, a chip on their shoulder, and a righteous crusade to cover for all their anti-social actions.
I did come to my senses a bit earlier than the people around me realized, while I was still in the fold. I started seeing what was around me; people destroyed for things that were well within their right to say, things that were clearly misunderstandings, for things that were being read in the least charitable light possible, for things that truly weren’t a big deal and the things that were a big deal it sure seemed like the accused deserved the right to fairly defend themselves in an impartial process, something that of course never came. I watched bands I love disintegrate in hours, never to be talked about in polite company again outside of derision, their work which once so seminal and important now entirely discarded, to pull anything positive from their work, let alone still support or even argue against their expulsion itself an expellable offense. In what little defense of myself I can muster I’ve read some writings and texts of mine from that time, and I stupidly seemed to believe that some sort of impartial process would come, that the call outs would result in a fair trial, of course they never came. I did my best to start distancing myself, to stay out of these things, to get back in line with my integrity and the live and let live mindset that though buried, still lied at the center of my being, but it didn’t matter. In a shocking twist, the sword I lived by, was the sword I died by.
The all seeing eye finally landed on me and my alleged misdeeds, and when the mob finally came for me, boy did they come for me. I thought I had been good, I had said all the right things, I had been very careful, to the best of my knowledge followed all the rules, of course that didn’t matter, the very fact that I had once done “good” in these peoples eyes prior only proved that I was simply covering the “bad”. I never got a clear what, when or how on my transgressions, but I suppose that’s always the point, harder to mount a defense against something formless. I would’ve plead not guilty if it would’ve done anything, I can’t apologize for something I didn’t do, I wasn’t going to sign my name on a false confession, I compromised enough of my principles unknowingly, I was not going to give one more inch. The Abolitionist Judge Dredds that made up my internet firing squad obviously felt differently. I was given the privilege of seeing people I loved dearly, to watch my closest friends pull the trigger, the strangers just cheered. Overnight, everything was gone. At that point I had devoted nearly all my conscious life to music, to punk and hardcore, all my friends and social connections, all my memories and future plans. My musical projects had never really amounted to much, but I had loved them and loved being part of something. The sad truth is that I’ve never found anything that made me feel like music and performing it did, I’ve tried different creative endeavors, I’ve tried competitive sports, but it all falls short. There’s a hole where something was, and I can’t fix it, all I can do is numb it. I never loved anything like I did music, and I probably never will again.
And two days later, everyone had moved on. The people I had spent my life with simply continued on as if I had never existed. What had been my entire reason for life only amounted generated less than 48 hours of the people I loved the most tearing me to shreds and then back to business as usual, a new target came along. One final humiliation. Well of course it wouldn’t be the final humiliation, I don’t exist, unless it’s to be the punchline every once in a while or god forbid somebody sees me out in public with one of the 5 friends I have left or there’s a murmur I may do something creative again, then we gotta re-scorch the earth.
Then there’s the guilt, the shame, the horror that not only did I help usher in this new regime, but I engaged in some of these humiliation rituals, I’m the Judge Dredd in someone’s story. Out there there is someone with the same wound, this unbearable pain, and knowing I’m the one who caused that cuts to my core. Leaving that world returned me to my integrity, it reactivated my empathy, I now clearly know my principles but the destruction in the rearview is etched in my soul. If somebody were to say I deserved what happened to me simply because I was part of similar mobs, I’d be inclined to agree. I’ve done my best to apologize to anyone I think I may have hurt, to try and make amends but I don’t think you can mend that. I finally get an ounce of self-reflection just to hate what I see in the mirror. I’ve made efforts to try and offer support when I see others going through this stuff, but that stain of the mob on me isn’t coming out, and I don’t think it should. I just hope that I can offer enough penance to offset, that maybe Saul can become Paul.
The world kept turning, I kept it at arms length, unable to take another single heartbreak. I grew more embittered, paranoid, isolated, resentful. I had some breakthroughs, I made some real progress, I grew as a person, even was able to build some meaningful relationships, but I’m always nursing a wound that never quite heals. I’ve struggled to put any of this into words, that the right combination of letters and sentences that would finally fix this exists and it is just right around the corner if only I could drive the knife deeper into myself. But the words never come, it’s a pain so deep I don’t know how to measure it, let alone map it.
During writing this I’ve worried that this story may end up inadvertently doxxing myself, but I realized that this entire story could refer to at least 300 people in my city alone, not to say anything about the entire scene. As the former President once said “MANY SUCH CASES!”
[7/16/2024] I’m pulling the Drug Church stuff out of this piece for the time being because I don’t want them wrapped up in anything regarding the Anti-Flag stuff. I’ve left the above portion because it’s relevant to the Blocked and Reported episode.
