Grinding California: Culture and Corporeality in American Skate Punk [1. Aufl.] 9783839421222

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Konstantin Butz Grinding California

Cultural and Media Studies

Konstantin Butz (Dr. phil.) has studied American Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen and at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He completed his dissertation as a scholarship holder of the a.r.t.e.s. Research School at the University of Cologne in 2011. His research interests include (Un-)popular Music and Literature.

Konstantin Butz

Grinding California Culture and Corporeality in American Skate Punk

This book is a slightly revised version of the author’s doctoral thesis completed in 2011 at the University of Cologne, Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2012 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover Design: Alexander Butz Cover Photo: Wynn Miller (www.wynnmiller.com) Typeset by Alexander Butz & Konstantin Butz Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-2122-8

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments | 9

INTRODUCTION: “Let’s skate!” | 13 A Brief Note on Subcultures | 15

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CONTEXT 1.1 The Body and Interlocking Expressions | 19 1.1.1 Lived Bodies: Movement, Forces, and Politics | 20 1.1.2 Body, Postmodernism, and Capitalism | 24 1.1.3 An Intersectional Access: Approaching Skate Punk | 28

1.2 The Context | 33 1.2.1 The USA of the 1980s | 33 1.2.2 The Middle Class and Intersections with Race and Gender | 36 “The Myth of the Middle Class” | 36 Race and Class | 38 Masculinity and Whiteness | 39 1.2.3 Suburbia | 44 Suburbia and Utopia | 44 Postsuburbia | 46 The (Post-) Suburban Home and the Tax Payers’ Revolt | 47 Cultural Vacuum in a Consumption-Oriented Landscape | 48 1.2.4 Skateboarding | 50 Three Paradigms in Skateboard History | 52 Surfing: From Ancient Hawaii to Suburban California | 53 Dogtown: Surf and Skate Rebellion | 63 After Dogtown: Skateboarding in the 1980s | 70 1.2.5 Punk and Hardcore Punk | 76 The 1980s as a Starting Point for Hardcore Punk | 80 Hardcore Punk and the Suburban Middle Class | 82 Race and Whiteness within Hardcore Punk Culture | 88 Masculinity in Hardcore Punk | 92 1.3 Conclusion | 96

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CONTENT 2.1 Introduction | 99 2.1.1 On Skate Punk | 99 2.1.2 Skate Punk and Popular Culture | 104

2.2 Skate and Hardcore Punk Lyrics in their Cultural Context: Between Banality and Blankness | 108 2.2.1 Song Lyrics in a Postmodern Dialog | 108 Space: Suburban Homes and Local Beaches | 111 Class: Home Is Where? | 117 Race: “White Minority” as a Subject Position in Hardcore Punk | 123 Gender: Bored Boys and Skate Punk Lyrics | 130 2.2.2 Conclusion: Beyond the Lyrics | 137

2.3 Flyers: Skate Punk Art and Scribbled Handbills | 140 2.3.1 Copied in Seconds | 140 2.3.2 Flyer Genealogies: Historical Traces | 142 2.3.3 Skulls, Skeletons, and the Bomb: Skate Punk Flyers in their Cultural Context | 145 2.3.4 Conclusion: Flying Matters – The Material Component of Skate Punk Flyers | 161

2.4 Thrasher: Skate Punk in Magazines | 164 2.4.1 A Magazine with “Hardcore Spirit” | 164 2.4.2 The First Issues: Radical Images and Skate Punk Fiction | 166 2.4.3 Pools and Nightmares | 175 2.4.4 Hegemonic Masculinity: Bikinis, Betties, and Wild Riders of Boards | 179 Bikinis and Betties | 179 Wild Riders of Boards | 182 2.4.5 Conclusion: Established Patterns with a Hardcore Surface | 184 2.5 Skate Punk Videos | 186 2.5.1 Video (R)evolution | 186 2.5.2 Skate Video Narratives: Old Tropes and a New Medium | 188 Streets on Fire | 190 Possessed to Skate | 198 2.5.3 Conclusion: Moving On | 204 2.6 Conclusion | 207

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CORPOREALIT Y 3.1 Introduction | 211 3.2 Approaching the Concrete | 218 3.3 Producing Presence through Skateboarding and Hardcore Punk | 225 3.3.1 3.3.2 3.3.3 3.3.4 3.3.5

Adding “Volume” | 225 Falling and Slamming | 227 Producing a Suburban Seascape | 233 Speeding Through Suburbia | 238 The Grind of the Voice | 244

3.4 Getting Closer | 256 3.4.1 “Adrenaline Aesthetics” and the Reduction of Distance | 256 3.4.2 Molecular Revolution | 257 3.5 Conclusion: Grinding on the Most Tenuous Borders of Discourse | 260

CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK: It’s All About Access | 265

WORKS CITED | 273 Books, Essays, Articles, Commentary | 273 Films & Videos | 285 Magazines and Newspapers | 286 Personal Interviews | 286 Songs | 286

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS Every skateboard maneuver in an empty swimming pool or ramp starts with a drop-in. It implements the transgression of a threshold that allows no turning back. Once you have dropped-in you have to really go for it; no matter if you make it or fall on your face. Many people accompanied me while preparing the academic drop-in for this book and even more helped me to not fall down. I would like to thank them in the following: First and foremost I would like to thank my dissertation supervisor Hanjo Berressem for supporting and believing in this project from the time we first met. He encouraged me to take a look into theoretical backyards that had not been part of my original itinerary. Had it not been for his deliberate push in unanticipated directions, my vision of Grinding California would have turned out differently. I would also like to thank my second and third advisors, Norbert Finzsch and Ursula Frohne, who always gave me the feeling that writing about skateboarding punk kids is truly relevant. A great many thanks go to Andreas Speer and everyone at the a.r.t.e.s. Research School which funded this project, including my research stay in Southern California. Without a.r.t.e.s. this book would not exist today. The actual drop-in for this project was performed at the University of Bremen in 2007 when Sabine Broeck encouraged me to take this leap. From the time I first set foot in her office and told her about my interest in American subcultures she provided tremendous support and profound academic advice without which Grinding California would not have been possible. I am deeply thankful for the countless hours we spent discussing my project in classrooms, cafés, and email correspondences. Equally important advisors at the University of Bremen were Karsten Kummer and Ulf Schulenberg, who introduced me to the basics of literary theory, critical thought, and a unique approach to American literature. Dorle Dracklé and Jochen Bonz provided inspiring support that shaped my interest in the academic study of youth and popular culture. It has been a privilege to drop-in in Bremen. “High-fives” go to Moritz Ingwersen, who not only read and commented on various drafts of this book but also never restrained himself from sharing his incredibly sharp mind, his interest in the English language, and his passion for crappy punk rock shows. Likewise, I would like to thank Stefan Niklas for highly inspiring discussions of academic theories, the development of my work, and all the other challenges of life. Equally important is Martin “Lance” Reilich, just for being the awesome dude he is!

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Jane Newman and John Smith at the University of California in Irvine provided the best accommodation a doctoral student could ask for in Orange County. I am deeply grateful that they not only shared their home with me but also their academic expertise, their dinners, and their surfboard. Thank you, Bryan Reynolds, for encouraging me to do research at UCI. Thanks go to Ben Marcus for sharing all his connections to the skateboarding world. Thank you, Wynn Miller, for providing the terrific photograph for the cover of this book! Further thanks go to Brian Brannon, Brian Walsby, Greg Ginn, Fred Hammer, Lance Mountain, Scott Radinsky, Steve Alba, and Steve Olson for sharing their memories in exciting interviews. Thank you Mary Jane Radford for copyediting the manuscript of this book. Sincere thanks go to Mara Waldhorn for her hospitality in California and her encouraging words in times of desperation. Special thanks go to Paul Reisberg, who started the “Molecular Revolution” while I was busy reading books. Thanks to Catha Lammers for forcing me to laugh against all odds. Thanks to Jan Pingel for the infamous “Rückfahrt.” A great many thanks go to Simee and Am Bodenwälzen for teaching me my first lessons in punk music and “Skatarchy.” My most profound thanks and “knuckles” go to Katrin Schaumburg. Last but not least I would like to thank my family: Unfortunately, Hermann Butz did not live to shake his head over this book; I am deeply grateful for his support and the affectionate humor with which he used to comment on my academic journey. My brother Alex is responsible for the book you are holding in your hands right now, as he brought the first skateboard into our house some time during the early 1980s and took me to my first punk show in the early 1990s. He got me into this and in return I forced him to do the layout of this book (I owe you!). Alex also is the best and most loyal friend I have. There are no words that could express my gratitude to my mom and dad, who shared so much more than just the laughs and tears it takes to write a dissertation. Nevertheless, at this point, words are all I can offer: Grinding California is dedicated to my parents, Hanni & Kalle.

Konstantin Butz Spring 2012

INTRODUCTION: “Let’s skate!”

“And remember: No skateboarding until you’ve done your homework!” These words introduce the 1986 music video of the song “Possessed to Skate” by Venice Beach hardcore punk band Suicidal Tendencies. It features a middle-aged father, ironically played by Timothy Leary, who instructs his son with this imperative before he leaves for vacation with his wife.1 As the parents depart in their minivan, the viewer catches a glimpse of the neighborhood: suburban sunny Southern California. The son waves good-bye to his parents from in front of their home, resembling a typical “McMansion” (cf. Batchelor and Stoddart 63), surrounded by almost identical single-family houses, palm trees and wide streets, before reluctantly starting to engage with his homework. When, out of frustration over his math assignment, he touches a wheel of his skateboard and absentmindedly starts to spin it, suddenly distorted guitar chords are heard. A burning pentagram appears in his exercise book, a punk song develops, and following a few shots of the neatly decorated living room and the luxurious swimming pool in the backyard, a group of skateboarders enter the house, headed by Suicidal Tendencies’ lead singer Mike Muir, who kicks in the door and shouts: “Let’s skate!” They literally start to tear the place apart, skate on the furniture, and spray-paint the walls. The main character excitedly moves to the pounding beat, swings his fist rhythmically, and joins the gang as they destroy the interior of the house and perform various maneuvers on their skateboards. The session culminates at the swimming pool, which is immediately emptied and exploited as a skateboard ground and becomes the site of a raging Suicidal Tendencies concert. The video ends with the return of the parents and their shock at finding a destroyed home.

1 | Leary, a psychologist who became famous for his advocacy of the use of drugs and psychedelics during the 1960s and its countercultural movements, brings an ironic twist to the video’s cast as his real life activities diametrically oppose the character of an authoritarian father and his patronizing instructions.

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In just three minutes, this video offers a very condensed account of the rebellious aspects of the two interconnected subcultures of skateboarding and hardcore punk, best described by the term skate punk. It appears to be the music, its distorted guitar sounds, aggressive drum beats, and shouted refrains that, in conjunction with the activity of skateboarding, turn an apparently average teenager against his middle-class upbringing and into a full participant in a punk rock riot, or an “outcast of society,” as the lyrics suggest (“Possessed to Skate”). A few chords and a skateboard seem to be enough to disrupt the idyll of a middle-class California neighborhood and to question its very foundations: Parental and institutional (i.e. school) authority is disregarded by favoring skateboarding over math assignments, paintings are torn from the walls and replaced with graffiti, the living room furniture is rearranged and appropriated as skating obstacles, and the swimming pool is redefined by emptying it in order to skate its concrete slopes and inclines. The pool’s significance for the plot is obvious from its prominent position in the video’s mise-en-scène: As a “saturated symbol of luxury” the swimming pool stands for the family’s social standing and their (upper) middle class affiliations and aspirations (Halberstam 81), which renders its transformation by teenage skate punks a direct attack on these values of suburban prosperity. The pool is no longer accepted as a capitalist status symbol but turned into a medium of skate punk performance. It is sonically engaged by the punk band playing next to it while skateboarders literally scratch its concrete surface. The parents’ American Dream, their Californian Utopia, and their suburban existence are all attacked by each and every move in this music video. These teenagers and adolescents do not want a single-family house with nice paintings on the walls and crocheted blankets on the couch. They rebel against this image of domesticity and try to escape it through physical movement. Moving to the beats of the music, moving on the skateboard, jumping in front of a stage and jumping into an empty swimming pool with a skateboard—all of the performances and expressions of rebellion deployed in this music video are ultimately bound to the movement of the body. The static normalcy of middle-class suburbia is disrupted by the bodily movement of rebelling skate punks. In what follows I will take a closer look at the cultures of skateboarding, hardcore punk, and their amalgam, skate punk, in order to approach the complex phenomenon of youth cultural rebellion and its reliance on discursive as well as corporeal representation and deviation. I want to question the rebellious stances and attitudes exemplarily insinuated in the music video for “Possessed to Skate” and find out by which means they are articulated within other media such as records and song lyrics, flyers, magazines, and videos, as well as through the corporeal movement of the body. How is skate punk rendered rebellious? What role does its discursive and material context play? How do subcultural media construct rebellious images of skateboarding punks and in what way do their corporeal activities contribute to the performance and expression of rebellious behavior? Who or what is the object of this rebellion? Who is involved and to what extent is the rebellious

I NTRODUCTION

and resistant claim of skate punks influenced, subjugated, and compromised by their social and cultural backgrounds? Assuming that skate punk culture developed in California during the early 1980s—a sociopolitical period often labeled the “Gimme Decade” for its blatant consumerism and probably best described as the climax of postmodern capitalism (cf. DeCurtis 2)—chapter 1 of this book starts with a discussion of various theoretical positions which anticipate the corporeal field of the body in its relationship to the discursive attributes of the time. In conjunction with a contextual delineation of both American politics and culture in the 1980s in general and the development of skateboarding and hardcore punk in particular, the first chapter constitutes a basis for an analysis of specific skate punk media and their content in chapter 2, and a consideration of the material and corporeal ramifications of skate punk performances in chapter 3. My work thus follows deliberations of contextual, discursive, and corporeal aspects of skate punk in order to fathom whether (and if so, how) American teenagers or, more precisely, skateboarding punks from the suburban middle class, find ways to resist, distance themselves, and deviate from their social, cultural, and physical environment in Southern California. How do these young people attempt to create a rebellious subculture and how do they attempt to live and cultivate a body in rebellion?

A Brief Note on Subcultures The resistance to the perceived ‘mainstream’ of the middle class that is implied in “Possessed to Skate,” at least from the perspective of skate punk participants themselves, renders their youth cultural group a ‘subculture,’ i.e. a formation of people whose appearance and actions deviate and differ from the normative values of their environment and particularly from the dominant culture of adults and parents (cf. Barsch). Although the term ‘subculture’ has repeatedly received critical commentary over the last decade, most prominently in the studies of David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl and their Post-Subcultures Reader (2003), it provides a useful working concept for my purposes as it implies an intentional attempt by skate punks to set themselves apart from an imagined other, an alleged mainstream. I refer to subcultures within the context of the term’s original coinage at the Chicago School of Sociology by scholars such as Albert K. Cohen or Frederic M. Thrasher, their work on gang cultures, and their concentration on juvenile delinquency and deviance, as well as its further specification by the Birmingham School and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which emphasized the subversive meaning of subcultural style (cf. esp. Hebdige). Following Ryan Moore and his recent study, Sells Like Teen Spirit - Youth Culture and Social Crisis (2010), I do not believe in the necessity of an “abandonment of [the term] ‘subculture’” as it is implied by ‘post-subcultural theory’ and its contestation of “the romanticism of the CCCS” and the latter’s alleged failure in reflecting “the political, cultural and

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economic realities of the twenty-first century” (Moore, Sells Like 24; Muggleton and Weinzierl, “What is” 4, 5). ‘Post-subcultural’ approaches raise important questions and correctly emphasize how “youth (sub)cultural phenomena” and “global mainstreams and local substreams rearticulate and restructure in complex and uneven ways to produce new, hybrid cultural constellations” which not only contradict the at times rather narrow preoccupation with class relations characterizing the work of the CCCS (Muggleton and Weinzierl, “What is” 3), but which also question the strict binary implied by the term subculture and its alleged antipole of the mainstream. However, I agree with Ken Gelder who precisely values the notion of subculture for being “both powerful and fragile,” “both ‘inappropriate’ and ‘illuminating’” (Gelder 12, 14). Gelder’s account of the term, in fact, renders it much more flexible than the proponents of ‘post-subcultures’ might acknowledge and, thus paves the way for Moore’s affirmative approach and his proposition that “the ‘sub’ in subculture signifies not only plurality but also subordination and subversion” (Sells Like 25). This provides an ideal conception for the delineation of skate punk’s entanglement with dominant modes of white middle-class discourse while acknowledging its potential for possible resistance and subversion. When I mention skateboarding, (hardcore) punk, and skate punk in the following, I will employ the term ‘subculture’ to outline and to question in what way the participants of these cultural phenomena act and interact within their respective environments. At the same time, I will consider the multiple influences and entanglements that link and relate them to broader contexts of popular culture. Moore’s approach exemplifies the possibility of adhering to the current state of research in youth and (sub)cultural studies while maintaining the notion of ‘subculture’ as a flexible concept. Instead of merely contributing to “what George McKay in a slightly different context has called a ‘rhetoric of newness’,” which Gelder locates within the works of “post-subculturalists” (Gelder 1; cf. McKay 13), I try to further enhance the term by referring to the very recently introduced conception of corresponding cultures in Emily Chivers Yochim’s book Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity (2010). Chivers Yochim explains that, “[c]ontinuously in motion, a corresponding culture is a group organized around a particular lifestyle or activity that interacts with various levels of media – niche, mainstream, and local – and variously agrees or disagrees with those media’s espoused ideas” (4). While her focus on media parallels my project’s intended analysis of song lyrics, flyers, magazines, and videos the verb form of ‘corresponding’ suggests a reciprocal movement, which not only bridges “a false [and static] binary between subculture and mainstream” but also perfectly fits my inquiries about the interplay, i.e. the correspondences, between skateboarding and hardcore punk (17). Chivers Yochim mirrors Gelder’s preceding explanation that “[s]ubcultures and society may be oppositional in many respects but they are also bound together,” i.e. corresponding (Gelder 7). She summarizes this flexible connection by emphasizing the permanent ‘correspondence’ that combines subculture and mainstream in a dynamic and interactive relationship. In ac-

I NTRODUCTION

cordance with Chivers Yochim and for the purpose of this book, I read subcultures, and particularly skate punk, as corresponding cultures that cannot be categorized in simple dichotomous entities. After the contextual remarks in chapter 1, chapter 2 elaborates on the extent to which the correspondence with a variety of media, e.g. TV series or popular movies, is crucial for an understanding of skate punk productions. chapter 3 points beyond the discursive realm and includes ‘correspondences’ to the material and corporeal field of bodily movement. All chapters include considerations of the different levels at which skateboarding, punk, and skate punk are subordinated and subversive in the environment of California, where they have developed as widely corresponding subcultures.

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CONTEXT

1.1

THE B ODY AND I NTERLOCKING E XPRESSIONS

In their 2007 anthology Beyond the Body Proper, Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar start with the notion of the “lived body” (1). “To make bodies a topic for anthropological, humanistic, sociological, and historical research,” they explain, “is to ask how human life can be and has been constructed, imagined, subjectively known—in short, lived” (2). They do not see lived bodies as proper entities but “as contingent formations of space, time, and materiality, [which] have begun to be comprehended as assemblages of practices, discourses, images, institutional arrangements, and specific places and projects” (1). Lock and Farquhar’s approach to the lived body provides a perfect starting point for my enquiries into skate punk: It implies and incorporates the discursive as well as the material formations that pervade this subculture and its entanglement in the Californian locale. Their interest in how human life is lived parallels the questions and assumptions that structure and organize my evaluation of skate punk. While I will initially try to point out how skate punk and its correspondences to other cultural phenomena are constructed and imagined through medial discourses, images, and arrangements (chapter 2), the subsequent goal is to delineate how skate punk, including its moments of rebelliousness and contradiction, is actually (i.e. corporeally) lived (chapter 3). I therefore use a theoretical consideration of the body as the basis for the structural organization of this work. It helps to situate my analyses within the postmodern setting of late capitalism and the discursive ramifications of race, class, gender, and space differentiations, while emphasizing the importance of an approach which always combines these aspects with their material and corporeal implementation and presence.

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1.1.1

Lived Bodies: Movement, Forces, and Politics

Opposing “the impossible poles of a Cartesian social science,” Lock and Farquhar suggest a very flexible approach to the body (15). Whereas Descartes held the opinion that “we perceive bodies only by the understanding which is in us, and not by the imagination, or the senses, and that we do not perceive them through seeing them or touching them, but only because we conceive them in thought” (Descartes 33), Lock and Farquhar’s notion of lived bodies avoids this mind/body separation: Rather than taking (apparently) empirical bodies and (apparently) interior experience as a starting point (this is, we think, the central limitation of many phenomenological approaches), comparative scholarship in anthropology, history, and the humanities shows that the problem of the body can be read from many kinds of discourses, mundane practices, technologies, and relational networks. The bodies that come into being within these collective formations are social, political, subjective, objective, discursive, narrative, and material all at once. They are also culturally and historically specific, while at the same time mutable, offering many challenges to both scholarship and the everyday politics of a world compressed in time and space. (9)

Following this explanation and assuming that bodies come into being within “collective formations” that range from the discursive to the material, it becomes evident that it is impossible to speak of ‘the body’ as a singular and finite figure.2 Rather, ‘bodies’ should be approached in the plural without being fixed in restrictive definitions of singularity. John Urry, in Mobilities (2007), feeds into this argument against fixity and literally unhinges it by adding the notion of performance. This opens up a very flexible approach to bodies and their entanglement in movement: Bodies are not fixed and given but involves [sic] performances especially to fold notions of movement, nature, taste and desire, into and through the body. Bodies navigate backwards and forwards between directly sensing the external world as they move bodily in and through it, and discursively mediated sensescapes that signify social taste and distinction, ideology and meaning. The body especially senses as it moves. It is endowed with kinaesthetics, the sixth sense that informs one what the body is doing in space through the sensations of movement registered in its joints, muscles, tendons and so on. Especially important in that sense of movement, the ‘mechanics of space’, is that of touch, of the feet on the pavement or the mountain path, the hands on a rock-face or the steering wheel. (48)

2 | In her anthology The Body (2005), Tiffany Atkinson argues in a similar vein as she explains that it is indeed “hard to discern what exactly is denoted by ‘the’ body in an abstract, totalizing sense, when even to visualise a body is to plunge immediately into the particulars of gender, race, age, posture and so forth” (3).

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Urry’s insistence on the importance of movement underpins my interest in the way bodily movement adds to the mediation of rebellious momentum in skate punk culture. It extends to the concrete by relating movement, or what he calls the “mechanics of space,” to the touch of pavements, mountains, rocks and steering wheels (48). Embracing Lock and Farquhar’s skepticism towards the mind/body dyad, he implicitly raises the question of further examples which concretely point out to what extent approaches to the body can work only in a synthesized fashion that reads the discursive in equality to the material and vice versa. The subject matter of skate punk culture is a very useful example which plays directly into this discussion. The touch of feet on skateboard, the skateboard on the pavement, the hand on the microphone, the touching of bodies in front of a concert stage—these are all implied in Urry’s remarks. The fact that skateboarding and hardcore punk both rely on movement in its various senses—skateboarding in its most basic function literally means to move on a wooden board with four wheels; hardcore punk involves particularly fast music (‘movement’ of hands on fretboards), aggressive dancing, and bands touring—illustrates how an examination of these phenomena generates valuable examples which, through their relations to movement and the body, incorporate discursive as well as material ramifications in a combining moment of allegedly rebellious mobility. Urry’s remarks show to what extent the Cartesian dualism of mind and body can be questioned using an epistemology of movement. Lock and Farquhar state that although “some philosophers have done much to overcome these invidious classifications, perhaps no writing in modern Western languages can entirely escape the persistent dualism of body and mind. It is this dyad that serious thinking about collective, material human life […] must work to overcome” (Lock and Farquhar 111). Urry’s citation implies a useful step in that direction. Although the navigation between an assumed “external world” and “discursively mediated sensescapes” at first glance seems to reinstall a binary between the realm of corporal materiality and the realm of thought (Urry 48), the strict division between the two is eliminated or “overcome” through the notion of movement. According to Urry, the body “senses as it moves” (48), be it in sensecapes or the external world, thus shifting the focus from Cartesian bipolarity to a rather circular flux that merges these poles through movement. Whereas bipolarity suggests rigidity, movement implies flexibility and thus the ideas of thought (or discursively mediated sensescapes) and materiality (or the external world) are folded into each other. Both Urry’s and Lock and Farquhar’s works and their descriptions of the (lived) body and its flexible, multiple, and plural constitution find an early predecessor in French sociologist Marcel Mauss. In the opening paragraph of his famous essay “Techniques of the Body,” Mauss similarly argues for a plural approach to bodily activity. His ideas offer an interesting starting point that allows for plurivalent references to the introductory example of the “Possessed to Skate” video and the (empty) swimming pool as a site for skate punk rebellion. He explains:

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Although I do not seek to develop a theory of “the technique of the body,” the reference to Mauss suggests that an analysis of skate punk—certainly a technique that is based on humans’ (and in the case of the mentioned music video it is really predominantly men’s) knowledge of how to use their bodies—enables a broader understanding of body theories. His suggestion of moving from the concrete to the abstract not only supports the possibility of incorporating the specific example of skate punk subculture, but it also implicitly refers back to the literal concrete of the Californian swimming pool that introduced this chapter. Aside from this concrete reference, Mauss’s inquiries are helpful insofar as they include the assumption that the body constitutes people’s “most natural instrument” or, more precisely, their “first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means” (56). Although, at first glance this definition appears to assume the body to be a kind of biologically determined essentialist entity, Mauss emphasizes the social and psychological dimensions that are involved. He hints at “the facts of education” which dominate the usage of the human body by explaining that children and also adults “[imitate] actions […] by people in whom [they] have confidence and who have authority over [them]” (54). Thus, the human body through a socializing momentum is inevitably linked to the notion of “habitus,” which Mauss defines in the plural as “ “habits” [that] vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges” (53). Resisting the Cartesian bipolarity of a body/mind split, he establishes the concept of the “total man,” which combines physical, psychical, and social viewpoints (53). Consequently, Mauss’s remarks highlight to what extent rebellious disobedience to authority—including all of its physical, mental, and social implementations—is connected to the body. Deploying bodily techniques which escape the habitual assumptions of a specific society can function as direct opposition to the authoritarian regulation of what is perceived as acceptable. Whereas, for example, a swimming pool very literally implies the bodily technique of swimming, its re-appropriation for skateboarding and skate punk expression poses an opposition to socially accepted norms (at least those of conservative 1980s California suburbia): The body becomes an “instrument” of rebellion or a “means” of disobedience that carries symbolic notions of resistance, while simultaneously posing an immediate and corporeal challenge to its concrete environment. Although Mauss’s investigations concerning the techniques of the body were originally published in 1935, his thoughts still hold relevance for contemporary inquiries. The 2008 monograph The Body of Nature and Culture by Rod Giblett sup-

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ports this view as it uses Mauss’s essay to introduce the body as a kind of force field that is “constituted by forces acting upon it and by forces with which it acts” (13). “Some of these ways and forces,” Giblett explains, “are what […] Mauss calls ‘techniques of the body’” (13). Specifying the relations of forces and the body, he turns to the work of Gilles Deleuze and his philosophical argumentation for multiplicities, which also evokes the flexible and multifaceted approaches of Urry and Lock and Farquahr.3 Giblett explains that “[t]he body is not a singular, unified, homogeneous entity”—an assumption that Mauss had already anticipated through his notion of a threefold “socio-psycho-biological study” (Mauss 68)—but “the clashes of forces. [N]ot a field of forces that pre-exist the forces that play in and upon it, but the field of forces that result from forces meeting and clashing” (Giblett 6). Giblett, still referring to Deleuze’s theories, including that “[e]very relationship of forces constitutes a body – whether it is chemical, biological, social, or political” (Deleuze, Nietzsche 37), hints at the possibility to parallel the abstract conception of forces with political ramifications. He states that “[t]he body is not a rationalist machine, nor an autocratic kingdom, nor a functionalist unity but a political struggle, an anarchist collectivity” (Giblett 7). This assessment enhances the conception of the body as involved in a “political field,” a term derived from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (28). Foucault explains that “power relations have an immediate hold upon [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs,” which, in his view, composes a “political investment of the body” (25). The Foucauldian perspective reveals to what extent this investment organizes or disciplines the “anarchist collectivity” of forces which Giblett describes. While it is still possible to speak of a politically motivated struggle characterizing the forces that constitute the body, Foucault’s remarks indicate in what way this relationship is bound to the body’s “economic use” (25/26). He adds that it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. (26)

Anticipating the body’s entanglement in modes of capitalist production, Foucault’s statement implies how the resistance to such an investment, or the rebellion against a system that is informed by economic modes of production and consumption, can be articulated through bodily activism. If the body is constituted by a political struggle that is ignited by disciplining powers seeking to establish an economically motivated increase of forces in “economic terms of utility” as well as 3 | Urry as well as Lock and Farquahr directly reference Deleuze in their respective publications (cf. Urry 50, Lock and Farquahr 428 ff.)

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“political terms of obedience,” then the bodily investment in disutility and disobedience would mark ways of rebellious counter-engagement (138). Without coming to any precipitous conclusions about skate punk’s success in that respect, it is still possible to develop the hypothesis that it embraces such an approach. Given punk’s sympathy for, if not direct relation to, anarchist ideas and skateboarding’s often articulated disregard for its capitalist cooptation (cf. Brooke 95; Macleod, “Social Distortion” 128; Weyland 28), it is logical to examine the bodily performances and expressions of skate punks in that context. Are they capable of escaping the disciplining mechanisms of a profit-oriented force field? Are they incorporated in the “economic use” of the body or can their allegedly rebellious actions indicate ways back to a more open conception of the body as an “anarchist collectivity”? Do their actions reflect ways of corporeal participation in the political struggle?

1.1.2

Body, Postmodernism, and Capitalism

Foucault’s notion of a body’s “economic use”, i.e. its “constitution as labour power” (25/26), and the postmodern consumer culture of 1980s California can be linked by Donald M. Lowe’s monograph The Body in Late Capitalist USA. Whereas Foucault began his complex inquiries by an analysis of 18th Century practices of torture and punishment, Lowe approaches the body in the postmodern setting of late capitalism. Embracing the theoretical implementations of poststructuralist thought, Lowe sets out to expound the problems of “embodied existence in a world where all aspects of our lives, the environment we live in, and everything in between, have become means, or signifiers, of exchange value” (Lowe 15).4 Jean Baudrillard’s description of California, and especially the Los Angeles area, feeds into this view of a commercially signified world. His conception of Los Angeles’s “imaginary stations that feed reality, the energy of the real to a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation” (Baudrillard, Simulacra 13), mirror Lowe’s account of the problems of embodied existence. Everything is transposed into the realm of signification, the imaginary or hyperreal world of commercial circulation, the flux of capitalist exchange value. However, Lowe claims that despite Baudrillard’s postmodern notion of hyperreality and the deconstructive ramifications of poststructuralism, there still remains one referent apart from all the other destabilized referents whose presence cannot be denied, and that is the body referent, our very own lived body. This body referent is in fact the referent of all referents, in the sense that ultimately all signifieds, values, or meanings refer to the delineation and satisfaction of the needs of the body. (14) 4 | Lowe evokes allusions to what George Lipsitz summarizes as the “crisis of representation” that had been theorized by European critics in the mid and late 20th century (“Listening” 311). He condenses the problematic by linking the notion of representation to the signification of exchange value.

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By insisting on the lived body as a remaining referent that is bound to “the delineation and satisfaction of [its] needs,” Lowe positions it within the field of “exchangist practices” and thus, ultimately, within “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” that Fredric Jameson sees as the crucial fundament of postmodernism (14, 175; cf. Jameson Postmodernism). Lowe thus combines the Baudrillardian notion of hyperreal simulations and the “destabilization of referents” with a remaining “body referent,” that is enmeshed in capitalist “production/consumption” modes (13, 14, 15).5 While cautioning against a “fall back on the body as an individual identity, subjectivity, private self, or any other autonomous, stable, unitary entity,” Lowe uses his conception of the body referent to delineate its entanglement in the material realm of “space/time”, as well as the sociohistorical field of “the construction and satisfaction of needs” (175, 174). He acknowledges the body’s uniqueness as an “embodied being-in-the-world,” i.e. a “lived body” whose materiality is “constructed and realized within social practices to satisfy changing needs,” and simultaneously avoids reducing it to an essentialist entity which escapes the postmodern “politics of decoding and recoding” (174/175, 1, 175). Thus, Lowe’s work enhances Foucault’s argument about the disciplining powers that organize the economic use of the body and inscribes it into the environment of Late-Capitalist USA. While, in 1975 Foucault asked for the “mode of investment of the body [that] is necessary and adequate for the functioning of a capitalist society like ours” (Power/ Knowledge 58), Lowe organizes his inquiries towards the question of active resistance. “How do we resist?” he wants to know before explaining that “[r]esistance is the negation of, i.e., the active opposition to, capital” (175). His study, thus, relies on the idea of the body as the nexus of activism against the social constraints of capitalist society. The question for him is no longer concerned with the modes that are required for the functioning of capitalist society, but with the investment that disrupts it. The fact that he develops his inquiries around the notion of the body referent or the lived body emphasizes the importance of the bodily field for potentially rebellious counter cultures. In terms of the scope of my project, it therefore becomes possible to open Lowe’s question to the bodily performances and

5 | A parallel to this conjunction can possibly be found in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s remarks concerning the “Postulates of Linguistics” in A Thousand Plateaus. They explain that a linguistic statement “applies to bodies but is itself incorporeal, internal to enunciation” (Deleuze and Guattari 91). They also state, “The independence of the form of expression and the form of content is not the basis of a parallel between them or a representation of one by the other, but on the contrary a parceling of the two, a manner in which expressions are inserted into contents, in which we ceaselessly jump from one register to another, in which signs are at work in things themselves just as things extend into or are deployed through signs” (96). It follows that the hyperreal and the body referent, or simulations (or signs) and materially lived bodies affect each other constantly and must be read in a combined manner which illuminates their interconnectedness.

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expressions of skate punk culture. Are the participating subjects able to develop valuable and efficient counter positions to the society they live in? How far are they enmeshed in the production and consumption cycle of postmodern capitalism? Can they produce alternatives to the consumer culture of 1980s California? How do their symbolic and representational productions relate to their corporeal actions and movements? An analysis of skate punk and its media can be linked to Lowe’s conception of effective resistance. He specifies: Resistance as counter-practice must seize and recode issues of bodily needs which the hegemony of exchangist practices have provoked. It must be founded on class/gender/race differences, not because they are essential, but because capital accumulation exploits all these differentials. Resistance must be discursively coherent and plausible, yet transgressive against existing discourses, in order to mobilize different groups and sorts of peoples. It must take into account the weight of cybernetic systems, which favor the established power. And it must be semiotically sophisticated in its counter-practices. Otherwise, it can mount no effective opposition to capital’s combination and recombination of structural, discursive, systematic, and semiotic practices. (Lowe 176)

According to Lowe, an effective critique of capitalism is bound to a seizure of bodily needs and their multilayered entanglement in the differentiating categories of race, gender, and class. While again claiming an anti-essentialist viewpoint on these categories, his statement emphasizes in what way they are crucial when it comes to bodily actions within a system that “exploits all these differentials” (176). Just as the lived body does not constitute a single entity, the facets of race, gender, and class do not hold universal essences. However, their effects in a given society influence bodily life. These considerations prepare for an argument in a similar vein, which is developed by David Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000). Harvey elucidates that any challenges to a dominant system of representation of the body (e.g. those mounted by feminists and queer theorists in recent years) become direct challenges to bodily practices. The net effect is to say that different processes (physical and social) ‘produce’ (both materially and representationally) radically different kinds of bodies. Class, racial, gender, and all manner of other distinctions are marked upon the human body by virtue of the different socio-ecological processes that do their work upon that body. (99)

Whereas the idea concerning the production of bodies through varied processes specifically evokes the possibility of the creation of a rebellious body through corporeal engagement in skate punk, on a more general level, Harvey’s statement supports and extends Lowe’s inquiries. He speaks about “a dominant system of representation” and thus alludes to Lowe’s account of the hyperreal consumer capitalism which the latter indicates through references to Baudrillard. The body is

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represented; it becomes, in Lowe’s words, a “body image/represenation” (1). However, as Lowe explains, the lived body by no means constitutes an equivalent to this representation: It is the remaining referent or the “embodied being-in-the-world” (174/175). Harvey acknowledges this differentiation but hints at the fact that the challenging of body images simultaneously affects body practices. This again parallels Lowe, who sees “social practices” as constitutive for embodied living (cf. 175). It becomes evident that the representations imposed by the dominant system (in the case of this project the system of 1980s capitalism and its consumer culture in California), despite their hyperreal ramifications, do have real, i.e. “materially and representationally” informed, consequences for the lived body and its practices (Harvey 99). For the analysis of both, media products and the corporeal role of the body in skate punk, these considerations are particularly important. The fact that media necessarily rely on modes of representation indicates that the objects of study in my book, i.e. skate punk songs, flyers, magazines, and videos, have to be approached primarily as parts of a larger system of representation and analyzed within the context of the popular consumer culture that influenced American life during the 1980s. However, they also need to be considered against the backdrop of the consequences that entail from the field of the lived body and the possible production of “radically different kinds of bodies” or (Harvey 99), in anticipation of the movement involved in skate punk, radically different kinds of bodily techniques and corporeal motions. Lowe and Harvey’s studies support this approach as they delineate the connections between representation and immediate practice. For the organization of this book it is practicable to proceed in the implied order and, after providing a description and delineation of the cultural and historical context, start with a media-analytical approach to concrete examples of skate punk representations (chapter 2). Building on these evaluations of skate punk song lyrics, flyers, magazines, and videos, a turn to the corporeal specificities of skate punk will subsequently combine the discursive findings with considerations of material and physical phenomena (chapter 3). The succession of my work only results from a pragmatic point of view: It does not claim to trace a determined chronology that segregates the realm of the discursive and the realm of the material, but rather approaches these seemingly divided fields separately for reasons of methodological practicability. Ultimately, the course of my work is meant to advance the argument that the discursive and the material always need to be grasped in their interconnection, interdependence, and interaction. The insistence on the ramifications of race, gender, and class affiliations, implies the methodological framework that can help to organize my proceedings. Lowe argues for a resistance that is based on the race, gender, and class triad, as it delineates the differentials that capitalist accumulation seeks to exploit. An analysis which investigates the rebellious stance of a youth cultural phenomenon in postmodern California needs to address these categories in order to examine their role for discursive and corporeal mediations: If race, gender, and class are deployed

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to organize capitalist society, then they consequently need to be involved in the rebellion against this very society. Harvey’s quote, in this context, re-emphasizes the decisive role of the body upon which “[c]lass, racial, gender, and all manner of other distinctions are marked” (99). It becomes evident that the examination of a rebellious subculture that relies heavily on bodily movement in addition to medial representation is necessarily bound to a closer investigation of the dynamics of these categories. In the specific case of Californian skate punk, it is important to complement the established triad of race, gender, and class with the notion of space, i.e. the site-specific characteristics of Southern California, since it constitutes the environment in which the cultures of skateboarding and punk first started to merge. Particularly against the background of youth cultures, Lawrence Grossberg supports the inclusion of a spatial category. He notes that “youth is always overdetermined, inflected not only by race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, but also by spatial location (in terms of both nations and regions and the different forms of social space—e.g., urban, suburban, rural, and small town)” (26). Space, consequently, can be included in the “distinctions” that Harvey links to the body. In combination with race, gender, and class, these are the four categories that delineate the methodological framework which constitutes the basis for my approach to skate punk.

1.1.3

An Intersectional Access: Approaching Skate Punk

Analyzing space, race, gender, and class as constitutive elements of the lived body incorporates four distinct axes of differentiation. It calls for a methodology that approaches the discursive and the corporeal field from a multi-layered perspective and thus promises a comprehensive examination of the various modes of representation, performance, and expression that are deployed in skate punk. Assuming that it is mainly through space, race, gender, and class that an undermining of and rebellion against dominant US society is organized and mediated in skate punk culture, it becomes possible to read the lived body—borrowing from Judith Butler—as a “corporeal field of cultural play” on which the respective categories create moments of rebellious expression (“Performative Acts” 415). The fact that Butler’s phrase establishes a field that combines corporeality with notions of culture introduces a very useful conception for my purposes. Just as in Lowe and Harvey’s remarks, it becomes evident to what extent cultural ramifications have corporeal consequences for the lived body. Although Butler in Bodies that Matter ultimately argues that the body in its material corporeality is always “posited and signified” through language and consequently always discursively predetermined, she acknowledges that “the options for theory are not exhausted by presuming materiality, on the one hand, and negating materiality, on the other” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 30). She claims that it is her “purpose to do precisely neither of these” and thus delineates an approach that is especially important within an analysis of skate punk (30). The corresponding subcultures in question here, i.e.

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skateboarding and hardcore punk, do not only rely on cultural representations in the form of fashion, music, texts, lyrics, and images, but also incorporate material expressions through physical maneuvers, bodily risks, and corporeal encounters. Thus, the analytic examination should not favor discourse over materiality or vice versa but instead should embrace their interconnectedness, which becomes manifest on the corporeal field of cultural play. It is here where culture influences the body and where bodily actions affect culture. It is where space, race, gender, and class can be deployed to constitute a skate punk body in rebellion. But how can categories of differentiation be analyzed in a structured way that acknowledges their interconnected importance for the subculture of skate punk? Butler identifies a major problem that occurs in such an approach by explaining that [o]n the one hand, any analysis which foregrounds one vector of power over another will doubtless become vulnerable to criticisms that it not only ignores or devalues the others, but that its own constructions depend on the exclusion of the others in order to proceed. On the other hand, any analysis which pretends to be able to encompass every vector of power runs the risk of a certain epistemological imperialism which consists in the presupposition that any given writer might fully stand for and explain the complexities of contemporary power. (Bodies that Matter 18/19)

Reading space, race, gender, and class as vectors of power or, with Giblett, as “forces” that act upon the body and with which the body acts, it becomes evident that an analysis which seeks to incorporate these aspects runs the danger of what Butler forcefully calls “epistemological imperialism” (18). Such an approach cannot assume that the four mentioned categories cover every aspect that is crucial for the lived body, and it would be inappropriate to claim that the analysis might stand for all the complexities which constitute the body’s corporeal and cultural characteristics. However, turning to the concept of intersectionality, which originated in the African-American feminist movement of the 1960s and onwards, allows for a practical example of how critical thought can be and already has been organized according to a variety of differentiating variables. In their essay “Ain’t I A Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality”, Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix initially define the concept of intersectionality “as signifying the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axis [sic] of differentiation – economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential – intersect in historically specific contexts” (76). Their approach implies the opportunity to identify space, race, gender, and class within skate punk culture as axes of differentiation that literally intersect within the specific context of 1980s Southern California where they function as affective elements of the lived body. Whereas Lowe and Harvey especially helped to explain to what extent the lived body is necessarily constituted and influenced by these distinctive categories, Brah and Pheonix offer a theoretical process that takes these insights and elevates them

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to the level of practical methodology. They present opportunities that allow for an intersectionally informed analysis which can be connected to theories of the lived body, its modes of resistance, and its differential constitutions. As the title of their essay suggests, Brah and Phoenix revisit the intersectional approach and thus remain within the original scope of the concept and its concentration on “simultaneously interlocking oppressions” (78). Their text recalls important works of intersectionality, such as Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought in which she similarly explains that “[i]ntersectionality refers to particular forms of intersecting oppressions” (18).6 The critical enquiries that follow from these feminist interventions prove how far oppressive conditions can be analyzed through a multilayered approach. Intersectionality, in this initial conception, reveals in which ways working class African-American women suffer from the ramifications of different axes of differentiation. As Hill Collins’ remarks imply, this effort does not claim to incorporate all aspects of difference but concentrates instead on specific categories such as the “intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation” (18), which proves that intersectionality manages to produce valuable analyses that are based on the consideration of a variety of differentiating categories, without falling prey to the claim of an imperialist epistemology. Consequently, intersectionality promises to offer a useful methodological framework for an analysis, which is constituted along the overlapping lines of space, race, gender, and class categories.7 The initial focus of intersectionality on interlocking oppressions, however, appears to stand in opposition to, or at least to fall short of, the space, race, gender, and class differences which provide the background for skate punk activists. As the introductory example of the Suicidal Tendencies music video implied, the protagonists of the skate punk subculture of the 1980s apparently need to be associated with rather privileged positions as they predominantly stem from and act within a suburban, white, masculine, middle-class context. Thus, it would appear to be tempting to shift the initial focus on interlocking oppressions to intersections of privilege in order to reapply the concept of intersectionality within the context of this project. However, such a reversal reduces the idea of differentiating axes to the mere binary between two poles. Instead of simply remaining within the dichotomous field of oppression and privilege, I refer to intersectionality as an approach which fosters an examination of interlocking expressions (as opposed to oppres-

6 | Hill Collins thereby refers to the works of Kimberlé Crenshaw who is credited for first introducing the term intersectionality to the debate on the oppression of Afro-American women in the USA (cf. Crenshaw). 7 | The fact that Harvey identifies feminist (and also queer) theories as a major reason for “an extensive and original theorizing of the body [which] became essential to progressive and emancipatory politics” supports my turn towards a concept that is rooted in the African-American feminist movement while simultaneously binding it back to theorizations of the body as they are introduced in this chapter (14).

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sions8). By avoiding to analyze the differences in question here within a scale of bipolarity, this modified application recalls Lowe’s statement that “class/gender/ race [and I add space] differences” are not essential (176). In fact, it regards them as crucial marks on the body that definitely play into social modes of oppression and privilege (cf. Harvey 99), but also can be analyzed within a broader focus on their expressive ramifications as constitutive characteristics of (subcultural) media and the lived body in 1980s US society. In this way, the categories named provide a “heuristic framework as a kind of reminder to keep the complexity and intersection of many constituent categories in mind” (Villa 183), as Paula-Irena Villa states in her very recent approach to intersectionality. She critically postulates: As I see it, intersectionality risks the reproduction of an old reductionist flaw in social theory, that is, the search for order as characteristic of the ‘macro’ level and its somewhat determinant projection onto the praxeological level. To put it differently: embodiment as part of any social practice shows that ‘doing’ is necessarily more and thus other than incorporation of theoretically and analytically defined central categories – however many categories there might be. (171)

Villa’s account implicitly delineates the structure of this book as it acknowledges the importance of intersectionality for critical research. At the same time, it underscores the crucial notion of “doing,” i.e. of corporeal activity, which is linked to categories of differentiation but exceeds them in “the somatic aspect of concrete social action” (171). She implies an additional examination of the microlevel and micropercepts which enhances the intersectional approach by “the fuzzy logic of concrete action” (183); a methodological addition that I will incorporate in chapter 3 and its focus on material and corporeal movement in skate punk culture. Since I am interested in the rebellious moment that is articulated through subcultural stylizations and representations, as well as through the body and bodily movement in skate punk, I employ an intersectionally informed approach to create a heuristic framework that accounts for those categories which take effect in the discursive and corporeal activities of this culture. Space (especially California suburbia), race (especially whiteness), gender (especially masculinity), and class (especially the middle-class origin) constitute aspects of normative American society—a background that many of the original skateboarders and hardcore punks came and continue to come from. In resisting and rebelling against this society and its norms, these categories are of central importance.

8 | I do not question the validity, necessity or capacity of the initial (black feminist) approach of intersectionality. Rather, I want to learn from this critical endeavor and find additional fields of application for a concept that insists on the interconnection of differentiating categories.

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In their anthology Performing the Body / Performing the Text, Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson parallel this thought through inquiries into the realm of art. They explain that “[b]y performing particularized bodies (often highly marked in terms of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and / or class), artists may dramatically unveil the processes by which non-normative subjects are conventionally excluded from the canonical narratives of art history” (6). This statement emphasizes to what extent intersecting differences affect people’s positioning towards the society they live in. The bodily engagement of these differences cannot only reveal the exclusion of “non-normative subjects,” but also be deployed in order to escape the constraints of normativity through an intentional representation and performance of “particularized bodies.” The question then is how skate punks engage space, race, gender, and class to set themselves apart from the mainstream they are rebelling against. A flexible approach of intersectionality structures my analysis according to these categories and evaluates them in their potential as symbolically, performatively, and expressively engaged bearers of a rebellious momentum. With regard to Brah and Pheonix’s definition of intersectionality as incorporating various axes of differentiation within a specific historical context, in the following I will give a short overview of the time period which forms the background for the development of skate punk culture before turning to the phenomenon and its predecessors, skateboarding and (hardcore) punk. As implied by the exemplary introduction of the Suicidal Tendencies video, I classify skate punk as a culture that emerged and developed in suburban Southern California around the early 1980s. I will document this assumption in detail within the subchapters concerning skateboarding and punk that follow the contextual description of the period. Departing from a brief insight into major economic, social, and cultural developments in the USA of the 1980s, I will first turn to the specificities of the middle class, its intersectional relationships with racial aspects as well as their connections to gender issues, and the circumstances of California suburbia. I will thereby set the stage for a description of skate punk’s development that relies on the characteristics of its discursive context and associations with those intersectional aspects of differentiation that are constitutive for the body and the subcultural representation of rebellion.

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1.2

THE C ONTE X T

1.2.1

The USA of the 1980s

Taking the specificities of the 1980s into consideration not only provides an important contextual overview of the period in which skate punk culture emerged, it also alludes to Lock and Farquhar’s conception of bodies as “contingent formations of space, time, and materiality” (1), and thus prepares for a deliberation of the period and its concrete ramifications for the corporeal realm of the body. George Lipsitz provides an essential statement which summarizes the conditions of the USA during the 1980s. He explains that “the transition to a ‘high tech’ service and sales economy has deindustrialized America, fundamentally disrupting the social arrangements fashioned in the 1950s” (“Listening” 324). Lipsitz explicitly distinguishes the period of the 80s from preceding decades and establishes a comparison with the 1950s in order to characterize the striking changes that began with the end of the 1970s. “Structural unemployment, migration to the Sunbelt, and the racial reconstruction of the family all have worked to detach individuals from the traditional authority of work, community, and family,” Lipsitz explains, and adds that “the individualistic ethic of upward mobility encourages a concomitant sense of fragmentation and isolation” (324/325). His statement depicts a stark contrast to the baby boomer years of the 50s, while the notion of an “individualistic ethic of upward mobility” hints at a development which Anthony DeCurtis outlines with the introduction of the term “Gimme Decade” (2). DeCurtis reads this notion as an indication of “the pinched privatism, the smug selfishness, the glib pragmatism, the grim status consciousness, the greed masking in taste, the brutal superficiality of the 1980s” in order to point to the individualistic consumerism of the time and distinguish it from the “Me Decade hedonism of the 1970s” (2).9 He deals with the 1980s within the scope of his inquiries concerning popular music, while his statement about the economic situation of the music industry provides useful information which helps to reveal correlations that reach beyond this specific field. DeCurtis illustrates a recession within the record industry by explaining that in “the early years of the decade, the economy was poor, video games – a technological harbinger of the very real war games to come – had seized the imagination of the young, and record sales were down significantly” (3). He not only hints at the general economic crisis of the 1980s, but also introduces an analogy between popular culture and US foreign policy by linking the hyperreal world of video games and the real SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) politics of Ronald Reagan.10 DeCurtis’s explications point out to what extent the study of pop 9 | The term “Me Decade” was coined by Tom Wolfe in his essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” published in the August 23, 1976 issue of New York Magazine. 10 | The software companies Cinemaware and Sega both released games that were called S.D.I. (the former in 1986, the latter in 1987). Both revolve around a Cold War setting.

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cultural phenomena is crucial for an understanding of the 1980s. Lipsitz supports this notion and emphasizes the importance of popular culture during this decade: Popular culture intervenes in the construction of individual and group identity more than ever before as Presidents win popularity by quoting from Hollywood films [...] while serious political issues such as homelessness and hunger seem to enter public consciousness most fully when acknowledged by popular musicians or in made-for-television movies. (“Listening” 325)

Ronald Reagan, ‘the great communicator’ that Lipsitz’s alludes to in his statement about presidents, not only quoted Hollywood films in his speeches but as a former actor in fact emerged from the movie industry. He can certainly be labeled a key personality who shaped the cultural as well as social and political climate of the 1980s and emphasizes the contrast to preceding decades. DeCurtis ascribes progressive politics and visionary thinking to the zeitgeist of the 1960s and rediscovers them partly in the reactions to Richard Nixon’s presidency and the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. However, by asking “who can deny that the election of Ronald Reagan proved to be the fatal blow to the 1960s dream?” (1), he implies the end of that phase and points to the changes that followed during Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. Daniel S. Traber adds to this account by explaining that domestic and foreign battles of the late sixties were a difficult time for Americans trying to make sense of their country’s future, but the post-Vietnam years saw the United States transform into a demoralized nation deeply wracked by uncertainty and instability. (“L.A.’s White Minority” 36/37)

He lists various reasons for this situation: a lost war, Watergate, feminism and Black Power’s continued attacks on the status quo, soaring inflation and interest rates, oil embargoes causing a decrease in real wages, deindustrialization and downsizing, and hostages in Iran. (37)

Traber explains to what extent these conditions of uncertainty and instability were exploited by Reagan and, besides the emergence of neo-conservatism, the New Right, and the Moral Majority, led to his election as president of the United States. Economically, Reagan established ideas primarily opposed to state intervention. This so-called Reaganomics stood in particular for a rigorous unleashing of market forces through the abolishment of unnecessary state interference and regulations, the privatization of public services, the diminishment of the allegedly too complex governmental machinery, and the resurrection of federalism (cf. Heideking 441). According to this economic logic, investments in social welfare merely represented an additional expansion of government and were therefore vehemently criticized. The idea of free market policies in combination with the belief in economic prog-

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ress and a politics against state intervention, ultimately freed the individual from the responsibilities of social solidarity and encouraged people to strive for personal advantage and profit maximization without remorse. These positions of selfish economic proficiency were accompanied by a religious fundamentalism that, in the form of evangelical Protestant Christianity and revivalism, constituted an important contribution to the rise of conservatism, including the literal exegesis of the Bible and strict moral ethics. This New Christian Right especially gained ground in Southern California where politicians like Ronald Reagan could profit from people’s fundamentalist Christian beliefs in combination with militant anti-Communism and patriotism (cf. Heideking 441-442). In summary, the USA of the 1980s was first of all characterized by a liberal economic policy, which focused on individual profit and personal upward mobility in a capitalist consumer culture. The economic crisis was sought to be countered by the reduction of state intervention, which was realized at the expense of social benefits and, accordingly, at the expense of disadvantaged and underprivileged groups of people. Additionally, the neo-conservative politics and propaganda of the Reagan administration and the New Christian Right caused a large part of the population that felt anxious because of social changes and economic stagnation to return to old “American values” of family, religion, and patriotism (G. Thompson 10). This development constituted a powerful antipole to the aims of the Civil Rights Movement and the feminist agenda of the time. Whereas the Black Power movement had accomplished the fact that “the descendants of African slaves have made their presence felt and, to a remarkable degree considering this country’s brutal history, been accepted as citizens, if not always as equals,” it must be noted that all that progress has not been as beneficial to the black masses as was anticipated in the ‘60s. The achievements of role models have not necessarily had a tangible impact on the realities of persistent poverty, poor education, and lingering, deep-seated social discrimination. A determined conservative backlash against the government’s role in altering social conditions, heretofore repressed class tensions within the black community, widespread drug use, and a debilitating cynicism [...] are just some of the elements that make the [1980s] often seem a muddle. (George ix)

The following description of the American middle class must therefore be complemented by the categories of race and gender, since non-white Americans as well as women and people who deviated from heterosexual norms still had (and have) to fight for equal rights and emancipation.

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1.2.2

The Middle Class and Intersections with Race and Gender

“The Myth of the Middle Class” The economic crisis which developed in the course of deindustrialization particularly influenced the economic situation of the American middle class. Traber mentions this aspect and describes “the collapsing expectations experienced by late baby-boomer professionals as well as those of the lower class and lower middle class whose once secure manufacturing jobs were disappearing” (“L.A.’s White Minority” 37). He references a decline of 14 percent in the average individual income between 1972 and 1982, and adds that “postwar subsidies like the Federal Home Loan program and G.I. Bill which enlarged a white middle class, had ended, and the tax burden had shifted from corporations to the lower and middle classes” (37). Traber’s account implies that America, including the American middle class, was not the “Affluent Society” that had been proclaimed during the 1950s (Parker 3). In view of skate punk’s emergence during the late 1970s and early 1980s, it is crucial to consider a period of time delineating the conditions of these decades and focusing on those class affiliations predominating within the subculture. Richard Parker’s monograph The Myth of the Middle Class (1972) suits this proposition as it describes the USA at the beginning of the 1970s and thus looks at the time of the first skate punks’ childhood and early adolescence. At the beginning of his book, Parker makes a crucial point by developing a definition which should always be considered when dealing with aspects of the middle class in the USA. Parker does not use the notion of the middle class to address a “hypothetical majority of prosperous and secure individuals,” but rather emphasizes that he uses the term to simultaneously allude to two separate groups, “the upper and lower middle classes” (xvii). “The awareness of these two distinct classes between rich and poor gives a much more realistic picture of America than does the notion of a single homogeneous middle class” (xvii), Parker proposes and reveals that the notion of a middle class incorporates family situations that range from “one step ahead of poverty” to “one step short of riches” (xviii). Building on this definition, Parker uses his study to debunk the myth of the middle class, which he locates behind the “assumption that prosperity and relative security are characteristic of the majority” (168). He states how an imbalance of power develops within the allegedly homogeneous and equal middle class and elevates the ‘elite’ of the “upper” middle class to a position of hegemonic supremacy. The so-called New Class of professionals, managers, and skilled workers can justify above-average incomes and privileges by being subsumed under the generalizing term middle class, while the distinction against the “lower” middle class is blanked out and the advantages are assumed to be available to everyone. “[T]he New Class’s claim to act in the interest of the whole” ensures the hegemonic status of the upper middle class while simultaneously maintaining the myth of a great and equal middle class in general (16/17).

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In order to illustrate the process of the developments Parker describes it is helpful to take a look at concrete numbers: Mike Davis’s City of Quartz provides a fitting resource for that purpose while simultaneously shifting the focus to the location of Southern California, i.e. the locale from which skate punk culture emerged: A recent survey of Los Angeles household income trends in the 1980s suggests that affluence (incomes of $50,000 plus) has almost tripled (from 9 per cent to 26 per cent) while poverty ($15,000 and under) has increased by a third (from 30 per cent to 40 per cent); the middle range, as widely predicted, has collapsed by half (from 61 per cent to 32 per cent). (7)

The numbers Davis refers to confirm a process that can be derived from Parker’s description of the fragmented middle class which, in Davis’ words, leads to a “[s]ocial polarization” (7). The New Class, which according to Parker enjoys hegemonic power, could obviously use its privileged position and expand its affluence while the “middle” sections declined and slid further into poverty. About 30 years after Parker, Paula S. Rothenberg summarizes the development of a social gap or polarization which puts the concept of an American middle class into question by emphasizing that “[a]lthough it is fashionable to deny the existence of rich and poor and to proclaim us all ‘middle class,’ class divisions are real and the gap between rich and poor in the United States is growing at an alarming rate” (Rothenberg 273). Rothenberg describes the denial of the difference between poor and rich through the universalizing label ‘middle class’ as a “fashionable” conception which can be further illustrated by another reference to Parker (273), who notes that being part of the middle class in the USA is perceived as having “arrived” (Parker 6). Being middle class denotes a status that marks people as “literally in the middle,” as “average,” and as “typical man in the street, the Good Joe” (16). It is interpreted as a positive status attribute, which explains why “the overwhelming majority of Americans publicly call themselves middle class, whether technician or laborer, blue-collar or white-collar” (xx). Referring to the example of higher-income blue-collar workers, Parker explains that the status attribute “middle class” is also coupled to the fear of losing this status—especially in times of economic crisis: For those who dwell in the larger cities and in adjoining suburbs, there is the further tension of “encroaching” blacks or other nonwhites. Many times the single debt-free possession of any consequence is the worker’s home, and in it he has invested not only his labor but a major portion of his psychic status. To feel constantly pressured from “below,” to be constantly reminded of the world from which many came and to which one might so easily return, can be a traumatizing experience for those living on the edge as so many blue collarites do. (11)

Although Parker refers to information by American sociologist Arthur Shostak, which he himself describes as too fixated on white male workers, his account sheds light on conditions that are important in order to trace the image connected with

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the status of ‘being middle-class.’ The importance of the “worker’s home” which is emphasized in this statement refers back to the middle-class cliché of “tree-lined suburbs and two-car garages” mentioned in the introduction to Parker’s book (xvi). The privately owned home is not only stylized as an ideal (and idyll) of American cities and suburbs, but also as an important status symbol of the middle class. The fact that the fear of “‘encroaching’ blacks or other nonwhites” is perceived as a pressure from “below” shows that the privileged position of whites is part of their self-conception. In contrast to this hegemonic status, African-Americans and other ethnic minorities are intuitively associated with a “lower class” connotation, which whites themselves escaped through their “arrival” in the middle class. The concept of the middle class is characterized by the myth of a homogeneous majority which leaves out the grave financial differences within this stratum. The status attributes evoked by the middle class label lead to the fact that a large proportion of the American people feel associated and classify themselves under this broad notion. Ethnic minorities are generally related to lower social strata, which hints at a correlation between class and race. An analysis of the middle class must take this intersection into account.

Race and Class In his essay “Being Black, Living in the Red: Wealth Matters”, Dalton Conley uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSDI) to develop the fictitious vitae of a white and an African-American family. He illustrates how “[a]t all income, occupational, and education levels, black families on average have drastically lower levels of wealth than similar white families” and thus explains that within the USA “race and property” are closely related attributes, marking the “nexus for the persistence of black-white inequality” (Conley 300). The essay helps to clarify in which way race relations both allude to aspects of class and influence class hierarchies. African-American families’ access to capital is often refused as an effect of racist prejudice and repression which also prevents their “advancement” into the middle class. Traber emphasizes that the privileged middle class tries to sustain this status quo by fighting against the “influx of inner-city populations” (“L.A.’s White Minority” 35), which again mirrors the fear of “‘encroaching’ blacks or other nonwhites” in middle-class residential areas (Parker 11). On the basis of purely racist motives, this process of segregation establishes fiscal advantages for the white middle class. MacLeod demonstrates how these proceedings work in practice in Southern California: As “incorporated municipalities with separate, and often separatist, governmental units,” suburbs—MacLeod specifies their condition, the spatial growth, and the increasing fragmentation around the 1970s and 1980s as post-suburban—offered the possibility for “[w]hite, middle-class citizens in many of these outer municipalities” to avoid “the burdens of city citizenship (read: taxes), while shifting the costs of social services to the poor and people of color still living within the confines of L.A. proper” (Kids 89/90). The example of Los Angeles reveals in what way African-Americans and other ethnic

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minorities are intentionally excluded and fiscally ‘fleeced’ through the white ‘flight’ to suburbia. The previously mentioned “conservative backlash against the government’s role in altering social conditions” adds to the consequences resulting from the fiscal losses of the cities and the following reduction or minimization of social welfare (George ix). The living conditions for ethnic minorities thus deteriorate drastically. While the concept of the middle class is elusory and correctly needs to be divided into lower and upper middle class groupings, the consideration of race in this context shows to what extent skin color is a crucial point influencing individual status and thus also privileging white citizens of the “lower classes” compared to people of other colors. Middle class affiliation is not necessarily a categorical sign of financial prosperity; white middle class, however, is bound to privileges that result from white skin color. Although a number of African-American families do manage to gain “the requisites for mobility, economic security, and a solid middle class status” it should be stated that “racial discrimination and economic isolation” remain as major problems (Coner-Edwards and Edwards 1). Considering the area of education, Coner-Edwards and Edwards indicate that “discrimination against Blacks has meant that employment status and income are determined more by race than by educational attainment. Therefore, Blacks are unable to gain employment commensurate with their education” (2). Referencing a national survey conducted and presented by Jerold Heiss in The Case of the Black Family (1975), Coner-Edwards and Edwards point out that “Blacks earned less,” which leads to the conclusion that “at all social levels regardless of education or occupation,” African-Americans have lower incomes than whites (3). Conley’s assessment of the privileged position of whites is confirmed and statistically documented. In this context, Brah and Phoenix refer to Rothenberg and her monograph Invisible Privilege – A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender (2000). They summarize her argumentation and raise the question of (in-)visibility by explaining that “people generally do not see the ways in which they are privileged, and so well-intentioned, middle class, white liberals often strive to maintain privilege for their children, while denying that they are doing so” (81). As the title of Rothenberg’s book suggests, the shielding and masking of privileges takes effect in a variety of categories and surpasses the interconnection of race and class. In the following, the category of gender is addressed through the examination of white masculinity, which appears is particularly relevant to the analysis of subcultures dominated by white middle-class males.

Masculinity and Whiteness For present purposes, the analysis of gender facets within the context of the middle class should be geared to the group of people primarily involved in the subcultures of skateboarding, hardcore punk, and skate punk: white males. It is important to refer to both Masculinity Studies as well as Critical Whiteness Studies for this purpose. Sally Robinson’s book Marked Men – White Masculinity in Crisis (2000)

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is very helpful in this regard as it picks up on both approaches. Its introductory chapter, “Visibility, Crisis, and the Wounded White Male Body,” constitutes a particularly important argument. Referring to Donna Haraway, Robinson notes that constructions of race, class, and gender had only been deployed for the marking of bodies belonging to women, colonized people, slaves, and workers until the middle of the twentieth century. Her word choice of “marking” and “marked” bodies allows for references that lead back to the preceding considerations of body theories, Foucault’s insights on how power relations “have an immediate hold upon” the body, and Harvey’s explanations about how “all manner of […] distinctions are marked upon the human body” (cf. Foucault, Discipline 25; Harvey 99). The title Marked Men not only implicitly alludes to the realm of the body and its enmeshment in intersectional categories of differentiation, it also indicates a shift in focus as it concentrates on the marking of men, i.e. male bodies. Robinson addresses the invisibility of white males, which she sets in opposition to minorities and describes as the “necessary condition for the perpetuation of white and male dominance, both in representation and in the realm of the social” (1). She does not define invisibility “in the sense of ‘hidden from history’ but, rather as the self-evident standard against which all differences are measured: hidden by history” (1). Accordingly, white men are not invisible because they disappear in the marginality of historiography (as often happens to women and ethnic minorities) but in a way that hides them behind “a mask of universality” (194). They are “visible in political terms” and profit from the invisibility of their own “racial and gender specificity” (2). Based on this, Robinson is able to establish the conception of an identity crisis among white men, which she locates in the post-sixties and thus in the relevant period for this book (particularly the late 1970s and early 1980s). She delineates how white males are decentered “in the wake of the civil rights movement, and with the rise of women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the increasing visibility of ethnic and racial diversity on the American scene” (2). In a very important step Robinson adds: Some accounts of this general shift take economic changes into account, noting that postindustrial (or post-Fordist or late capitalist or Sonyist) economies have thrown not only the working class into crisis, but the professional managerial class, as well. While such economic shifts clearly affect women as well as men – and people of color as much or more than whites – an enduring image of the disenfranchised white man has become a symbol for the decline of the American way. Since the middle classes are arguably the source of normative representations of Americanness, those who speak loudest and most forcibly for the decline of America in post-sixties culture speak of the middle class “falling from grace.” That this class is assumed to be normatively white perhaps goes without saying; but the degree to which the crisis afflicting the white middle class is also, and most forcefully, a crisis in masculinity, has become clear in recent years, with the vociferous cries of men who are contesting the claim that they are the villains in American culture. (2)

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In this quotation, Robinson reads race and gender as interconnected attributes in order to relate them to aspects of the middle class. She illustrates the intersections that link various axes of differentiation in an overlapping pattern. Robinson mentions the economic recession, a circumstance already indicated by Lipsitz’s statement about the “crisis of deindustrialization in the United States” (“Listening” 312), and explains that—despite similar or even worse consequences for women and non-white people—the white male emerges as the symbolic figure for America’s decline. The normativity of white males is supplemented by the fact that they are affiliated with the middle class, a stratum that presents itself as a homogeneous majority. What is detailed at this point is the intersectional privilege of the white male who not only becomes ‘the norm’ due to his skin color and gender, but also uses his associated middle-class affiliation to stylize himself as disenfranchised and suffering from social change. It remains to be seen to what extent this condition is incorporated and deployed within the medial representations and bodily expressions of skate punk culture. The fact that an economic recession sets the background for the intersection of white masculinity in post-sixties America, picks up on the conception of a profit-oriented force field which was delineated in subchapter 1.1.1. It underlines the importance of the interplay of varied axes of differentiation in combination with the postmodern conditions of capitalism for the impact on representation, as well as the constitution and construction of the body. The economic crisis of the middle class of the post-sixties not only affects the working and lower middle class, but also the New Class of management so that Robinson rightly employs Katherine S. Newman’s book title Falling from Grace to summarize the overall situation of the middle class.11 Robinson sees the reaction of privileged white males threatened by the economic crisis as well as by the “continued attacks on the status quo” grounded within their vehement complaints and disputes about being the “villains” in American culture (Traber “L.A.’s White Minority” 37; Robinson 2). She establishes the basis for a particularly illustrative assumption, which implies that white males increasingly adopted the roles of victims in order to deal with the new conditions prevailing at the end of the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement becoming highly visible during this period and fostering debates about multiculturalism constituted a new situation for the bearers of normative invisibility, according to Robinson: Invisibility is a privilege enjoyed by social groups who do not, thus, attract modes of surveillance and discipline; but it can also be felt as a burden in a culture that appears to organize itself around the visibility of differences and the symbolic currency of identity politics. (3) 11 | See Newman’s Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence. Newman documents the social decline of American middle class citizens on the basis of interviews. She incorporates examples from the “blue-collar” industry, as well as from the management sector.

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This account illuminates how invisibility can be experienced as a disadvantage by white males of the middle class because they embody the social group with the greatest possible factor of normativity. Robinson contrasts her interpretation by elucidating how “the minoritized subject proudly claims her own difference from the norm, and so marks herself as the bearer of an embodied particularity” (3). The fact that she speaks of embodiment in this context emphasizes how the axes of differentiation are represented in and through the body. She implies to what extent white males feel excluded from an identity politics that enables others to gain and articulate self-esteem, and additionally implies the corporeal ramifications that accompany this process. Robinson establishes the thesis that “[t]he white male victim—personally, individually targeted—is the emblem of the current crisis in white masculinity” (5). It is helpful to turn to the reading of John Updike Robinson uses in order to demonstrate the transition from the white male as actor or ‘doer’ to the white male as victim. In Self Consciousness: Memoirs (1989), Updike notes: My earliest sociological thought about myself had been that I was fortunate to be a boy and an American. Now the world was being told that American males–especially white, Protestant males who had done well under ‘the system’–were the root of evil. Law-abiding conformity had become the opposite of a refuge. The Vietnam era was no sunny picnic for me. (139)

The quotation demonstrates how, in the wake of the women’s, anti-war and Black Power movements, an identity that was primarily regarded as privileged becomes a social burden. Updike’s narrator recalls the Vietnam era from the perspective of a victim, a stance which supports Robinson’s argumentation: Dominant masculinity is in crisis, a condition that emblematically becomes manifest in the (self-) victimization of the white middle-class male. Robyn Wiegman’s essay “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity” introduces a further example which describes how privileged white subjects adopt the role of victim. Wiegman refers to a controversy that developed concerning the opening of a Ku Klux Klan museum in South Carolina in order to examine the arguments raised in debates about the legitimacy of this institution. The owner of the museum equates his concerns with those justifying a Civil Rights museum in Alabama. Wiegman comments on this case by explaining that “the language of civil rights is mobilized to protect whiteness, which is cast not only as a minority identity but as one injured by the denial of public representation” (116). She thus establishes a crucial parallel to Robinson’s remarks. ‘Threatened’ by the Civil Rights Movement, privileged whites slip into the role of victim in order to argue from the position of a minority. The fact that Wiegman incorporates the act of being “injured” at this point again parallels Robinson’s argumentation and her statement that “[w]hite masculinity most fully represents itself as victimized by inhabiting a wounded body” (6). Under reference to Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray,

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Robinson expounds that white males, as a consequence of their invisible preeminence, do not hold multicultural connotations; their only possibility to participate in multiculturalism consists in stylizing and perceiving themselves as its victims. In fact, they can thus identify as “victims of victims,” which paradoxically provides the alleged status of having “the richest and most marginalized identities around” (qtd. in Robinson 8).12 The delineated development of white men as intersectionally privileged to selfstyled, wounded victims can be summarized with regard to conclusions that are important for an examination of skate punk culture. Robinson explains that “[i] mages of wounded white men, manufactured traumas, and metaphorical pains abound in post-sixties American culture” (6), which implies that there is a chronological congruence to the early development of skateboarding, hardcore punk, and subsequently skate punk. She locates the stylization of ‘invisible’ white men as victims within the “mainstream,” the “Middle American,” and the “vast middle”: The Middle American is the great unmarked, the phantom figure against whom differences become visible—but [...] himself deeply invested in coming to visibility. The Middle American is the American individual, and his fortunes parallel the fortunes of dominant conceptualizations of American identity. While it is obvious that both the left and far right practice identity politics—witness the rise of the Christian identity movement alongside the rise of multiculturalism in American universities—it is not immediately evident how and to what effect the broad “middle” participates in a renegotiation of gender and racial differences in post-liberationist American culture. (14/15)

Robinson provides an interesting link to the subject matter of my book by referring to integral intersections that are important for skate punk culture. The image of the white male picks up on the categories of race and gender, while the term of the “broad middle,” besides its political connotations, also corresponds to matters of class and thus alludes to the conception of the middle class—the stratum from which the majority of American skate punks emerge. Despite, or precisely because of, its questionable character as a “hypothetical majority” (Parker xvii), the notion of a middle class personifies the phantom figure Robinson calls the “Middle Amer12 | This paragraph shows how—also in post-Derridean times—the “logocentrism of Western culture,” to use Lipsitz’s words, impacts the positioning of subjects (Lipsitz “Listening” 314). It is through the use of language that privileged whites manage to appropriate positions according to their will, even if these positions are negatively connoted (in this case “injured”). They use their privileged positions to inscribe themselves into the discourse of civil rights, while the linguistic allusion to injuries evokes a connection to corporeal, i.e. bodily, consequences and thus emphasizes the interconnectedness of the discursive and the material realms. The role of the white male as a victim exemplifies in what way “language positions the subjects and objects of knowledge” while producing images that entail bodily consequences and become affective beyond linguistic representation (314).

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ican.” Her remarks concerning white men provide important information about aspects of race and gender, which are essential for the examination of a mainly white youth subculture dominated by men. Robinson’s question concerning the “middle’s” participation in renegotiations of race and gender differences can be extended and geared towards forms of expression that take effect both within and outside these intersections in order to negotiate from there: Skate punk represents such a form of expression as it is not only influenced by overlapping patterns of privilege but also explicitly tries to position itself against them. Its emergence in the suburbs of California calls for a more detailed examination of its site-specific origins and the spatial environment in which race, class, and gender differentials intersect.

1.2.3

Suburbia

The geographic origins of skate punk constitute an important attribute that has to be considered in an examination of this subculture. As I will point out in the subchapters on skate punk’s predecessors skateboarding and hardcore punk, affiliations to the suburban environment play a crucial role in both cultures. Traber, for example, states that hardcore punk’s “sense of anger and unrest came out of southern California communities where post-sixties children were searching for something to pierce the boredom of their lives and express their sense of social and political marginality” (“L.A.’s White Minority” 33). Moore specifies this account and adds that “the epicenter of Southern California punk rock in the 1980s was neither Hollywood nor East LA, but rather the suburbs and beach towns of the South Bay and Orange County” (“Postmodernism and Punk” 316). Concerning the beginnings of hardcore punk, MacLeod adds that “[w]hile suburbia had always been essential to punk, as the place to leave and destroy, now suburbia was subject to attack from within” (“Social Distortion” 127). In analogy to these developments, Chivers Yochim states that skateboarding is at least “largely imagined as a suburban, middle-class pursuit” (20), while Borden expounds that it “began in the suburbs” and that, particularly in the post-sixties, “the suburban modernism of Los Angeles and other Californian Oceanside cities allowed frustrated surfers to re-enact the sense of being on the sea” (Skateboarding 1, 29). The progression of punk and especially hardcore punk as well as the evolution of skateboarding are closely connected to the specificities within the California suburbs. A survey of this environment constitutes an essential element in the contextualization of these cultures.

Suburbia and Utopia “Suburbia from the 1920s through World War II tended to be white, middle-class, family oriented and socially homogeneous,” Mark Baldassare states, adding, “Land use patterns were low density, nonindustrial, and primarily residential” (46/47). He implies the traditional image of suburbia as a “Burgeois Utopia,” which represents a “cultural creation” and consequently a “conscious choice based on the economic

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structure and cultural values of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie” or the “Middle American,” as one could say with Robinson (Fishman 8/9; Robinson 14/15). Until the end of World War II the notion of suburbia appeared to describe “a romantic community in harmony with nature,” which enabled the middle class to leave the city without losing contact with its culture (Jackson 73). Suburbia became the “new ideal of family life, an ideal so emotionally charged that it made the home more sacred to the bourgeoisie than any place of worship” (Fishman 4), emphasizing again the importance of the private home for the middle class. The fact that Baldassare ties this ‘classical’ image of suburbia to a period defined by the end of World War II already hints at the transformations that take effect at this point in time and which start to radically change life in the American suburbs. Baldassare provides an important statement which illustrates the connection between the transformations of suburbia and social conditions, which have been delineated in the preceding subchapters: [M]any dramatic changes occurred in American society during the 1970s which had profound impacts on suburbia. The economy shifted from industrial to information and service-oriented work. Housing and energy costs increased dramatically. The nuclear family became less prominent as single life, childless marriages, and divorces grew more commonplace. Civil rights activities lifted some of the barriers that kept races and ethnic groups geographically separated. Confidence in government and its ability to solve problems was shaken. The public monies available to improve community life declined. The meeting of basic service needs has become more complex. (viii)

Baldassare sees the changes that impacted the suburbs of the 1970s as connected to economic shifts from the secondary to the tertiary sector and as a consequence following the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. It is important to note that the borders of suburbia became highly permeable with the social movements of the 1970s. As a consequence, the ‘flight’ to the suburbs no longer ‘protected’ white citizens from the problems they associated with the city center. In this context Baldassare adds: Existing social and economic problems have not been solved by the relocation of people to the suburbs. Supporters of this perspective point to trends in crime, racial tension, pollution, and congestion to prove that the escape to suburbia is a myth, a convenient ploy by civic boosters and real estate developers. (2)

Similar to the myth hidden behind the concept of the middle class in order to depict a fragmented society as a homogeneous and equal group, the concept of suburbia is also revealed as a myth which pretends to protect the middle class from the alleged dangers of the urban core. The fact that this myth was particularly fostered for commercial reasons becomes manifest in the example of the area around Irvine, which was explicitly marketed as a “carefully planned, middle-class, subur-

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ban utopia” by the Irvine Company (Kling, Olin, and Poster, “Emergence” 22). The advertisements incorporated “images of neatly landscaped communities, convivial village life, freedom from crime and congestion, upscale consumer conveniences, and other pleasant amenities,” a marketing strategy that was adopted by “[l]and developers who built several cities in the vast open areas of southern Orange County and numerous subdivisions throughout the region” (22). Images of a white middle-class utopia are maintained and distinguished from attributes of “poor people, crime, minorities, deterioration, older dwellings, and abandoned buildings” that are associated with the city (Jackson 275).

Postsuburbia Kling, Olin, and Poster (1991) and MacLeod (2010) describe and try to specify the development of suburbia with reference to the term postsuburbia, which provides a useful concept for an explication of the environment that constituted the origin of skate punk culture. Fishman defines traditional suburbia as “physically separated from the urban core” despite the fact that it “nevertheless depends on it economically for the jobs that support its residents” (5). An essential difference between suburbia and postsuburbia is the way that “[t]raditional suburbs […] function as peripheral bedroom communities” whereas postsuburbia “exhibits the dynamism customarily associated with major urban centers, although it is much more decentralized than a traditional city” (Kling, Olin, and Poster, “Emergence” 5; “Beyond” viii). The economic dependence on the urban core is no longer present within the postsuburban area. Kling, Olin, and Poster’s inquiries into the economic development of Orange County illuminate this independent evolution. They state that “Orange County has developed its own powerful subregional economy, which exceeded $60 billion in 1989 (compared with $ 13,5 billion in 1975), making it the nation’s tenth largest county economy” (“Emergence” 1). This more than quadrupled economy suggests that Orange County can no longer be called a mere suburb “or even a collection of suburbs” of Los Angeles, while the introduction of a term like postsuburbia is a definition that acknowledges the economic progression of the area (“Beyond” viii). The economic independence which ultimately eliminates the connection between a postsuburban environment and a specific city center constitutes postsuburbia as an entirely decentralized and fragmented area. Although original suburbia can also be described as a coreless settlement, its relation to an urban center puts the “political and economic fragmentation” in perspective (Baldassare 5). In postsuburbia this fragmentation becomes extreme and constitutes a “multinucleated metropolitan region” that stretches over vast areas (Kling, Olin, and Poster, “Beyond” ix). Kling, Olin, and Poster explain how “[i]nstead of stores and residences being integrated into neighborhoods, or shopping being mixed in with industrial work spaces, in postsuburbia one will find distinct and separable centers: residential neighborhoods, shopping malls, and industrial parks” (ix). They hint at the “antipedestrianism” which makes postsuburbia a landscape which ties its dwellers to

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their cars and forces them to commute between highly specialized centers of commerce (x). Kenneth T. Jackson explicates the postsuburban “antipedestrianism” by referring to a “Drive-in Culture,” which also implies consumption-oriented individualism finding its climax in institutions such as the “Drive-in Church” (246, 264). The “Drive-in Church” offers a telling example of postsuburbanites’ commuting between specialized service providers as its service is held on silver screens via video broadcast for fast and private consumption in the anonymity of the automobile. Kling, Olin, and Poster see these “multicentered spatial elements of Orange County” as part of the “core cultural value of consumerism,” establishing a connection between postsuburbia and the superficialities of the 1980s.

The (Post-) Suburban Home and the Tax Payers’ Revolt Kling, Olin, and Poster provide a very useful evaluation of the repeatedly mentioned importance of the private home while maintaining a focus on its commercial aspects. They state that many of the residential and commercial structures are implicitly designed to emphasize private domesticity and material consumption. As in many suburbs, the single family homes open onto private patios rather than onto the streets. [...] Such residential designs turn people inward toward the private spaces of their homes. (“Emergence” 7)

The quotation indicates that, through the outward emphasis of property and prosperity, the private home adds to the “fragmentation and isolation” that is not only characteristic of postsuburbia but also for the beginning of the 1980s (Lipsitz, “Listening” 325).13 William F. Gayk illuminates the commercial character of the private home by labeling it a “consummate commodity” and explaining that “[w]hen one buys a house, he or she is buying into the society and lifestyle of the neighborhood and community” (Gayk 292). He points out that the purchase of a home is tied to expectations of its “social and economic value” so that the possession of real estate is always accompanied by the fear of its loss as well as the threat of “residential and commercial development, vanishing open space, low-cost housing projects, inclusionary zoning, property taxation, noise, group homes, halfway homes, mental hospitals, jails, and roads and highways” (292), which would diminish the property’s cultural and financial quality. Fishman explains that “the true center of any bourgeois society is the middle-class house” and thus summarizes the significance of the private home as a status symbol that needs to be defended against various different threats (4).

13 | The single family house in the narrative of the Suicidal Tendencies video mirrors this condition as it does not open on the street directly but is rather organized around the internal patio and the swimming pool. While it seems rather closed and defensive towards the outside, it celebrates prosperity and wealth on the inside.

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The California Taxpayers’ Revolt of 1978-1980 exemplifies the way in which homeowners tried to protect and maintain the status of private property. As a reaction to an unexpected increase in property taxes, the conservative electorate managed to assert the significantly important Proposition 13, which limited the “assessment to 1 percent of the market value of property and restricted increases to no more than 2 percent annually thereafter” (Gayk 284). Gayk comments on the Taxpayers’ Revolt and explains: Property taxes are perceived to threaten homeowners both economically and socially. [...] In the extreme, they are perceived as a direct threat to homeownership. This fear is tied, in part, to fear of losing one’s social standing [...]. In addition, homeowners and property taxpayers in general both are the majority in suburban communities and are also more likely to be registered voters and to participate in elections. (291)

The fact that homeowners constitute the majority of the constituency that voted in favor of Proposition 13 shows how it is possible to decrease property taxes for relatively wealthy citizens. The simultaneous success of Proposition 4, a 1979 measure whose “primary objective was to limit increases in state- and local- government spending” (284), intensified the social consequences for people with lower incomes: Socially and financially disadvantaged groups who depend on state support are excluded from whole residential areas. The Taxpayers’ Revolt very concretely illustrates what was already indicated in MacLeod’s description of the “methods for avoiding the burdens of city citizenship (read: taxes), while shifting the costs of social services to the poor and people of color“ (Kids 98/90). It proves that “[s]uburbanites are really trying to exclude the poor, the working class, blacks, and other ethnic minorities through rather complex land use politics“ (Baldassare 20). Life in (post-) suburbia is thus especially advantageous for white middle-class citizens who enjoy a number of privileges compared to social and ethnic minorities.

Cultural Vacuum in a Consumption-Oriented Landscape A last important characteristic of the Californian suburbs results from the earlier mentioned fact that a consumption-oriented organization of (post-) suburbia creates a starkly fragmented and consequently extremely decentralized social topology which changes among residential areas, commercial centers, amusement parks, and industry. Debra Gold Hansen and Mary P. Ryan outline the resulting problems referencing the example of Orange County: The decentralization and privatization endemic to postsuburban society fractures the local basis for generating a common culture. The absence of a central political jurisdiction in which to deliberate about the common good, combined with the paucity of sustained social connections between residents, handycaps Orange Countians in their attempts to create a local identity, common belief system, and home-grown values. (165)

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Hansen and Ryan further their argument by taking an exemplarily look at the celebration of the Huntington Beach Independence Day and point out that “early in the history of the county local commercial elites utilized public space, popular images, and mass entertainment to develop and maintain a self-legitimating and profit-taking public picture” (182). This statement subsequently leads to the conclusion that “[i]n short, public festivity now seems to promote passivity and privatization, turning citizen into audience – an impassive consumer of images and products” which again alludes to the consumption-oriented society of the 1980s (182). In a closing recapitulation Hansen and Ryan sum up: The relative paucity of public life and vacuity of public symbols in Orange County may be the earmark of information capitalism, which leaves local citizens indifferent or powerless to challenge the control of the corporate economy and mass-culture industry over the creation and circulation of public values. Although the postsuburban county may spawn polynucleated centers for cultural expression and occasional resistance, it has not yet created a ceremonial platform from which to express a powerful, nuanced, diverse, and authentic local culture. (184)

This passage recapitulates the social problems that evolve within (post-) suburban California and provides a perfect transition to an analysis of skate punk culture and its predecessors. It can be introduced by a reference to Dennis P. Sobin: Suburbia was originally considered to be a utopia for the young, at least for young couples with children to raise. [...] It was viewed as an ideal place to raise children. For very young children this was somewhat true. The suburban problems did not emerge until these youngsters became adolescents. The teenagers were the first to sense the inadequacies of suburbia. Life in the suburbs was limited and dull to young people who were anxious to experiment and explore the world. (Sobin 80)

Sobin summarizes the problems that ‘degrade’ the concept of suburbia as a mere utopia and emphasizes that it is especially among teenagers and adolescents that these conditions cause potential for conflict.14 The quotation indicates that the absence of an authentic local culture becomes particularly noticeable within the lives of young people who are faced with the fact that “the local movie house, bowling alley, or pizza place is expected to take up the slack and energies of the adolescent” (85). Skate punk may represent an attempt, consciously or not, to establish an authentic culture in order to surmount the isolation within decentralized (post-) 14 | Penelope Spheeris’s movie Suburbia (1983) includes an interesting parallel to Sobin’s statement as the mother of protagonist Evan notes in her diary, “Suburbia is a great place for children.” The contemptuous laughter with which Evan’s young punk friends comment on this entry implies that the experiences they have gained are ambivalent towards the mother’s impression; they experience the suburbs as “limited and dull” (Sobin 80).

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suburbia, and it remains to be seen how the participating adolescents deal with the specificities that they encounter within this environment. The delineation of suburban California indicates that its general conception incorporates ideas of peaceful and secure life, which become materially manifest with the possession of a private home. Postsuburban developments cause the decentralization and fragmentation of suburban space. They are characterized by a consumption-oriented structure, which constrains the emergence of an authentic local culture and positions the status of the individual above communal solidarity. Despite these structural problems it can be stated that life within American and especially Californian suburbs is tied to privileges which the white middle class seeks to protect and maintain. Suburbia can thus be defined as a locale where advantages of white middle-class citizens, especially those of white middle-class males, overlap intersectionally. In the following I will explain how skateboarding and (hardcore) punk emerged from this context and how the respective participants engaged this specific environment. The conclusions regarding the categories of class, race, gender, and space that were drawn in this chapter are meant to tie the descriptions of the subcultures to concrete social conditions and organize their examination accordingly.

1.2.4

Skateboarding

Establishing an account of the development of skateboarding is a challenging inquiry into a youth cultural field that is pervaded by a multitude of biased narratives. The academic realm hardly offers any historical evaluations of this subculture. A major contribution to the academic assessment of the topic comes from Iain Borden who comprehensively approaches the subject matter from the perspective of an architectural historian. He analyzes the activity as a “Performative Critique of Architecture” and, mainly referring to the works of neo-Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre, examines how skateboarding functions as a connection of space, the city, architecture, and the body (cf. Borden 2000, 2001, 2002). His account includes historical evaluations and most importantly is predominantly based on an overview of magazines that directly originate in the skateboard subculture itself. Borden develops his theoretical inquiries on the basis of primary sources, which were produced by “skateboarders themselves who have become journalists through working on such publications” (Borden, Skateboarding 5). He values these magazines for the fact that they depict “whatever [skateboarders] saw fit to say and publish at [a certain] time” (5). The introduction to his major work on skateboarding, the 2001 monograph Skateboarding, Space and the City – Architecture and the Body, incorporates a quotation from the British skateboard magazine Sidewalk Surfer, which summarizes the difficulties that necessarily accompany an historical approach to this specific culture:

1 C ONTEXT There are no official records documenting the progress of skateboarding in the reference sections of your local libraries . . . There’s no ‘official’ version of skateboarding, no one has any claims to ownership. (qtd. in Borden Skateboarding 5)

Although such a statement itself should be read with caution as it already includes a self-styled interpretation of skateboarding as an activity on the unexplored margins of an otherwise documented society, it implies to what extent approaches to the culture cannot be established from a pretense of totality, but rather need to be organized along a pragmatically constricted archive of available sources. Following this insight, I do not intend to create or recreate an ultimate history of skateboarding but rather to describe a carefully selected chronology of events that are retold time and again in academic and popular attempts to delineate the subculture’s development. It is crucial to keep in mind that the almost paradigmatic descriptions of the turning points in skateboarding’s alleged genealogy depend on their respective author’s intentions and thus can be employed for the simple reasons of narrative effect. It makes sense, however, to organize the overview of skateboard culture along these particularities: They affect skateboarding’s development, its medialization and reception and can therefore be of great value in understanding how the culture came into being and, particularly relevant for the angle of this book, why and at what point it started to interconnect with punk and its specific development towards hardcore punk. Building on the preceding subsections, it is important to incorporate the categories of race, class, gender, and space as constitutive elements. As pointed out before, these play a decisive role within the discursive as well as corporeal ramifications that accompany the subcultures in question here. Besides Borden’s groundbreaking works concerning skateboarding, there are a number of academic essays which deal with the subject matter from a variety of perspectives. Beal (1995 & 1996) provides early insights into the realm of skateboarding and resistance with a focus on gender, especially masculinity; Kelly, Pomerantz and Currie (2005) build on this and consider girlhood and femininity; Brayton (2005) approaches the topic with a focus on racial politics and establishes parallels to the Beat Generation; MacDonald (2005) takes a look at the skateboarding body in youth leisure; Steyn (2005) similarly focuses on the body in public culture; Kusz (2007) examines skateboarding within the scope of revolt and white athleticism. In addition to Borden’s work and these shorter but highly valuable publications, the only comprehensive academic account of skate culture of book length is provided by Chivers Yochim’s aforementioned 2010 monograph Skate Life – Re-Imagining White Masculinity. Chivers Yochim establishes an ethnographic approach that examines the role of “mainstream, niche, and local media forms” in the everyday lives of a group of male skateboarders she accompanied during her study (Chivers Yochim 4). Apart from the fact that her dissertation offers highly valuable insights into the construction of white masculinities and their options in appropriating alternative positions within dominant US society, Chivers Yochim’s work is particularly

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relevant for my project as it provides a highly critical approach to skateboarding’s history, i.e. its alleged chronological development. Trying to avoid a mere recreation of an already established popular narrative, I rely on Chivers Yochim’s findings in order to enhance my delineation of skateboarding’s past with a critical questioning of the discourses that pervade it. I regard this proceeding as crucial, since my intended analysis of skate punk requires an account of skateboarding (and subsequently of punk) that combines the description of historical developments with a sensitivity for the discursive, mythological, and ideological implications involved. I argue that an examination of skate punk requires a consideration of certain aspects of skateboarding’s past that reflect both its historical development as well as its contradictory entanglement in intersectional categories of differentiation. It is important to detach oneself from the conception of an “experimental science in search of law,” to borrow from American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and, instead reread the existing accounts of skateboarding’s history “in search of meaning” (Geertz 5). The narratives of skateboarding, its myths, and its popular histories play an important role in the way this specific culture ‘teamed up’ with the phenomenon of US hardcore punk at a specific locale during a specific time. In the following, I do not claim to exactly pinpoint when and where skateboarding emerged. Rather, I am interested in interpretatively reconsidering the way it entered peoples’ minds in order to prepare for a consideration of the way it affected their bodies.

Three Paradigms in Skateboard Histor y In addition to the aforementioned academic approaches, the history and development of skateboarding has enjoyed a high degree of attention within popular publications over the last decade. Books such as The Concrete Wave – The History of Skateboarding (1999) by Michael Brooke, Aaron Rose’s Dysfunctional (1999), Jocko Weyland’s The Answer is Never: A Skateboarder’s History of the World (2002), Thrasher magazine’s books Insane Terrain (2001) and Skate and Destroy – The First 25 Years of Thrasher Magazine (2006), Keith David Hamm’s Scarred For Life - Eleven Stories About Skateboarders (2004), Sean Mortimer’s Stalefish – Skateboard Culture from the Rejects Who Made It (2008), Glen E. Friedman’s photographic works Fuck You Heroes (1994), Fuck You Too (1996), and Dogtown: The Legends of the Z-Boys (2003) and Ben Marcus’s very recently published Skateboard – The Good, the Rad, and the Gnarly (2011) all assemble non-academic accounts of skate culture’s emergence and progression. Mostly accompanied by a variety of images, photographs and graphic illustrations, these publications range somewhere between primary and secondary source, as they are often produced by skateboarders and skateboard aficionados themselves who offer a first-hand insight into the respective particularities of their passion’s past and present. They incorporate extracts from a huge variety of skateboard magazines and publications, interviews, movies, images, and song lyrics, as well as music reviews. Reading these accounts in combination with each other, it becomes possible to recreate a ‘history’ or rather a cultural image of skateboarding as it is popularly written and constructed from within the subculture itself.

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This ‘history’ can neither be total nor neutral nor objective—it is necessarily biased. Its information derives from a number of different backgrounds, resources, and personalities, a fact which forecloses any attempt at aspiring to a positivistic account of skateboarding. Within my book, I will focus on certain particularities that appear to be constitutive for the creation or construction of this subculture and its past. I pragmatically shape my focus using a concentration on those events which constantly reoccur in the popular as well as academic accounts, and which promise to provide useful starting points for an assessment of the overlapping specificities with punk culture. In the following, I will thus delineate the importance of three major topics that I gleaned from the reading of the aforementioned publications. I will delineate the evolution of skateboarding along a rough chronology and the culture’s connections to, first, surfing and surf culture; second, the specific influence of the “Dogtown” era in the 1970s; and, third, the ambivalent particularities of skateboarding’s progression during the 1980s.

Surfing: From Ancient Hawaii to Suburban California Almost all of the publications mentioned with reference to the broad topic of skateboard culture, whether academic or popular, at least peripherally reference the activity of surfing and its surrounding cultural manifestations as important and influential precursors of skateboarding and skating maneuvers (cf. e.g. Borden, Skateboarding 13ff; Brooke 23; Chivers Yochim 27ff; Macdonald; Pomerantz et al. 556; Stecyk, “Episodic Discontrol” 7ff; Steyn 15; Weyland; Marcus, The Skateboard 31ff.). These allusions offer the opportunity for skateboarding to be connected to activities and the development of millennia-old traditions. The spatial and chronological localization of surfing within the culture of early Polynesian settlers in Hawaii is often used to establish the activity as a mythological experience incorporating allusions to a time long before the European ‘discovery’ of the archipelago by James Cook in 1778.15 The description of the damnation of surfing by Calvinist missionaries who arrived in the Hawaiian islands around 1820 in the wake of Cook’s expedition and considered it an “evil” activity, constitutes a regularly recited starting point for different accounts of surf culture and history (Weyland 13; Heimann 3; Stecyk, Surf Culture 38; Riding Giants). It is used to illuminate surfing’s relative marginality until its re-emergence at the beginning of the 20th century when Hawaiian natives as well as Caucasian immigrants again started to ride waves at the island’s shores, while its commercial appeal simultaneously started to affect its broader recognition (cf. Weyland 14). Retrospective accounts constantly mention two major figures associated with the spread of surf culture and especially with its subsequent popular-

15 | Only very few publications mention Africa and the Atlantic Ocean as alternative or simultaneous origins of surf culture. Cf. Pearson (1979), Finney (2002), Langan (2003).

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ity in Southern California: “Half-Irish, half-Hawaiian” Waikiki Beach local George Freeth and Hawaiian native Duke Kahanamoku (Heimann 3).16 Through his surfing abilities, Freeth gained celebrity status after being introduced to American writer Jack London, who featured him in an article for the “widely read magazine Woman’s Home Companion” (Heimann 4). According to Stecyk, the essay (entitled “A Royal Sport: Surfing at Waikiki”) “immortalized [Freeth] as ‘The Bronze Mercury’” (“Episodic Discontrol” 7), which eventually aroused the interest of “railroad magnate and real estate developer Henry Huntington” who promoted him as “the man who could walk on water” at his “beachside development in […] Redondo Beach” in 1907 (Heimann 4). Stecyk, employing an explicitly economic diction, describes Freeth’s relocation from Hawaii to Southern California by stating that Huntington “imports” him (“Episodic Discontrol” 7). He directly implies the commercial interests that appeared to be connected with Freeth’s abilities and his move to California. This account is further illuminated by the description of Huntington’s expectations about Freeth who, in his opinion, “would prove to be a promotional asset in the coastal zone adjacent to Los Angeles” (7). Since “Huntington’s predictions proved accurate as thousands flocked to Santa Monica Bay’s southern beaches to witness Freeth’s aquatic wizardry” (7), it becomes evident how surfing, from the very beginning of its transpacific popularization and its subsequent arrival on the North American continent, was tied to profit-oriented marketing considerations related to a certain imagery of the Southern Californian lifestyle. Freeth constitutes an example of the way in which subjects are incorporated in a profit-oriented force field that is constitutive and has direct consequences for the lived body. Entangled in the capitalist aspirations of Huntington, he is relocated, i.e. physically moved, and inscribed into a discourse of “economic use” (Foucault, Discipline 25/26). In addition to Freeth and his promotional role in the evolution of surfing in California and the USA, Duke Kahanamoku, born in Honolulu in 1890, fostered its popularity on an international scale. Already associated with early 20th century Hawaiian surfing through his participation in founding the Hui Nalu, “a poor man’s fraternity whose name, roughly translated, meant ‘united in surfing’” (Weyland 15), during his early youth, Kahanamoku gained massive attention at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm where he traveled as a member of the US swimming team (cf. Heimann 4, Stecyk, Surf Culture 41; Willard, “Duke” 13ff).17 In addition to this partic16 | Malcolm Gault-Williams hints at the often blanked out role of South Carolina born Alexander Hume Ford, whom he describes as a major promoter of Freeth and Kahanamoku as “surfing’s first stars of international stature” (2). I concentrate on the latter two as they constitute the most prominent figures that are time and again mentioned in popular accounts of surfing and thus intensively shape its public image. For detailed information on Ford see Gault-Williams’s essay “Alexander Hume Ford (1868-1945).” 17 | Kahanamoku won “gold and silver medals at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, double gold at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, silver at the 1924 Paris Olympics, and, at the age of

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ipation in international swimming contests, Kahanamoku’s travels were employed to demonstrate and promote the activity of surfing. As Heimann states, “[i]f Freeth brought surfing to the mainland, Duke Kahanamoku brought it to the world” (4). In addition to introducing the activity to the US East Coast, Australia, and New Zealand, Kahanamoku’s “role as ambassador of surfing would have furthest-reaching consequences in California” (Weyland 15). His “surfing demonstrations in Santa Monica and Corona del Mar” furthered the impact of Freeth’s performances and can be interpreted as another major reason for the fact that surfing started to be associated with Southern California, its beach communities, and the Californian way of life (Heimann 4). While in popular accounts Kahanamoku is regularly presented as one of the most important figures and “forefathers” in the history of surf culture (Warshaw, Photo/Stoner 14), Michael Nevin Willard provides a very critical reading of the circumstances that led to Kahanamoku’s stylization as “an icon of the Hawaiian tourist industry” (Willard, “Duke” 14). According to Willard, Kahanamoku’s importance as a sportsman was paralleled by racial underpinnings, which will also be significant for the later development of skateboarding discourse. Willard ties his argument to an analysis of the article by Jack London mentioned earlier. He argues that London establishes a stylization of native Hawaiians that ultimately places them within a racial hierarchy and logic “that became necessary to carry out the transformation of Hawai’i from a plantation landscape and economy to a landscape and economy of tourism” (15). A specific passage from London’s article—which, after its initial publication in the Women’s Home Companion, became part of his travelogue The Cruise of the Snark—illustrates to what extent this early description of surfing within its native context delineated its future reception as an occupation “that enabled white American men, as tourists, to recreate London’s formula of achieving manly civilization by taking the place of primitive, brown-bodied Hawaiian surfers” (16). London writes about his observation of a native Hawaiian surfer: It is all very well, sitting here in the cool shade of the beach, but you are a man, one of the kingly species, and what that Kanaka can do, you can do yourself. Go to. Strip off your clothes that are a nuisance in this mellow clime. Get in and wrestle with the sea; wing your heels with the skill and power that reside in you; bit the sea’s breakers, master them, and ride upon their backs as a king should. (London 84)

Exported to the US American mainland in the form of a “widely circulated middle-class magazine” (Willard, “Duke” 16), Willard argues that this kind of account denounced the original space of the native surfers and their traditional and historical meaning for the Hawaiian locale while opening it for the refurbishment forty-one, a bronze medal as an alternate on the U.S. water polo team at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics” (Willard, “Duke” 13/14).

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by white American tourists. Referring back to Marcel Mauss’s “Techniques of the Body” emphasizes the appropriative momentum that is immanent in London’s description: Mauss’s notion of the importance of education in the acquisition of bodily techniques assumes that children and adults imitate the practices of subjects they accept as confiding authorities (54). London, in contrast, claims to be able to imitate the technique of surfing due to his racial superiority as a man of the “kingly species.”18 In combination with Willard’s argument about the touristic opening of Hawaii, it becomes evident how techniques of the body can be incorporated and shifted into the realm of capitalist modes of consumption. Justified through assumptions of superiority, the appropriation of the technique of surfing exemplifies how a bodily expression is coded with economic and racial significance. Willard furthers his enquiries by establishing parallels between London’s early description of surfing and the commonplace depiction of surfers in general and Duke Kahanamoku in particular in photography and on post cards. Almost always shown bare-chested within familiar and popular backgrounds of the Hawaiian landscape and in front of a standing surfboard, Kahanamoku was written into “the racial hierarchy of Waikiki tourism” (Willard, “Duke” 21). The beach became a refuge “where American (and European) men could fulfill their evolutionary destiny of civilized manliness” while the commonplace imagery of the present natives rendered these “as acceptably brown and not black” (18), which exemplifies to what extent space functions as a formative aspect of the lived body (cf. Lock and Farquhar 1). Personalities like Kahanamoku could be established as icons of Hawaiian attractiveness in the realm of American tourism while still remaining outside the discourse of white supremacy. Being imagined as “brown” and consequently more light-skinned (cf. London 84), Hawaiian natives appeared closer to white ‘civilization’ while still holding the inferior position of primitivism. The fact that Kahanamoku was almost never depicted while actually surfing but always on the beach in front of his surfboard adds to the argument of racial hierarchization as “[h]is skill as a waterman was thus deemphasized and rendered more achievable for white male viewers” (Willard, “Duke” 21). It was not until his success as an Olympic athlete that Kahanamoku’s body was rendered differently and deployed as “a symbol of a racially unified American nation” (23). In that context, photographs of Kahanamoku showed him with a more ‘civilized’ swimsuit that differed from earlier depictions of his bare-chested body. Willard summarizes these opposing medializations of Kahanamoku and his body by explaining that [r]acial discourses of primitivist exoticism and of assimilationist national belonging have existed side by side in sport. They reinforce each other. The exotic primitive proved the

18 | Although London also recognizes the surfer to be “a member of the kingly species”, first and foremost he conceives him as a “Kanaka” who is only considered “a man” on second view (84).

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He delineates in what way the bodies of native Hawaiian surfers in general and Duke Kahanamoku in particular become bearers of differentially imposed meanings. With regard to Willard, it is possible to distinguish between the depictions of Hawaiians within an exoticized native locale on the one hand and, on the other, the deployment of these figurations as examples of the civilizing influence of sport as well as tourism, which ultimately prepare for the commercial opening of an allegedly primitivist culture and its environment. The spatio-temporal localization of surfing within the native cultures of Hawaii ultimately establishes the historic development of the activity within the realms of medialized exoticism and exploitive commercialism. Before exploring how these two renderings of surfing and surfing culture indicated the future development of skateboarding within the specific environment of Southern California, it is necessary to follow the progression of surfing after its early appearances in connection with the American tourist industry in Hawaii and medially stylized personalities such as George Freeth and Duke Kahanamoku. As Douglas Booth notes in his essay “Surfing: From One (Cultural) Extreme to Another,” “[t]echnology was the main obstacle to the development of surfing in the first half of the twentieth century” (95). Surfboards, during that period, were massive wooden planks that had to be kept at the beach because they were too heavy and cumbersome to be carried around. This mostly restricted ownership of boards and participation in surfing to people living near the shoreline. In the 1950s, however, “Californian surfers produced shorter, lighter and highly manoeuvrable boards made of balsa wood (later polyurethane) and fiberglass,” which “made surfing more accessible” to a broader public (95).19 Simultaneously, with this mainstream accessibility of the surfboard a distinct culture emerged that fostered the occupation’s popularity and further introduced it to the commercial realm of the postwar mass market. Frederick Kohner’s 1957 novel Gidget—a coming-of-age story about a girl and her love for surfing and the obligatory surfer boy—is often cited as a major influence on surfing’s appeal to a mass teenage audience. The 1959 Hollywood movie adaptation of the story only marks the most obvious starting point for a vari19 | Stecyk implies the site-specific particularities of the Southern California locale which played a role in this development as he explains how, after the war, “formerly strategic materials such as Styrofoam, resin, and fiberglass found their way into surfboard building” (Surf Culture 53). The fact that Southern California, especially after the attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941, provided the base for a large part of the US defense industry illuminates how “strategic materials” influenced the development of surfboards simply due to the geographical proximity of the military complex and surf culture. For further examples of these materials’ “pronounced influence on the art world” in Southern California see Fox’s “Tremors in Paradise” (208/209).

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ety of films that operated in a similar vein of teenage romance combined with surfing action. Other movies in this genre are, for example, Ride the Wild Surf (1964), The Horror of Party Beach (1964) or Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) (cf. Booth 95; Stecyk, Surf Culture 58).20 Surf movies that were more documentary-like and resembled “‘travelogues’ with footage of surfers riding waves” became equally popular (Booth 95). Titles such as The Big Surf (1957), Slippery When Wet (1958), Surf Trek to Hawaii (1961), and especially the highly influential The Endless Summer (1964) added to surfing’s popularity in California and elsewhere (95). The motion pictures co-developed with the genre of surf music, “a thundering guitar-based sound played as single-note riffs” that produced its first hit records with Dick Dale’s instrumental song “Miserlou” (1962), the Chantys’ “Pipeline” (1962), the Astronauts’ “Baja” (1963) and, most prominently, the Beach Boy’s 1962 debut album Surfin’ Safari (95). The commercial appeal and success of surf culture in the 1950s and 1960s presents interesting parallels to its employment by land developers such as Huntington at the beginning of the 20th century. Huntington imported surfing icon George Freeth to promote his enterprises along the Southern Californian coast with a man who could walk on water, while the postwar culture industry similarly took hold of the burgeoning surf culture in order to gain commercial access to the newly emerging teen market in California and beyond.21 A major reason for the mainstream success of surfing during this period therefore goes back to the simple fact that it could be sold. After making the surfboard available to a majority of customers through the forementioned improvements in material, it turned into a commodity and thus appealed to “dominant culture” (Langan 175). However, the mentioned exoticism that pervaded surfing in addition to the commercial aspect remained somehow existent although it can be noted that it experienced a shift from a projected exoticization on native Hawaiian bodies to an imagined exoticism concerning surfing in general and the respective participants in particular. Whereas one aspect of surfing culture started to become commodified for mass marketing beyond the “embodied activity of surfing,” e.g. in fashion, music, and film, another tried to remain independent and outside the grasp of popular commercialism (Langan 175). The fact that Stecyk labels popular surf-related movies such as Gidget as “surfploitation” supports the latter point, as it implies a critical stance towards the commercial marketing or “exploitation” of surfing and suggests that there is another, more authentic, side to it (Surf Culture 58). Stecyk’s obvious allusion to the “blaxploitation” films of the 1970s reveals his insistence on a pure and commercially untouched surf culture that he intentionally parallels to an allegedly authentic black identity, which is exploited through a cinematographic genre. His wordplay illuminates to what extent racial allusions—and thus associations of exoticism— 20 | For an overview of early surf movies from Hollywood see Lisanti (2005) and Warshaw (2005). 21 | For a comprehensive account of “the invention of the teenager” as a “marketing term” in postwar America see John Savage’s Teenage – The Creation of Youth Culture (xiii).

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are deployed in order to create an image of pure and noncommercial surf identity. A quote from Bill Hamilton, a successful Californian surfer during the 1960s and 70s, underlines how surfers look for an authentic lifestyle outside the norms of mainstream society, which can be read in the light of Stecyk’s racial insinuations. Whereas normative US society or, according to Sally Robinson “the middle American” (14), would be associated with the white middle-class life that is depicted in what Stecyk termed “surfploitation,” Hamilton states that the surfing lifestyle really lends itself to the very fringe of society – it’s such a free-and-easy lifestyle, and it has so much to do with individual freedom – an almost irresponsible kind of freedom. [S]urfers are edge-riders. We’ve made a decision … to live on the fringe of society and not be active citizens and participants in society, unless we want to. (qtd. in Booth 94)

This quote reveals how, through self-imposed marginality, surfers attempt to write themselves into the social margin and thus position themselves outside the norms of dominant US society. They seek to place themselves within the exoticized fringe that native Hawaiian surfers were associated with according to the racial hierarchizations of white supremacy. Chivers Yochim provides a comprehensive reading of post-1950s USA which helps to link the delineated development of surfing to the emergence of skateboarding and the specificities of Southern California. She preliminary locates the origins of skateboarding within the “youthful imagination” of children and their experiments with boards and roller skate wheels, which she ties to a “nostalgically remembered children’s culture of suburban postwar America” (Chivers Yochim 27, 28).22 She explains how “mainstream media picked up on skatebaording’s suburban appeal and surfer style” and thus implies the medial construction of a close connection between the specific locale of suburbia and surf culture (34). Weyland enhances this assumption by referring to “skating’s first brushes with the mainstream media” in the June 1964 issue of Life magazine, which referred to skateboarders as “Sidewalk Surfers” and described the skateboard itself as “the next best bet to shooting the curl on an oceangoing surfboard” (25).23 The term “Sidewalk Surfer” already merges the suburban allusions of skateboarding with its references to the activity of surfing: The safety a sidewalk is meant to provide for citizens reflects the homely and peaceful environment that postwar suburbia promised its predominantly white middle-class citizens, while the image of the Surfer evokes a

22 | For similar accounts of such an image also cf. Weyland’s The Answer is Never (21), Borden’s Skateboarding, Space and the City (13/14), and Peralta’s documentary film Dogtown and Z-boys. 23 | ‘Shooting the curl’ is an expression from surf jargon, which describes the action of riding a surfboard in front of a wave’s crest or also within the tube that develops when a wave breaks (cf. Warshaw, Encyclopedia 142/143).

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quite different scenario ranging from ancient Hawaiian mythology and exoticism to Californian teenage culture. The associations linking surfing and skateboarding were used to commercially market the skateboard. In 1963, Larry Stevenson, Venice Beach lifeguard and publisher of the California based Surf Guide magazine, established Makaha Skateboards (named after the Makaha Surfing Championships in Hawaii) after he realized that “with the Surf Guide I had a unique capability to promote [the skateboard]” (Brooke 23; cf. Stecyk, “Episodic Discontrol” 9/10). He “laid the foundation for the roots of surfing to mesh with skateboarding,” and the fact that Makaha sold “$4,000,000 worth of boards” between 1963 and 1965 underlines the marketability and success of the new device (Brooke 23).24 The Thrasher publication Insane Terrain goes on to indicate the connection between the suburban origin of skateboarding and its ties to surf culture as it states that “[p]roduct development and skating styles coincided with the invention and perfection of two other modern American postwar activities: Surfing and suburban sprawl” as well as “the realization of the industrial revolution in America and the increase in cheaper mass production of steel products for car parts, tools, and toys” (Thrasher, Insane 13). Building on these quotations Chivers Yochim notes: As it moved to the world of the suburbs and California, skateboarding also became distinctly white, as the availability of leisure time and access to the relative quiet and space of suburban streets and sidewalks were distinct to whites. At the same time, however, its surfing roots in both Polynesia and California and its relative danger, as well as its association with the burgeoning teen culture, lent skateboarding a rebellious and even exotic edge. (32/33)

This quotation, in a highly comprehensive manner, chronicles skateboarding’s emergence as it assembles allusions to the aforementioned characteristics of early and mid-century surfing development, its passage into consumer culture, and its ties to exoticized imagery. It becomes obvious to what extent surf culture’s early commercial enmeshment in urban and suburban development by Henry Huntington in Redondo Beach already laid the groundwork for the later inscription of skateboarding in the suburban landscape of Southern California. Preceded by the commercial appeal and touristic allusions to Hawaii, surfing’s significance in Southern California created the perfect basis for skateboarding’s early success. The image of the Sidewalk Surfer evolved from already present cultural manifestations and grew in the wake of modern light-weight balsa surfboards and the accompanying surf culture around popular films and music. Its appeal to the middle-class youth of suburbia mirrors white Americans’ early interest in the appropriation of native Hawaiian traditions for the thrill of exotic bodily action and mirrors racial underpinnings that range back to Jack London’s first encounters 24 | For more information on Larry Stevenson and Makaha Skateboards cf. .

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with surfing, the medialization of Duke Kahanamoku’s body, and the self-imposed otherness of surfers and their search for a life outside of mainstream society. Skateboarding’s first popular boom—exemplarily implied by Makaha’s commercial success—came to a temporary halt at the end of 1965. Similar to surfing’s slow progression at the beginning of the century, this interruption was partly caused by stagnation in the development of equipment. As Brooke recounts “[t]he boards, while fun to ride, could not really grip the road well. The clay wheels were too hard. The trucks were also fairly poor in design” (23/24). He goes on to explain how these disadvantages in technology caused a variety of accidents and injuries, which finally led the California Medical Association labelling skateboards “a new medical menace” while “police chiefs were telling stores not to carry skateboards in the interest of public safety” (24). Chivers Yochim refers to these explanations and retells how the media, for example the Los Angeles Times, picked up on the alleged dangers of skateboarding and released a series of articles that documented the number of injuries the activity caused and that informed readers about serious attempts to outlaw skateboarding (cf. 34/35). She summarizes how “the media served to make skateboarding decidedly suburban and decidedly subcultural” by “simultaneously playing up a rather non-threatening practice as a fad […], linking it to a strange non-mainstream counterculture of California surfing, and asserting its eminent danger” (34). Again, this proceeding mirrors the initial associations of surfing as a commercially attractive activity of Hawaiian tourism on the one hand and its exotic and dangerous undertones as a mythological native tradition on the other. Jocko Weyland’s book The Answer is Never - A Skateboarder’s History of the World (2001) exemplifies how the multifaceted renderings that establish the origins of surfing and consequently skateboarding somewhere in-between attributes of adventure, danger, and commercial appeal is practically inscribed in retrospective narratives of skateboarding history. In the first chapter of his monograph, Weyland recalls the purity and the closeness to nature that seem to pervade surfing’s initial purpose in Polynesian cultures: The inspiration might have come from riding canoes in the surf, though before that, [the Polynesians] were surely engaging in body-surfing, one of the purest manifestations of a body acquiring speed via a natural force. Surfing waves with the body was going on in Tahiti, Samoa, New Zealand and New Guinea, but it wasn’t until the eastern migration from the Society Islands to Hawaii around 500 A.D. that surfing developed the intermediary platform to balance on that bodysurfing lacked. By 1000 A.D., he’e nalu—surfboard riding—had been perfected in the waters surrounding the Hawaiian Islands. (12)

Weyland uses this account to imply the “avant-garde” character that he attributes to the early Hawaiian practitioners of surfing and their rejection of “mere transportation for a more transcendent connection to nature” (13). Subsequently, he contrasts this description with Calvinist missionaries’ denunciation of surfing after their ar-

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rival in Hawaii. Weyland quotes missionary Sheldon Dibble, who summarizes the Calvinist rejection of the Hawaiians’ activities and lifestyle as follows: Some lost their lives thereby, some were severely wounded maimed and crippled, some were reduced to poverty, both by losses in gambling and neglecting to cultivate the land; the instances were not few in which they were reduced to utter starvation. But the greatest evil of all resulted from constant intermingling, without any restraint, of persons of both sexes and of all ages, at all times of day and at all hours of the night. (Dibble qtd. in Weyland 13)

Weyland goes on to explain how surfing could survive these years of institutionalized damnation until its more open and also commercially informed reemergence at the beginning of the 20th century. In a highly stylized choice of words he assumes that “some Hawaiians must have been surfing in secret, riding hidden breaks by moonlight; some rebels continued to hear the siren song of the crashing waves” (14). This portrayal seems to epitomize the narrative function of the activity of surfing as an integral part of the history of skateboarding. As a preparation of his account of skate culture’s evolution and certainly in anticipation of its rebellious undertones, Weyland establishes surfing as a romanticized version of native rebellion. He creates a certain mystery by imagining the “hidden breaks” that an obviously selected number of Hawaiians sought out “by moonlight” to rebel against the Calvinist administration through the forbidden activity of riding the waves. This imagined rebelliousness of surfing is then remarkably combined with the foundations of the modern Western literary canon as a hearing of “the siren song of the crashing waves” alludes to Homer’s Odyssey. Although this choice of words does not necessarily imply an intentional or direct reference to the ancient epic or Greek mythology, it is quite telling how Weyland, consciously or not, crosses the romantic conception of a rebellious minority that resists the imposed regulations of white invaders with the metaphors of Western modernity. He parallels Jack London’s description of a native surfer as “a brown mercury;” an allusion to Roman mythology which similarly “displaced surfing into the context of classical antiquity and western civilization” (London 83; Willard, “Duke” 28). Surfing, in Weyland’s account, is read and valued as a form of active native resistance, but simultaneously assessed through the lens of Western literary tradition. The fact that Mark Twain in his 1872 book Roughing It recounts a personal attempt of trying “surf-bathing” (i.e. surfing), underlines the literary appeal of the activity within American culture (258). In describing the “national pastime” of the “naked natives” as an art which “none but natives” would ever master, Twain establishes an early description of the seemingly mythological connection between surfing and romanticized indigenous aptitude (258). Weyland uses those characteristics of surfing, which—in a Western reading—appear to enhance the rebellious stance that is projected onto the activity. Surfing’s “eminent danger,” its “exotic edge” (34, 33), and the accompanying countercultural appeal that Chivers Yochim simultaneously

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discovers within the medial depictions of skateboarding can be located within the evocations of Weyland’s narrative. It becomes evident how historical allusions to surfing are deployed in order to prepare for presentations of skateboarding within similar notions of rebellious exoticism.

Dogtown: Surf and Skate Rebellion Following a medially established chronology in historical accounts of skateboarding, in his narrative Weyland continues to describe the early successes of Sidewalk Surfing and its eventual decline in the mid-1960s. He turns to the invention of the urethane skateboard wheel by Frank Nasworthy in the early 1970s, which replaced the lower quality and often dangerous clay and metal wheels of the earlier decade and introduced the next boom in skateboarding’s popularity (cf. Weyland 34). Brooke emphasizes the importance of these new “smooth, stable and quiet” devices by dedicating a double page to what he calls “The Real Story of How the Skateboard Wheel went from Clay to Urethane,” whereas Stecyk mentions the invention’s impact, which “inspired countless new adherents” (Brooeke 46/47; Stecyk, “Episodic Discontrol” 11). Thrasher recounts how “the urethane wheel literally transformed things overnight” and “allowed skaters to move beyond the simple carves of earlier generations and suddenly radical slalom, downhill street, poolriding and skating in spillways and drainage ditches came to prominence” (Thrasher, Insane 15). Chivers Yochim goes further and not only mentions the importance credited to the invention of the new wheels, but she also interprets the story of inventor Frank Nasworthy’s success as a narrative incorporating basic elements of American values. She locates his stylization within the spirit of the American Dream, i.e. somewhere between subcultural credibility as a surfer and skateboarder with a past of discontinued education and the commercial success of a mainstream entrepreneur (cf. 42). Accordingly, she accentuates to what extent Nasworthy’s invention and the success of his so-called “Cadillac Wheel”—a branding that itself evokes associations of American iconography, mythology and mobility—grew from a step in skateboard technology’s evolution into an “origin myth” that builds the basis for a whole new chapter in skateboarding’s chronology (42). Similarly to Chivers Yochim’s localization of this myth in the 2001 documentray Dogtown and Z-Boys, Weyland’s account of Nasworthy’s invention is followed by a chapter entitled “Dogtown Rising” (41ff). The emergence of the phenomenon of Dogtown can be directly linked to a technical innovation that can be connected to American inventiveness and entrepreneurship. The story behind the group of skaters who are associated with the name Dogtown appears to constitute a paradigmatic turning point in the culture’s development. As I will point out in the following, it connects the early allusions to surfing, the accompanying racial significations, and the rebellious countercultural associations with a new style in skateboarding and its medialization. The name “Dogtown,” in present day popular culture, became recognized on an international scale with the publication of the award winning 2001 documen-

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tary film Dogtown and Z-Boys directed by former Z-Boy Stacey Peralta. The movie retells the story of a group of skateboarders, the Z-Boys (named after the Zephyr Surf Shop), which emerged in a geographical location referred to as “Dogtown,” the Los Angeles beach areas stretching from Santa Monica to Ocean Park and Venice Beach during the 1970s. Whereas the documentary introduced the Z-Boys and 1970s California skateboarding to a larger audience in 2001, within skateboard culture itself Dogtown and the associated skateboarders had occupied legendary status from their first appearances at skate contests and their early introduction within skate media. In 1975, the second issue of SkateBoarder magazine (resurrected after its initial demise during skateboarding’s stagnation in 1965) featured the first of a number of essays that came to be known as the “Dogtown Articles” (cf. Dogtown and Z-Boys). Written by journalist and photographer Craig Stecyk III, these texts constitute the first major contribution to the fame of the participating skateboarders and their surf-inspired skating style. As Borden puts it, “Dogtown served to set Santa Monica skaters apart from the rest of Los Angeles and California both physically and socially. This was the most intense of skateboarding domains, and became the most famous of skateboard centres, attaining a mythic status and reputation” (Borden, Skateboarding 46). Brooke similarly emphasizes the apparently paradigmatic importance of Dogtown’s skaters by explaining how they “collectively […] changed the direction of skateboarding” and that “[t]he legacy the Z-Boys left the world of skateboarding cannot be understated. Their intense, aggressive style paved the way for generations of skaters. It is this foundation that people are still riding on today” (56, 57). The legacy of Dogtown and its skaters is constantly retold in various popular accounts of skateboarding subculture. Especially in the wake of the documentary, they gained wide attention which led to a new wave of popularity and the continuation of the Dogtown narrative. Photographer Glenn E. Friedman’s book Dogtown: The Legends of the Z-Boys (2003) offers a visual retrospective of the style of that time; Rose basically dedicates the introduction of his book Dysfunctional (1999) to the “Dogtown Cross”—the spray-painted symbol of the crew—and thus stylizes it as the foundation of “the skateboard lifestyle, culture, art, and attitude” (5); the Laguna Art Museum’s catalog Surf Culture visually references Dogtown (50); Thrasher’s book Skate and Destroy puts Z-Boy Jay Adams on its cover and under the rubric “Legends” dedicates extra texts to Adams and fellow Z-Boy Tony Alva. Additionally, the story of the Z-Boys is repeatedly referred to in skateboard magazines, and the legend of Dogtown is a constant in the overall history of skateboarding culture that in 2005 was adapted in the fictional Hollywood production Lords of Dogtown (Dir. Catherine Hardwicke) starring Emile Hirsch and Heath Ledger. The extraordinary presence of the Dogtown legacy in skateboard media emphasizes, on the one hand, the importance of its inclusion in my project’s account of skate culture while, on the other hand, indicating that a mere repetition of its historical development and chronological progression from a local phenomenon

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to an international influence would only add a new version to the already existent variety of retrospectives. It would appear to be more fruitful to approach the impact of Dogtown through an analytically focused reading which ties in with the specificities that were elaborated in the preceding remarks about surf culture and to allude to the implied categories of race, class, gender, and space. The Z-Boys’ obvious connection to surfing is in itself a valid reason for such a proceeding. Besides being surfers themselves, the skate maneuvers they invented were heavily influenced by the state-of-the-art surfing styles of the period. Appropriating the concrete architecture of schoolyards, they “looked up to the Australian surfers who were pioneering the short-board aggressive style—Wayne Lynch, Nat Young, Midget Farrell and the Hawaiians Barry Kanaiapuni and Larry Bertleman,” explains Wayland who adds that “[t]he link with the surfers was so strong that some of Dogtown’s prime movers referred to their low, fast cutbacks and off-the-lips adapted to concrete as ‘Bertleman style’” (47). Former Z-Boy Nathan Pratt approves this connection to modern surfing and states that “The Z-Boys thing was Larry Bertleman on concrete” (cf. Dogtown and Z-Boys). These direct references linking surfing and skating raise the question whether the attributes that were located within surfing’s development throughout the 20th century described in the preceding subchapter can be relocated within the practices of the Z-Boys. Given that they constitute a major influence in skate culture it is necessary to retrace to what extent surfing’s images of exoticism and commercial attractiveness play into this new development. Reading Dogtown as an influential element in skateboarding’s history necessitates a critical evaluation of its appeal. I start from the impact of the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, as it not only retraces the chronological steps of its development, but also constitutes a resource that depicts Dogtown in a condensed form, allowing for accounts of how the phenomenon was (and is) mediated to a broader public. Kyle Kusz, who provides the only critical academic approach analyzing the documentary in detail, starts his inquiries by quoting from the film’s description on the cover of its video sleeve. Reciting this passage not only offers a brief summary of the documentary’s basic plot but also recounts the major legacies that are connected with the Dogtown era and its medial reproduction. Featuring historic old-school footage, exclusive interviews and a blistering rock soundtrack, DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS captures the meteoric rise of the Zephyr skateboarding team from Venice’s Dogtown, a tough ‘locals only’ beach with a legacy of outlaw surfing. Armed with a guerilla code, the notorious Z-Boys sharpened their skills in the concrete jungle of 70’s L.A. and then took it to the next level. Getting vertical in abandoned suburban swimming pools, they ignited an underground phenomenon that shaped the attitude and culture of modern-day extreme sports. With rare appearances by skateboarding icons TONY ALVA, JAY ADAMS, and TONY HAWK, DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS is a thrilling all-access tour of the birth of a pop culture phenomenon. (qtd. in Kusz 104)

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This brief excerpt assembles a variety of tropes that link back to the attributes that characterize the early developments of surfing. Set in the “tough ‘locals only’ beach” of Venice, California, the locale of Dogtown is established as a dangerous surfing environment that indirectly resembles the exotic shorelines of a mythological place like Hawaii whose waves could only be mastered by the native inhabitants. The “legacy of outlaw surfing” thereby parallels Weyland’s description of the few native “rebels” who dared to practice the activity of surfing during the period of missionary suppression. Dogtown and its surf culture is similarly stylized as outlawed and, in combination with the alleged “guerilla code” of the Z-Boys, rendered in a highly rebellious fashion. In parallel to the aforementioned accounts of skateboarding’s evolution, the quotation follows the established chronology of events and describes a development from surfing and beach culture to skateboarding’s emergence within Southern California, specifically the “concrete jungle” of Los Angeles. The activity of rebellious surfing is thus transferred to an urban environment, which again is represented through a metaphorical allusion to an exotic locale. The Z-Boys apparently act in the “jungle,” which evokes associations of wilderness and savageness as well as pure and uncivilized nature which only add to the rebellious character ascribed to the group. The fact that they take their rebelliousness to suburban swimming pools not only provides another parallel to early surfing and its importation to Southern California, but also emphasizes the counter-cultural character of skateboarding. Representing the direct opposite of the wild and exotic beaches of Hawaii or the tough neighborhoods of Dogtown, the suburban environment in which the Z-Boys found empty swimming pools can be read as the normative space of white upper middle-class prosperity. Transferring a surf-inspired movement from its allegedly exotic origin of a marginal ‘locals only’ beach to the center of white middle-class normality, i.e. Californian suburbia, itself appears as an act of rebellion that renders skateboarding a direct attack on the values that are associated with this specific locality. Weyland supports this interpretation by explaining: The Dogtowners had a mission at the midpoint of the decade. Along with skaters at the L pool in the inland empire east of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley and everywhere else in Southern California, they began a wholesale invasion of private pools, an act of mass trespassing and athletic civil disobedience. It was a full-scale, inherently criminal assault. (51)

The citation from the back cover of the video names two specifically important characters of the Z-Boys, Tony Alva and Jay Adams, while mentioning professional skateboarder Tony Hawk as a third person who, in fact, only appears very briefly in the course of the documentary in order to comment on the impact of the Z-Boys

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legacy. Whereas Adams and Alva are assigned major roles in the documentary,25 the mention of Tony Hawk, voted the “coolest big-time athlete” ahead of stars such as Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods in a 2002 marketing poll, is obviously included only to further the documentary’s marketability (Wheaton 1). Given that the reference to Hawk is preceded by the information that the Z-Boys “ignited an underground phenomenon that shaped the attitude and culture of modern-day extreme sports” supports this argument as, in the 1990s, “the ‘extreme’ moniker quickly became prevalent, as an all-embracing label, particularly in popular media discourse, and most significantly in the emergence of ESPN’s extreme Games, later named the X Games” (Wheaton 2/3). The Z-Boys’ outlaw guerilla appeal is thus combined with the athletic popularity of an internationally admired icon of professional skateboarding and the commercially induced label of extreme sports. The rebellious aspects of surfing and skateboarding are coupled with marketing considerations which, once again, follow very early approaches to surf culture and its introduction to the American consumer market. The works of photographer Glen E. Friedman constitute an important resource for an account of the impact of the Dogtown skaters. Friedman, himself a skateboarder who was around during Dogtown’s emergence in the 1970s, published photography of the decade on an international scale and is credited with having “helped make this obscure group of youths into an identifiable influence. His shots of the unbridled D.T. skate life revealed the compelling aspects of these unique activities” (Stecyk, Fuck You Heroes n.pag.). In his introduction to Friedman’s book Fuck You Heroes (1994), Stecyk remembers the day he and members of the Dogtown crew first met the photographer. He describes a scene that can be read as a telling example of how the phenomenon of Dogtown skateboarding is mediated. It adds to the findings concerning the quotation from the back cover of the documentary video and is particularly important as it reflects the writing of a journalist who laid the groundwork for Dogtown’s legendary status through his articles. Published with the work of a photographer who occupies a similar position when it comes to the visual documentation and promotion of the era, the following remarks come from the center of Dogtown’s medial representation: Back in the day—eighteen years ago to be exact—Kenter Canyon, West Los Angeles. A hot day with screeching Santa Ana winds blasting furnace-like conditions. A group of teenage skateboard riders are aggressively recreationally-orienting over a suburban school’s downhill banked asphalt playground. The 12-foot-high chain link fence enclosing the yard bears a sign which explicitly states “SKATEBOARDING PROHIBITED BY LAW.” An L.A.P.D. patrol car arrives and the skate crew scatters into the neighborhood. A few are unlucky enough to be caught by the cops. (Stecyk, Fuck You Heroes n.pag.)

25 | For a detailed analysis of Adams and Alva’s role in the documentary see Kusz (126-132).

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The rebellious stance of the Dogtown skaters, i.e. the Z-Boys, is explicitly emphasized in the description of this scene. The site-specific characteristics of Southern California are deployed to create a contrastive atmosphere of uncontrollable climatic conditions on the one hand and the strict organization and order of suburbia on the other. The “furnace-like” Santa Ana winds evoke associations of an extreme natural environment, while the localization at a suburban school constitutes a highly constructed counterpart to the implied forces of nature. The Z-Boys are inscribed into this landscape and similarly stylized in a dualistic fashion, as they incorporate associations of both aggressiveness and recreation. Their skating at a school where skateboarding is officially prohibited positions the Z-Boys directly in opposition to a major institution of social authority. The educational learning facility is appropriated for the surf-inspired activity of skateboarding and—especially through the accompanying attributes of exoticism, rebelliousness, and counter-cultural appeal—questioned in its original function as an institute of organized socialization. The recreational aspect of the Z-Boys’s skateboarding simultaneously places this rebellious stance in perspective and suggests a certain scope of innocence among the participating teenagers who are only looking for a relaxing leisure activity. The confrontation with the Los Angeles Police Department, however, reinforces the implied act of rebellion and stylizes the respective skateboarders as fugitive outlaws who need to run from state surveillance. Confirming the “guerilla code” described in the documentary’s advertising text, Stecyk enhances this impression and explicates how the “search, skate and destroy tactics of the DogTown elite contrasted strongly with the clean, organized ‘Little League’ sport orientation of the skate industry leaders of the era” (Fuck You Heroes n.pag.). He emphasizes the exclusiveness of the Z-Boys and their aggressive approach to skateboarding while implicitly criticizing the commercial image of skateboarding as an organized sport. According to Stecyk, the destructive skateboarding of the Z-Boys sets the group apart from the mainstream industry that had developed around skateboarding in the 1970s and in fact turns them into a rebellious “elite.” Diametrically opposed to the suggested safety of “Little League” sport, he sees the Z-Boys (and other subjects within Friedman’s photography) as people “who willingly cripple themselves in the pursuit of edge performance thrills” (Fuck You Heroes n.pag.). He distinguishes the Dogtown skaters as highly dedicated to the risk of rebellious bodily action. The film Dogtown and Z-Boys reinforces the images, attitudes, and stylizations that Stecyk produced in the introduction to Friedman’s book. The rebellious and aggressive attitude is especially accentuated in the course of the documentary, as Kusz emphasizes in his chapter “White Boyz in the Hood: Examining the Cultural Politics of Dogtown and Z-Boys.” He notes how the Z-Boys revel with great delight in recounting such seemingly unbecoming anti-social, rebellious stories, such as: threatening “outsiders” who dared to surf at the Pacific Ocean Pier (POP); draining and vandalizing other people’s pools in order to skate them; scaring “old ladies”

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Kusz surveys more than 20 film reviews to prepare his argument that the “anti-social antics [of the Z-Boys] are read as seemingly innocent youthful transgressions, which they pridefully recount at various times in the film with unquestioned humor or lack of shame” (Kusz 109). He reads “the absence of criticism toward the Z-Boys [as] a symptom and effect of the social and cultural privileges of being white and male,” which is supported by pointing to the overtly positive media reactions to the film and the fact that it received a number of festival awards (Best Documentary Award at the Independent Spirit Awards, Audience Awards at Sundance, Audience Awards at SFI) (Kusz 111). By making race and gender, i.e. whiteness and masculinity, the subject of his analysis, Kusz establishes a highly critical approach that reveals skateboarding’s entanglement in these categorizations. This proceeding is of particular importance for my book as it works along the lines of intersectional differentiation. Regarding the racial underpinnings that take effect in early surf culture, Kusz’s insights help to prove how the longing for exotic and rebellious adventure by white males pervades the development of surf-inspired skateboarding in California. The rebellious bodily activity of skateboarding appears to be directly connected to associations that revolve around the aspects of white masculinity and thus it operates at the intersection of two highly important categories marking privileged subject positions within a certain spatial locale. Chivers Yochim enhances this argument noting that “[b]ecause Dogtown and Z-Boys functions as a foundational myth explaining skateboarding circa 1970 and guiding contemporary skateboarding, I argue, its portrayal of white masculinity reverberates in current visions of this identity” (Chivers Yochim 41). She underlines the importance of the Dogtown era for skateboarding’s evolution and recognizes its influences within contemporary skate culture. Kusz reads the enmeshment in white masculinity as a marker of alleged normativity within the USA—a position that contrasts with the rebellious margin the Z-Boys seem to occupy. Despite their counter-cultural behavior, the overtly white masculine position embodied by the group links them to the normative American mainstream. Chivers Yochim similarly interprets the Z-Boys image by explaining how the documentary “positions the 1970s skateboarding era as a moment of working-class teen rebellion” and thus “produces a myth central to skateboarding’s current definition as a mainstream but edgy culture” (69). It becomes evident to what extent the phenomenon of Dogtown serves “as a cultural reminder that the practice [of skateboarding] is supposedly rooted in rebellion” (69). Skate culture’s development during the 1970s thus needs to be read as an important factor in the establishment of the rebellious aspects associated with skateboarding afterwards. Chronologically located at the dawn of the punk and subsequently the hardcore punk cultures, Dogtown constitutes an important predecessor of what will be analyzed as skate punk in this book.

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After Dogtown: Skateboarding in the 1980s After its first demise in the mid 1960s, skateboarding experienced another downturn with the beginning of the 1980s, although the previous decade had started out rather promisingly for the four-wheeled device. As Borden recounts, during skateboarding’s second heyday in 1975, “southern California had some two million skateboarders” and by the end of the decade in 1978/79, “the US alone had twenty to forty million skateboarders” (Skateboarding 57). In the wake of this enormous growth in the number of active participants, the building of skateparks, i.e. “facilities specifically dedicated to skateboarding,” became a lucrative and profitable business that provided “another way to make money off the sport” (Brooke 64; cf. Borden, Skateboarding 58). Although California remained a central location in skateboarding culture and consequently in the emergence of skateparks, the first commercially run skatepark was opened in Port Orange, Florida, in 1976, one week before Carlsbad skatepark opened in Southern California. Subsequently, skateparks were built all over the USA and followed by international equivalents in Australia and New Zealand, Europe, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, South Africa and Japan.26 A close connection to California, however, constantly accompanied the national and international dissemination of skateboarding as “many [skateparks] drew symbolic strength from the association with surfing and, by extension, with the Californian origins of skateboarding in the 1950s and 1960s” (Borden, Skateboarding 73).27 Although skateboarding was booming again and skatepark building profited from and supported this progression, with the beginning of the 1980s most parks in the USA had to close and were bulldozed for legal reasons: In addition to problems with city councils and the allocation of adequate zones for the parks, the main challenge for their owners “was obtaining adequate insurance” (Brooke 66). As a result of safety concerns and a number of lawsuits, insurance fees were rising and many park owners were forced to close their establishments. Brooke interprets this development as the point when “the sport went underground and into people’s backyards” where “[h]ardcore skaters began building ramps and took the sport in a completely different direction” (67). Skateboarding’s second demise thus can be connected with a legal and actuarial intervention that resembles the attempts in the mid 1960s to outlaw the sport as a medical threat, while it also constitutes a starting point for the underground associations of the activity and the temporary limitation of its practitioners to a small and individual core group. In the book Insane Terrain, Thrasher provides an interpretation of these events which incorporates a critical stance towards the commercial and regulatory side of skateparks: 26 | For a comprehensive account of skatepark development in the USA and beyond see the chapter “Constructed Space” in Borden’s Skateboarding, Space and the City. 27 | Weyland notes that “L.A. had more parks than any other city in the world” (171). This fact is evidenced in the article “L.A. Skatepark Paradise” in the March 1981 issue of Thrasher magazine.

1 C ONTEXT It may be that the demise of skateboarding began in the parks it had been relegated to. Of over 200 skateparks built in the 1970s, ninety percent were pay-to-play facilities that charged skaters to walk behind a fence and don the required helmet, wrist guards, elbow, and knee pads to skate on terrain that was sometimes so kinked and poorly designed as to be dangerous. Many experienced skaters decided they’d rather go back and skate the abandoned hotel pool down the street for free. (Insane 20)

Whereas Brooke reported that most skaters who frequented skateparks “were delighted to be free of the hassling they got when they skated the streets, and […] enjoyed the new challenges offered by the landscapes specifically designed with them in mind” (67), the quote from Thrasher implies a critique of the entrance fees, the obligatory safety equipment, and the fenced and thus restricted terrain. Referencing skaters who would preferably skate a pool “down the street” instead of an official skatepark, Thrasher represents a perspective that can be read in line with the more aggressive image of the Z-Boys’ “guerilla code.” The “Dogtowners and the urchins who had always seen the potential in L.A. schoolyards, parking garages, and driveway runs” had prepared the way for an approach to skateboarding that ignored regulations and restrictions by offensively appropriating space outside officially assigned areas (Thrasher, Insane 21). Thrasher’s assumptions concerning the demise of skateboarding in the 1980s imply how the establishment of safety regulations faced opposition among skateboarders. The above citation suggests that skateboarding behind a fence while wearing obligatory safety gear loses a lot of its original appeal. Although the criticized skateparks themselves often constituted a dangerous environment due to poor design, it seems as if the imposed security measures and admission charges clashed with the rebellious thrills induced by the Dogtown crew and their tough appeal: Skateboarders who were highly influenced by practitioners originating from a “locals only” beach where they would not let outsiders surf can hardly be imagined to pay admission for a regulated skate session behind fences. The insinuations made in Insane Terrain mirror those of the earlier Thrasher magazine and denote its importance for skateboarding while subsequently implying the rebellious overlap with punk culture. The magazine’s development out of the skate media landscape at the beginning of the 1980s makes it highly important for an adequate account of skateboarding during that decade. In order to outline the emergence of Thrasher magazine it is necessary to start in 1975 when the resurrected SkateBoarder magazine constituted the main information medium for participants of the subculture. Compared to the first phase of the magazine (1964 - 1965), Weyland recounts that the new SkateBoarder incorporated “a lot more advertisements [since] skating had blossomed as a viable economic activity that would soon grow into an industry with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales” (44). He describes how “[a]t first glance what was portrayed in the magazine did not […] look much different than what was shown in the sixties. But underneath the surface, things were definitely different” (44). Weyland interprets the cover of the

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first issue from 1975 as a harbinger of what was going to follow. It shows a young skater “halfway up the wall of an eight-foot-deep pool: barefoot with his arms outstretched, defying gravity, taking concrete reality and treating it like a wave while smiling with his long blond hair flowing” (Weyland 44). This image anticipates the physical movements of the Z-Boys and their pool skating in and around Dogtown and thus indirectly evokes associations with a more radical approach to skateboarding and its surrounding culture (see the image on p. 168 in this book). Brooke’s statement about the problems that SkateBoarder would be faced with roughly five years later explicitly mentions the more aggressive stance that had developed in the sport and which certainly can be reconnected to the Z-Boy’s rebellious impact: As punk and new wave music began to fuse with the “outlaw” or underground image of skateboarding, it started to dramatically change the entire sport. As skating moved from horizontal (slalom, downhill, freestyle) towards vertical (pools, parks, ramps, pipes), it assumed a more aggressive style. There has been much debate about whether this fusion was good or bad, but the fact is that it happened and SkateBoarder had a hard time deciding how to handle the sport’s more aggressive turn, which was unappealing to some advertisers. (Brooke 71)

The aggressiveness that pervaded skateboarding at this point in the early 1980s eventually caused SkateBoarder magazine to turn in a different direction and reenter the market as Action Now in August of 1980. This publication incorporated a huge variety of sports like windsurfing, BMX, jet-skiing and even horseback riding and thus lost its appeal to readers and members of the skateboard industry who were interested in a magazine exclusively dedicated to skateboarding (Thrasher, Insane 20; Brooke 93). As Stecyk recounts, “[o]ffended skateboard manufacturers” called a meeting with Action Now’s publishing company, Surfer Publications, to protest the magazine’s “ignorance of skateboarding” (Stecyk, “Episodic Discontrol” 14). He describes how Thrasher co-founder Fausto Vitello “angrily leaves the meeting vowing to fund his own magazine” and “‘Thrasher’ is a reality one month later” (14). The birth of Thrasher magazine can be read as the medial manifestation of the underground approach to skateboarding that developed from its low point at the dawn of the 1980s. It basically constitutes a medialized form of a turn to a rebellious skate culture and thus stands for a paradigmatic moment in skateboard ‘history.’ In Insane Terrain the emergence of the magazine is recounted as follows: Thrasher Magazine came out in 1981 with attitude and a mission statement that said, “by skaters, for skaters, and all about skateboarding.” Skateboarders were out there and Thrasher knew they would be there. Even if there was only one, it was reason enough to have a dedicated mag. (21)

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The emphasized dedication of the magazine implies the seemingly non-commercial approach of its publishers. Thrasher apparently was a product of active participants in skateboard culture and it was run under the belief that, in Fausto Vitello’s words, “skateboarding wasn’t a passing fancy; it was a lifestyle choice” (Thrasher, Skate and Destroy 8). Vitello observes, “It seemed to me that kids would continue wanting to skate, at the very least to piss off the neighbors or fuck with the school principal” (8), which indicates the rebellious attitude that Thrasher’s makers sensed among their readership and consequently incorporated into the magazine. Chivers Yochim notes that in a later Sports Illustrated interview, Vitello admits that “[w]e just wanted to be outlaws. The mainstream thing hadn’t worked so we just terrorized. That was how we saw we could promote the sport” (qtd. in Chivers Yochim 55). She notes how Thrasher constitutes a part of the “discursive constructions of skateboarding that would be marketable” and thus reveals that the rebellious reactions to skateboarding’s demise were, at least in part, financially motivated (56). The commercial component of Thrasher’s approach, however, does not subtract from the impact the magazine and its originator Fausto Vitello had on skate culture and the image of skateboarding in general. As Brooke records, Vitello’s “philosophy, his influence on skateboarding cannot be understated” (95). He quotes Vitello who summarizes his attitude that “[s]kateboarding attracts a unique person. It influences the rest of society. Thrasher is not about hypocrisy or selling out to corporate America. We are about skate and destroy” (Brooke 95). Although this statement contradicts Vitello’s later comment about “terrorizing” as a way to “promote the sport,” it becomes evident why the magazine was received as “the rebellious bible of skateboarding subculture” (M. Fox n.pag). Thrasher’s famous “Skate and Destroy” shibboleth originally stems from the title of an article that Craig Stecyk (under the pseudonym Lowboy) wrote for the December 1982 issue. Until today it represents the magazine’s rebellious attitude, a fact emphasized by a book-length retrospective that looks back at the first 25 years of the magazine: It is simply entitled Skate and Destroy (2006). The subtitle of Stecyk’s/Lowboy’s original article reads “Something to offend everyone” and thus demarcates Thrasher and the “Skate and Destroy” attitude as intentionally opposed to “everyone” or, in other words, society or what was perceived as the norm (Thrasher, Skate and Destroy 14). Seven years after the end of the Vietnam War, the obvious reference to the US military’s strategy of search and destroy thereby constitutes a major provocation for American conservatism. Evoking the guerilla-like attacks on suburban swimming pools by the Z-Boys, the “Skate and Destroy” mantra remains within a militarist jargon that can be read as a ridiculing pun on failed US imperialism in Asia, while simultaneously distancing Thrasher’s position from the peace and love harmony of the preceding decades’ hippy culture. “Skate and Destroy,” whether read as an imperative or a motto, implies that skateboarders invade the terrains around them in order to intentionally do damage and destroy them. The sport is thus stylized as deviant and anti-social while providing a new form of identification for its participants. As Margalit Fox in a New York Times article on Fausto

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Vitello’s death in 2006 remarks, the magazine and its “Skate and Destroy” stance “embodied the punk-rock ethos of the day” (n.pag). Michael Brooke, author of The Concrete Wave and publisher of the eponymous magazine, who was interviewed for the article, furthers this allusion to punk culture. Brooke calls Vitello the “godfather of punk-rock skateboarding” and thereby underlines the connection between Thrasher’s obvious provocations and the subsequent allusions to punk culture (qtd. in M. Fox n.pag). The 1973 song “Search and Destroy” by American proto punk band The Stooges (with lead vocalist Iggy Pop also known as Iggy and The Stooges) constitutes another possible inspiration for Thrasher’s punk-influenced battle call. Weyland summarizes the characteristics of Thrasher and these obvious involvements in the punk underground by paralleling his reading experience with the discovery of new records: Punk and skating informed everything. They were incredibly exciting and life-affirming, proving that there was something of interest and value out there in the world. Every issue of Thrasher had somebody doing a new trick or airing higher, and every record I heard had sounds that had never been made before. It was a call to arms, a call to skate, to ask questions, to rebel, to think. It was an education and an initiation. (165)

This statement, again, shows how military jargon can be coupled with skateboarding action and punk music in order to mediate a rebellious stance. For Weyland, skateboarding and punk constitute “a call to arms” whereas military maneuvers seem to be embodied within skateboarding tricks on the one hand and the content of punk records on the other. That this radical and rebellious development is formative for skateboarding in the 1980s is further exemplified by Weyland’s direct comparison between Thrasher and the 1970’s SkateBoarder magazine. Whereas “Skateboarder had been glossy and mainstream [,] Thrasher was black-and-white and scrappy-looking, with a graphic style that made it more like a punk zine than anything with commercial aspirations” (167). The punk-look of Thrasher was also reflected in terms of content: Vitello, reflecting on the early days of the magazine, recounts that his “nights were reserved for the fresh brewed punk club scene” (Thrasher, Skate and Destroy 8), a fact that mirrors Brooke’s statement about Thrasher’s ability to “closely document the California Punk/Thrash scene of the 1980’s” (Brooke 94). This was done in the magazine’s exclusive music section called “Notes from the Underground,” which was part of Thrasher from the very first issue. While emphasizing the important role that music played in skate culture, the title of the section shows how the musical affiliation was also oriented towards the more marginal realms outside the popular mainstream: It preferred the underground.28 28 | It is questionable whether Thrasher’s editors had Fyodor Dostoevsky’s existentialist novel Notes from (the) Underground in mind when they labeled the magazine’s music

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The emergence and success of Thrasher constitute a highly relevant account of the direction skateboarding took at the beginning of the 1980s. As the “most constant form of rejection of society by skateboarding” the magazine epitomizes the consequent continuance of the Z-Boy’s rebellious approach to skateboarding and provides a regular medium for its participants (Borden, Skateboarding 161). The early impacts of exoticized surfing and its counter-cultural appeal apparently found their way into the influential advancements and re-appropriations on skateboards in Dogtown and finally led to a medial dissemination through Thrasher magazine and its punk appearance. However, the 1980s also saw a quite different approach to the sport, which developed out of direct opposition to the attitude presented in Thrasher. The magazine Transworld Skateboarding, according to Stecyk, was founded “in protest over Thrasher running an Independent Trucks’ ‘Built to Grind’ ad which features a naked underage model” (“Episodic Discontrol” 14). A company that specialized in the production of skateboard trucks (i.e. the axles that hold the wheels), Independent Trucks was co-founded by Fausto Vitello in 1978, which explains its frequent appearance in Thrasher’s advertising sections. Established by Peggy Cozens and Larry Balma, owner of Independent competitor Tracker Trucks, Transworld Skateboarding started in 1983 “as a rebuttal to Thrasher’s ‘skate and destroy’ ethos” (Weyland 255). The magazine set out “to highlight the positive aspects of the sport” and the first issue included the “‘Skate and Create’ manifesto” (Stecyk, “Episodic Discontrol” 14), which gave direction to a “much more mainstream-friendly” side of skateboarding “with an emphasis on striking photography” (Weyland 255; cf. Borden, Skateboarding 171). Chivers Yochim interprets the rivalry between Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding as the manifestation of “two poles of existence” which define skateboarding’s future development between “the domain of punk rebels and a highly athletic endeavor” (56). As my book seeks to provide an analysis of skate punk media and a subsequent anticipation of a rebellious body, it will concentrate on the former direction. I want to find out exactly how skateboarding fits into the punk culture and vice versa. Why does punk blend in with skateboarding so well? How can skateboarding be punk (and vice versa)? How is the punk image constructed? Where does it come from? How are the skate and punk cultures connected? Where and why did they converge? In order to find answers to these questions it is necessary to first establish a closer look at punk culture in general and California hardcore punk in particular.

section. However, the spite for society that Dostoevsky’s unnamed protagonist articulates would go well with skateboarding punks’ “Skate and Destroy” antics.

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1.2.5

Punk and Hardcore Punk

I began my consideration of skateboarding with a statement questioning the existence of any official account of the subculture. Within punk culture the opposition to universal explanations of the phenomenon is equally strong if not stronger.29 In the introduction to Craig O’Hara’s The Philosophy of Punk Marc Bayard notes the following difficulty: The major problem with trying to explain punk is that it is not something that fits neatly into a box or categories. Not surprising as punk had made the explicit aim of trying to destroy all boxes and labels. With that as a major hurdle, any project that tries to define punk or explain it must do so with very broad brush strokes. Punk and punk music cannot be pigeonholed to some spiked-haired white male wearing a leather jacket with a thousand metal spikes listening to music real loud. If that’s all it was and is then I’m not even remotely interested. (11)

As in the case of skateboarding, this statement implies the problematic of a valid definition that accompanies any examination of punk, whether academic or popular. The fact that Bayard expresses his dissatisfaction with any kind of narrow attempts to reduce punk to a common denominator shows that, again in parallel to the case of skateboarding, the narrative recapitulations of the culture are oftentimes intentionally localized at the fringes of what can be documented. It appears to be at the core of these cultures that they elude themselves from outside and inside definitions in order to maintain an autonomous status opposed to an allegedly definable mainstream. As Roger Sabin notes, “any attempt to define is also part of a process of construction: that to map a subculture is simultaneously to ‘make’ it” (5).30 His statement elucidates why an approach to punk culture does not have to depart from the constraint of a universal definition. The aim of my account of punk is not to construct or to make a certain culture but to hint at its meanings and influences for the development of skateboarding, skate punk, and the constitution of a rebellious bodily activity. It does not build on a definition of punk. Sabin criticizes that “[t]oo 29 | Cf. Goshert (102/103) for an account of the impossibility or, more precisely, the impracticability of an unambiguous definition of punk. 30 | The complementary argument, of course, reveals that punk’s (and similarly skateboarding’s) mapping of the ‘mainstream’ adds to the latter’s construction. In order to distance themselves from an alleged ‘mainstream,’ the protagonists of a subculture need to “map” and consequently to “make” it. The implied interdependence of the two imagined poles emphasizes that terms like subculture and mainstream are highly ambiguous in their essentialist binary. It becomes evident that the enhancement of the conception of subcultures as corresponding cultures provides a much more accurate, i.e. flexible, account of the interrelated phenomena in question here.

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often, ‘big theories’ have been relied upon (Marxism, the sociology of deviance, semiotics, etc.), which picture those involved in subcultures as passive pawns of history, their lives shaped by grand narratives beyond their control” (5). He postulates that, “thankfully,” the Cultural Studies of the 1990s refocused on “a more subjective approach,” which pays intensive attention to “such factors as a person’s class, gender, race, sexuality, geographical location, and age-group” (5). This assessment goes along with the intersectionally informed approach and the elaboration on the importance that the categories of race, class, gender, and space have for this project and its focus on the body. Sabin’s remark provides an argument for the structuring of my approach to punk along the lines of the forementioned categories of differentiation. My account of punk is oriented intersectionally instead of historically or genealogically. It is supposed to allude to important steps in the development of this subculture in order to delineate its entanglement in the amalgam of 1980s skate punk and its ramifications for corporeal expressions. I specify my inquiries into punk culture by establishing a focus that concentrates on a domain referred to as hardcore punk. Musicologically, hardcore punk can be considered a subgenre of punk as it provides a faster and more aggressive enhancement of earlier punk rock variations.31 Additionally, it is characterized by differences in fashion, participation, and textual content. The focus on hardcore punk is very useful for my purposes as the phenomenon and its emergence in the 1980s can be read as genuinely American and specifically Californian or, to be precise, Southern Californian (cf. Blush 13; Azzerad 14/15). I argue that it was specifically through hardcore punk that the cultures of skateboarding and punk merged. The Southern California locale provided a common ground for both phenomena to grow and finally amalgamate. Consequently, a concentration on hardcore punk constitutes a necessary prerequisite for an analysis of skate punk while simultaneously allowing for an approach that sets the limits for a selected incorporation of the numerous publications within the realm of punk-related literature. It is important to note that Californian hardcore punk developed from older punk or punk rock scenes whose ‘histories’ were told and examined at various other occasions.32 The early New York punk scene is equally important for the development of hardcore punk as the British punk movement around bands such as the Sex Pistols and The Clash. However, both phenomena have been documented and analyzed extensively.33 Sabin provocatively asks “[H]ow many more times must we hear the Sex Pistols story?” and thus supports my intended proceeding of 31 | For an extensive musicological approach to hardcore punk see Budde’s Take Three Chords. 32 | For detailed insights into these histories see particularly McNeil and McCain’s Please Kill Me (1996) and Spitz and Mullen’s We got the Neutron Bomb (2001). 33 | Hebdige, in one of the first academic approaches to the phenomenon of punk, already incorporated references to both scenes in his highly influential 1979 monograph Subculture – The Meaning of Style.

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acknowledging the forementioned punk scenes in their importance for hardcore punk without establishing yet another retelling of their emergence and development in detail (2). My focus on hardcore punk and its affiliations with California adds to the few pre-existing academic examinations of this specific culture (cf. Traber 2001, 2007; MacLeod 1997, 1998, 2010; Moore 2004, 2010; Nehring 2006) and simultaneously introduces those aspects of punk that are important for the (e)mergence of skate punk. Spitz and Mullen, in the introduction to their oral history of L.A. Punk, argue for the relevance of a consideration of Los Angeles’s punk and subsequently hardcore punk scenes. They imply its importance for skate punk and hint at the hitherto ignorance concerning the affiliation to skateboarding and surfing by claiming that too many times the so-called founding punk scenes of New York and London have been autopsied, then crudely sewn and suited up for the big funeral ceremony, where everybody wants to be a pallbearer to seal their own legacy and sustain a quasi mainstream career as a “professional punk.” To let anybody else in on it, especially a surfer or a skater, would stall the gravy train. (Spitz and Mullen xv)

Despite being targeted at popular accounts of punk culture that follow commercial interests, this quotation mirrors the academic void concerning skate punk culture. While analyses and considerations of hardcore punk have increased, especially over the last decade, its intersections with skate culture remain basically unmentioned.34 MacLeod’s seminal 1998 dissertation about suburban Punk in Southern California, published as Kids of the Black Hole – Punk Rock in Postsuburban California in 2010, hints at the influences that surfing and skateboarding had exerted on punk in California but only mentions the phenomenon of skate punk in a footnote (cf. 115n29). His work emphasizes the important connection between hardcore punk and Southern California while implying that it is this environment which marks the origins of skate punk. The term ‘hardcore’ cannot be ascribed to a specific place or date but is usually associated with the further evolution of California’s L.A. Punk Rock scene. With respect to the musical emergence of hardcore punk, Michael Azzerad states that the participating kids “boiled the music down to its essence, then revved up the tempos to the speed of a pencil impatiently tapping on a school desk and called the

34 | Although Willard’s “Cutback: Skate and Punk at the Far End of the American Century” (2004) in fact highlights parallels between the two cultures, it hardly analyzes direct interconnections and coherences. The phenomenon of skate punk remains unstudied, although the immanent connection of bodily performance (especially in skateboarding) and allegedly radical opposition to society’s center (especially in hardcore punk) promises an excellent opportunity for a critical study of youth culture and its discursive as well as material ramifications.

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result ‘hardcore’” (13). His reference to music critic Barney Hoskyns simultaneously implies the first connections between this musical tendency and a social context as Azzerad uses Hoskyn’s quote in order to distinguish the music from more traditional punk rock and describe it as “younger, faster and angrier, full of the pent-up rage of dysfunctional Orange County adolescents who’d had enough of living in a bland Republican paradise” (Hoskyns 313). Brendan Mullen hints at the consequences for the L.A. punk rock scene that followed from this development and which, in his opinion, started to look like “the exclusive domain of sweaty acne-scarred sexually frustrated teen boys with bashedin faces. In other words, Hardcore” (Mullen 2002: 159). Despite the fact that the term ‘hardcore’ can have rather different connotations (cf. Belisto and Davis 7), MacLeod tries to find a common denominator that characterizes the culture: He explains that most of the participants “were, if vaguely, leftist/anarchist and directly anti-authority. What united them more than a political label, though, was their disdain for the institutions and lifestyles of mainstream U.S.A.” (“Social Distortion” 128). Steven Blush adds that “[r]egardless of the precise origin, when Punks said, “Hardcore,” other Punks knew what they meant. Hardcore expressed an extreme: the absolute most Punk” (16). These obvious references to punk explain why I use the notion of hardcore punk in my work. A combination of the terms hardcore and punk is particularly helpful in taking a look at the early period of hardcore, which is coined by the transition from one scene into another.35 The intersectional categories of class, race, and gender in combination with the spatial category of suburbia will constitute the focus for the examination of hardcore punk culture. This organization offers the advantage of further sharpening the focus and allowing a choice from the existing literature concerning punk and hardcore with regards to concrete aspects of differentiation that overlap intersectionally in Californian hardcore punk. Following an overview of the 1980s’ contextual implications for hardcore punk development, this chapter will initially concentrate on the category of class and hardcore punk’s emergence from the California middle class and its specific (post-) suburban environment. In a further step, I will address contradictions that develop within this culture of predominantly white participants. In conclusion, aspects of masculinity will be incorporated in order to elucidate and evaluate the prevalently violent rituals and stylizations of hardcore punks. I thus prepare for the subsequent discussion of skate punk media which combines inquiries into both the skateboard and hardcore punk cultures while maintaining a structure that is oriented along the lines of intersectionality.

35 | Cf. Traber who hints at the temporal overlapping of (L.A.) punk and hardcore. He states that “hardcore is best understood as an emerging culture within an emerging culture [i.e. punk]” (“L.A.’s White Minority” 57).

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The 1980s as a Starting Point for Hardcore Punk In order to follow the overall structure of subchapter 1.2, it is helpful to first incorporate references to the 1980s and their fundamental meaning for hardcore punk. Blush recounts: By 1982—the apex of the HC era—Reaganomics dominated. America experienced a recession. Steel and auto factory closings impacted everyday life. Sharp price increases and rampant real estate speculation began. But nothing gets a kick-ass music scene going like repression coupled with recession (Blush 20).

With this account, he explicitly highlights the correlation between social change and the culture of hardcore punk. Azzerad labels the phenomenon a “wake-up call for the California dream” and thus, even stronger, highlights the causalities of the overall context of 1980s California and the development of hardcore punk (22). He specifies this characterization and adds: [F]or all the perfect weather and affluent lifestyles, there was something gnawing at [California’s] youth. Los Angeles wasn’t a sun-splashed utopia anymore – it was an alienated, smog-chocked sprawl rife with racial and class tensions, recession, and stifling boredom. (22)

These conditions and their influence on the development of hardcore punk are best summarized and marked as an important starting point for the subculture by referring to the notion of postmodernism. Ryan Moore establishes a useful working concept by speaking about the “condition of postmodernity” (“Postmodernism and Punk” 305), which incorporates the essential characteristics a postmodern society is based upon. He mentions the “collapse of hierarchies and boundaries between the ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’” as well as the consumerism that followed from the deindustrialization of the “West” (305/306). Moore states that “the crisis of representation and sense of fragmentation characteristic of postmodern theory, culture, and politics are theorized as symptomatic of […] a broader shift in social structure catalyzed by processes of economic restructuring and political realignment” which recapitulates fundamental issues that were already discussed in 1.2 - 1.2.3 (307). The “crisis of representation” mentioned by Moore can be particularly referred back to subchapter 1.2.2 and implies that the identity crisis of the white middle-class man is part of the “condition of postmodernity.” The “fragmentation” he describes reflects the specific developments in the USA during the 1980s while simultaneously comprising and implying the conditions that unfold within California (post-) suburbia. Moore introduces an important correlation for this book when he locates two different reactions to the postmodern condition within punk culture. He distinguishes between the “culture of deconstruction” and the “culture of authenticity” and thus delineates two phenomena that are crucial for a description of the evolution of California hardcore punk (“Postmodernism and Punk” 308). While the

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former is characterized by its development of “signs, symbols, and style for the purposes of shock and semiotic disruption,” the latter tries to avoid the “superficiality of postmodern culture” by independent work in the “underground” (307).36 The “culture of deconstruction” is oftentimes associated with British punk bands such as the Sex Pistols that, according to Dick Hebdige, acted as bricoleurs who used “conventional insignia […] stripped of their original connotations” in order to shock and provoke their environment (Hebdige 104). The “culture of authenticity,” in contrast, is primarily linked to the “do-it-yourself ethic” that is characteristic of American punk and offered the mass-medially socialized adolescents “to involve themselves in cultural production” (Moore, “Postmodernism and Punk” 314). While both reactions mentioned by Moore can be found within California hardcore punk, the “culture of authenticity” and the resulting “do-it-yourself ethic” take a special position. Moore supposes that the transition from the “culture of deconstruction” to the “culture of authenticity” simultaneously mirrors the transition from punk to hardcore. His assumption calls for a closer analysis of this momentum and the importance of “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY). It can be recorded that Moore— just like Blush and Azzerad—sees a causality between the context of the 1980s or the “condition of postmodernity” and the development of hardcore punk: In the suburbs of Los Angeles, where a [...] groundswell of anxious conservatism and greed had opened the doors of the White House to a former Hollywood actor, who then cleared the way for a glossier but even more merciless form of capitalism, the symptom and the response was hardcore. (Moore, “Postmodernism and Punk 317)

Hardcore is interpreted as a reaction to aggressive capitalism, which Moore locates within the state of postmodernity while establishing a direct relation between the burgeoning youth culture and the election of Ronald Reagan as the 40th president of the USA. Blush similarly summarizes the contemporary conditions through the notion of “Reaganomics” and emphasizes the decisive role that Reagan played in the development of hardcore punk: Ronald Reagan, another product of Southern California, won the presidency in 1980. He was the galvanizing force of Hardcore – an enemy of the arts, minorities, women, gays, liberals, the homeless, the working man, the inner city, et cetera. All “outsiders” could agree they hated him. (20) 37 36 | In this context, it is possible to link the notions of “deconstruction” and “authenticity” back to the preceding quote by Blush who speaks of the coupling of “repression” and “recession” (Blush 20). One can read the deconstructive culture as a reaction to the repressive conditions, while the striving for authentic culture can be interpreted as a pragmatic reaction to the consequences of recession. 37 | The enormous influence that Reagan exerted on the hardcore and punk scenes becomes manifest in events such as the Rock Against Reagan concerts as well as in numer-

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Blush depicts how Reagan and his politics evolved into a unifying projection screen for the hatred and discontent of many people. He calls Reagan an “enemy” of minorities while subsuming the latter under the term “outsiders.” This remark raises an important question: To what extent are the participants of the hardcore punk scene “outsiders” and in what relation do they stand to the minorities named by Blush? Put differently: Where exactly do the participating adolescents come from and what kind of social status are they associated with? Answering these questions helps to delineate the development of the ‘original’ hardcore punk culture while highlighting the privileged positions that are immanent within the scene. Dirk Budde explains that with hardcore punk, the suburban scenes in Anaheim, Fullerton, Garden Grove, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and beyond became the new points of interest while the scene in Hollywood started to fall apart (199). He points out that the local origins of hardcore punk can be found within the aforementioned landscape of suburbia. Jeff McDonald, member of early L.A. punk band Redd Kross, further explains that “[t]his new scene was created by upper-middle-class suburban kids” and thus specifies the social environment that many participants were drawn from (qtd. in Mullen, Lexicon Devil 160). It can be stated that the descriptions of the American middle class and the California suburbs offered in the preceding subchapters constitute important starting points for a detailed approach to hardcore punk; they allow for statements considering the status and background of the participants. In the following, I will incorporate specificities of middle-class life and their relevance for hardcore punk. Since the California middle class can generally be associated with settlement in the suburbs, the conclusions concerning the suburban environment will be included in this analysis.

Hardcore Punk and the Suburban Middle Class Claiming that all hardcore punks in California come from a middle-class background would appear to be questionable. While the term ‘middle class’ is in itself highly ambivalent, there are no quantitative evaluations that would allow for a precise proposition in this respect. However, statements regarding the local and social background from within the respective scene suggest that the majority of the participants in this culture can be associated with the normative status of being middle-class. In the book We got the Neutron Bomb, Mugger, a former roadie of the band Black Flag, is quoted concerning the beach suburbs of Orange County and Los

ous song titles and band names. Examples are songs like “Reagan’s In” by Wasted Youth (1981), “Reagan der Führer” by D.I. (1983) or “Reagan Gun Club” by Social Spit (1986). The New York band Reagan Youth (founded in the early 1980s) is still influential in today’s hardcore scene. Spencer Ackerman, in The New Republic, summarizes Reagan’s impact in a rather ironic estimation and exclaims: “Ronald Reagan is responsible for some of the best punk rock ever recorded” (Ackerman n.pag.).

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Angeles. He describes the local development of hardcore punk as “a full-on white suburbanite rebellion” and thus implies the conclusion that the participants came from an environment that was clearly privileged: white suburbia (qtd. in Spitz and Mullen 193). Blush similarly notes that “[t]he first HC bands came out of suburban LA beach towns, probably ‘cause there they lived as close to The American Dream as you could get. Born of a doomed ideal middle-class utopia, Punk juiced their nihilism” (13). The fact that he associates the origin of the first hardcore bands with the American Dream shows that the suburbs of Los Angeles are connoted positively, i.e. prosperous. However, he identifies the middle-class ideal located in this environment as a utopia and thus evokes insights of the preceding subchapter, which revealed the middle class as a myth and suburbia as a utopian phantasm. The assumption that punk “juiced” the nihilism of adolescents is supported by MacLeod, who explains that “[t]hey came to hardcore organically, through their experiences in dysfunctional families and conformist suburban environments” (“Social Distortion” 135). This statement points out in what way hardcore constitutes a form of expression for negative experiences in a positively connoted environment, which, following Blush, can be articulated through nihilistic behavior. These teenagers grow up with the experience of financial differences and family difficulties that are blanked out by the myth of a homogeneous middle class. Tony Cadena, vocalist for Orange County band the Adolescents and Greg Ginn, guitarist and founder of the Hermosa Beach band Black Flag, both fit this pattern.38 Cadena defines Orange County as a “very suburban Right Wing, White middle-class stifling environment” and adds that “[t]here was no father in my family. We were dysfunctional, a welfare family living in an upward middle-class neighborhood”, while Ginn notes that “[w]hen you’re surrounded by that materialistic kind of thing and you’re looking for something deeper than that, then that’s not an ideal environment” (resp. qtd. in Blush 86; Azzerad 36). Cadena’s experiences constitute an example of the changing family structures of the 1970s and 80s while showing how they influenced the reception of his social status in an ostensibly family-oriented middle-class neighborhood. It remains questionable whether he uses the term “welfare family” literally or just wants to emphasize the way his family was treated in this environment. Ginn, in addition, addresses the conformist characteristics of suburbia by labeling them “materialistic” and summarizing them through the 38 | My choice of exemplary representatives of the Southern California hardcore scene (whether bands or specific personalities) is modeled on Traber’s politics of representation. In his essay on L.A. punk, he chooses to refer particularly to bands and people who are later on “included in a documentary or compilation record, who [get] their music reissued” (“L.A.’s White Minority” 59n11). The examples of Ginn and Cadena—the musical projects of both are reissued and documented to this day—are not only important and highly visible pioneers in American and especially Southern California hardcore punk, their bands also were particularly influential on the skate punk scene, as will be seen in the following chapters.

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musical reference that “when you’re surrounded by Genesis fans, I don’t know how idyllic that is” (Azzerad 36). The pop musical conventions that Ginn criticizes at this point find an emblematic equivalent in the “homogeneous architecture” of Orange County and illustrate the prevalent suburban conformity (Kling, Olin, and Poster, “Emergence” 7).39 This conformity entailed that fragmented families such as the Cadenas “did not fit in” and young people like Ginn experienced punk as a refuge “where anybody could go who didn’t fit into the conventional rock mode” (qtd. in Blush 86; Azzerad 16). Despite the negative experiences of the two influential musicians, it is necessary to record that they—and many other hardcore punks as well—enjoyed the privileges of the suburban middle class. Cadena, in continuing the aforementioned statement about family life, remembers, “I started bringing bands to my garage to rehearse. It was exciting to tip that ‘hood on its ear. It was the final fuck-you” (Blush 86).40 Although his family might have been affected by the divorce of his parents, the privilege of a private garage, which not only serves as the basis for musical rebellion but also constitutes the “abiding signifier of homely suburbia” (Osgerby 159), indicates that this is not a case of existential poverty as found within the urban core. Cadena’s statements concerning his family situation are pervaded by contradictions. At one point he speaks about the absence of his father and explains that “[s]ome of us came from very stable families, but there was also a lot of turmoil, a lot of divorce, a lot of kids literally running their households” (Spitz and Mullen 258). At another point, talking about the preparations for a concert, he retells: “My dad helped Rikk’s dad lift a guitar amp up the stairs. Of course, half the band had to be home by 11” (Blush 90). The reference to these statements is not meant to belittle or question the problems of the teenagers and adolescents involved in hardcore punk; it just must be stated that, despite divorces and financial difficulties, it is not appropriate to speak of extreme neglect or poverty. The respective participants sometimes even received direct support by their parents. Henry Rollins, probably the best known of the many vocalists of Black Flag, recalls that “Ginn’s parents would often help out with food or even clothing” and that “[w]ithout the Ginn family […] there would not have been a Black Flag” (Azzerad 41). This exemplary relationship to the parents, after all a form of dependency, implies middle-class associa-

39 | The fact that such conformist implications can be deduced from Ginn’s naming of the band Genesis becomes obvious in the symbolic usage of the band name within literature: Bret Easton Ellis characterizes the protagonist Patrick Bateman in his novel American Psycho as “a big Genesis fan” who is especially enthusiastic about the “first rate pop songs” which the band produced at the beginning of the 1980s (133). Ellis thus manages to intensify the image of a superficial and materialist character that very fittingly criticizes music that is “too punk” (353). 40 | Note the similarity to Vitello’s statement about skateboarding as an activity “to piss off the neighbors or fuck with the school principal” (Thrasher, Skate and Destroy 8).

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tions that mark many of the participating people as “relatively affluent suburbanites who could afford things like renting halls and PA systems” (18). A focused look at the band Black Flag, which Azzerad calls “more than even the flagship band of American Hardcore” and which will later be classified as one of the first bands that can be associated with the phenomenon of skate punk, supports the impression of a predominant middle-class background among hardcore punks (14). Some of the members of the band from Hermosa Beach were: founder and former UCLA economics student Greg Ginn; Keith Morris, son of a “fishing tackle business” owner who refused to be the future heir and saw music as his “protest against being geared toward this nine-to-five existence,” UC Santa Barbara student Chuck Dukowski (originally Gary McDaniel); Dez Cadena, son of well-known jazz producer and A&R man Ozzie Cadena; and Henry Rollins (originally Henry Garfield) from Washington DC who himself says that he was “raised [with] white underwear, three square meals, a bed with Charlie Brown blankets, total middle-class upbringing“ (Azzerad 17, 24, 43; Spitz and Mullen 194). Without trying to speculate about the musicians’ family problems, it becomes obvious that many of them have backgrounds that characterize them as members of the middle class and at least protect them from existential poverty. Traber finds an explicit allusion to the middle-class background in the fanzine Search & Destroy where Tony Kinman, member of L.A. punk band The Dils, comments on the media’s accusation that “Punks here are just middle-class, well educated kids” by countering that “that does not necessarily invalidate revolutionary integrity—you don’t have to be poor, black or on welfare to know it stinks!“ (qtd. in Traber “L.A.’s White Minority” 46). The bottom line of this statement is comprehensively summarized by Traber’s conclusion that “[h]ere is a figure deeply involved in the movement who acknowledges the privileged economic background of its members and attempts to prod them into political consciousness” (46). Accordingly, the prevalence of an advantageous middle-class position within California punk and hardcore cannot be denied and needs to be noted as a special attribute. The forementioned “full-on white suburbanite rebellion” within hardcore punk, in conjunction with the “revolutionary integrity” referred to by Kinman, raises the question of what these rebellious and revolutionary forces are directed against and how hardcore punks reflect on them in the first place. Although musicians like Cadena saw punk as a chance “to reject everything [they] couldn’t have anyway” (Blush 86), one cannot ascertain that there existed a permanent deprivation of necessities that the respective teenagers and adolescents could have opposed or objected to. The answer to the question posed needs to be linked to the conditions in suburbia, as the prevalent boredom and “purposelessness of suburban youth socialized to be spectators and consumers,” which many hardcore punks and their bands seem to personify, can be considered a trigger for rebellious behavior (Moore, “Postmodernism and Punk” 307). MacLeod postulates that “[h]ardcore punks opposed fundamentally that mass culture which they sat at the center of in suburbia” and thus includes both those who could not financially afford to participate in the con-

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sumption-oriented culture, as well as those whose financial background allowed for excessive consumerism (“Social Distortion” 129). The accounts of the suburban and postsuburban environment have shown that it constitutes a conformist, fragmented, and consumption-oriented area, i.e. a profit-oriented force field, which—at least at the beginning of the 1980s—lacked an “authentic local culture” (Hansen and Ryan 184). A rejection of the present conditions thus required the establishment of an alternative network. According to Azzerad, Black Flag was among the first bands to proclaim, “if you [don’t] like ‘the system,’ you should simply create one of your own” (14). They invoked resistance to a stifling situation that suburban teenagers could agree on and which helped them to unite against the conformist culture that surrounded them. Moore’s conception of the “culture of authenticity” describes this and illuminates that it allows for the creation of an individual subculture, which constitutes the basis for the participants’ organization within the suburban landscape. Blush incorporates another quotation by Tony Cadena who explains, “We had to create a scene because we didn’t have the transportation or financial capacity to get out of the neighborhood” (88). The “do-it-yourself” ethic evolving from this idea and characteristic of California hardcore punk is regarded as an important legacy of the early period of the subculture, as it paved the way for bands that followed by establishing an ever-growing touring network of concert venues all over America (cf. Azzerad 24; Blush 275ff.). With reference to the introductory remarks about the body, it becomes evident how the realm of the lived body holds special importance within this context. Urry’s statement that the body “senses as it moves” reveals that the lack of mobility, be it in terms of transport or finances, prevents an unrestricted development of experiencing the “external world” or “discursively mediated sensescapes” (48). The contestation of the profit-oriented force field of (post-) suburbia through the creation of a network involved in DIY activity can be read in terms of a corporeal counter reaction. A rebellious momentum can be detected in the development of a local scene that ultimately fosters mobility and movement or bodily sensing, to make use of Urry’s diction. While the notion of corporeal movement will build the focus in chapter 3, at this point it can be recorded that the activities of hardcore punks are based on teenagers and adolescents’ own initiative within a “safe and boring” environment which enabled them to confront their neighborhood with a “final fuck-you,” thus implying an answer to the question about the alleged rebellion of middle-class youths (Blush 18, 86). What is not included in this explanation, however, is a consideration of the privileges that take effect in hardcore punk and which are often neglected in the historiographies and narratives of the subculture. Azzerad’s claim that Black Flag was one of the first bands to propose the creation of one’s own system as an alternative is already reason enough to question the privileged positions that influenced the actions of the band members. The statement appears rather superficial if not ignorant, considering that there are numerous and obvious examples of the fact that—way before suburbanite boys in Southern California—other people had already established musically inspired

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systems as alternatives to their living conditions. Greil Marcus’s reference to African-American blues singers constitutes only one example, which obviously preceded the developments described by Azzerad. As “black men who took a half step away from the feudal constraints of turn-of-the-century Mississippi, men for whom the public expression of rage […] was a sign of freedom” (Marcus, Fascist Bathroom 183), these musicians’ own initiative apparently enabled them to create ways to articulate musical expression and communicate despite the adverse living conditions that were imposed upon them.41 Tony Cadena saw the necessity of a self-organized scene in the fact that it was hardly possible to leave one’s own neighborhood, and Black Flag wanted to create a new system because they did not “like” the old one. Comparing these motivations with the predecessors of self-organized systems mentioned by Marcus appears to render the DIY ethics of hardcore punk similarly unspectacular, as the “do-it-yourself” hobby tinkering that middle-class men carried out in their private basements and which represented nothing but a “core component of suburban masculinity” (Gelber 102). Marcus emphasizes the difference between a system one does not “like” and a system that actually kills, by pointing out that “in 1910 a Mississippi bluesman who called for the death of the man who ran his plantation would have found groundhogs delivering his mail” (Fascist Bathroom 186). As white young men of the middle class, Black Flag seemed to be able to establish an alternative system with relative ease—after all the former economics student Ginn was “an adult with a job, and he had money, which he made from his own electronics company” (Spitz and Mullen 196).42 Without questioning the fundamental achievements for America’s independent music scene that the band accomplished with their “non-stop work ethic” (196), it can be stated that they, and other scene members as well, at least did not have to fear for their lives while looking for alternatives to mainstream culture. The enormous success of bands such as Nirvana or Metallica can certainly be credited to the preliminary developments within the hardcore punk scene and institutions like Black Flag’s DIY record label SST Records (cf. Azzerad; Spitz and Mullen); the obvious privileges of the participants, however, are often obscured. Although hardcore punks did not have to fear for their lives, all members of the early scene dreaded violent attacks. Since it seemed unthinkable for “a counterculture to exist in law-and-order-loving Orange County […] in Punk’s early days,” it could be enough to wear “short hair that maybe wasn’t combed nice and [...] a 41 | Also cf. Nicholas Rombes’s A Cultural Dictionary of Punk in which he states that “[i]n truth, the DIY spirit has long characterized music, from the early blues to early rock and roll to rap and hip-hop to street musicians throughout the ages playing any type of music” (201). 42 | Already at the age of 12 Ginn had established SST, short for Solid State Tuners, a “small but thriving” mail-order enterprise through which he sold ham radio equipment (Azzerad 15). Later on he turned the company into a record label but kept its original name and logo.

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black T-shirt and straight-leg pants” in order to be harassed by the police or chased by “hillbillies” (Blush 86, 24; Spitz and Mullen 200). The consideration of the fact that these outfits were chosen intentionally anticipates a transition to the next subchapter and its examination of racial politics within the hardcore punk culture. As Joe Nolte, former singer of the band The Last and member of the South Bay scene asserts, “it was almost as if we’d turn black overnight” (qtd. in Spitz and Mullen 200).43 Society’s often violent and brutal reactions to hardcore punks thus appear to create a marginal status for the participants while they are apparently tied to associations with the social position of African-Americans and other ‘non-whites.’ 44

Race and Whiteness within Hardcore Punk Culture In the subchapter “Race and Class” (cf. 1.2.2) I set forth that—irrespective of a specific class allocation within the upper or lower middle class—white skin color is associated with a privileged position that is protected from and defended against minorities. The description of the Tax Payers’ Revolt revealed in what way this protection from minorities and its reliance on racist prejudices was institutionalized. Traber picks up on this fiscal policy and the latent racism that is concealed behind it. With regard to the participants of punk and hardcore, he elucidates: Even as their parents fought battles over taxes, property values, and neighborhood boundaries to prevent the influx of inner-city populations, this subgroup of youth (who were the public justification for the parents’ politics) rejected the planned utopias to live among the very people the folks back home claimed to be protecting them from. (“L.A.’s White Minority” 35)

While Traber assumes that the respective teenagers or adolescents leave their parents’ home in order to actually live among the minorities they are supposed to be protected from, his account provides a revealing example of how youths try to adopt a marginal identity. For hardcore punk, suburbia was a “subject to attack from within” so that the participating teenagers did not necessarily move to the urban centers, as the statement suggests in view of the earlier scenes of downtown L.A. (MacLeod, “Social Distortion” 127). However, with the identity of what Traber calls the “sub-urban Other” (“L.A.’s White Minority” 33), they found a way to distance themselves from 43 | Also cf. Barry Shank and his study of the Texas Rock’n’Roll scene. Paralleling the development of hardcore punk in suburban California, he states that “liking punk rock seemed to produce momentary experiences for middle-class Anglo-Texans akin to the everyday life of Blacks or Hispanics” (110). 44 | It is important to note that the social reactions hardly attest the success or credibility of hardcore punks’ rebellion. Rather, they mirror the extreme and often racist conservatism that associates everybody who does not fit into the ‘clean’ and ‘white’ world of the suburbs with non-whites ‘others.’

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their original background, which one could label the suburban Self accordingly. Traber introduces the term “sub-urban” (hyphenated), using this pun to establish a contrast to the notion of the “suburban” (no hyphen). The former refers to the existence of “a very specific class position, one that must confront the utmost levels of poverty, hunger, inadequate housing, and the constant threat of physical danger and death” (31), while the latter describes the privileged positions of the suburban middle class that have been delineated in the preceding passages. Initially, Traber emphasizes the specific class connotations of the term, however, since “poverty is not just a ‘nonwhite’ problem,” in the following he explicitly links the identity of the “sub-urban Other” with aspects of class and race (31): The racial and class facets of the sub-urban identity are deployed by L.A. punks to re-create themselves in the image of street-smart kids who are skeptical about the trappings of bourgeois America. In doing this they hoped to tap into a more “authentic” lifestyle—equivalent to “real,” “hard,” “tough,” all those qualities associated with a life on city streets— than the one they thought themselves being forced to replicate. (31)

As the forementioned statement by Nolte illustrated, the teenagers and adolescents who chose a punk or hardcore punk outfit could have the impression that they changed their skin color over night. This interpretation of the reactions they were faced with supports Traber’s assumption that, in addition to class attributes, they used facets of race to adopt an apparently more authentic lifestyle. In “Masculinity and Whiteness” (cf. 1.2.2) it was pointed out that whiteness is accompanied by a form of universal invisibility, which of course also affects the participants of hardcore punk. In analogy to this conclusion, Adam Cornford postulates: [W]hiteness is a complex of unquestionable (because invisible) assumptions, behavioral norms, and power relations reproduced by and within all the major institutions of US society: the workplace, the school, the mall and other shopping/consumption sites, the private automobile/highway system, the suburb of detached single family houses, and of course the mass media. All these institutions teach possessive individualism; anxious competitiveness; rigid emotional control through ‘niceness’; narrow or instrumental rationality; ready acceptance of isolation, boredom, and meaninglessness; the sacrifice of a lifetime for merchandise and security. (Cornford n.pag.)

This paragraph almost reads like a complete listing of precisely those structures which hardcore punk strives to resist. Cornford’s description of whiteness appears to delineate a system that is repugnant to bands like Black Flag and which they try to oppose with a “culture of authenticity.” Living in a country in which dichotomies were (and still are) omnipresent and formative for the overall social organization, it comes as no big surprise that young hardcore punks try to burst this strictly binary system by simply turning it around. Cornford explains how the original

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“Christian/savage dichotomy” in America developed into the “white/black” differentiation during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and then links this notion to “the Calvinist division between the Elect and the Damned” which leads to the concept of whiteness recreating “an absolute binary division of the human world” (n.pag.). The reference to the Calvinist origins allows Cornford to describe whiteness as the “adaptation of the Protestant ethic and accumulationist social personality that emerged in the merchant classes of Germany, Holland, and England during the seventeenth century” (n.pag.).45 The causality between whiteness and capitalism he establishes with this account implies to what extent the consumption-oriented developments, which the allegedly authentic culture of hardcore punk opposes, can be located within this interrelationship.46 For Cornford, whiteness represents consumerism, institutional authority, suburbia, boredom, and meaninglessness—exactly those attributes which hardcore punk culture set out to fight against. It appears logical that hardcore punks try to express their rebellion through the adoption of a position that is diametrically opposed and which they find in the identity of the “sub-urban Other.” Traber is thus able to summarize and explain that “[t]he impulse of this self fashioning and its class politics is the rejection of a specifically conceived racial identity; namely, whiteness as a specific social, economic, and cultural formation” (“L.A.’s White Minority” 41). Provoking social reactions through one’s outward appearance—an experience that is otherwise only imposed on minorities—supports hardcore punks in their assumption to lead an ‘authentic’ lifestyle. Arturo J. Aldama’s essay “The Timeless Color of Violence” suggests that until today racially motivated acts of violence have often functioned to “remind” the respective victims of their “place” in society (n.pag.). Aldama emphasizes that, contrary to the “common acceptance that the mass struggles of civil rights are over and that everyone has equal civil rights” (n.pag.), racist violence is omnipresent and becomes manifest in instances such 45 | Cornford obviously refers to the works of Max Weber at this point (cf. Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). 46 | A reference to Willard’s essay about “Duke Kahanamoku’s Body” (referred to in “Surfing: From Ancient Hawaii to Suburban California” (cf. 1.2.4)) illuminates this context and implies how whiteness is tied to “the ethos of industrial and monopoly capitalism” (26). Willard details how, in Hawaii, “Anglo elites […] sought to turn surfing and canoeing into sports by redefining them within the individualistic rhetoric of the Protestant work ethic” (26). The activities were turned from instruments of “travel and labor (fishing) in addition to their use in sporting competition and physical recreation (wave riding)” into “rewards for disciplined work rather than tools in its practice” (26). Willard argues that racial “differences were thus defused of any threat, as achievement was safely attributed to the unique individual rather than to any collective group” (26). He points out how surfing was “whitewashed” through this capitalist rendering; while originally attributed with exotic allusions, the incorporation into the Protestant ethic puts this exoticized image into perspective: The capitalist appropriation of the Hawaiian activity connects it to the realm of whiteness.

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as police harassment and random attacks. He lists how “[v]iolence can range from the benign of being snubbed in restaurants, followed in stores, tailed by the police, pulled over in ‘nice’ or white dominant suburbs to more direct types of aggression” (n.pag.). Joe Nolte mirrors these examples in a further account: The South Bay remained this fascist long-haired scene that felt totally threatened by punk. I was lucky if I only got ten catcalls walking down the street [...] We deliberately placed ourselves outside of society; we had a choice, but we put targets on our shirts for the police by daring to look different. (qtd. in Spitz and Mullen 199/200)

It is indicated that (hardcore) punks had to suffer from social and state repressions; however, they could interpret them as a “badge of honor,” which confirmed an allegedly authentic “sub-urban” (hyphenated) identity (Traber, “L.A.’s White Minority” 47). In contrast to racial minorities, the white middle-class youths chose their marginal position and thus intentionally provoked respective reactions and repressions. While the chronological congruence between the childhood or adolescence of the white suburban teenagers, the Civil Rights Movement, and the burgeoning multiculturalism revealed the presence of oppressed minorities on the one hand, on the other hand the conservative backlash of the government and the concomitant police brutality simultaneously communicated the impression that these identities were tied to repression. Being persecuted by the police and mainstream society could thus become a signifier of ultimate “rebel credibility” (34). Traber picks up on a very important point of criticism concerning hardcore punks by attesting that they “unconsciously reinforce the dominant culture rather than escape it because their turn to the sub-urban reaffirms the negative stereotypes used in the center to define this space and its population” (31). He summarizes that “[w]hat aims to be a critique of repression in L.A. punk ends up an agent of it, for its rejection of the dominant culture relies on adopting the stereotypes of inferior, violent, and criminal nonwhites” (49). Again, it is important to note that the relatively affluent white teenagers create and construct their marginality themselves and quasi deal with it “by choice” (cf. Nebergall).47 The social groups that are in fact oppressed and ousted to society’s fringes are forced into a role that promises to represent a welcome alternative although it factually constitutes an imposed reality, which the ones concerned cannot escape through a return to a middle-class environment. “[W]hen kids coming from comfortable lives earn hipness by playing dress ‘down’” (Traber, “L.A.’s White Minority” 53), their race and class positions— privileging them intersectionally as members of the middle class—are reversed. Instead of fighting and questioning the dichotomous positions of poor/rich, lower 47 | The quoted statement by surfer Bill Hamilton in “Surfing: From Ancient Hawaii to Suburban California” (cf. 1.2.4) parallels this assumption as it reveals that surfers may live at the “fringe of society” and refuse to participate “unless we [i.e. the surfers] want to” (qtd. in Booth 94).

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class/upper class, and black/white, they are deployed to “sustain a false sense of autonomy” because “like those in the center, without the Other they cease to exist” (33). The consideration of racial aspects provides a first answer to the question concerning hardcore punks’ enmeshment within intersectional axes of differentiation. The deployment of racial allusions is closely linked with class attributes and notions of suburban living. Traber’s inquiries, in particular, helped to elucidate how hardcore punks look for modes of representation outside positions of privilege. He criticizes the adoption of an identity he defines as “sub-urban” because this act is tied to prejudices of hardcore punk’s alleged counterpart: the social center of the white middle class. Before I turn to the phenomenon of skate punk and its emergence from the skateboarding and hardcore punk cultures, I incorporate another important intersection that takes effect in the development of hardcore punk: masculinity.

Masculinity in Hardcore Punk With particular reference to Robinson, the discussion of racial aspects has shown that whiteness obtains an invisible status in society. As Robert Soza suggests, “‘white’ is the super-normative; so normal, it’s invisible” (n.pag.). He elaborates on this account by adding that “[w]omen and men of color, ‘white’ women, homosexuals, and the poor exist in opposition to this ‘universal’ norm” (n.pag.). Soza not only marks racial minorities, homosexuals and financially disadvantaged groups in opposition to whiteness, but also includes white women within this status. Accordingly, whiteness is read as heteronormatively masculine while white masculinity is explicitly rendered invisible. Jane Wiedlin, member of early L.A. punk band The Go Go’s, describes the transition from punk to hardcore by declaring that a former “scene of girls and gays and stuff” suddenly was took over by “real angry white boys” (Mullen, Lexicon Devil 161). She points out that hardcore punks act from positions that incorporate a normative character. The invisibility of any racial and gender specificity that is tied to these positions, with reference to Robinson, becomes a burden for the white protagonists of hardcore punk as they try to distance themselves from society through the adoption of a marginal and diametrically opposed identity. While noting that invisibility can be felt as a handicap within a culture that organizes around “the visibility of differences and the symbolic currency of identity politics” (Robinson 3), Robinson employs a vocabulary similar to the words Traber uses within his analysis of the self-marginalization of L.A. punks. He speaks of a sort of “border crossing [that] can be read as a commodification of the Other that aestheticizes identity for capital in a symbolic economy of signification” (Traber, “L.A.’s White Minority” 50). The “symbolic currency” Robinson mentions can thus be read in accordance with the self-marginalization of hardcore punks and their attempt to adopt the identity of a “sub-urban Other.” With reference to her account, the hardcore punks’ aspiration can be interpreted as an effort to make their invisible position equal to an identity that can be perceived as a “bearer of an embodied particularity” (Robinson

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3). The self-imposed marginality in hardcore punk can consequently be interpreted as an indication of the identity crisis that Robinson detects among white males. The fact that she emblematically ties the crisis to the white male as victim promotes an interesting approach to the aspect of masculinity in the subculture. Hardcore punks were able to identify with a victimized role through the adoption of a “sub-urban” position and the resulting repressions by their social environment and the police. Educationalist and sociologist Curry Malott helps to understand how this role was staged and maintained within the scene: Concerning his own experiences with punk culture he remembers that “in the process of destroying our prescribed roles, we too often destroyed and destroy ourselves” (Malott and Peña 7). He implies the self-destructive tendencies that pervade the early punk and hardcore scene. Blush describes a similar scenario and explicitly mentions the significant relevance of the body by noting that “[m]any of those kids turned against themselves as well as others. They craved self-destruction, often committing violence against their own bodies” (Blush 30). Sid Vicious, bassist of the British Sex Pistols; Iggy Pop, who is considered one of the most important predecessors of American punk; Darby Crash, vocalist of the L.A. punk band The Germs whose musical style is already very close to what would later be labeled hardcore; and Henry Rollins who occupies a prominent position in hardcore punk as Black Flag’s last and best known singer, all embody obvious examples of the fact that public self-destruction, time and again, played (and still plays) an important role in punk and hardcore punk cultures (cf. McNeil and McCain; Mullen; Rollins). The “post-Iggy Pop ‘Open Up and Bleed’ concept” (Mullen, Lexicon Devil 215), particularly personified by Darby Crash and Henry Rollins, constitutes the most direct presentation of bodily wounds. Numerous photographs in fanzines and books about the original punk and hardcore scenes not only depict the singers but also show various other protagonists and participants of the culture bare-chested and with bruises, cuts, and cigarette burns, which were often self-inflicted during musical performances (cf. e.g. Belisto and Davis; Blush; Mullen; Rollins). Rollins provides a telling example of how the role of the victim was virtually enjoyed: “When they spit at me, when they grab at me,” he explains, “they aren’t hurting me” (qtd. in Azzerad 46). In fact, almost excitedly looking forward to being involved in acts of violence, he proclaims, “I hope I get bashed up soon […] I need the pain to play. I need to play for my life or it’s not worth it” (49). Robinson’s assumption that “[w]hite masculinity most fully represents itself as victimized by inhabiting a wounded body” constitutes a significant approach for the interpretation of these stagings (Robinson 6). Although the downright sadomasochistic acts of violence against the body do not necessarily have to be read as an indication of a male identity crisis, such an interpretation appears logical if one considers the fact that the hardcore punk scene was “almost exclusively white and male” (Moore, “Postmodernism and Punk” 322). “I’m hard pressed to remember many women being present,” remembers Blush and thus illustrates that the staging of pain and wounded bodies especially attract-

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ed young males and respectively excluded women from their violent rituals (34). The image of the wounded male body in hardcore punk can thus be integrated into the logic of self-marginalization by establishing a symbolic platform that the respective boys/men could use to deal with the identity crisis and the contradictions that follow from the fact that, as intersectionally privileged subjects, they try to adopt the identity of a marginal Other.48 In his essay “‘Social Distortion’ – The Rise and Fall of Suburban Punk Rock” MacLeod traces the medial reception of punk and hardcore while describing the fundamental impact that it had on the violence within the scene. Hellin Killer summarizes an important point of MacLeod’s work by taking a retrospective look at the developing hardcore scene and criticizing that “[t]he new kids were in it for all the wrong reasons, for what they heard on the news, that punk was violent” (qtd. in Mullen, Lexicon Devil 162). MacLeod illustrates the media’s exaggerations and notes that “[t]he accounts of senseless violence, vandalism and even mutilation at some area rock clubs read like reports from a war zone” (“Social Distortion” 130). He mentions a major reason for the attractiveness that the punk scene bore for people who can be described as “six foot three, and two hundred pounds, skinheaded and pissed-off” and who just attended punk concerts to exercise violence while “slam dancing” in the “slam pit” (Mullen 213, 211; Spitz and Mullen 192). This development within the scene might provide an answer to the question that Blush poses concerning the small number of female hardcore punks: “Why did Hardcore, allegedly open-minded and egalitarian, involve so few women? And is it politically correct to write women into the history, to pretend they had an active voice, when in truth they didn’t?” (35). Blush wants to know why there were so few female hardcore punks and simultaneously questions the legitimacy of cultural narratives that exaggerate the participation of women in a disproportionately high fashion. An obvious answer to the first part of the question can certainly be found within the forementioned increase of violence in the development of the scene, whereas a closer analysis of the second part calls for a more complex evaluation. The implicit critique Blush articulates concerning publications that strive for an emphasized integration of topics that concern women for reasons of political correctness is legitimate, as this tactic is often used to conceal male dominance within hardcore punk. The listing of certain female protagonists and bands is frequently emphasized in order to create the impression of an equal and emancipated culture. 48 | MacLeod also deals with violence in hardcore punk culture. He interprets the self-inflicted injuries or the so-called “[c]arving” in hardcore punk as a possibility to represent “reality” in a “hyperreal world” (Kids 126). Also using the example of Henry Rollins, he notes that, for Rollins, “carving was not about performance […]. Carving was a part of everyday life, and it was one way Rollins established his identity as a real person in a hyperreal world” (126). Referencing the general crisis of masculine identity that developed in postmodern America can extend MacLeod’s interpretation. The identity crisis in Robinon’s sense thus constitutes the main focus here.

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Blush tries to circumvent this hypocritical strategy by questioning whether it is correct to claim that women “had an active voice, when in truth they didn’t” (35). What Blush ignores is the fact that women of course had (and still have) an active voice within the scene—the small but still relevant number of female hardcore punks and hardcore punk bands seems adequate proof. The crucial point is that their voice was not heard or even intentionally ignored. It would, for example, be hypocritical to read Kira Roessler—one of the changing bassists in Black Flag—as an irrevocable proof for the fact that hardcore punk bands and scenes offered unrestricted access to women. Degrading her voice as “not active” in the way Blush’s statement suggests, however, would not only be extremely questionable but plainly wrong. The role of a victim that male hardcore punks adopt all too often in order to step outside the shadows of their invisibility just does not offer any place for female protagonists. The decidedly active voices of women are simply not heard within this masculine environment and consequently do not appear in its narratives. Blush, who set out to document the scene, describes hardcore as only “allegedly open-minded and egalitarian” (35). Rather cautiously, using the adverb “allegedly,” he acknowledges the dilemma that had always entailed the male dominance in hardcore punk: the intersectional privilege that not only renders white males of the suburban middle class invisible, but also makes them blind about the way they deploy this privilege in a normative fashion. In almost the same manner as they regard it as natural to use their parents’ garage as the basis of their DIY network, they ignore the fact that their self-marginalization relies on the maintenance of a dichotomous demarcation between privileged positions of the ‘center’ and disadvantaged positions of the ‘periphery.’ In that way, they constitute a homogeneous group that is based on the staging of injured masculinity while excluding women and the emancipatory credibility they could add to the culture of hardcore punk. The examination of masculinity within hardcore punk describes another axis of differentiation that takes effect within this subculture, while intersecting with the suburban middle-class background and the normative position of white Americans. The protagonists of hardcore punk try to avoid mainstream culture, whereas “dress ‘down’” with respect to fashion as well as simplicity and aggression with respect to music constitute the style which, with Hebdige, can be read as a “challenge to hegemony” (Hebdige 17). However, they act from the privileged positions after all that in fact compose the hegemonic system they try to oppose. Traber thus comes to a rather pessimistic conclusion concerning the participants of hardcore punk: [W]hile I do not accuse them of a “failed rebellion” because they cannot get outside that system, I do reject treating this contestation as if the agents are completely aware of the contradictions within which they move. There is simply too much being invested in this public image that wants to be taken quite seriously as a cultural intervention. (“L.A.’s White Minority” 50)

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The seriousness of the youths’ stylization as a marginal group in public causes Traber to question their awareness concerning the contradictions that accompany their subculture. Reversing this argument implies that it would be precisely this awareness, which might be a factor of credibility for the alleged rebellion. A closer look at the medial representations of hardcore punk helps to verify to what extent the respective protagonists find ways to reflect on the contradictions of their culture; if they are capable of pointing beyond the restrictive system that privileges them; and if they manage to escape the dominant discourses that structure the life in suburban California around the 1980s. Combining such an approach with an evaluation of the similarities and interconnections of hardcore punk and skateboarding will delineate the site-specific phenomenon of skate punk in the following.

1.3

C ONCLUSION

Departing from theoretical considerations of the body and connected discourses of postmodern USA, in this chapter, I introduced the contextual situation of the American or, more precisely, the Californian middle class and its suburban environment in the late 1970s and early 1980s. On the basis of these insights, I established accounts of skateboarding and (hardcore) punk subcultures and their relation to intersectional axes of differentiation. Challenging these subcultures’ claims concerning their foundation as rebellious and resistant activities, I pointed towards contradictions that derive from the privileged social backgrounds that many of the early Californian skateboarders and hardcore punks shared. Skateboarding’s reliance on the racialized and exoticized images of surfing, its deviant and rebellious demeanor in the wake of the Dogtown skaters, and its entanglement in the antics of a “Skate and Destroy” attitude constitute distinct parallels to the development of hardcore punk and its respective deployment of racialized images of marginality, its intended deviance from suburban middle-class normativity, and its (self-) destructive performances and expressions. All these characteristics indicate a mutual basis connecting the two subcultures. Since both skateboarding and hardcore punk are closely tied to the site-specific locale of California suburbia, it seems as if it was only a matter of time before they would merge. In the following, I will continue to delineate the overlapping characteristics that connect skateboarding and hardcore punk. I will do this along the lines of a media analysis, which provides a closer look at specific and exemplarily medial products that heuristically sketch the subculture of skate punk and its stylizations and representations. These interpretations of skate punk media fulfill three major functions within the scope of this book: First, they introduce and provide a selected overview of a youth cultural phenomenon that has hardly achieved any academic attention so far. Second, they establish a critical approach that questions allegedly alternative and subversive media products in view of their correspondences to the discourses of mainstream popular culture while being enhanced by analyses that consider

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intersectional categories of differentiation in particular. Third, they prepare for the subsequent examination of the corporeal and material movements that pervade skate punk, while fathoming the subculture’s potentiality for transgressing the established discourses it emerged from.

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CONTENT

On the day of the murder, Michael went to the home of the murder victim, Pamela Marie Pope, seeking help with his mathematics homework. Seven hours later, Pamela’s body was found in a garage can. Another girl told the police she saw Michael wheeling the body away on a skateboard. LA Times (1981) 49 Mrs. Dozier, for all that you do so well, not only teaching but coordinating homecoming half-time activities, cheerleading in the student-faculty basketball game, and even dressing up for Punk Rock Day — [laughter] — we salute you. Ronald Reagan (1985) 50

2.1

I NTRODUCTION

2.1.1

On Skate Punk

“Skate punk? Yeah, for sure there were skate punks. We were skate punks. We skateboarded and we were punk rockers. And we loved it and it was fun,” remembers Steve Olson, 1978’s “Skateboarder of the Year” and arguably the first person to introduce “hardcore punk rock skateboarding” to a scene that was still dominated 49 | From the L.A. Times article “Freeing of Killer” (F11). The article ends with the sentence, “The room where the girl was killed was littered with torn-apart toys. Scrawling on the wall included the message: ‘I hate girls.’” (F11). The misogynic and violent attitudes that are taken to extremes in the crimes documented in this article while subtly being linked to the skateboard, reverberate throughout the medial representations of skate punk as this chapter will reveal (for explicit examples cf. the song lyrics of the Adolescents’ “I Hate Children” or TSOL’s “Code Blue”). 50 | From Reagan’s “Remarks at a White House Ceremony Honoring National Teacher of the Year Theresa K. Dozier. April 18, 1985” (n.pag).

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by “long bleach blond hair, O.P. short shorts”-wearing Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac fans at the end of the 1970s (Olson, Personal Interview; Olson, “Juice” n.pag.). Although at first somewhat hesitant to label the activity of skateboarding punks, Olson’s statement, taken from an interview I conducted in March 2010, probably summarizes the most obvious characteristics of skate punk: It is a term that refers to punk rockers who skateboard or to skateboarders who are involved with punk rock. Relying on this very basic description of the phenomenon, in the following I wish to explore exactly how the two cultures of skateboarding and punk rock mediated a rebellious and resistant stance that picked up on the different attributes accompanying the respective activities. It is not my goal to present and develop a definite historiography and terminological fixation of skate punk. Goshert aptly remarks, “[t]he call for an absolutely correct definition of punk will always miss the point, for the stable form of genre or fashion is always subject either to appropriation by the flattening forces of the entertainment industry, or to transformation by punks themselves” (Goshert 102). His statement illustrates that it is exactly “punk’s inability to be defined as a subculture, as a political movement, as a genre” which presents possibilities for an approach which resists “homogenization” and fosters inquiries into skate punk that take into account the plurality of factors that converge in its different modes and moments of medialization (103). As my remarks about skateboarding in 1.2.4 have shown, the activity dates back to the first half of the 1950s and thus precedes the first references to punk in a musical, i.e. a rock context, for example as manifested in New York’s eponymous Punk Magazine of 1976.51 This suggests that skateboarding at some point opened up to the influences of punk and incorporated its styles and attitudes into its culture. According to Olson, this might have happened in 1978 when SkateBoarder magazine awarded him the “Skateboarder of the Year” trophy. Olson recalls: I had cut my hair and I was totally into the world of punk rock. I thought it was fucking amazing, whatever. I got the award and instead of…, they wanted me to hold a speech, I picked my nose and I flipped boogers at them and spit at them… And, eh, like the magazine was like, “Wow, our current leader dudes are against what we stand for. And we don’t think they are good representatives of skateboarding.” And little did they know, that it was gonna change the whole fucking look at skateboarding. And it did. But they didn’t like it. They kind of condemned us. They condemned me for sure and then Tony Alva as well. But I think they were like, “Let’s give it to this Olson guy, he’s nice and clean cut and everything.” And then I was just like, yeah, fuck you! (Olson, Personal Interview)

51 | It is hard to discern when exactly the term “punk” or “punk rock” was first used in a musical context. Rombes, in an entry about Alice Cooper, notes that Cooper “prompted Grace Lichtenstein, in The New York Times, to use the phrase ‘punk rock’ in 1972, after David Marsh had used it in Creem in 1971” (53). These are very early, if not the earliest manifested, i.e. mediated, mentionings of punk as a musical subculture.

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Olson’s account illustrates two things. First, he points out to what extent punk rock is associated with deviant behavior and the rejection of established authority. Instead of conforming to the role that the skateboarding ‘establishment’ ascribed him to, he ridicules the award ceremony and chooses to “flip boogers” instead of giving a speech. Second, he delineates the (medial) direction that skateboarding culture developed into in the aftermath of such incidents. Although it is quite unlikely that Olson’s example was really the first act of deviance in the world of skateboarding—as mentioned earlier, the Dogtown skaters constituted but one example of other skateboarders associated with similar behavior—it certainly marks an important point as it occurred within the public realm of a medialized event. Olson emphasizes that skateboarding’s “look” changed at the moment its apparent “representatives” chose a direction different from the established media version. The emphasized deviance that Olson demonstrated at the “Skateboarder of the Year” event also meshes with the broader representation of the activity within mainstream media. The first mention of the skateboard in the Los Angeles Times, already in 1959, reported on the four-wheeled device in a context discussing the imminent dangers it entailed. Students were “requesting that skateboards be outlawed to cut down the growing list of accidents caused by the free-wheeling toys” (“Week in Review” SG2), whereas three years later, in 1962, a longer article on the increase of skateboard bans described the sport as one of the latest rages of the teen-age set. Most of the demons either are roller-skating enthusiasts with a yen for high adventure or surfboard novices who feel they can acquire additional practice without the need of surf. Others are just roller rebels without straps (Earl SG14).

Olson, more than 15 years later, began to embody and live up to the image of the rebellious outlaw by intentionally attributing deviant social behavior to an activity that mainstream media had already presented as dangerous, hazardous, and risky. Asked about the similarities between skateboarding and punk, Olson recalls: Skateboarding was a little bit more, I’d say, rowdy and a little bit more dangerous. And punk rock had a little bit of danger behind it. And, eh, what I can see is that when you step on a skateboard back in…back in those days…you were considered an outlaw, kind of, because people did not need you skateboarding by their, in their driveways, in their swimming pools, anywhere (Olson, Personal Interview).

His statement not only emphasizes the element of danger that accompanies both phenomena but also underscores the 1962 L.A. Times article which considered citizens “fortunate if [they] don’t have a garden fronting [their] lawn, or if [they] don’t take evening strolls down the sidewalk” as skateboarders would allegedly endanger their own and other people’s safety, as well as their “rose beds” (Earl SG14). Punk’s association with danger and outlaw existence thus fit perfectly with the media imag-

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ery constructed around skateboarding. Although skateboard-centered media such as SkateBoarder magazine, possibly for reasons of marketability, “tended to portray the sport in a clean-cut way” (Blush 19), a unifying basis for punk rock’s entrance into skateboarding seems to be enmeshed in the mutual association with danger. A very obvious point of convergence between skateboard culture and punk music resulted from the simple fact that, with the emergence of punk in the youth cultural landscape, skateboarding teenagers—just like many of their contemporaries—started going to punk shows. At around the time that Steve Olson “flipped boogers” at the established skateboard world, punk rock seemed at a crossroads: Seminal British punk band The Sex Pistols had broken up after a turbulent US tour and with its demise seemed to delineate the shift from a punk rock culture that arose “among the working class and artists and bohemians in the cities” to a “mutant offspring” that was induced by “middle class youth in the exurban areas of Southern California” (MacLeod, Kids 3). Hailing from such an environment, i.e. Montclair in California’s Inland Empire, former professional Skateboarder Steve Alba exemplifies a Southern California adolescent of that era who participated in both skateboarding and punk. In 1978, Alba went to see British punk rock legend The Clash play together with the newly founded Dead Kennedys in San Francisco. Tellingly, according to Alba, among the friends he brought along were three other major figures of 70s and 80s skateboarding culture: Dogtown’s Z-Boy Tony Alva, Thrasher Magazine co-founder Fausto Vitello, and Steve Olson. While the headlining band epitomized early English punk rock, Alba and his friends added a hint of Southern California skateboarding attitude to the event. He remembers, “We thought we were crazier than anybody else. And if we weren’t we’d do anything in our power to be more crazy. That was just our nature” (Alba, Personal Interview). He interprets their influence on punk by going on to recount: The skateboarders were the same guys that made up slam dancing. And what we called pogo. Pogo was all English, but it was our version of the pogo in California and we definitely made it up. It was me, Tony Alva, Steve Olson, Fausto [Vitello], gosh man […]. This was in San Francisco in ’78 when we saw the Clash, Dead Kennedys and The Cramps. […] we just crashed into each other, man. […] We were drunk off our asses first off. We were drinking heavy. I’m not gonna say we weren’t cause we were. And all the other guys were probably loaded up on drugs, you know what I mean… But anyhow, yeah, it was rad. We’d climb over the crowd, dance to ourselves. And the other thing is, too, I remember between the Dead Kennedys playing and waiting for The Clash to come on, we were so amped, you know what I mean, it was like energy, you know what I mean. We just wanted to have more music. And when punk rock came over the system, when The Ramones came up, and we loved The Ramones at that time, we all just started getting kind of crazy and pulling each other down and hitting each other and tackling each other and sliding into each other and one thing led to another and you kind of crashed into the crowd and the crowd started to get mad kind of pushing you back and we’re like, “Fuck you!” […] It was just nuts, man. And that’s

2 C ONTENT like anytime the skaters got together at any show, that’s all our deal was: Get on stage. No matter what it took. And that’s how we started the whole deal. (Alba, Personal Interview).

Alba’s account demonstrates how the “danger” that Olson mentioned with respect to punk rock appealed to and resonated with skateboarders at punk concerts. The fact that he draws a line between English pogo and the Californian equivalent of “slam dancing” suggests that a change was under way that added new facets to the British-styled punk rock of the previous years. Alba’s reference to New York’s Ramones and the skater’s enthusiasm for the band indicates that this development was based on a musical style that was characterized especially by speed and simplicity or “the simplest of rock’n’roll: thumping 4/4 beats, buzzsaw guitars without any leads, and a submerged, melodic pop hook,” as MacLeod puts it (Kids 2). It is questionable whether the phenomenon of slam dancing during punk rock shows really was “made up” by Alba and his friends during that exact show in that exact year, however the three people he mentions as accompanying him to the 1978 Clash show, i.e. Tony Alva, Steve Olson, and Fausto Vitello, all play important roles in the medialization of skateboarding in connection with punk, and thus it is very likely that their involvement entailed influences on a broader scale. Tony Alva, “the Elvis of skating” or also “the Ted Nugent of the skateboard generation,” had already received an extraordinary amount of media attention in the late 70’s, particularly because of his involvement with the Z-Boys from Dogtown (McDonald and Mullen qtd. in Mullen, Lexicon Devil 203). Olson remembers that “the Dogtown dudes just rode in their own style and the media picked up on it” (Spitz and Mullen 220), which is evident in an excerpt from WET magazine (circa 1979): Their aggression, the lines they were finding, their driving-but-liquid approach to riding solid curves established them as a pool-riding elite. They created the Dogtown consciousness. The D Boyz [sic] had charisma. They had style. They were crass. Their attitude was not at all sportsmanlike. They embodied pure cause without concern for consequence. Pool riding is dangerous. (WET qtd. in Mullen, Lexicon Devil 203/204)

Before their sympathies for punk rock, Alva and the Z-Boys were associated with musicians such as the more (hard) rock-oriented Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent, but later on, amplified by the medial stylization of the Dogtown boys as risk-taking pool skaters, Alva “revolutionized skating, and then he came out as this huge punk rock fan” (Mullen, Lexicon Devil 203). He remembers: Once I was exposed to punk and started going to shows, it was just really exciting. The independent attitude toward their music, producing their own sounds and saying “Fuck everything, we’re gonna do it our way,” that really was the same independent spirit I related to being a surfer and a skateboarder. (Alva qtd. in Spitz and Mullen 219)

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With Tony Alva, a major figure of medialized skateboarding rebellion was present during the event that Steve Alba remembers as foundational for the slam dance and thus for an important alteration of previous punk rock behavior. Steve Olson, due to his popularity as “Skateboarder of the year,” is a similarly important personality who fostered media interest and thus makes an interesting addition to this group of people. Alba describes Olson “as the first guy to get into punk rock as a skater. [H]e’s the guy that got people hooked” (Alba, Personal Interview), which emphasizes his influential position as a professional skateboarder who started sporting a punk rock style. With Fausto Vitello as the third name mentioned in Alba’s statement, another figure is included who, especially in the years to come, would play a crucial role in presenting and marketing skate punk through the medium of his co-founded Thrasher Magazine. Although still three years before the first issue of the magazine was published in 1981, Vitello’s presence at the moment that slam dancing allegedly was invented by skateboarders is emblematic for his future focus on the rebellious aspect of skateboarding and the “Skate and Destroy” attitude. In the company of Tony Alva, the “representative” of the rebellious and guerilla-like Dogtown style on the verge of hard rock and punk rock, as well as Steve Olson, the professional skateboarder who turned people on to punk rock with his unique style, Vitello was at the core of what, in Alba’s retrospective remarks, was an important basis for the later development of interconnections between skateboarding and punk, i.e. skate punk. The success of Vitello’s Thrasher magazine would tend to prove that he managed to capture this moment and develop it into a style that appealed to a new generation of skateboarders and punk enthusiasts. It implies the importance of medial representation for skate punk culture and illuminates to what extent a closer analysis of its media products promises to generate deeper insights into the mechanisms which are employed to enable American middle class teenagers to distance themselves from their social backgrounds and mainstream normativity. The examples of Olson, Alba, Alva, and Vitello constitute personal accounts of skate punk’s emergence and its very first rebellious manifestations. It is within the culture’s media output that the image and style of skate punk further evolved, and it is to the broader cultural context of 1980s American popular culture that these media relate.

2.1.2

Skate Punk and Popular Culture

Ray B. Brown, founder of the first academic Department of Popular Culture, the American Culture Association and the Journal of Popular Culture, provides one of the most comprehensive definitions of popular culture: Popular Culture is the system of attitudes, behavior, beliefs, customs, and tastes that define the people of any society. It is the entertainments, diversions, icons, rituals, and actions that shape the everyday world. It is what we do while we are awake and what we dream

2 C ONTENT about while we are asleep. It is the way of life we inherit, practice, change, and then pass on to our descendants. (vii) 52

This quote illustrates that an analysis of skate punk media cannot treat its subject matter as an isolated entity. Skate punk is a part of popular culture as much as popular culture is a part of skate punk. The flyers, magazines, songs and videos that I will examine in the following emerged from the system—the everyday world—that Browne describes as popular culture and thus they are in constant interaction, exchange, dialogue, and, with reference to Chivers Yochim, correspondence. Browne uses a question asked by French writer Hector St. Jean de Crevecour in the 1782 Letters from an American Farmer to specify his inquiries into popular culture and establish a focus on the USA: “What is an American?” the Frenchman wondered and, according to Browne, answered that such a person is the creation of America and is in turn the creator of the country’s culture. In-deed, notions of the American Dream have been long grounded in the dream of democracy—that is, government by the people, or popular rule. Thus, popular culture is tied fundamentally to America and the dreams of its people. (vii)

Crevecour’s question is located at the very core of what American Studies (i.e. North American Studies) has tried to answer since its early tentative steps as an academic discipline. Henry Nash Smith, in the prologue to his constitutive work Virgin Land (1950), likewise recites the question and makes it a fundamental issue of the Myth and Symbol School that initiated the endeavor of studying American culture, including its popular artifacts in the early 1950s (cf. Smith 3). The close connection that Browne draws between the question’s paradigmatic role and the study of popular culture indicates that an analysis of skate punk (as a part of popular culture) cannot be done without a consideration of its broader context. Skate punk, in its Californian figuration, is an American creation, and in turn contributes to the creation of American, i.e. Californian, culture. The “entertainments, diversions, icons, rituals, and actions that shape the everyday world” also shape the world in which skate punks interact (Browne vii). Thus, it is the challenge for any serious attempt of skate punk analysis and examination to illuminate and retrace these interactions. With respect to the “dialogic nature of culture” and in view of the theories by Mikhail Bakhtin, Lipsitz aptly remarks that “every utterance enters a dialogue already in progress” (Footsteps xxiv). After mapping the emergence of skateboarding and hardcore punk cultures out of the social and historical circumstances of America in the 1980s and the underlying roles of class, race, gender and space in the first chapter of this book, in the following, my goal is to listen or zoom in to such dialogs. I will regard flyers, magazines, songs, and videos as the medial utterances of skate 52 | Also cf. the “Introduction” to Browne and Browne’s The Guide to United States Popular Culture.

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punk and it is only within the dialogue of their contemporary cultural context that they make sense. In the introduction to his book American Culture in the 1980s, Graham Thompson characterizes or, more precisely, refuses to characterize the decade by describing the multiple tensions that pervade the period and prevent an absolute or unifying definition of the 1980s. Referring to Richard King, he summarizes the situation as shifting between “‘homogenization and dispersal, between uniformity and diversity’” (G. Thompson 5), a statement that encompasses the undeniable influences of the politics of Ronald Reagan as well as the ‘Culture Wars’ and ensuing debates about multiculturalism, racism, and feminism. Batchelor and Stoddart, in view of the realm of popular culture, share this assessment although forcing the tensions into a rather dualistic structure. Emphasizing the “dichotomies represented in the styles and trends of that era,” they explain: The decade was a time of extremes. Values were either conservative or liberal. Fashion either reflected money (Preppies and Valley Girls) or the latest visit to local thrift stores or a heavy metal concert. Hair was either permed and teased into a giant wall of bangs and layers or chopped off in the front and allowed to grow long in the back (the now-famous mullet). (xi/xii)

Their approach reveals to what extent the everyday world of popular culture and its commercial styles and products in fact shape the image of a certain time in history, at least when considered retrospectively. They turn to the medium of popular movies in order to capture the “extremes of the 1980s”: Juxtaposing the teen films Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Heathers (1989) they imply two poles that frame the decade’s “dichotomies” (xii). Fast Times revolves around the high-school pranks of “benign ‘surfer-dude’” Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn), whose “lone ambition is to be recognized as the greatest surfer on the California coast” while Heathers, featuring Christian Slater and Winona Ryder, adopts a darker tone and deals with affluent students, violence, murders, and suicides (xii). Although the reduction of a decade’s zeitgeist to such simple binaries is questionable, the filmic examples imply a set of contrasting experiences and attitudes which defined the lives of many American teenagers and adolescents of the time: youthful fun and superficial violence, popularity and marginality, prosperity and indigence. The fact that the surfing and skateboarding character of Spicoli is played by Sean Penn, who 20 years later would narrate the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, while Christian Slater, in addition to Heathers would also star in the 1989 film Gleaming the Cube (also known as Skate or Die) constitutes a set of intertextual details implying the pop-cultural appeal of skateboarding rebels. They function as support for my assumption that skate punk mediation is strongly enmeshed in the broad context of 1980s popular culture and consequently mirrors the tensions and extremes that pervade the decade.

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Skate punk’s songs and lyrics are plain and short; its flyers are hasty scribblings and collages; its magazines include episodes of ostentatious literary simplicity; and its videos rely on amateur camera work and repetitive plots. However, as utterances within a contemporary cultural dialogue they can help to illustrate how middle-class American teenagers and adolescents tried to distance themselves from what they perceived as the normative mainstream, and they can help to show how intersectional categories of race, class, gender, and space pervade the most marginal products of subcultural expression. Treating skate punk as entangled with contextual “webs of significance,” as Clifford Geertz might say, I do not approach the respective media “in search of law” but within the scope of an “Interpretative Theory of Culture” and thus “in search of meaning” (5). Affiliating my examination with Lowe’s account of effective resistance in late capitalist USA, it is useful to go back to his work and his thoughts on successful “counter-practice” (176). Tracing the question of how and if teenagers of the American middle class who are involved in skate punk can generate effective resistance against what Roland Barthes might call “the essential enemy” or more distinctly “the bourgeois norm” (Barthes, Mythologies 9), Lowe’s inquiries help to focus my analytic approach. He notes that resistance needs to be “discursively coherent,” while “transgressive against existing discourses” and “semiotically sophisticated in its counter-practices” (Lowe 176). In order to locate, examine, and validate these principles of resistance within skate punk, I will conduct a contextual media analysis which allows for deeper insights into the dynamics at work in the subculture’s practices. My analysis picks up on Lowe’s work and programmatically applies it to skate punk media as it traces the discursive stylizations, contextual correspondences, and semiotic practices that pervade the respective medial manifestations. The fact that Lowe connects resistance to “class/gender/race differences” supports my approach, as it evokes the necessity of an intersectionally informed proceeding that picks up on the preceding focus on the middle-class origin, masculinity, whiteness, and the spatial realm of suburbia within skateboarding and hardcore punk subcultures. Oriented towards these categories, my account of skate punk media seeks to find out how, or more precisely, if effective resistance is articulated and mediated within the respective lyrics, flyers, magazines, and videos. The reference to the different (and differentiating) categories helps to establish a set of questions that can be applied in order to examine how semiotic signification creates skate punk stylizations and how these relate to the discursive context of 1980s California suburbia: What role does race play in the constitution of a rebellious skate punk stylization? Is there class-consciousness within the subculture? What image of masculinity is presented? What role does suburbia play (e.g. the single-family house, the antipedestrian traffic pattern or the exclusion of the inner-city poor)? How is the suburban middle-class origin reflected?

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2.2

S K ATE AND H ARDCORE P UNK L YRICS IN THEIR C ULTUR AL C ONTE X T : B E T WEEN B ANALIT Y AND B L ANKNESS

2.2.1

Song Lyrics in a Postmodern Dialog

Simon Frith states that most “contemporary music takes the form of song […], and most people if asked what a song ‘means’ refer to words” (158). The “two obvious strategies” that Frith suggests for the treatment of songs—“either as poems, literary objects which can be analyzed entirely separately from music, or as speech acts, words to be analyzed in performance”—however, imply that the concrete mode of presentation must be included (158). The presentational frame must be kept in mind, as it adds an important dimension to the textual content that songs mediate. As I will argue in the third chapter, the presence of skate punk performance foregrounds the material and physical ramifications fostered by the music—particularly in view of its connections to skateboarding. In the following, however, I start with a contextual analysis and depart from Malott and Peña’s assumption that “music, like discourse in general, represents particular interests and worldviews whether the performer(s) are aware of it or not” (68). I concentrate on a reading that approaches exemplary skate and hardcore punk lyrics within the broader context of their time and in relation to the discursive ramifications that they carry and evoke. “One critique frequently leveled at subcultural studies,” Moore states, “is that its semiotic theories overestimate the depth of meaning in rituals and practices— that they ‘read too much into’ style and music” (Sells Like 30). Moore hints at the problems that arise with an examination of songs which treats them as separate and self-contained entities. Because of their ostentatious simplicity, i.e. their elliptic character and their often-banal content, it would appear to be impossible to take skate punk songs at face value. On the contrary, they need to be analyzed in a culturally informed way that necessarily includes semiotic theories but which does not so much read meaning “into” them but rather considers their meaning within their dialogic participation in a larger context. Referring to Lipsitz’s conception of popular music as dialogic, I read skate and hardcore punk lyrics regarding the contextual specificities of 1980s popular culture and, thus, with reference to the argument that “social context is the matrix of production and reception of popular music” (Time Passages 105). Lipsitz explicates: Popular music is nothing if not dialogic, the product of an ongoing historical conversation in which no one has the first or the last word. The traces of the past that pervade popular music of the present amount to more than mere chance: they are not simply juxtapositions of incompatible realities. They reflect a dialogic process, one embedded in collective history and nurtured by the ingenuity of artists interested in fashioning icons of oppositions. (Lipsitz, Times Passages 99)

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This quote implies popular music’s potential to critically engage with its historic context while “fashioning icons of opposition.” It directly alludes to my question concerning the possibilities for American youths to distance themselves from their social backgrounds, economic environments, and what they perceive as the mainstream. In reading early California hardcore and skate punk lyrics, I try to eschew “formalism by finding meaning not in forms themselves, but in how forms are put into play at any given moment to re-articulate or dis-articulate dominant ideology” (102). An analysis that parallels my purposes while simultaneously providing a contextual example in the field of contemporary literature can be found in the academic treatment of what has come to be known as blank fiction. James Annesley’s monograph, Blank Fictions – Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel (1998), constitutes a comprehensive overview of this literary phenomenon and provides various methodological approaches that can be applied to the subject matter of skate punk lyrics. Locating blank fiction within the early 1990s and the writings of authors such as Donna Tartt, Susanna Moore, Douglas Coupland, Sapphire, Katherine Texier, Mark Leyner, Ray Shell and Evelyn Lau, Annesley links its roots back to the “emergence of the ‘bratpack’ in the 1980s,” most prominently personified by authors Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, and even further to the mid-1970s’ “fiction of insurgency” and “its guerrilla campaign against the imminent transformation of American consciousness into a shopping mall” (Annesley 2; Siegle 2). Blank fiction and its predecessors in the 1970s and 1980s can not only be seen as contemporaries of skate punk culture, they also feature traces of what Siegle, in allusion to the works of author and poet Ron Kolm, calls a Suburban Ambush (1989) in his eponymous book. The title parallels skate punk’s stylized attack on California suburbia and its positioning “on the margins of the suburbanization of America” (Siegle 3). Reading these fictions “as the product of a postmodern condition” establishes a direct link to Moore’s interpretation of hardcore punk as a reaction to this condition (Annesley 3; cf. Moore “Postmodernism and Punk”). Jameson states that “[p]ostmodernism replicates, it reproduces—reinforces—the logic of consumer capitalism [while] the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic” (“Postmodernism and Consumer” 554). Picking up on this statement and applying it to his subject matter, Annesely expounds that “this kind of argument focuses on the ways in which contemporary narratives articulate anxieties about subjectivity, representation and the relationship between text and context” (4). The concrete example of Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero subsequently suggests that an “interpretation built on an analysis of the social currents and experiences of this particular period provides, it seems, the most sensible way of approaching the vision of an indolent, wealthy, white elite offered” in the novel (5). Mainly concentrating on the white upper class of Los Angeles, Less Than Zero is set in a similar environment to skate punk and its predominantly white middle-class participants. The surfers and punks who populate

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the bleak Californian landscape described in Ellis’s novel underline this linkage (cf. e.g. Ellis, Less Than 28, 120, 167); references to Los Angeles punk bands such as X (who provide the epigraph to Less Than Zero) or Black Flag which also pervade his follow-up The Rules of Attraction (1987) strengthen the connection of bratpack and blank fiction to California punk by placing an “emphasis on the specifics of time and space” (Annesley 5). It reveals why an analysis of skate punk song lyrics needs to be organized along the cultural currents of the period while incorporating the broader social context as its matrix of production and reception. In this way, an examination of lyrics can generate assertions concerning “subjectivity, representation and the relationship between text and context” of skate punk’s protagonists and their subculture (4). Keeping in mind the notion of the postmodern condition that Annesely establishes with reference to Jameson and which forms the background of skate punk culture, I depart from the hypothesis that its song lyrics correspond to a Lyotardian understanding of narrative. In the introduction to The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard defines the term postmodern as a state of “incredulity toward metanarratives” and thus implies a shift that is particularly important for approaches that seek to analyze how people and societies create, interpret, and sustain meaning (xxiv-xxv). As paraphrased by Thompson, the French critic argued that one of the features of the condition of postmodernity is an increasing distrust of large explanatory ideas—or metanarratives—like religion, science, historical progress, freedom as ways of understanding the world. In their place, Lyotard argues, there is a turn to smaller, more localized narratives—or petit récits. (G. Thompson 51)

Seeing them as contemporaries of the invoked writers, a group that Thompson tellingly describes as the “New Postmodernists” (cf. 38ff), the extreme brevity and overt simplicity of skate and hardcore punk lyrics resembles such petit récits: They are fragmentary utterances that constitute localized narratives within the larger dialogue of 1980s culture. Such a localization allows for a focus on those aspects which are characteristic of the suburban environment from which skate punk emerged. As indicated in the first chapter of this book, suburbia constitutes a space in which aspects of race, class, and gender intersect and create a locale privileging white middle-class males. Consequently, the organization of an analysis of skate punk lyrics as part of 1980s culture can move along these categories and read them in relation to the respective songs and their entanglement in discourses of popular culture.

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Space: Suburban Homes and Local Beaches I want to be stereotyped I want to be classified I want to be a clone I want a suburban home Suburban home Suburban home Suburban home I want to be a statistic I want to be masochistic I want to be a clone I want a suburban home Suburban home Suburban home Suburban home I don’t want no hippie pad I want a house just Like mom and dad “Suburban Home.” Descendents. Milo Goes to College. New Alliance Records, 1982.

In 1979, a year after the Descendents from Manhattan Beach formed as a band, a television series called Knots Landing began airing on prime time television. Employing the tropes established by Dallas, which had premiered a year earlier, the show was set in a typical Southern California cul-de-sac of a fictitious coastal suburb (cf. Batchelor and Stoddart 146). It depicted the lives of three wealthy (white) families and their interrelations. Their homes were imposingly presented in the opening credits of each episode: suburban mansions, wide driveways, and backyard pools. Knots Landing seemed to broadcast the template of the American Dream and its suburban ideal. Another three years later, coinciding with the release of the Descendents’ song “Suburban Home” on their album Milo Goes to College (1982), young Michael J. Fox gained extraordinary popularity in the TV series Family Ties set in suburban Ohio. Fox’s character of Alex P. Keaton, “the boy with the briefcase who wears ties and spouts conservative rhetoric” (138), is introduced as antagonistic to his liberal ex-hippie parents: They met in the Peace Corps; he is a Republican. The two television shows, Knots Landing and Family Ties, vividly exemplify and bracket the discursive setup and the cultural codes that pervade popular images of 1980s suburbia and reverberate within the lyrics of the cited Descendents song and a variety of similar texts produced by skate and hardcore punk musicians. In The Semiotic Challenge Barthes describes codes as “essentially cultural: the codes are certain types of already-seen, of already-read, of already-done” (288). He

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establishes a definition that allows for references between the song lyrics and the historical as well as pop-cultural context of skate and hardcore punk. In consideration of the textual arrangement of the Descendents’ song, it becomes evident to what extent they revolve around a set of cultural codes corresponding to the so-called “Gimme Decade” (DeCurtis 2): They overemphasize the phrase “I want” and combine it with the wish for a suburban home. The society in which skate and hardcore punks, including the members of the Descendents, grew up is characterized by an “individualistic ethic of upward mobility” and can therefore be reduced to the concise statement, “I want” or “Gimme” (Lipsitz, “Listening” 324/325).53 In Barthes’ sense the behavior indicated by these phrases can be regarded as “already-seen” or “already-done” (Barthes, Semiotic Challenge 288), while TV characters such as Alex P. Keaton illustrate that such attitudes were in fact introduced to a wide audience and thus really have been seen. The generation gap indicated between the conservative Alex and his hippie parents on TV also reverberates within the Descendents’ text. They “don’t want no hippie pad,” they want a house just like “mom and dad,” and thus more or less evoke associations with the perfect homes that were shown in programs like Knots Landing. Instead of trying to read a fixed meaning into their song, it is important to note that the Descendents evoke a number of cultural codes which describe the decade’s preoccupation with the suburban ideal and consumerism, i.e. with the suburban home and the “gimme”-attitude of people who just “want.” The song exemplifies how the codes of the decade, the codes “of culture as it is transmitted […] by the whole of sociality” are put into play within the lyrics of adolescent hardcore punks (Barthes, Semiotic Challenge 289). Skate punk band The Faction (featuring professional skateboarder Steve Caballero) from San Jose, “by mid-decade one of the five most expensive real estate markets in the nation” (Batchelor and Stoddart 62), additionally incorporates allusions to the activity of skateboarding into their approach to a wealthy suburbia. In “Skate Harassment” (ca. 1982) they state, “[t]here’s disobedience in the streets / In all of suburbia’s dreams” and thus present their skating actions as antagonistic to the ideal of suburban living. “Kids are tired of the same old things / Drive in movies football games” is another contestation in their song and links directly to Sobin’s critique of the assumption that in suburbia movie theaters and fast food joints are “expected to take up the slack and energies of the adolescent” (85). The Faction introduce skateboarding as an alternative to this suburban condition and proclaim that “at least we don’t stay home and sit,” which distances them from the passive normality that they see enforced by “bitchy neighbors and police.” The Adolescents’ song “Skate Babylon” (1987) picks up on the decade’s obsession with ownership and repeatedly claims: “Riding in the street - these streets are mine.” They connect the activity of skateboarding with territorial claims and introduce a 53 | The Germ’s song “Lexicon Devil” (1978) and its line “Gimme Gimme This, Gimme Gimme That” enhance this interpretation. Black Flag’s song “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie” (1981) similarly implies hardcore punk’s reflection of the 1980s as a “Gimme Decade.”

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possessive momentum manifested in their movement on boards. The band Agression [sic] from Oxnard—labeled a “Skatecore” outfit by Blush (20)—constitutes the lyrical basis for this kind of expression and exemplarily incorporates the “Gimme” attitude in their song “Locals Only” (1983). The lyrics refer to the band members’ home beach and announce that this space “is for locals only.” The singer or narrator of the song adds the line, “[g]oing into my waters and what do I see / Out of town faggots in front of me.” It includes a homophobic rendering that illustrates the constant usage of the term “faggot” as an expletive in skateboard and punk culture. Olson remembers that he was called a “faggot” because he “looked different. And for them [other skaters] ‘faggot’ is like you’re not normal. It’s completely weird to them. They’re homophobic. It’s called ignorance” (Olson, Personal Interview). While illustrating to what extent skate punks—despite their counter cultural aspirations—reinforce assumptions of what is perceived as normal, Agression’s song also mirrors the “Gimme” decade’s greed within a context of suburban skate or surf punk culture: The ocean is “my” waters and the beach is reserved for “Locals Only.” Sticker (ca. 1986): A message to the Huntington Beach Police Department.

From Nedorostek, Nathan and Anthony Pappalardo, eds. Radio Silence - A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music. New York: MTV Press, 2008.

Moore establishes a concrete parallel between social realities and suburban hardcore punk. He defines the subculture’s music as the fitting soundtrack to Proposition 13 and the tax “revolts” of 1978, when homeowners in the valley and Orange County organized to rid themselves of responsibility for other people’s education and other people’s children. (“Postmodernism and Punk” 318)

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The quote elucidates to what extent experiences of suburban teenagers’ everyday lives included the reckless enrichment policies of their parents. Proposition 13 and the “Tax Payers’ Revolt” were meant to optimize conditions for homeowners while simultaneously excluding minorities from the suburbs (cf. “The (Post-) Suburban Home and the Tax Payers’ Revolt” in 1.2.3). They institutionalize the capitalist logic reflected in the Descendents’ screaming, “I want” and “I don’t want,” as well as in the Faction’s lyrics about possessive skating in their streets or Agression’s defense of the local beach. The song lyrics highlight in what way these attitudes were part of everyday suburban life in California and therefore at least unconsciously were marked as “already-seen” cultural codes. The repetitive modes of appropriation and their entanglement in the consumer-oriented environment of the 1980s the lyrics evoke allow for allusions to Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. While the chapter “Clone Story” provides a link to the Descendents’ “Suburban Home” and the expressed wish “to be a clone,” Baudrillard’s employment of the term simulacrum, describing a copy of a copy without a corresponding original, offers a theoretical approach to the contexts to which skate punk lyrics relate. As the basis for Baudrillard’s theory of postmodernism the references to simulacra help to establish a connection between the song lyrics mentioned and what Moore calls the “Condition of Postmodernity” (305). As Moore recapitulates, Baudrillard emphasizes the close link between his understanding of postmodernism and an economic and social development centered on consumerism. In Simulacra and Simulation the chapter “Hypermarket and Hypermodernity” concentrates on precisely these aspects. It is particularly relevant at this point since the concept of a consumerist “hypermarket” perfectly matches the aforementioned labeling of the 1980’s as a “Gimme Decade.” The “hypermarket” is identified as a place where “men and things” are brought together and where “a whole new sociality is elaborated” (Baudrillard, Simulacra 75/76). Baudrillard illustrates in what way “the hypermarket centralizes and redistributes a whole region and population, how it concentrates and rationalizes time, trajectories, practices—creating an immense to-and-fro movement totally similar to that of suburban commuters” and thus establishes an explicit parallel to the space of suburbia (75). By defining these surroundings as “homogeneous space,” he suggests to what extent the suburban landscape can be read as an agglomeration of simulacra itself; every house and every street looking like the next in an endless mode of repetition, which ultimately affects the people living there and turns them into homogeneous beings, i.e. “[h]uman cuttings ad infinitium” and for that matter “clones,” themselves (76, 95). Suburbia is characterized by a “core cultural value of consumerism” that makes its inhabitants conformist copies of copies and therefore resemblances of Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum (Kling, Olin, and Poster, “Emergence” 8). Agression, in their song “Money Machine” (1983), allude to such an environment by singing, “It’s all part of the money machine, the money machine / It’s all part of the capitalist scheme, the money machine / Makes you forget you’re a human being.” The lyrics suggests that

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a market-oriented version of suburbanites as passive clones replaces notions of humanity and creates subjected people or an “oppressed society,” as Orange County surf and skate punk band D.I. put it in their song “OC Life” (1985). Suburbia—the home for “nice communities / middle class families / too much cleanliness / too much stupidity,” as the Circle Jerks (with former Black Flag singer Keith Morris on vocals) sing in “Moral Majority” (1982)—becomes the epitome of conservative and conformist California in the lyrics of young skateboarders and punks. They establish hardcore punk as a reaction to this highly ordered environment and use its medial image as the fabric for their songs and contestations. The Baudrillardian notion of the hypermarket shows how the song lyrics’ evocations of consumerist suburbia entered into a trajectory which also determined the literature and culture of the 1980s. During the 1960s, freedom-seeking surfers still populated the beaches that surround suburban mansions such as those presented in Knots Landing. Tom Wolfe vividly describes this scenario in his 1966 New Journalist account of The Pump House Gang, a group of young Southern Californian teenagers. These young surfers preceded the “Gimme Decade” and airily wondered, “What’s the big orgy about money? It’s warm, nobody even wears shoes, nobody is starving” (Wolfe 174). In the 1980s, the decade of profit-seeking adolescents such as Alex P. Keaton, the atmosphere had profoundly changed and while Wolfe proceeded to write a “savage indictment of Reagan’s America” in his 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities (Batchelor and Stoddart 104), the contestation of the relevance and importance of money in his portrayal of a sunny surfing paradise made way for the likes of Gorden Gekko (Michael Douglas) and his dictum “Greed is good” in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (also 1987). Just as the novels of Ellis began to coin a blank style “where the listing of brand names replaces traditional methods of character description,” skate punk’s song lyrics offered a similar response to “the experience of commodification as it changed the face of American culture in the 1980s” (G. Thompson 45, 44). Whereas “brand names of consumer culture [became] integral to the language” of blank fiction (45), hardcore punk lyrics made use of mass-mediated images of suburbia ranging from idyllic beach communities to consumerist, conformist, and boring housing estates. Oscillating between these positions, the song lyrics’ elliptic evocations of the suburban ideal and its commodified setup precede and parallel the narrative structures Ellis introduced in Less Than Zero. Ellis’s writing “mirrors the cutting of MTV videos—short, staccato-like paragraphs that capture [the protagonist’s] observations, but not his emotional core” (Batchelor and Stoddart110). The brevity and simplicity of skate and hardcore punk lyrics constitute an extreme form of this style: Oftentimes not even exceeding one minute, the songs do not leave time for more than a few hasty rhymes and the simple interjections of catchwords that can immediately be associated with certain images of skate punks’ living environment. These fragmented expressions—in congruence with the literally fragmented landscape of (post-) suburbia—create a number of blanks as the lyrics escape definite interpretations and rather point towards a realm which transcends the semantic

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meaning of their content. Skate and hardcore punk addresses the situations and characteristics of suburbia and its inhabitants who “feed on MTV, shaping paths of thought / About the third World War and things they should have bought,” as described by The Faction in “Spineless Majority” (1984). The lyrics enter into a dialog centering on a suburban provenance and rely on forms and images provided by television and the broader context of popular culture. It is within the blanks, i.e. the elliptic evocations and the empty narratives emerging when staccato-like song lines put tropes of suburban living into play, that we find moments of contestation which exceed literal meaning and call for an approach acknowledging what happens in these blanks; i.e. what happens in combination with their expressive presentation on stage; what kind of material effects of presence enhance the lyrics; and what makes them affective in skate punk culture. Before fathoming such an investment of materiality and immediate presence in chapter 3, it can be concluded that, read at face value skate punk’s preoccupation with suburbia provides simplistic and banal outbursts which oscillate between ironic distancing and blunt imitation of suburban behavior. The lyrics incorporate a highly contradictory element because only those who really come from a suburban home and benefit from the accompanying privileges can ironically distance themselves from this environment by screaming “I want a suburban home” or transfer its exclusive politics to the adjoining beaches and claim that they are for “Locals Only.”54

54 | Fred Hammer, a photographer from Oxnard who is deeply involved in the local hardcore punk (“Nardcore”) and surfing scene as documented in his book The Power of Expression, supports the assumption that some of the lyrics mentioned here were in fact not at all ironic. Asked about Agression’s song “Locals Only,” Hammer told me: “No, they were being serious. […] Agression wasn’t really joking about that. They’re just sort of tough hardcore punker kids who like to surf and, you know, they didn’t want people surfing at their beach. So, when people would come surf here, you know, people would throw down and some violence was happening and…that’s what happened” (Hammer, Personal Interview).

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Class: Home Is Where? Families breed inside four walls like they’re expected to do uphold standards of living consorts to the myth they’re given. Home is where Defects swept under the carpet the maintenance of paradise the costs of all these simple pleasures every laborer has his price. This is what it feels like to grow old This is someone else’s dream This is all you’re ever left with, any home at the end of your prime. A fragile fabrication cultural conceit live the way nostalgia lives die the way your elders die “Home Is Where.” Middle Class. Scavenged Luxury. Torture Garden, 1980.

In 1979, the Urinals, one of Southern California’s early punk rock bands, released their Another EP and with it the song “I’m white and middle class.” While the almost Duchampian name of the band might still indicate the influence of older and more art-oriented bands from Hollywood, the song’s statement could not be more explicit about the social background of most of the teenagers who were drawn to the punk scene and who would dominate its transition into suburban hardcore and skate punk. The fact that class is an important topic within this scene’s song lyrics becomes evident by the numerous examples of bands which allude to it. The band White Flag (punning their contemporaries Black Flag) pick up on the topic in their 1984 song “Middle Class Hell” featuring Mike Ness of the aptly named Fullerton band Social Distortion on backing vocals, while the Circle Jerks in their forementioned song “Moral Majority” locate “middle class families” in “nice communities.” A 1988 German compilation summarizes Southern California’s hardcore punk scene with its title Middle Class Uprising and, featuring the Adolescents, Circle Jerks, and TSOL (True Sounds of Liberty), exclusively assembles bands that

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are also associated with the skateboarding scene.55 The name of the band Middle Class predestines this Orange County band for closer analysis with a focus on the category of class, while their song “Home Is Where” provides a useful allusion to the preceding remarks about suburbia. “Home is Where” can be read in view of the observations concerning the 1980s context of skate punk culture as it uses only a few words to summarize crucial characteristics associated with the middle class and its suburban habitat. Families are not described as human beings that live in a house; they are pictured as existing in isolation and secluded within “four walls” where they try to keep up with expectations that focus on their investment in procreation. The verb “breed” that is used within the text at this point inevitably produces associations with animal husbandry and thus shifts the significance of the words “four walls” from the notion of a residential home to that of a cage.56 It epitomizes the oppressive conformity of the suburban middle class, which forces families to live up to the expectations of an orthodox society. The already mentioned mechanisms that hide behind the Tax Payers’ Revolt are incorporated as the lyrics imply the families’ attempts to “uphold standards of living.” These standards—apparently resembling the isolation of caged breeding animals—appear highly questionable so that, in conclusion, the song critiques and reveals the families as supporters and “consorts” of a myth that sells them their existence as a desirable standard of living. The context of the word “myth” within “Home Is Where” shows that the lyrics actively represent a negative valuation of the living conditions of suburban middle-class families while it parallels Parker’s critical considerations of the specificities that underlie the American middle class (cf. subchapter “‘The Myth of the Middle Class’” in 1.2.2). The lyrics and their reference to “the myth they’re given” can be read as a challenge to the dominant—with Parker a hegemonic (cf. 16/17)—ideology that sustains and establishes this “fragile fabrication.” The song shows how the myth of a homogeneous middle class urges families to fulfill the expectations they are faced with in order to 55 | All of the bands mentioned appear on the soundtracks of various skate videos to this day. Cf. e.g. videos such as Black Label’s Label Live (2003) or Alien Workshop’s Mind Fields (2009) for songs by the Adolescents; Church of Skatan’s Wild in the Streets (1998) or Etnies’s Sponsored (1999) for songs by the Circle Jerks; and Transworld’s Are you Alright? (2003) or Globe’s World Cup Skateboarding Street Riot (2004) for songs by TSOL. 56 | J.G. Ballard provides a definition of suburbia that not only adds to the symbolism evoked in “Home is where” but also connects it to the notion of the body: “Unlike its unruly city counterpart, the suburban body has been wholly domesticated, and one can say that the suburbs constitute a huge petting zoo, with residents’ bodies providing the stock of furry mammals” (Ballard 273). Furthering the idea of suburban living as caged, Ballard’s statement emphasizes the conformity and passivity that characterizes life in suburbia while implying that resistance to such an environment could be organized around the corporeal realm of the body and its liberation from constricting ‘domestication,’ a thought that will become particularly important in chapter 3 of this book.

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belong and to preserve alleged standards of living that comply with the neo-conservative Reagan administration and the New Christian Right.57 Elvis Presley, in the early 1960s, had still used the proverb “Home is where the heart is” in the eponymous song (originally written by Sherman Edwards and Hal David). He sings that “Anywhere you are is home / I don’t need a mansion on a hill / That overlooks the sea / Anywhere you’re with me is home,” thus proclaiming that financial and material commodities such as “a mansion on the hill” could easily be neglected in the face of love. The superficial 1980s no longer provided the context for such ‘sweet talk’: The band Middle Class subtracts the emotional part of the proverb and turns it into the elliptic phrase “Home is where,” implying a question (Home is where?) rather than articulating a romantic statement. Where Presley invoked the emotional powers of the heart, Middle Class leave a blank that not only indicates the “glib pragmatism” of the “Gimme Decade” and the suburban home as the ultimate status symbol (DeCurtis 2), but stylistically also foreshadows the callous narratives of Ellis and his “bratpack” contemporaries. California hardcore punk, with Middle Class as one of its first representatives—their debut seven-inch record Out of Vogue is often read as “the (vinyl) foundation of LA hardcore” (cf. Järisch n.pag.)—moves within the discourses of the decade’s culture and, just as the literary fiction of the time, deals with the consequences of the “economic upturns provided by Reaganomics and the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich that marked the 1980s” (G. Thompson 44). The suburban mansion overlooking the ocean—an image that was constantly reproduced in the opening sequences of series such as Knots Landing and, in the likes of The O.C. or Laguna Beach is sustained to this day—had become the epitome of the American Dream, “someone else’s dream” as Middle Class emphasizes. While distancing themselves from this “fragile fabrication,” they simultaneously acknowledge their own roots within this social stratum by referring to their band as exactly that: the Middle Class. A distancing from this middle-class background can further be located within two exemplary and extremely short songs of the prototypical skate punk bands JFA (originally hailing from Phoenix, AZ) and the already mentioned The Faction.58 57 | The most adequate definition of myth in this context is most likely connected to Barthes’s idea that (bourgeois) ideology is only sustained by the help of myths that depoliticize historical experience and turn it into a kind of common sense (cf. “Myth Today” in Barthes’s Mythologies). Extended by the notion of myth as a collective wishful fantasy that refers to Sigmund Freud (cf. Kühnel), it becomes evident to what extent the usage of the term within Middle Class’s song lyrics articulates a critical statement: The wishful fantasy, in this case, seems epitomized in the “fragile fabrication” of the American Dream. 58 | Steve Alba explains that “when I think of skate punk, the first band that comes to mind would be JFA” (Alba, Personal Interview). Additionally, the importance of The Faction becomes evident when considering that their guitarist Steve Caballero is one of the most popular skateboard professionals to date and published a skateboard fanzine called Skate Punk in the early 1980s.

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Both, JFA’s song “Cokes and Snickers” (1981) as well as The Faction’s “Fast Food Diet” (1982), reveal how a culturally informed reading of their lyrics allows for interpretative inferences emphasizing the antagonistic character of the respective content within the context of the 1980s. The entire song lyrics of JFA’s 50 second hardcore ‘hit’ consist of only three lines: “Cokes and Snickers is all I eat / Cokes and Snickers is all I need / Health sucks, health sucks.” The Faction provide only slightly more text in their “Fast Food Diet” by listing a number of fast food restaurants and the narrator’s explanation that “I’m on a fast food diet, I need that greasy diet / On a fast food diet, maybe you should try it / Mom works late so she won’t cook / She wants me to read the recipe book.” Considering that during the 1980s the “trends of the corporate world, once more, trickled down to the tables of America’s middle class” (Batchelor and Stoddart 87), the two skate punk songs appear much more significant than the banality of their lyrical construction suggests.59 In 1981, at around the same time as JFA released “Cokes and Snickers” on their seven-inch EP Blatant Localism and two years before The Faction presented “Fast Food Diet” on their LP No Hidden Messages, Judy Mazel published her bestselling book The Beverly Hills Diet. The first paragraph of the introduction reads as follows: Welcome to the diet phenomenon of the ‘80s—the diet that first exploded into reality in the heart of Beverly Hills among the movie stars, the jet-setters, and the ultra body conscious who are hardened to flimsy fads. The diet embraced by everyone from “Dallas” star Linda Gray, actress Sally Kellerman, and singer Englebert Humperdinck [sic] to hundreds of skinnies shouting the praises of the Beverly Hills Diet—a way of eating that has turned slimhood into a reality. A way of eating I call Conscious Combining. (xv)

The success of the book and the quoted paragraph illustrate the fact that dieting “became a multibillion dollar industry in the 1980s” while revealing to what extent the mediated images of young and healthy “skinnies” dominated popular culture and extended the myth of a wealthy middle class and its suburban facade to the bodies of the people, especially in Southern California (Batchelor and Stoddart 81; also cf. H. Fox, “Many Californians” 250/251). The referenced skate punk songs by JFA and The Faction basically turn this phenomenon around and seek an outsider position within the opposite diet, a fast food diet of Cokes and Snickers. Only within the contextual specificities of a decade obsessed with looks, do the song lyrics reveal their distancing character. In a society where “all look the same: thin, tan bodies, short blond hair, blank look in the blue eyes,” as Ellis’s character Clay describes it (Less Than 152), the monotony of repeatedly screaming that “health sucks” is turned 59 | Although made in a different context, a remark by Ronald Reagan in his “Farewell Address to the Nation” (1989) is particularly interesting for this argument. The president states that “[a]ll great change in America begins at the dinner table” and thus implicitly illustrates to what extent teenagers could distance themselves from their parents and articulate rebellious behavior by ‘unconventional’ food choices (Reagan, “Farewell” n. pag.).

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into a statement that opposes this conformity. Consciously or not, JFA and The Faction exemplify the extent to which textual references to such simple trends as diet could become meaningful as metaphors for a challenge to normativity. Just as the “brand names of consumer culture became integral to the language” of Less Than Zero, the listings of fast food restaurants, chocolate bars, and soft drinks in the songs by The Faction and JFA rely on these commodities as “the very texture of the contemporary world” (G. Thompson 45). This texture is transferred to the lyrics of skateboarding hardcore punks and their contestation of middle-class life. The Faction’s remark about an absent mother who “works late, so she won’t cook” integrates the changing structures of the nuclear family that characterized the 1980s and especially the middle classes. It adds to a whole variety of California punk bands that addressed the topic through their lyrics: “Milo of the Descendents sang ‘My Dad Sucks’ […]. Kat of Legal Weapon wrote numerous songs about sexually abusive family situations […]. Wasted Youth sang about a ‘Problem Child’” and the Angry Samoans “ranted” about their “old man” who knows that “he owns this house” (MacLeod Kids 103). Suburban houses had become mere hideouts behind status-oriented facades, which left hardcore punks such as Middle Class wondering where their real home actually was. MacLeod summarizes this situation and specifies that “the notion of the home as the last remaining hope to fight off the fragmentation of the outer world came about as the world inside the home was itself fragmenting” (Kids 101). Again, hardcore punk and its preoccupation with middle-class family life directly corresponds to similar discourses in popular culture as a turn to the movie screen illustrates. Robert Redford’s directing debut, Ordinary People (1980), precisely lays out the 1980’s preoccupation with the demise of wealthy upper middle-class families, “the perfect family on the outside, falling apart from within” (Batchelor and Stoddart 158), while Spheeris’s Suburbia (1983) transfers the topic into the lives of abandoned punk kids who find an ersatz family and refuge in the attractions of the shopping mall. In contrast to the 50s and 60s, when Elvis Presley still invoked the values of true love and “marriage films revolved around the pursuit by single men and women to marry by film’s end,” the 1980s with its constantly growing divorce rates presented filmic productions that “worked to examine the destruction of the institution” (158). “[T]he changes of identity and roles for parent and child were directly connected to the postmodern, postsuburban environment and its exaltation of consumerism,” explicates MacLeod, who adds: “Postsuburban hardcore punk rejected both the traditional and the new types of families—both the Reaganite ‘fascist’ family and the liberal ‘hippie’ family” (Kids 104). The two tendencies reverberate within the exemplary lyrics introduced here and, rather than fitting into this “postsuburban” setting, young skateboarders tried to distance themselves from it and turned to hardcore punk music.

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The Adolescents exemplify this escapist development in the song “Skate Babylon” (1987): When I feel - there’s no way out, I grab my board and I head out And Skate Babylon! And Skate Babylon! And Skate Babylon! And Skate Babylon! “Skate Babylon.” Adolescents. Brats in Battalions. S.O.S. Records, 1987.

The boredom, the conformity, consumerism, and flawed parental utopia of a suburban paradise are countered here by conflating them in the metaphor of Babylon and the imperative to skate it. Babylon and the associated history of exile had already played an important role in punk’s genealogy and its roots in Reggae and Rastafarianism, as Hebdige pointed out. Signifying “white colonial powers” as well as “contemporary capitalist society” in Reggae music, the notion of a contemporary Babylon constituted an appealing adversary for white punk kids in London (Hebdige 34; also cf. his chapters on “Boredom in Babylon” and “Reggae and Rastafarianism”). While Rastafarians saw the redeeming escape from Babylonian suppression in an “exodus” to Africa, the suburban skate punks of California appropriated this struggle against heteronomy, projected it onto the conservative middle-class environment, and found their “way out” in the “exodus” provided by riding their skateboards through the streets. Linking the Babylonian metaphor back to punk’s interconnections with Rastafarian Reggae culture implies the racial connotation that the allusion carries. It points toward the status of rebellious outcasts that white kids from Southern California suburbs could adopt by identifying with these positions. Imagining white suburbia as their Babylonian exile allowed skate punks to stylize themselves as partisans on four wheels. For “Reaganite ‘fascist[s]’” (MacLeod, Kids 104), this amounted to the ultimate provocation and an examination of the employment of racial signifiers in further lyrics of hardcore and skate punk proves that they indeed constituted an important factor in the participants’ attempt to distance themselves from their conformist environment. It reveals how the notions of suburbia and the middle class intersect with the category of race.

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Race: “White Minority” as a Subject Position in Hardcore Punk We’re gonna be a white minority We won’t listen to the majority We’re gonna feel inferiority We’re gonna be a white minority White pride You’re an American I’m gonna hide Anywhere I can Gonna be a white minority We don’t believe there’s a possibility Well you just wait and see We’re gonna be a white minority White pride You’re an American I’m gonna hide Anywhere I can Gonna be a white minority There’s gonna be large cavity Within my new territory We’re all gonna die “White Minority.” Black Flag. Jealous Again. SST, 1980.

In his book The Coming White Minority - California, Multiculturalism, and America’s Future (1999), Dale Maharidge introduces the following numbers: Between 1900 and 1970 California’s white population dropped from 90 percent to 78 percent of the total. But by 1980 the percentage of whites dropped as much as it had in the century’s first seven decades. Between 1980 and 1990 it plummeted another 10 percent— and has continued declining about 1 percent a year since then. (4)

Maharidge comments on this rapid decrease of white population numbers, which becomes especially evident at the end of the 1970’s, by connecting it with the fear felt by white citizens. He states that “[w]ith each drop in the white population, fear among white voters rose commensurately” and thereby hints at the white middle class’s worries about losing its hegemonic status (5). The Tax Payers’ Revolt had

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institutionalized the reactionary politics resulting from this fear in the suburbs and hardcore punks put it into play in their lyrics. Black Flag’s song “White Minority” is exemplary in this respect. It reveals the extent to which hardcore punks draw on the status of a minority in order to establish themselves as opposed to the American mainstream (cf. Traber). The band from Hermosa Beach forms the vanguard of groups that embodied a combination of hardcore punk with skateboarding as well as surfing culture while seeking a self-stylized position at the margins of society. “Wasted,” one of Californian hardcore punk’s seminal songs from Black Flag’s 1978 debut seven-inch record Nervous Breakdown, is entirely constructed around the position of the marginal: Its first person narrator lists a number of attributes that characterize him as wasted. He screams, “I was so wasted / I was a hippie / I was a burnout / I was a dropout / I was out of my head” and adds “I was a surfer / I had a skateboard,” which arguably constitutes the first musical and lyrical manifestation of skateboarding as a (self-) marginalized activity within hardcore punk and specifically, for that matter: skate punk. Singer Keith Morris comments on the song and remembers, “I wrote the lyrics to ‘Wasted’ […] because that’s what I was. It was a self-deprecatory stance, but at the same time, there’s a coolness to it, because I’m saying this is what I am and where I’m from, and you’re not” (qtd. in Chick 52). What Traber describes as “playing dress ‘down’” or the “mimicking [of ] a ‘way of life’ others must negotiate in order to survive” (“L.A.’s White Minority” 53), seems to respond to the narrator’s (i.e. Morris’s) description of being a burnout and a dropout, while leading back to the Descendents’ wish “to be stereotyped” (“Suburban Home”). The stylization of hardcore punks into stereotyped categories highlights precisely what Traber defines as an act of self-marginalization: In order to express their own individuality, the teenagers involved in skate and hardcore punk use attributes usually associated with minorities. They want to be stereotyped as individuals and thereby evoke connotations which are normally linked to marginal social groups.60 The adoption of the stage name Chuck Dukowski by Black Flag bassist Gary McDaniel—certainly inspired by Los Angeles author Charles Bukowski—exemplifies the aspect of self-marginalization and its appeal for hardcore punks. He explains: I wanted to be on the one hand this regular kinda macho working guy –‘Chuck the Duke’– but the same time be from a people – Polish – that got picked on. It was kind of the punk thing of being self-effacing, making fun of myself. It helped me. It made it easy for me to be bigger. (qtd. in Chick 126)

Numerous other bands associated with the California skate and punk scenes pick up on the minority attribute and embed it in further juxtapositions to an op60 | The definition of a stereotype as a “set of beliefs about the personal attributes of a group of people” established in the anthology Stereotyping and Prejudice shows that stereotyping refers to groups of people and not to single individuals (Stroebe and Insko 5).

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posed majority. The Circle Jerks rant against the regulations and censorship of a “Moral Majority.” TSOL, in their song “Abolish Government/Silent Majority,” describe how the “government […] don’t want us here / You folks can’t feel that fear / You can walk the streets today / You can walk in your own way,” suggesting that in contrast to “you folks” the singer of the song cannot move freely. Opposed to a “Silent Majority,” the narrator implies that he has seen through the government’s repressive forces which turn him into a minority. The Faction parallels these lyrics with their song “Spineless Majority.” They claim to be a minority because they use their heads while the “others”—the “spineless majority [that] wants you dead”—are “so many it’s fucking scary.” In their skate punk anthem “Beach Blanket Bong-Out” JFA likewise claim a minoritized status by stating: “We’re outnumbered but we don’t care.” Hardcore punk lyrics take up a momentum of social fear rooted within the changing demographics that were influencing 1980s suburban life. In the ears of the inhabitants of an allegedly stable and secure middle-class environment they might sound extremely provocative while offering the teenagers and adolescents who sing (and sing along with) them an opportunity to position themselves against their parents and the conservative environment that surrounds them. After several confrontations and conflicts between teenagers and the police that followed Black Flag concerts, Dukowski was asked why the police were against the band. He answered, “I think that it’s probably because they’re scared that it represents change. Change scares anybody who is part of the existing structure” (Dukowski).61 The statement proves that among hardcore punks there was not only awareness of society’s fears but also of the origin of those fears in (demographic) change. The change that is reflected in the song “White Minority” and that predicts a mere minority status for the white population emerges as a potential threat to white supremacy. Thus, the lyrics can be read as an allusion to the conservative fears of a threatened white society. By predicting this society’s end the lyrics stoke its fears. The significantly named band FEAR from Los Angeles provides a further example of the threatening stylizations that pervade California’s punk scenes. Songs such as “We Destroy the Family” (1982) or “Let’s have a war” (1982) with the lines “It already started in the city! / Suburbia will be just as easy!” set the tone for the following groups’ mediations of frightening teenage rebellion. That such a rebellion of young people, i.e. the conflict between new ideas and old conventions, is not new goes without saying. John Savage, in his book Teenage – The Creation of Youth (2007), traces the “idea of the generation gap” back to the times of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Article 28 of the 18 codicils that were added four years after the revolution “stated that ‘one generation cannot subject to its law the future generations’” 61 | Also cf. Thrasher’s 1982 interview with Black Flag. Henry Rollins comments on police violence and states: “People in a position of power will violently oppress change, that’s all there is to it” (Thrasher Sep. 1982, 37).

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and thus constituted a manifestation of generational differences (14). That the borders of this gap between the young and the old were intentionally emphasized by teenagers’ attempts to stylize themselves as decidedly different is a development which pervades American culture and literature from its very beginnings; the “New World” itself might be read as a juvenile delinquent that turns its back on the old and established. The deployment of racial connotations thereby had always accompanied the respective narratives of adolescent rebellion and—way before Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay on “The White Negro,” and Sal Paradise’s “wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music” in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road of the same year (179/180)—characterized (white) American fiction. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain is paradigmatic in this development. Critical readings provided by Toni Morrison (1992), Shalley Fisher Fishkin (1993) or Ishmael Reed (2009) all focus on the complex relationship between a white protagonist (Huck) and the African-American character (Jim) whose presence is necessary as “freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism” (Morisson 56). This dependence on an African-American Other reverberates in the song lyrics of hardcore punks who equally rely on the subject position of the minority in order to be credible as individual outcasts engaged in rebellious activity. Black Flag’s “White Minority” exemplifies how this self-marginalization is tied to racial allusions and the black/white dichotomy within American culture (cf. Cornford). The song “Slaves” (1981) by L.A. band Bad Religion furthers this stylization, expressing opposition to a conservative government by means of allusions to a slave/master dichotomy which necessarily carries racial connotations given the history of the USA: “And we’re all just slaves under stricter masters / We’re all slaves under stricter masters / We’re slaves.” Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, describes such a reliance on racially coded minority positions as the “parasitical nature of white freedom” (57); her critical approach can be read as an analogy to the phenomena described in Traber’s critique of Los Angeles punks. He argues that “without the Other they cease to exist” and thus reveals how independence, protest, opposition, and the freedom of white punks are dependent on the existence and the persistence of the suppressed positions of non-white minorities. Morrison states that “American means white” (47) but, as exemplified by the line “You’re an American” in Black Flag’s “White Minority,” hardcore punks reject such a position for themselves. They construct a virtual antagonist—“the stricter masters,” as Bad Religion put it—helping the involved teenagers to distance themselves from the mainstream connotations of the attribute “American” by striving for its alleged opposite. Traber summarizes that without the stereotypical and also racist idea of “inferior, violent, and criminal nonwhites” an opposing position to the mainstream cannot be established; on the contrary, it ends up being “an agent” of the repression it had originally set out to criticize (“L.A.’s White Minority” 49).

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Hardcore punk’s contradictory identity politics, i.e. the self-marginalization of suburban middle-class whites as underprivileged minorities, is not the only example of youth cultural entanglement in racialized discourses during the 1980s. The Huckleberry Finn reference revealed the longstanding phenomenon of white culture’s appropriation and romanticization of black stereotypes—“Romancing the Shadow” in Morrison’s words (29)—and Reeds’s very recent approach to Twain’s novel points towards the discourse’s broader reverberations at the end of the 20th century. First, he calls the book “a festival of what linguists call code switching, and of identity changing, where in order to get out of a jam characters must create bogus biographies on the spot,” thus establishing a parallel to the changes and switches that white adolescents undergo in order to take on the self-marginalized roles of rebellious punk outcasts in the 1980s (382). Second, Reed illustrates the dependence of Huck on the enslaved character Jim, which Morrison already examined and critically analyzed, by quoting Huck directly and comparing the situation to further pop-cultural examples: “Huck cries, ‘I want my nigger,’ like the children of the suburbs who are addicted to gangster rap” (384). Reed, by his reference to gangster rap, not only incorporates a phenomenon that emerged in Los Angeles during the mid 1980s but also names a pop-cultural example of a youth culture that presents an often highly exaggerated version of “blacks as criminal suspects” which seemed particularly appealing to white adolescent suburbanites (384; cf. Baldwin 166). The 1988 record Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A. (Niggaz with Attitude) is probably the most telling example of this trend. Reflecting “the brutal circumstances that define the boundaries within which most ghetto poor black youths in Los Angeles must live,” it deals with territorial differences in Los Angeles’s sprawl and creates a musical counterpart to skate and hardcore punk’s description of suburbia (Dyson 64). With songs such as “Fuck the Police,” however, they not only parallel hardcore punks’ and skateboarders’ conflicts with and contempt for the police;62 lines about officers who think “[t]hey have the authority to kill a minority” also incorporate a dichotomous description of a minority status that hardcore punks also used to stylize themselves as outcasts. Essentially carrying the messages of early gangster rap as well as hardcore punk into the 1990s, N.W.A. rapper Ice Cube in the title song of his 1990 album Amerikkka’s Most Wanted proclaims, “It’s time you take a trip to the suburbs / Let ‘em see a nigger invasion / Point blank, on a Caucasian.” The fact that this kind of music’s “biggest registered consumers are suburban white kids” shows how a core component of 80’s hardcore punk, namely the questioning of white suburbia, remained appealing for a white audience throughout and beyond the 1980s (Baldwin 166). The fear of becoming a “White Minority” that Black Flag had put into play early on in 1980 reverberates in gangster rap, while Ice Cube textually invokes sub62 | Cf. e.g. No Comply: Skateboarding Speaks on Authority by Long and Jensen; also cf. the songs “Police Story” by Black Flag, “Senseless Violence” by Rich Kids on LSD (RKL), or “S.A.T.C.” by Agression.

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urbia’s worst nightmare: the unwanted “influx of inner-city populations,” i.e. “‘encroaching’ blacks or other nonwhites” (Traber, “L.A.’s White Minority” 35; Parker 11).63 It reveals how the rebellious stylizations of suburban youths rely on racial discourses that often merely reinforce the stereotypes of a conservative middle class.64 Whereas gangster rap’s “expressions of violence certainly reflect the actual life circumstances of many black and Latino youth caught in L.A. ghetto living” (Dyson 65), the “identity changing” that underlies hardcore punk lyrics and constitutes its participants as a white minority in the normative and privileged landscape of middle-class suburbia is enmeshed in a contradictory logic (Reed 382). Barthes’s understanding of (cultural) codes helps to elucidate to what extent the significance of a “White Minority” generates a break within such a system of codes (cf. Barthes, Semiotic Challenge 288). The demographic changes that were taking place in California may indicate a decrease in the percentage of white population but the hegemonic supremacy which becomes manifest in “all the major institutions of US society,” is hardly affected by this (Cornford n.pag.). Maharidge illustrates, Even now as the number of whites hovers around the 50 percent level, they are able to maintain political control because electoral power among the various ethnic groups has not reached parity. When California votes, it is largely a white vote, between 80 and 85 percent of the votes cast in any given election. (5)

It becomes evident that whites possess the status of a majority on the level of political power. In contrast to “many nonwhites [who] live in a society isolated from the one in which they would vote and often struggle to survive in third-world conditions” (5), as members of the white middle class hardcore punks belong to a social stratum that legitimizes its privileged status through allegedly democratic elections. Therefore, the pairing of the adjective “white” with the noun “minority” takes on oxymoronic characteristics that break with conventional codes: A white minority in Southern California suburbia is something that has not been “already-seen,”

63 | This is not to say that gangster rap was directly influenced by hardcore or skate punk. Its entanglement in older (oral) African-American traditions such as Signifyin’ is much more important for the genre’s evolution. The popularity of gangster rap among white teenagers just reemphasizes the position of a (racially connoted) minority that is often searched for in youth cultural mediations and activities. 64 | Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra assumes that the later (early 90s) interest of major music labels in grunge music was caused by the fear that “a whole generation of white suburban kids [would] get their entire political brain food from rap music” (qtd. in Malott and Peña 67). Sarcastically he explains the reactionary politics he senses behind the industries’ promotion of bands such as Nirvana or Pearl Jam: “‘We can’t have them [i.e. the kids] listening to this ‘negro’ music, so we’ll give them some loud guitar music besides metal’” (67).

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“already-read,” or “already-done” so that the term “minority” works as a disruptive attribute in a code with the adjective “white.” Hardcore punk lyrics can in fact reflect and put into play the white population’s fear of becoming a minority in numbers, but the power-political positions of privilege which make white Americans a majority on the political level are not really questioned here. Because of their self-imposed looks and appearance they may have felt like a minority in their neighborhoods, high schools, and colleges but the examination of the hardcore punks’ own ranks reveals that they were anything but a “white minority.” There is no doubt that the homogeneous and conformist suburbs of California in the 1970s and 1980s in particular began to develop a more diversified structure that also changed the relation of whites to other ethnic groups. Nevertheless, during concerts and skate sessions a teenage skate or hardcore punk merely had to take a look to the left or right to realize that he still belonged to a majority: a majority of white men.

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Gender: Bored Boys and Skate Punk Lyrics There’s nothing to do Excitement level zero I can’t find a girl Cos they’re all out chasing heros We’re just a wrecking crew bored boys with nothing to do Alone in a corner of a room with a knife Better ways out than taking your life Home’s not so bad, don’t need to run Come join our primitive ways of fun We’re just a wrecking crew bored guys with nothing to do Safety in numbers an enemy to beat Let’s overturn cars and rip up the street I’m tired of being a peaceful citizen Noise and destruction are in my vision We’re just a wrecking crew bored boys with nothing to do You’re not all by yourself You’ve got a few friends When we become one The violence never ends We’re just a wrecking crew bored boys with nothing to do “Wrecking Crew.” Adolescents. Adolescents. Frontier Records, 1981.

“Although the nation seemed to skew toward conservative thinking in the 1980s,” Batchelor and Stoddart explain, “the music industry had room for different brands of masculinity, represented on different ends by Springsteen and Prince” (128). Alluding to two popular singers who appealed to a larger mainstream audience and exemplified spectral extremes of possible gender stylization, they describe flexibility in attitudes towards masculinity that interestingly did not hold true for the hardcore punk scenes of suburban California. While Madonna’s “freewheeling sexuality challenged societal norms” and Cindy Lauper’s “primary agenda seemed defying the moral majority” (118, 131), the skateboarding hardcore punks of the decade seemed to stick to rather “traditional” gender roles. The Adolescent’s song “Wrecking Crew” is exemplary in this respect and simultaneously incorporates a variety of tropes that pick up on the preceding findings and the allusions to the intersectional categories of suburbia, the middle class, and their relations to race.

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The first verse is already characterized by both the subject matter of gender and the category of suburbia. The introductory lines “There’s nothing to do / Excitement level zero” build a parallel to the desolate and boring characteristics of a conformist suburb and its “paucity of public life” (Hansen and Ryan 184), while the complaint “I can’t find a girl / Cos they’re all out chasing heroes” establishes a connection to the first-person narrator’s frustration about his inability to find a girlfriend, which finally leads to a situation where “violence never ends.” On a textual level this mirrors the L.A. hardcore punk scene of “sexually frustrated teen boys,” as Mullen describes it (Lexicon Devil 159): a quite different scenario from the performances of the likes of Prince and Madonna. TSOL’s song “Code Blue” (1981) plays into this tendency. Its introductory lines read, “I never got along with the girls at my school / Filling me up with all their morals and their rules / They’d pile all their problems on my head / I’d rather go out and fuck the dead. / ‘Cause I can do what I want and they won’t complain.” A reference to Robinson, which deals with the interplay of frustration, masculinity, and violence, can be established here. The acts of destruction and violence suggested by the Adolescent’s identification as a “Wrecking Crew” or TSOL’s necrophilic allusions, can be read in connection with an alleged blockade of masculinity that Robinson criticizes as an argument for “calls for ‘male liberation’” (129). She argues: The idea that men are emotionally blocked owes its sense and its dominance to a particular construction of male heterosexuality and the male body: male sexual energies are constantly flowing, sexual arousal “automatic” and uncontrollable, and any blockage of these energies, and the substance through which those energies are expressed, leads either to psychological and physical damage or to violent explosions. (136)

The concept of “blocked masculinity,” which Robinson identifies in authors who call themselves “men’s liberationists,” allows her to conclude that “the cure for what ails these men is not, as we might have hoped, the abolition of patriarchy, but rather the uninhibited release of emotional energies and ‘natural’ impulses” (135, 136, 139). She not only provides one way of critically reading hardcore punk lyrics, but also opens a possibility to link them to a broader context of 1980s popular culture and especially contemporary trends in Hollywood film. Many of hardcore punk’s allusions to gender relations were in fact pretty close to what was happening on the nation’s movie screens. One of the most financially successful films of 1981 was Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. The adventures of archeologist Indiana Jones presented in this movie—a heroic masculine figure that the singer of the Adolescents’ song might suspect of being chased by girls—constitute a “combination of rememoration (harking back to a romanticized patriarchal past), narcissistic individualism, incipient authoritarian leadership and fun,” according to Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner (239). These attributes all seem to reverberate in the exemplary lyrics: the longing for heterosexual relationships, individual enforcement of (sexual) desires, (anti-) authoritarian organiza-

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tion, i.e. leadership in a “crew,” and the implementation of “primitive ways of fun.” These tropes of heterosexual men that are frustrated by women’s self-determined choice of who “to chase” or who “to get along with” and the attempt to reinstall patriarchal power through violence are by no means new. Diane Negra sees them as a part of the “neoconservative turn of late-twentieth-century American culture,” which picks up on classic Hollywood formulas “working most frequently to excavate heroic and empowered images of masculinity and to discredit images of active femininity” (56, 44). She names John Derek’s 1981 Tarzan, the Ape Man as another filmic example of “masculine rejuvenation in an era of urbanization and rhetorical devotion to the social/economic power of the New Woman” (56).65 The figure of Tarzan as the “white primitive” not only parallels male adolescent suburbanites trying to hold their ground in an era of suburbanization through wild and equally “primitive fun” as described in “Wrecking Crew” (58), its masculine primitivism also evokes the ‘necrophillic rapist’ described in “Code Blue.” The narrator of TSOL’s song imagines his deeds to dead girls: “Never on the rag or say leave me alone / They don’t scream and they don’t moan / Don’t even cry if I shoot in their hair / Lying on the table she smiles and she stares.” The lyrics illustrate hardcore punk’s allusions to 1980s cinema and follow the trend of 1981 as a year in which people sat “through hideous horror movies about psychopaths” as one New York Times critic describes it (qtd. in Negra 43).66 Oxnard skate punk band Ill Repute adds to this tendency with their song “Sleepwalking” (1983): I wake up in a cold sweat Sometimes far away from home And I don’t know where I’ve been I don’t know what I’ve done The streets are dark and lonely And there’s blood upon my hands A scream keeps ringing in my ear My shoes are filled with sand

65 | That adolescent skate punks in fact were influenced by such movies becomes evident in JFA singer Brian Brannon’s account of his first visit to the local skate park. He remembers, “I wore a Tarzan suit that my mom made me and that went over pretty good with everybody there. […] I just wanted to rock that, it was for like, you know, I was into it. My Tarzan suit” (Brannon, Personal Interview). 66 | In the documentary American Hardcore (2006), TSOL singer Jack Grisham summarizes the misogynistic stylization by proudly claiming: “Me being a violent, robbing, grave-digging rapist was part of my world. Like, this is what we do, man. Yeah, that chick passed out and I pissed in her face, so what?”

2 C ONTENT The next day all the papers write Another girl was killed last night Her mutilated body Was found out on the beach “Sleepwalking.” Ill Repute. Oxnard—Land of No Toilets. Mystic Records, 1983.

Just as movies of the early 1980s—especially werewolf narratives such as An American Werewolf in London or The Howling (both 1981)—“update classical codes through humor and a foregrounding of male sexuality as part of the psychological matrix of horror” (Negra 59), the lyrics of hardcore punks put these tropes into play and transfer them into their Californian environment of suburbia and the beach. As will be shown in the examination of concert flyers and skateboard magazines, the horror motif constantly reoccurs in skate punk media and promotes allusions to violence. In addition to schemes of violence and horror, however, hardcore punk also offers a different way of expressing discontent with the respective participants’ living conditions: the position of the victim. Although still coupled to acts of violence, it incorporates an additional aspect that links back to Robinson’s account of masculinity. Another filmic example points towards the direction adopted here: In John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988), the protagonist John McLane (Bruce Willis) is introduced as “an idealized image of American heroism and working-class masculinity—violent, independent, white, muscular, and victorious,” however confronted with a “personal crisis [that] was expressed not through emotion, but through direct talk and action” (Gates 111). The anxieties that result from McLane’s divorce from his successful and upwardly mobile wife imply “the threat of feminism” which the film alludes to (Overpeck 199). The violent actions of the protagonist were rendered in a discourse that evoked the “changes to American business culture and family structure that stood in opposition to values espoused by Reagan” (Overpeck 200), and McLane’s vigorously wounded body “became a site where masculine crisis was inscribed” (Gates 111). As already quoted, Robinson assumes that “[t]he white male victim—personally, individually targeted—is the emblem of the current crisis in white masculinity” (5). She thus offers an interpretation of the decade’s preoccupation with victimized males, as well as their involvement in violent negotiations and the reinstallment of patriarchal power relations through an uninhibited release of energies (5).67 This phenomenon is omnipresent in the song lyrics of hardcore punk as they establish a coherence between sexual frustration and acts of violence. Robinson’s

67 | Also cf. Savran who describes “the ascendancy of a new and powerful figure in U.S. culture: the white male as victim” (4).

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remarks show that the foundation of a “Wrecking Crew” can hardly be justified as a self-evident compensation for blocked emotions but, on the contrary, the formation of such a ‘gang’ mirrors the reference to ideological conceptions of masculinity, which are “violently at odds with the spirit behind women’s demands that men ‘open up,’ express themselves honestly, and release their repressed emotions” (136). Like the arguments of “men’s liberationists” the song lyrics of hardcore punk move within a discursive field that contests the possibility of an open and honest demonstration of feelings with an uninhibited release of destructive energy. The accounts of the failure of desired heterosexual relationships exemplified in “Wrecking Crew” and “Code Blue” highlight the victimization examined by Robinson. The fact that the first-person narrators associate the reasons for their unfulfilled sexuality with the self-determined decisions of the girls shows how they feel personally attacked and hurt and therefore take on roles similar to those of victimized males. Santa Barbara based skate punk band Rich Kids On LSD (RKL) constitutes an interesting example illuminating this argument. In “Not Guilty” (1984) they lament how “Police will fuck up all our lives;” how “[t]his country doesn’t like you;” and how the narrator apparently is “Not guilty, just a victim.” To the phrase “just a victim,” the singer adds, “I’ve lost my mind,” which incorporates an allusion to the identity crisis that Robinson diagnosed within this context. While establishing an ironic reference to the privileged backgrounds of many skate and hardcore punks, Rich Kids On LSD create the image of a victimized “pariah” (cf. Weyland 181; Traber, Whiteness 4). Similarly, the band D.I. in the song “OC Life” (1985) express their disgust for the superficial life in Orange County, while the first person narrator again seems to force the credibility of his position as a stereotyped outcast by stating that he finds “himself labeled as a victim.” TSOL emphasize this proclamation and combine it with the threat of a global conflict that points towards militaristic imagery in skate punk flyers and similar allusions in Thrasher magazine (cf. subchapters 2.3.3 and 2.4): In their song “Word War III” (1981) they sing, “Where do I fit in this government / I find no choice / Third world war / And you’re the victims / Third world war / And you’re the victims.”

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Flyer for a concert by Los Angeles bands FEAR and Wasted Youth: “How does it feel to be the innocent victim!”

From Turcotte, Bryan Ray and Christopher T. Miller. Fucked Up + Photocopied: Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1999.

The deployment of the victim trope goes along with Traber’s concept of self-marginalization and the longing for authentic street credibility that was sought in the position of the sub-urban. In dialogical correspondence with the action movies of the decade, hardcore punk lyrics couple this victimized role with the exertion of violence and thus tap into an ideological setting which Kellner describes as “a spe-

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cific set of images of male power, American innocence and strength, and warrior heroism which serve as vehicles of masculist and patriotic ideologies which were significant during the Reagan era” (60). Kellner sees this discourse exemplarily personified in the figure of John Rambo from Ted Kotcheff’s 1982 film First Blood. A key element of the movie, he points out, is the “remasculinization and re-establishment of white male power after defeat in Vietnam and assaults on male power by feminist and civil rights movements” (60). Kellner’s statements can be reapplied to the scope of lyrics dealing with gender issues in skate and hardcore punk: They similarly negotiate male power and thus participate in the decade’s discursive localization of men between victimized innocence and violent hypermasculinity. The song “Hang Ten in East Berlin” (1985) by D.I. illustrates this configuration.68 The narrator starts out with a masculinized self-description and links it to ‘deadly fun’ and racialized allusions: “I’m a stormtrooper / Tan and young / Riding the waves of death and having fun / Master race mayhem on the beach / The Fourth Reich is within our reach.” Resembling the character of Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who bombed a Vietnamese village just to surf its beaches in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), the song’s narrative deploys the Rambo-like figure of a stormtrooper to incorporate implementations of a “Fourth Reich” on the beach. It evokes associations of a militaristic invasion and inscribes it into Southern California surfing culture and the fun of riding waves. The destructive characteristics of male protagonists which circulate in 1980s popular culture, most notably in film, link back to the Adolescents’ “Wrecking Crew” and constitute an important interconnection to associations accompanying skateboard culture: The lines “Let’s overturn cars and rip up the streets” and “I’m tired of being a peaceful citizen” directly correspond to Thrasher’s “Skate and Destroy” mantra, and skateboard-related songs such as the Faction’s eponymous song “Skate and Destroy” (1983), Bl’ast’s “Surf and Destroy” (1986) or JFA’s “Great Equalizer” (ca. 1984), a dystopic post nuclear war fantasy in which “bands of skaters [appear] in roving packs” that have “the adaptability” to survive an atomic attack. Skateboarding is linked to discourses of demolishment, violence, and war, and as the Adolescents’ seem to suggest in “Wrecking Crew,” “Noise and destruction” are skate punk’s major objectives. These violent groups formed because—plain and simple—there was “nothing to do.” Mallot and Peña paraphrase Dead Kennedys’ singer Jello Biafra in order to point out that “[t]o understand punk is to understand that punk rock emerged as a result of a general boredom, disgust, and rejection of mainstream culture” (62). Their statement emphasizes the importance that the factor of boredom holds for the subcultures in question here. The fact that the participating teenagers do not act from social necessity but rather from base motives such as boredom and sexual 68 | To ‘hang ten’ is an expression from surfer jargon referring to a “[l]ongboarding maneuver during which the rider hangs all 10 toes off the front of the surfboard—the most celebrated form of noseriding” (Warshaw, Encyclopedia 248).

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frustration highlights the impact of their privileged position as white middle-class males. As The Faction sing in “Skate Harassment,” for suburban youth in the 1980s it is “[t]ime to have some real fun, time to put boredom under the gun.”69 They are neither faced with hopeless situations nor do they have to fear or flee from any repercussions but rather look for—apparently radical—ways of generating fun. Bearing in mind the white men’s identity crisis examined by Robinson, the normative middle-class origin appears to be the only reason for skate punk mayhem: With the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, multiculturalism, and feminism, young white males of the middle class start to feel invisible and in the case of the hardcore punk subculture it seems as if they see “[n]oise and destruction,” skating and destroying, and uniting in “roving packs” as the only way to struggle for visibility and recognition. The “male bonding experience” expressed in the lyrics presented incorporates a military jargon into skate punk that implies an almost institutionalized organization of adolescent males (Robinson 140). Band names such as Youth Brigade or Jodie Foster’s Army (JFA) and songs such as the Adolescents’ “Brats in Battalions” (1987) or Suicidal Tendencies’ “Join the Army” (1987)—including the telling chorus line “Dressed down, homeboyz, minority - Join the Army”—provide many opportunities for young white men to gain self-assurance by associating with militaristically styled groups. While they try to rant against a normative mainstream and renounce their suburban middle-class background, they rely on stereotyped images and tropes that are part of the popular culture which builds the discursive context of their everyday lives. Apparently unimpressed by new contestations of gender that were being explored by musicians such as Madonna or Prince, they stick to rather conservative images of masculinity and form skateboarding packs of punks who copy the decade’s action (anti-) heroes. The search for “safety in numbers” as described in the lyrics of “Wrecking Crew” exemplifies the empowering moment skate and hardcore punks find in their groups. It is another proof of the fact that this union of young men personifies anything but the position of a “White Minority.”

2.2.2

Conclusion: Beyond the Lyrics

The analysis of exemplary skate and hardcore punk songs reveals to what extent their lyrics are deeply involved in the mass-mediated context of their time. They are, with Lipsitz, “nothing if not dialogic” and the dialogue that they enter puts their texts in relation to the context of 1980s popular culture and the images and 69 | The band Bored Suburban Youth from South Carolina only constitutes one of many examples which show that the phenomenon of bored males grouping together in hardcore punk bands reverberated far beyond Southern California. Their telling band name proves that the social circumstances of the participants were often directly reflected and located within the space of suburbia.

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values of white middle-class suburbia (Time Passages 102). The topics they invoke, the discontent they formulate, and the strategies they deploy to articulate narratives of rebellious subjectivity, outcast identity, and stylized individuality rely on tropes that not only pervade American literature and popular culture, but which characterize the conflicts that developed from the early manifestations of a generation gap. In this regard, the lyrics of skate punk constitute only one among numerous forms of youthful participation in an everlasting discourse of teenage discontent and the striving for emancipation from a previous generation. Savage links the emergence of the teenager as an American icon to the decades following World War II: The post-war spread of American values would be spearheaded by the idea of the Teenager. This new type was the ultimate psychic match for the times: living in the now, pleasure-seeking, product-hungry, embodying the new global society where social inclusion was to be granted through purchasing power. The future would be Teenage. (Savage 465)

The “Gimme Decade” of the 1980s seems to exemplify this development to an extreme. Consumption appeared to dominate everything and thus the persona of the teenager and the ability to gain social status through purchasing power grew even further. The song lyrics of skateboarding hardcore punks—sometimes witty, sometimes blunt, mostly banal on the surface, but at times suggestive in their blankness—are a product of this time. They rely on the 1980s and suburban Southern California for their cultural fabric and thus necessarily reproduce its discursive setting, ranging from ironic cynicism to racist stereotypes and from class-conscious ridicule to hypermasculine machismo; they reproduce a “suburban state of mind that lurched precariously between rage and self-mockery” (Hoskyns 317). A consideration of the rebellious connotations of skateboarding and hardcore punk illustrates the contradictions that emerge in skate punk lyrics’ attempt to dis-articulate what surrounded its participants in a “bland Republican paradise” (313): Carrying the “racism and homophobia [that] lurked in even the hippest quarters” of Los Angeles, they often merely re-articulate this paradise’s ideology (309). In this way, they fall short of Lyotard’s notion of the postmodern and contribute to what can be regarded as the grand (meta- or master-) narrative of suburban California. The elliptic style of the lyrics and their staccato-like realization in ultra fast and short songs, however, leaves blanks that point towards a realm beyond the literal meaning of its texts. The blanks are filled with sound, with noise, voice, and with bodily expression that is part of their performance at concerts or during skate sessions. Traces of this material side of music pervade all forms of skate and hardcore punk medialization. An interesting example can be found in a commercial mainstream account of punk subculture: Marcus mentions the character of Zed in Jerry Paris’s film Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985) and introduces him as an example of pop-cultural Dada, while his description of the “punk gang leader” is interesting and revealing in another aspect:

2 C ONTENT In his mid-twenties, but seemingly superannuated—fat, balding, sweating, drooling—Zed heads thugs signed as punks by their multicolored hair and studded leather, by 1985 the diffused and floating signs of London 1976. They terrorize a neighborhood for lack of anything else to do with it. Zed is so full of rage he can barely talk: you can feel his vocal cords breaking up every time he opens his mouth. (Marcus, Lipstick Traces 198)

Although the punk gang’s behavior once again points towards the formation of “bored boys with nothing to do,” another detail in Marcus’s description implies the material and physical side that punk particularly experienced in the aftermath of hardcore. Zed’s rage no longer finds a symbolic outlet in the mid 70s punk uniform that, by the time of the release of the movie in 1985, had already become a commercialized parody of itself. What is really disturbing about him is the physical presence of his breaking voice. Zed can barely talk. His utterances are disrupted by textual blanks that lack semantic clarity, prevent interpretation, and, instead, foreground the material presence of his voice. English journalist Mick Farren comments on hardcore punk and implies the psychological triggers of Zed’s rage while simultaneously pointing towards reasons for kids like the Adolescents to organize in “Wrecking Crews”: Their hatred is immediate and directed at the most available targets: parents, hippies, the polyester and soap opera people of Beverly Hills and Hollywood... They even hate the commercial new wave—‘powerpop queers in narrow ties’… but the majority of these Reaganland kids have no way out. [...] they are locked into a going-nowhere spiral of hostility. They hate so hard that they have no space to grow. (qtd. in Heylin 538)

The breaking of Zed’s voice indicates a way—a realm of blankness—that might after all provide a space for hardcore punks and skating adolescents to grow or at least to add a scope that goes beyond the raging lyrics of their songs. It implies a material friction that operates apart from, or more precisely in addition to, the semantic meanings of the songs and thus suggests a physical dimension of skate punk expression. In the third part of this book I come back to this phenomenon and explore it in more detail. For now, I will continue my contextual reading of skate punk media and extend it to the handbills that informed the respective participants about the concerts where they would hear the songs that I have discussed.

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2.3

F LYERS : S K ATE P UNK A RT AND S CRIBBLED H ANDBILLS

2.3.1

Copied in Seconds

“The invention of the Xerox machine was an epochal event in the history of communication and, therefore, in the history of civilization,” states David Owen in his book Copies in Seconds, which recounts the story of American physicist Chester Carlson’s invention of electrophotography, and the slow but successful development of the photocopier (Owen 13). That this invention was also of major importance for what Penelope Spheeris labeled The Decline of Western Civilization in her 1981 documentary on the burgeoning hardcore punk scene of Los Angeles, implies the multifaceted applications that the new technology facilitated. The Xerox machine, or photocopier as we know it today, “didn’t arrive until 1960, when a small photographic supply company in Rochester, New York, shipped the first Haloid XeroX 914 Office Copier” (9). It is thus not precisely correct when Schweinoch states that the “advent of the punk movement roughly coincided with the invention of the black and white photocopier,” which he dates around the year 1975 (248). However, the connection he implies between the technical device of the copy machine and the development of punk rock, as well as other youth cultural scenes cannot be denied: Access to a photocopier enabled young punks in the USA and around the world to create masses of handbills, so-called flyers, “a key communicative tool within the scene” and arguably the most visible evidence of a youth that, in the eyes of frightened parents, might indeed have personified both the beginnings and the anxieties of social and cultural decline (Büsser 181). As one of the most prolific medial representations of hardcore punk and subsequently of skate punk, the flyer constitutes an essential medium for informing the respective scenes’ participants about concerts and other cultural events. “[I]f you did hear about a punk rock show and you did go to it […] they would hand you flyers for the next one” summarizes Scott Radinsky, former vocalist of Simi Valley’s Scared Straight, implying the medium’s importance for the maintenance of a striving scene (Radinsky, Personal Interview). Astonishingly, within scholarly approaches to punk culture, analyses of flyers have received only very marginal attention. Wohlrabe assumes that the emergence of the flyer in the realm of popular music is especially linked with “the rise of the electronic music movement” in the 1980s (4), which mirrors the tendency of academic as well as popular approaches to concentrate on the medium in its role for the techno, rave, and house scenes (cf. Jordan et al.; McCarthy; Parkes; Rose; Thornton).70 A major exploration of “social symbioses of music-centered community life in urban spaces revolving around the medium of flyers” is presented in Riemel’s 2005 anthology Flyer Soziotope - Topographie of a Media Phenomenon [sic], which assem70 | The importance of flyers in the Hip Hop scene has not received any substantial studies either (cf. Poschard 202; Schweinoch 248).

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bles inquiries from various approaches, including sociological and psychological questions, as well as comments and numerous examples of flyer designs. It includes Büsser’s essay “Colorful Chaos at the End of an Era,” which concentrates on 1980s American hardcore punk while locating its flyers somewhere between trash and avant-garde (cf. 180 ff), i.e. amid the tension that characterized the decade. Büsser describes the “badly photocopied motifs cut out of newspapers—ranging from mushroom clouds and porn through mass murderers and the ever-present face of Ronald Reagan” as an “interplay of anti-aesthetics and political protest” and thus summarizes the topics that dominated flyer imagery (181). In order to establish a culturally informed analysis of skate punk flyers in the following, it is necessary to relate their hand-drawn images, photographic depictions, and textual contents to the broader context of 1980s culture.71 A condensed description of flyers that illuminates the connection between hardcore punk and skateboarding comes from Dogtown skateboarder Tony Alva: If you had a punk rock band, you had to create punk rock flyers. Of course the only way to have 100% of the creative power was to do them your self [sic]. There was no Kinko’s [copy shop], so it wasn’t easy to even make copies of the flyer once you attempted to even design one. There was a primitive barrage of artistic subversity that usually dominated our flyers. The Skoundrelz [Alva’s band] & my brother’s band Ozie Hares were our shitty little attempts at being hardcore. It was kinda cool to be opening for other bands like the Circle Jerks, X, Black Flag, China White and Bad Religion. It added punk rock integrity to our little fucked up band. The sense of pissed off humor added even more interest for me. I’m glad I had a chance to be a part of the LA/SF punk scene. The flyers all fucked up and photocopied, are definitely a jolt to my brain 25 years later. (Alva qtd. in Turcotte 214)

Alva’s retrospective account of the importance of punk rock flyers illuminates their function within the scene. Most importantly, he mentions the creative power that resulted from the do-it-yourself approach flyer production is based on. Alva’s description alludes to Moore’s conception of punk and hardcore punk as reactions to the “condition of postmodernity” (Moore, “Postmodernism and Punk” 305). While the “primitive barrage of artistic subversity” combined with a “sense of pissed off humor” relates to Moore’s understanding of a “culture of deconstruction,” the flyers’ ability to enhance an “underground” network of information alludes to a “culture of authenticity” (cf. 308ff.). The moments of bricolage that are formed by the cut-and-paste techniques underlying the flyers’ graphic compositions supple71 | For my analysis I consider flyers as skate punk if their imagery includes at least one visual reference to the activity of skateboarding, i.e. the depiction of a skateboard, a skateboarder or skating terrain. Many skate punk bands, however, also produced flyers that did not directly allude to skateboarding. In those cases, it was/is only through subcultural knowledge about the respective bands, their members, and their songs that one would associate them with skateboard culture.

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ment their banal and “fucked up” anti-aesthetics with creative potential.72 Whether demonstrating deconstructive techniques or authentic articulations, the medial characteristics of the flyers hark back to a variety of preceding developments.

2.3.2

Flyer Genealogies: Historical Traces

The “absence of professionalism and the impression of a hurriedly cut-and-pasted disposable product” implied by Alva’s remarks was by no means an entirely new technique of sub- or youth cultural expression, let alone an innovative addition within the scope of artistic creation (Büsser 181). Historically, the emergence of the skate punk flyers in question here can be seen in close connection to the genealogies of the political handbill and artistic currents concerned with the technique of collage. Although the similarities with and influences on punk that followed avant-garde phenomena such as early twentieth-century Dada have already been examined—most prominently in Marcus’s Lipstick Traces (1989)—their obvious connections to flyer creation and design have been largely overlooked so far.73 The style of flyers promoting hardcore and skate punk shows during the 1980s immediately reveals similarities to the “Dadaists, who left behind few paintings or other artworks in the conventional sense, focusing instead on collages, manifestos and invitations to events, i.e. mostly bits of paper, small things” (Büsser 181). Piecing together clippings from magazines, newspapers or other leaflets, punk flyers—and consequently also those that document the California skate punk scene—continue Dada’s ad hoc assemblages and enter into the tradition of papiers collés, which had been introduced by the European artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque as compositions in which different materials, mostly paper, were glued and pasted (cf. Taylor 8). Such composite imagery, however, was not unknown before the twentieth century: “The seventeenth-century Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens freely added ‘improvements’ to the drawings of others, regardless of modern attitudes to originality” and thus implies a trajectory in the development of collage techniques that reaches back to early modern Europe (8); interestingly, a period that also received much scholarly attention for the role of political leaflets and handbills, i.e. early versions of flyer deployment (cf. e.g. Bach 1997; Schilling 1990).

72 | For a comprehensive definition of bricolage that transfers the concept from its usage in anthropology—most prominently by Claude Levi-Strauss—to the analysis of subcultures, cf. Hebdige’s chapter on “Style as bricolage” (102-106). Particularly important for my examination is the term’s reference to “conventional insignia” that “were stripped of their original connotations” in order to convey a certain (subcultural) style (104). 73 | While Marcus mainly focuses on the Sex Pistols and the earlier punk scenes, Nehring (2006) concentrates on American hardcore punk since the 1980s and similarly connects it to the avant-garde movement of the Situationist International. He does not include a discussion of flyers either.

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This is not to say, of course, that someone like Tony Alva was consciously alluding to the techniques or artwork of Picasso (let alone Rubens) and the “first genuine modernist collages [that] emerged […] in the middle of the artistic upheaval known today as Cubism” (Taylor 11). However, just as early twentieth-century European artists encountered cities “covered in printed ephemera in the form of commercial hand-bills, entertainment posters, political massages,” which greeted “the citizen as a medley, as a confusing and varied set of signs” (8), skate punks at the beginning of the 1980s entered a “culture driven, and dominated, by the production and circulation of the image” (G. Thompson 5; also cf. Batchlor and Stoddart 77). The comparison between the early and the late twentieth century thus emphasizes how the respective image-laden landscapes can be reflected within the creative output of each period’s cultural productions. Mass-mediated ephemera constitute the (cultural) fabric of the composed artifacts of the respective times: While the modern European city had provided the material for the collages of Cubism and Dada, the visual output of the 1980s—especially boosted by the “Video Revolution,” Silicon Valley’s push for the personal computer, and the arrival of arcade games like PacMan—made up an infinite pool of images and references that also pervade the flyers of California’s skate punks as newly composed objets trouvés (cf. G. Thompson 92ff., 25ff.). Locating the early predecessors of these flyers among political handbills and leaflets promotes the correspondences between medial and artistic productions at both the century’s advent and the early 1980s. As Schweinoch notes, handbills and pamphlets “have been and continue to be produced in greater numbers in times of cultural, social and political upheaval: revolutions, wars, etc.” (244). Despite his contention that today’s output of the medium is unrelated to such upheaval, Schweinoch’s statement suggests in what way, for example, the impressions of the First World War profoundly impacted the artifacts of Dadaism. At the same time, the statement implies that the “Culture Wars” of the 1980s—“the battles over gay rights, abortion, education and the arts,” as well as the debates about multiculturalism and the backlash against women, immigrants and ethnic minorities (G. Thompson 31)—provided the context of “upheaval” within which the flyers of the time emerged. The point of this juxtaposition, of course, is not to draw a direct parallel between the traumas of military conflict during the World Wars and the experiences of skate punks in suburban southern California. Instead, it stresses the importance of flyers as medial and “historical sources of great significance” whose material composition allows for insights into the political and cultural context from which they emerged (Schweinoch 244). To reapply the focus on postwar California, it is helpful to concentrate on the realm of art history and what Taylor labels the “California Collage” (119): Aware of the limitations of its geographical isolation yet mindful too of its freedom from suffocating precedents, Californian art was well placed after 1945 to evolve attitudes and practices all its own. And here again we encounter collage as the guiding principle of most

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Introducing the works of Clay Spohn and Wallace Berman as examples, Taylor interprets these artists’ assemblages of different products “to demonstrate how all objects inhabit a cycle of rising and falling value—an idea of some force in a culture already mired in rapidly changing patterns of consumption and obsolescence” (120). Such works found their most visible and probably best-known epitome in Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers (completed in 1954). Located in the Watts neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, this work symbolically mirrors the city’s character as “a mesocosm, an ordered world in which the micro and the macro, the idiographic and the nomothetic, the concrete and the abstract, can be seen simultaneously in an articulated and interactive combination” (Soja 191); in this case within the 99-foot-high assemblage of thousands of found objects. In congruence to the consumption cycles implied in Taylor’s interpretation of Spohn and Berman, the giant presentation and reorganization of objets trouvés of Watts Towers artistically pinpoints Los Angeles as the “capital of capital” and foreshadows the dawn of even more consumption-oriented decades to come (192). They constitute a material example of the way in which commercial products—ranging from railroad tracks to soft drink bottles—are involved in correspondences between artistic assemblage, economy, and culture. The artistic currents of “California Collage” also became evident within the realm of music as “the world of jazz was already supplying terms like improvisation, virtuoso, self-assertion, and naivety for use in the visual arts” (Taylor 120). These notions would later reverberate as a strong do-it-yourself ethic in the mentality of hardcore punk, although, considered musicologically, the notion of virtuoso in most cases gave way to its exact opposite and a “sense of amateurism,” since “the sound of hardcore punk was nothing if not pure white noise, rock music which had been purged of nearly all its debts to rhythm and blues or any other ‘outside’ influences” (Moore, “Postmodernism and Punk” 314, 322). Moved away from downtown locations such as Watts and the African-American communities “which spawned the striving jazz scene” (Taylor 121), hardcore punk reapplied its improvisatory self-assertion to the surrounding suburbia about three decades later. It exported earlier artistic and musical movements into the sprawl of Los Angeles and thus entered a fragmented space that itself made the city into a kind of giant collage. Besides the fact that hardcore punk flyers can be linked back to a long tradition of art and music production, it also finds contemporary parallels in other artistic movements of the 1980s. As Thompson notes, the Neo-Expressionist art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel, for example, was known and partly criticized for “simply recycling previous styles,” and thus—like the flyer designs

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in question here—indebted to a whole range of preceding influences and techniques (G. Thompson 73). Bringing “attention back to the body,” Neo-Expressionism chose a “decidedly abstract and distorted way,” making it especially interesting in the context of skate punk as it incorporated a bodily moment that also points towards the material and physical realm implied in punk music and which accompanies the activity of skateboarding (73). The exhibition “PAINTING IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: The 1980s Neo-Expressionism and Driven to Abstraction II” (2008-2009), which took place at the Riverside Art Museum, explicitly draws the connections between the State of California (Southern California in particular) and Neo-Expressionist style, while the description on its web page mentions artists who were “associated with performance art [and] punk music” (cf. “Painting in Southern California”). It is possible to approach skate punk flyers within the context of a Neo-Expressionist reaction, interaction or correspondence to 1980s culture as they present abstracted and distorted forms and collages that depict an engagement with these surroundings. Whereas Watts Towers’s assemblage of consumer goods literary sticks out from postwar Los Angeles and the paintings on broken crockery by Julian Schnabel (not only an artist but also a dedicated surfer) establish artworks on three-dimensional material, skate punk flyers deploy a similar technique in that they take snippets from mainstream culture but then shift, i.e. copy, this material agglomeration onto the two-dimensional surface of the leaflet or handbill. That these specific media themselves have a very material side to them is an important factor which plays a decisive role in their dissemination and dispersion. In the following, I will take a closer look at exemplary skate punk flyers in order to, first, examine their relation to and meaning within the cultural context they allude to and, second, to point towards the material and physical features that take effect in their function as important bearers of skate punk information.

2.3.3

Skulls, Skeletons, and the Bomb: Skate Punk Flyers in their Cultural Context

Turcotte’s books Fucked Up and Photocopied (edited with Miller; 1999) and Punk Is Dead Punk is Everything (2007) currently offer the most detailed documentations of American punk and hardcore punk flyers, while including sections that explicitly focus on the phenomenon of skate punk (cf. Turcotte and Miller 46/47; Turcotte 211-224). Although the books provide no information about the temporal origin of the skate punk flyers depicted, it can be assumed that they all originated during the 1980s as some of the bands such as Simi Valley’s Scared Straight or Los Angeles’s Alley Cats and venues, including Costa Mesa’s Cuckoo’s Nest or Hollywood’s Cathay de Grande, only existed during that decade (cf. Turcotte 220/221). Thus the two publications provide the most comprehensive sources available for an analysis of 1980s skate punk flyer design.

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Flyer: The Skoundrelz, The Faction et al. / Flyer: Scared Straight and Fatal Error.

Both from Turcotte, Bryan Ray. Punk Is Dead Punk Is Everything. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2007.

A flyer for a concert by Alva’s band The Skoundrelz together with The Faction, Black Athletes, and Frightwig in San Francisco provides a telling example of the technique of collage and thus resembles a Dadaesque assemblage: In addition to hand-written and printed text, the flyer incorporates an image from a Batman comic and combines it with a cut out picture of a skateboard. The flyer connects a mass medial allusion to a fictional superhero with the activity of skateboarding and thus creates a collage that shows how skate punk imagery is based on fragments from popular mainstream culture. In 1986, about 50 years after the original Batman publication, comic book artist Frank Miller created the series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and established a dystopic setting for the superhero’s adventures. These publications “racked up impressive sales” and made Batman part of a broader discourse that also included movies (Daniels 149), “the most popular during the 1980s [being] science-fiction and fantasy-adventure films” (G. Thompson 98). The flyer exemplifies the way in which young people created skate punk imagery out of the pop-cultural productions they grew up exposed to, or, in the words of Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, it presents their “own dark retakes on the plastic Amerika [sic] that spawned” them (Biafra qtd. in Turcotte and Miller 9). Taylor assumes that the technique of the collage expressed “a sensibility attuned to matter in the modern city, matter under the regime of capital” (8). The Skoundrelz’s flyer seems to be pervaded by such a sensibility as it unhinges the character of Batman from its commercial presentation and incorporates it as cut-out matter in a collage that re-contextualizes it within skate punk discourse. Although the banality of the design—the clipping is scruffy and the arrangement appears arbitrary—bears witness to the adolescent urge that fostered flyer production and makes it little more

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than a pragmatic announcement of a skate punk show that just happened to take place at a time when Batman, the Dark Knight, returns, it is precisely this plain decontextualization of popular matter that implies a momentary alternative to the “regime of capital.” Regardless of whether the flyer was produced with an intentional evocation of the narratives around Batman and the hypermasculine presentation of a buff hero or as a random assemblage of contemporary objets trouvé, the hasty cutand-paste style emphasizes its material construction as papier collés, i.e. “principally glued papers” (8). It exemplifies how skate punk style relies on popular culture and how it distorts its original meanings by newly arranged assemblages. A closer look at the hand-drawn flyer that advertises a concert by the bands Scared Straight and Fatal Error shows how contemporary (media) discourses pervaded skate punk flyer styles on a variety of other levels. Representative of handdrawn punk flyers in general, the drawing that advertises the Scared Straight show is produced rather hastily without the pretension of artistic complexity. Azzerad’s description of the intensity of hardcore as comparable to the “speed of a pencil impatiently tapping on a school desk” is essentially mirrored in the drawing (13). It is easy to imagine that the flyer originated from a similar feeling of classroom impatience and the equally speedy strokes of that pencil. The flyer thus constitutes a visual manifestation of a discussion of boredom that discursively enters 80s popular culture through a whole range of different media, one example being the highly popular movies of John Hughes. Set “in shopping malls, middle-class homes, and most importantly, high school corridors” they not only evoke the same social environments of many of skate punk’s protagonists but also incorporate teenage boredom as a reoccurring trope (Batchelor and Stoddart 28). The Breakfast Club (1985), one of Hughes’ most successful films, is entirely centered on the topic of boredom as it tells the story of a group of high-school students faced with a seemingly endless Saturday of detention. The opening scenes show a close-up shot of a notebook filled with repeated scribbling of the word “Help,” which stylistically matches the improvised drawing of the flyer. It provides a visual framing for the plot which inscribes it into the vast discourse of bored adolescents seeking escape in mindless doodling—a phenomenon that ranges from desks in the auditoriums of institutions of learning to the journals of Kurt Cobain (cf. Cobain and the desks at your respective school/university). Questioning the “high school caste system” of preppies, jocks, Valley Girls and Metal-Heads (Batchelor and Stoddart 30), The Breakfast Club taps “into the idea that authority tangles with the lives of teens in a manner that cripples one’s identity and forces conformity” (29), which is paralleled in hardcore and skate punks’ attempts to distance themselves from the normative mainstream. Although the movie cast, with Judd Nelson as John Bender, provides a character sporting the ‘standard’ outfit of an early 1980s hardcore punk, i.e. boots and bandanas (cf. the photograph of Edward Colver in Blush 45; Belisto and Davis 5), Hughes’s mainstream success shows that this desire for individualism is by no means an exclusive wish of adolescent punks. On the contrary, this “idea is one of the most prevalent threads running through American

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literature and culture” and the skate punk flyers of the 1980s only provide a further outlet for its expression (Traber, “White Minority” 39). Consequently, it is questionable when Mullen describes late 70s and early 80s punk flyers as “anthropological evidence that 20th century America’s last pre-MTV, pre-cyber, last organically incubated and developed ‘oppositional youth’ movement ever even existed” (Turcotte and Miller 62). To the contrary, from its beginnings or at least pretty soon after this ‘innocent’ start, flyers seem to be massively enmeshed in the broader mainstream culture and thus constantly resonate with a variety of popular discourses and media channels.74 The scenario in the Scared Straight flyer centers on two skateboarders approaching a ramp—a quarter pipe. One of the skaters is in midair performing a jump while grabbing his board. The other leans on his board with one foot while pushing forward with the other. He wears a T-shirt that sports Scared Straight’s band symbol (two S’s divided by a large X) and there are tiny drawings on his forearms suggesting that he is tattooed. A wooden fence separates the two skateboarders from a mushroom cloud that implies the detonation of a nuclear bomb. The explosion provides the background for the capitalized lettering of the flyer’s main information: “Suburban Punks presents a day of backyard chaos with Simi Valley’s very own Scared Straight plus Fatal Error” (cf. Turcotte 221). Further lettering on the skateboard ramp adds details about the venue, date and time of the show, and the cover charge of two dollars. Another small drawing provides directions to the respective address of the venue. Despite its relative simplicity, the flyer combines various important characteristics that pervade skate punk culture and its connections to the context of 1980s suburban California and beyond. The fact that the show is presented by a group called “Suburban Punks” proves that the participants not only consciously reflect their provenance but also intentionally incorporate it in their cultural activities. Being suburban conveys a certain kind of characterization, which enhances the information about what kind of punks are organizing this concert. “Punk was urban, hardcore was suburban,” explains Los Angeles fanzine publisher and Bomp! Records founder Greg Shaw, pointing to how the term “suburban” might easily be read as a genre-specifying attribute which mediates a certain set of stylistic characteristics that the flyer recipients might expect at the advertised show (qtd. in Hoskyns 313). Additionally, the classification of the involved organizers as suburbanites contextualizes the scene depicted in the flyer. In combination with the ancillary information that concert attendees can expect a “day of backyard chaos,” the wooden fence that bisects the image suggests that the depicted skateboarders are acting within a suburban locale; i.e. that they represent precisely the chaotic element that skate punk carries over the picket fences of suburbia and right into the “private domesticity” of the middle class (Kling, Olin, and Poster, “Emergence” 7). A flyer for a concert 74 | Suicidal Tendencies even appeared on a poster/flyer that explicitly advertised their first appearance on MTV in 1984 (cf. Blush 97).

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by several skate punk groups labeled “Skate Band Extravaganza” at Los Angeles’s Startdust Ballroom similarly picks up on this representation as it foregrounds a drawing of a skateboarder in an empty swimming pool while incorporating a tiny detail of another skateboarder climbing a fence in the background (cf. Turcotte 221). Albeit hardly visible, this element emphasizes the notion of trespassing that is often associated with skateboarding and especially its development in the aftermath of the medial popularity of the Dogtown skateboarders. It supports the interpretation of the wooden fence in the Scared Straight flyer as part of a reoccurring symbolism that inscribes skate punk into the suburban realm, whereas its cultural practices are disassociated from this locale by its alternative appropriation for skateboarding. The fact that the fence in the drawing is ‘branded’ with graffiti bearing the Scared Straight symbol additionally attributes the promised chaos to skate punk expressions and, in combination with the ramp in the area in front of the fence, suggests a materially attested invasion of a backyard now confronted with chaotic activity. Skate punk, it is mediated, happens behind fences that need to be climbed first; it is an intrusion, an irruption and, consequently, an act of suburban disobedience. Flyer: Skate Band Extravaganza.

From Turcotte, Bryan Ray. Punk Is Dead Punk Is Everything. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2007.

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The picket fence adds a whole range of connotations that surpass the culture of skate punk and connect it to a much broader discourse involving American middle-class life. While its incorporation into skate punk imagery might take the form of an oversimplified and banal drawing, the fact that it appears at all can be linked back to the fence’s cultural symbolism. David Lynch’s 1986 movie Blue Velvet, called the “most influential and crucial film of its decade” (Atkinson qtd in Grindon 160), e.g. provides one of the most telling incorporations of the fence as a symbolic allusion to “the small-town ethos celebrated by Reagan’s politics as the foundation of American values” (Grindon 164). Blue Velvet “opens with the camera panning from clear blue skies to white picket fences and gardens with blooming roses and tulips” and thus establishes the fence as a status symbol that not only demarcates the privately owned home but also signifies peace, security, beauty, and prosperity (G. Thompson 106). However, the zoom into the suburban lawn reveals “the battle of the Darwinian bugs underneath” and suggests that under “the veneer of what looks like an idyll resides another world that is much more discomforting” (Grindon 164; G. Thompson 106).75 The nostalgic utopia of suburban small-town life is challenged by the violent and psychosexual encounters presented in Blue Velvet. Like other movies of the same year, e.g. Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me or David Anspaugh’s Hoosiers, Blue Velvet contrasts 1950s and 1960s nostalgia—emblematically invoked by the 50s fire truck that appears in the opening and closing scenes—with a gloomy and uncanny plot that points towards “the disturbing underbelly of social fissures and malcontents” pervading Reagan’s America (Grindon 166). The “extremes of setting and behavior” (162), i.e. the allusions to a peaceful past as opposed to violent characters, mirrors the tension implied in skate punk flyers and their incorporation of the (picket) fence as a border separating square suburbia from rebellious skate activity. The violence and the dangers that linger behind the innocent whiteness of the picket fence constantly reappear in skate punk flyers and their representation of an activity that challenges the securing retreat of middle-class suburbanites. Towards the end of the 1980s the aforementioned rap group N.W.A. similarly makes use of the fence as a symbol indicating the border between security and anxiety. In the video for their song “Straight Outta Compton” (1988), they push and kick away fence-like cordons and barriers and thus emphasize the violence that emanates from their gang and the danger that lingers behind the borders of their hometown of Compton. Just like the skate punks who initiate every illegal backyard pool skate session with the climbing of a fence, N.W.A. stylize their attack on bourgeois normality with reference to the violent transgression of barriers and

75 | Note that in 1978 a punk and new wave band by the name of Suburban Lawns was founded in Los Angeles; their band name seems to allude to the symbolism of the suburban yard and its deceiving presentation of peaceful prosperity that Blue Velvet picks up on in 1986. A poster of the band appears in the aforementioned movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

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thus exemplify that other youth cultures are equally involved in a permanent contestation of existing borders. The mushroom cloud—an element that not only characterizes the Scared Straight flyer but also appears as a constant in 1980s hardcore and skate punk imagery—indicates a nuclear explosion behind the picket fence and incorporates a further detail alluding heavily to the discourses pervading 1980s America. Announced for May 11, 1985, the Scared Straight concert was set to take place only four months after Ronald Reagan was sworn in for his second term as President. Reagan, who received fundamental support from conservative voters in Southern California’s suburbs, embodied the quintessential bogeyman for the hardcore punk movement (cf. e.g. the introductory scenes of the documentary American Hardcore). As a major protagonist in the Cold War arms race between the USA and the Soviet Union, his politics were directly associated with the nuclear threat that allegedly emanated from the ‘Eastern bloc.’ The apocalyptic vision that the flyer presents thus directly alludes to the fears of conservative suburban California. As Eric Avila notes in his book Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight – Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles, “[t]he Cold War against the Soviet Union loomed as the gravest threat to the nation, not only provoking fears about nuclear annihilation, but also heightening anxieties about internal subversion” (46). Skate punk flyers couple this fear with the activities of punk and skateboarding and thus create an image that might have left conservative citizens who stuck to the conception of a clean and peaceful suburbia literally scared straight. A flyer promoting a show of the bands Agression, Sin 34, Stalag 13, Don’t Know, and RKL (Rich Kids on LSD) in Oxnard provides a further example that alludes to the possibility of nuclear conflict. The similarly hand-drawn image incorporates a mushroom cloud as the background for a skateboarding scene: While a skating skeleton performs a jump (a backside air) in a ramp (a half pipe) the atomic cloud creates an apocalyptic scenario within which the action takes place. The fact that the skeleton would seem to be a personified version of death on a skateboard sustains the impression of doom and Armageddon and illustrates how skate punk media flirts with the Cold War discourses that turned Southern Californian suburbia into what Mike Davis might call an Ecology of Fear (cf. Davis’s eponymous book). An interesting parallel in contemporary art can be found in the works of California Chicana Ester Hernández: Concerned with the ecology of farming [she] contested the traditional notion of California as an agricultural Eden with her silkscreen print Sun Mad, replacing the familiar and cheerful trademark image of the Sun Maid with a startling skeleton. (H. Fox, “Tremors”197)

Hernández’s 1981 screenprint deploys the same style that pervades skate punk imagery which incorporates illustrations of skulls and skeletons into landscapes of suburban prosperity: backyards and swimming pools. Her artwork shows that the awareness of a changing California was widely perceived throughout the visual

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arts of the 1980s and that notions of a pastoral past and suburban dreams began to shatter under the threatening impressions of environmental hazards and nuclear scenarios. Just as Hernández’s illustration of an intoxicated California agriculture, skate punk’s fictionalizations of Cold War destruction fit in with Davis’s inquiries into the “Literary Destruction of Los Angeles” (Ecology 273ff.). He records that “nuclear weapons have been detonated over the Hollywood sign an amazing 49 times” in novels and films, which shows how the flyers in question here correspond to a mass-medialized discourse of “disaster fiction” (281). The early Los Angeles punk rock band The Weirdos very explicitly set the tone for such references within the scene through their song “We Got the Neutron Bomb” (1978) and their threat to “drop it all over the place.”76 Flyer: Agression, Sin 34, Stalag 13, et al. / Screenprint by Ester Hernández: Sun Mad (1981).

From Turcotte, Bryan Ray. Punk Is Dead Punk Is Everything. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2007. / © 1981 Ester Hernandez

The juxtaposition of nuclear extinction and skateboarding punk action renders skate punk as an alternative to the conservative, fearful, and ultimately destructive society that exists outside the self-made retreat of the backyard ramp. Such allusions to anti-communist or anti-Soviet attitudes in the wake of the Cold War and evocations of the “post-nuclear holocaust wasteland” that might confront skate punks outside of their half pipe do not, however, necessarily represent a serious contestation of Cold War politics and a nuclear arms race (Hammer and Kellner 120). Rather, they show how the imagery provided by mass media and the contemporary dystopias created in movies such as James Cameron’s The Terminator or in 76 | The Weirdo’s seven-inch record Skateboards to Hell (1979) also constitutes an explicit connection to skateboarding.

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the “militarist-masculinist scenario” of John Milius’s Red Dawn (116), both released in 1984, was incorporated into the design of the flyers. The Reagan years seemed to be overshadowed by a constant threat of nuclear conflict and, just as “California’s manmade and natural disasters became the televised erotica of popular culture” (Fox, “Many Californias” 240), skate punks incorporated this atmosphere of extinction into their medial representations. A flyer for a show by Agression, Stalag 13, The Vandals, and JFA in Santa Barbara summarizes the alternatives skate punks seemed to be faced with. It proclaims: “Skate tough or die!” (cf. Turcotte 221). The names of many of the bands themselves added to the apocalyptic scenarios of death and destruction that the flyers created. Oxnard’s Agression—already disrupting order by the intentional misspelling of their name—semantically implied what its audience could expect at their shows and in a single word summarized what the nuclear bomb represented on an inconceivable scale, i.e. pure and ultimate aggression. Stalag 13, also from Oxnard and named after a German prisoner of war camp in World War II, provocatively played with fears of a new World War that apparently did not seem unlikely within the context of a massive arms race. Their name further proves in what way mass media influences visibly pervaded the skate punk scene: It seems highly unlikely that a punk kid from a Southern California beach community had heard about Stalag 13 anywhere else than in the TV series Hogan’s Heroes which was set in a fictional German prisoner-of-war camp.

Graphic from the back cover of Stalag 13’s LP In Control (1984).

Courtesy of Jamie Hernandez.

Other bands that constantly appeared on flyers within the skate punk realm and similarly picked up on militaristic connotations include Tales of Terror, whose name speaks for itself, and the aforementioned, infamous JFA, short for Jodie Foster’s Army, a sarcastical allusion to John Hinckley Jr. who had attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981 in order to impress actress Jodie Foster. The implication of the latter illustrates the contempt that the skate punk scene felt for the American president and suggests that rebellious skate punks represented an army of deviant kids out to counter the government or at least disrupt the idyll of the “bland Republican paradise” they were born into (Hoskyns 313). Together with

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the recurring images of suburban backyards, swimming pools, nuclear explosions, and skull-faced skateboarding skeletons, the aptly chosen band names fostered the impression of an ongoing rebellion, which perfectly fit the homologous style that skate punk flyers incorporate.77 While skateboarding punk kids could witness Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen forming a guerilla-like gang to fight the obscure Soviet/Cuban invasion of the USA (literally starting in their school’s backyard) in Red Dawn, they found their own battlefields behind the homes of suburban California. Their flyers provided a medium with which to push these fantasies even further and to incorporate even more grotesque characters.

Flyer: Adolescents, Jodie Foster’s Army et al.78

From Turcotte, Bryan Ray and Christopher T. Miller. Fucked Up + Photocopied: Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1999. 77 | I use the term homologous in view of Hebdige’s conception of homology as a description of “the symbolic fit between the values and lifestyles of a group, its subjective experience and the musical forms it uses to express or reinforce its focal concerns” (113). 78 | The images show the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.

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All of the flyers that either depict skateboarders or skateboarding skeletons represent the facial expressions of the figures in nearly the same manner: They look angry, frightening, in pain and, first and foremost, dead serious if not aggressive. Even the very few exceptions with smiling faces evoke associations with the sadistic and impudent smirks of adolescent vandals (to insinuate the Orange County bands Adolescents and The Vandals). Considering the fact that all images show white males, it becomes evident to what extent the flyers and the characters they depict create and pick up on a certain image of white masculinity relying on aggression, fear, backlash politics, and the crisis of representation affecting white males in the 1980s. Many of the aggressive mimics that characterize the flyers are directed at the viewer’s gaze. They address the viewer and incorporate him or her into the respective scenario of skate punk disruption. The depicted figures seem to strive for recognition and acknowledgement, while their needs are mediated through the provocative representation of activities of trespassing, the twisted bodies of performing skateboarders, and distorted faces full of pain and aggression. The suburban environment in which they are active is under enormous pressure. Nuclear threat and death lurk behind the picket fences that once guaranteed freedom and shelter from inner-city dangers. The monstrous characters that skate punk imagery inscribes onto the suburban landscape evoke and play with the anxieties of conservatives and the “racial hysteria [that] was typically expressed as fear of invading hordes (variously yellow, brown, black, red, or their extra-terrestrial metonyms)” (Davis, Ecology 282). Either directly relating to the threat of the atomic bomb, implicitly evoking the fear of economic and political crisis, or depicting the invasion of skeletal monsters, skate punk flyers convey the notion of a changing 1980s suburbia. They imply that the middle class utopia suburban living once represented, along with the “larger demand for social order” it reflected, might easily turn into a scary backyard chaos (Avila 46). The backyard, and especially the backyard swimming pool, constitutes the main setting of skate punk flyer imagery. It bears traces of a stereotypical site-specific landscape of Southern California: “well-manicured lawns and backyard swimming pools” as the symbols of an “ineluctable sense of place—of ‘Californianess’” (H. Fox, “Tremors” 200). However, the contexts in which this scenario is presented create an antagonistic tension already reflected on in earlier artifacts. British expatriate and LA denizen David Hockney’s painting The Splash (1966) exemplifies an early indication that something was not quite right in the prosperous backyards of the Golden State. His “pervasively domesticated” illustration of a backyard swimming pool contrasts romantic visions of California as a “vast, untamed Eden” (200). The splash in the water that slightly disrupts the almost right-angled order of the painting implies that someone has just jumped into the pool and remains the only indicator of human life in this otherwise immaculate environment. Life in California, Hockney seems to say, happens beneath the surface of a placid and domesticated facade. Thirteen years later, in 1979, photographer Joel Sternfeld in his print After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California 1979 presents a suburban scenario that

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similarly eschews the direct depiction of human life and presents a landslide as a “grisly image of a massive heap of compostlike debris vomited up into an idyllic suburban backyard” (H. Fox, “Many Californias” 241). While Hockney still depicted the backyard as a place that absorbed human individuality into the depth of the concrete swimming pool, Sternfeld presents its total destruction and replaces it with a gaping void. The trajectory that the two artists imply in their approach to the California landscape is complemented by 1980s skate punk imagery, which picks up on the symbolic power of the backyard and populates it with crude graffitos of skulls, skeletons, and nuclear death.

The Splash (1966) by David Hockney (original work is in color).

David Hockney, “The Splash” 1966 Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72” © David Hockney

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After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California 1979 (1979) by Joel Sternfeld (original work is in color).

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

The early Black Flag flyer art of Raymond Pettibon (half-brother of the band’s guitarist Greg Ginn and among the first lineup of the group) provides a perfect example that demarcates the interface between the mentioned art of Hockney and Sternfeld and the further development of the hardcore and skate punk flyer ‘genre.’ The “dark black-ink scenario[s]” he devised to advertise Black Flag concerts centered on “shocking” and “divisive” motifs—the Manson Family and their murders only constitute one of many “offensive” references (Chick 65). In congruence with the disrupting moment in The Splash and the violent abyss in After a Flash Flood, Pettibon’s art exemplifies how the flyers’ imagery was able to “cut to the dark heart, the paranoia and madness that lay beneath California’s placid surface” (65). Looking at the black and white drawings and photographs of skaters, skeletons, twisted bodies, and distorted faces of pain that predominate in skate punk flyers, it becomes evident how they pick up on Pettibon’s drawings and the impression that “noir was everywhere, lurking within every shadow, within the hearts of all, only ever barely repressed” (65).

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Flyer: Black Flag at the Whisky Wednesday, October 8, 1980. / Flyer: Black Flag at Mabuhay Friday, February 27 and Saturday, February 28, 1981.

Both 11 x 8.5 inches, Photocopy, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Raymond Pettibon.

The backyard pools on skate punk flyers are subject to this noir. No longer signifiers of prosperity and the good life in the sun, they become dystopic concrete pits harboring monstrous creatures that perform lethal skate sessions. Most importantly, these backyard pools are empty. Halberstam notes, the “empty pool speaks of abundance and its costs; it tells of cycles of wealth and the ebb and flow of capital” and thus helps to connect the flyer designs to the economic changes with which 1980s suburbia was faced (81). The utopian characteristics of suburbia turned into dystopia is a theme lucidly reflected and further connected to the punk scene within Spheeris’ film Suburbia (1984) and its story of young punks fleeing their parents’ homes. In the film, protagonist Evan reads out a passage that his mother wrote in her diary in 1968: “Air is clean, skies are blue, and all the houses are brand-new and beautiful. They call it Suburbia and that works perfect as it’s a combination of the word suburb and utopia” (Suburbia). In combination with shots from the desolate and decayed houses shown in the film, it becomes evident how the parents’ fantasies differ from the realities that came into being during the late 70s and early 80s. MacLeod comments on the film by observing that it “depicts not the clichéd cul-de-sacs and ranch houses or tract homes that the word ‘suburbia’ normally connotes, but the new landscape of postsuburbia” (Kids 101). It indicates a broader discourse of dystopic fantasies that pervaded 1980s popular culture and also alludes to the demographic shifts that changed American suburbs and created a new image of this locale. Skate punk flyers, in their adolescent simplicity, represent both traces of boredom that are figuratively articulated through allusion to popular culture as well as

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evidence of youth cultural contributions to “artistic representations of the suburban dream” (H. Fox, “Many Californias” 247). The eponymous painting Suburban Dream (1983) by Chicano artist Carlos Almaraz epitomizes the thematic thread underlying such engagements in the discussion of California suburbia. It shows a burning suburban mansion and the anonymous bystanders helplessly staring into the flames. Fox interprets the painting as a metaphor for “the destruction of the (white) American Dream by forces beyond control” and thus provides a reading that can similarly be applied to the imagery that skate punks create in their flyer designs (248): They turn their backs on the utopian fantasy of suburbia and imagine an escapist space defined by its opposite: invading monsters, death, destruction, and chaos.

Suburban Dream (1983) by Carlos Almaraz (original work in color).

Courtesy of Elsa Flores Almaraz.

In this way, skate punk matches the broader trend that Davis attributes to literary works, especially since the 1980s. He notes that “disaster, as allusion, metaphor, or ambience, saturates almost everything now written about Southern California” and assumes that this phenomenon is “rooted in racial anxiety” (Ecology 280/281). It is the white American Dream that is under attack here and it is “white fear of the dark races [that] lies at the heart of such visions” (281). Despite their aesthetic banality and artistic amateurism, the reliance of skate punk flyers on tropes of disaster and invasion bear witness to a discourse that revolves around race. Davis very convincingly argues that it is this aspect,

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He indicates to what extent it is along intersectional categories that pop- and subcultural products generate effects of disastrous disruption: In the case of skate punk flyers, the middle-class background of the participants is graphically deployed and juxtaposed to a subtextual tradition of “racial fantasies” (279). As middle class and whiteness intersect in the spatial realm of suburbia, the indication of a racial invasion and destruction of that environment constitute a possibility to express one’s opposition and distancing. ‘Racialized fantasies’: Advertising for an album by The Faction.

From Turcotte, Bryan Ray. Punk Is Dead Punk Is Everything. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2007.

Again, it is important to note that the ad hoc production of a flyer by a teenage skate punk does not necessarily represent a conscious allusion to racial signifiers—the improvised and banal design often rather suggests a focus on flyer making rather than meaning—however, the materials that went into the collages and

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drawings from the scene are pervaded by, or more critically put, “contaminated by middle-class illusion” and the objets trouvés that postmodern capitalism and its icons of pop-cultural commercialism and entertainment provide (Traber, “L.A.’s White Minority” 32). Whether emerging from youthful “anti-aesthetics” or “political protest” or considered “[m]asterpieces of primitive graphic design or scruffy naive folk art” (Büsser 181; Mullen qtd. in Turcotte and Miller 64), skate punk flyers in 1980s California constituted one more component of a cultural context that produced a variety of medial works—ranging from blockbuster movies to visual art and sculptural assemblages—that indicated and illuminated the “vulnerability of a treasured cultural icon” (H. Fox, “Many Californias” 248): the American Dream and its suburban figuration.

2.3.4

Conclusion: Flying Matters – The Material Component of Skate Punk Flyers

“Archaeologists of the 30th century will think Black Flag was the name of the municipal electrical utility,” speculates Joe Carducci, a former SST Records associate, with regards to the masses of flyers he and his comrades plastered to the electricity and telephone poles of Los Angeles and Orange County (qtd. in Turcotte and Miller 87).79 His statement reveals that flyers, apart from their design and content, incorporated an additional component: They occupied space, they marked territory, and they bore witness to their makers’ presence. In this context, they embraced techniques of subcultural expression that have a much longer history than the promotion of punk shows. An obvious similarity to the flyer distribution exemplified in Black Flag’s tacking “on walls and lamp posts and telegraph poles around the South Bay and as far into Los Angeles as the group and their friends would venture” (Chick 65), can be found in early graffiti art and tagging: Actually labeling, or tagging, entire regions of Los Angeles as war zones, graffiti scrawled by gang youths became as much a part of the cityscape as the buildings it was written on. Although it was mostly Puerto Rican taggers in New York City who, to much fame and infamy, turned subway cars into the venue of choice during the 1970s, it has been documented that the graffiti tradition in the United States took root decades earlier in Mexican American neighborhoods of Los Angeles. (H. Fox, “Many Californians” 247)

Fox’s description of tagging as a demarcation of “war zones” not only parallels the dissemination of hardcore punk flyers as a form of “hooligan publicity campaign” and “a guerilla operation” (Chick 65), it also traces graffiti’s origins back to Southern California, i.e. Los Angeles, making it a local phenomenon that young surfers, skateboarders, and punks witnessed while growing up. Its function as a territorial 79 | For another account of Black Flag’s flyer promotions cf. Caen’s novel Sub-Hollywood (105).

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marker for gangs emphasizes graffiti as a physical and material pervasion of the cityscape that allowed its makers to become visible and present themselves on a broad and extensive scale. Black Flag’s song “Spray Paint (the Walls)” (1981) shows that they picked up on this technique and added it to their ‘flyering’ tours. Sarah Thornton’s approach to club flyers provides a theoretical interpretation that illuminates the parallels between the media of the flyer and graffiti tags. She explains that tracing flyer distribution provides information about “young people’s routes through the city, exhibiting an understanding of what Michel de Certeau would call their ‘practices of space,’” and thus establishes a description that perfectly matches the production of graffiti (141). Riemel states that in graffiti it is “all about logos and placement, about speed, audacity and humor” (“Street Art” 214). The importance of placement and speed especially relates to Thornton’s train of thought as it resonates with her allusion to spatial practices. It elucidates graffiti technique within a specific environment, a (site-) specific landscape, and it reveals to what extent flyer distribution, for example in the form of pole tacking, follows in its footsteps. Borden equally refers to De Certeau’s theories in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) in order to describe skateboarders’ maneuvers as a practice that generates a “discontinuous edit of architecture and urban space” (Borden, Skateboarding 219). The references to De Certeau that he shares with Thornton thus establish a link between flyer distribution and skateboarding paralleled by graffiti’s similar deployment of architectural space. This reveals the correspondence and interaction of the respective practices, while the Mexican-American influences that Fox ascribes to graffiti tags are mirrored within “the graphics on 1970s Dogtown skateboards [that] had been derived from Los Angeles Chicano gang-culture lettering styles” (141). It becomes evident how skate punk’s flyers draw on influences that surpass the suburban background of its participants and incorporates inner-city styles of marginalized gang youths. The presence of flyers, like graffiti marks, produces a “[c]olonized terrain” that materially occupies space and, in the case of hardcore and skate punk, redefines it on its own terms by making use of a style that is rooted in Chicano culture (52). Skate punk flyers can be seen within a larger context of graffiti art that became especially visible within the 1980s. Through artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti-influenced works on the East Coast, the art form gained national and international recognition and praise, while Basquiat’s Haitian and Puerto Rican background prominently foregrounded “the issue of race in a traditionally white-dominated art world” (G. Thompson 68). His appearance on New York ‘basement show’ TV Party (1978-1982) also connected him to the city’s early punk culture as the television broadcast was co-hosted by Blondie guitarist Chris Stein (cf. G. Thompson 68). He managed to take an underground expressionist art form to a highly visible stage. About a decade earlier, in 1972, on the West Coast, Asco, an L.A. group of Chicano artists were not as (visibly) successful as Basquiat but similarly used graffiti to make a significant statement concerning ignorance about certain artists and minorities:

2 C ONTENT Asco […] spray-painted the names of three of its members on the entrances of LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art], protesting a principal curator’s stated lack of interest in Chicano art. Though the museum painted over the graffiti the same day, Asco envisioned their action as performance/guerrilla/theater/conceptual activity and thus cheekily laid claim to the first Chicano art exhibition at the museum. (H. Fox, “Tremors” 226/227)

Asco’s action not only demonstrates graffiti’s political potential and the important role it played for non-white artists, it also exemplifies how graffiti can in fact appropriate space, occupy space, and redefine space. With their spray-paintings the group physically performed the transgression of an ideological barrier that had excluded them from the official realm of art exhibition. The invasion that their graffiti signified corresponds to the threats that pervaded skate punk flyers’ allusions to disaster fiction and invading creatures. A subculture “that flyered every telephone pole from here to Timbuktu” re-enacted the fictional accounts of an environment under skate punk attack and transferred them to a material equivalent in the form of a “gradual penetration of the suburbs” (Denney 66; Mullen, “Intorductory Rant” 64). Skate punks picked up on the political art that non-white artists established in the course of the 1970s and 1980s and used it as a way to distance themselves from the orderly environment of their suburban habitats. Whereas African-American and Chicano/Chicana artists had managed to overcome borders that denied access, skate punks reapplied those methods to step back from a society they already had access to, i.e. that they were in fact part of as predominantly white middle-class suburbanites. The threatening and invasive tendencies that pervaded the content of their imagery could be sensed in the material features of graffiti and flyers, which consequently provided a way into apparently dangerous and threatening discourses and thereby out of the square security of suburbia. About 10 years before the hardcore and skate punk scene emerged in California’s suburbs, flyers had already proven to be bearers of dreadful associations within the same locale that skate punk imagery would become effective in later on. Avila describes how Samuel Yorty, during the election campaign for his third term as mayor of Los Angeles, discredited his opponent, African-American Tom Bradley, with the help of flyer distribution. Trying to associate Bradley “with the militant strain of black nationalism,” Yorty circulated “black and red flyers that read ‘Watts power’ in white suburban communities” (Avila 50). Watts had come “to signify the danger of the city to many whites, particularly following the Watts riots of 1965” and Yorty could successfully build on this fear (50). He evoked stereotyped associations with feigned flyers and projected the entailing anxieties onto his political opponent. Yorty made use of the symbolic strength of the flyer which, in addition to its function as a medium of information, materially signified the “tension of ‘encroaching’ blacks or other nonwhites” (Parker 11). As a consequence of their material presence—they actually appear on front lawns and in backyards—flyers are able to signify a literal penetration of the borders between white suburbia and the

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non-white and allegedly dangerous inner-city core. They embody a very real threat and imply the vanguard of even worse things to follow. Hardcore and skate punk flyers in general not only signified the participants’ “chaotic” responses to the conditions of 1980s California, but also constituted a medium that materially entered the suburban space and “placed them in direct opposition with the authorities” (Chick 65). The example of mayor Yorty in combination with flyer distribution’s similarity to graffiti tagging reveals in what way the medium can symbolically embody the dread of an intruding danger through its material presence. It illuminates how skate punk flyers operate beyond the simple exchange of information. The depicted imagery, despite its banal aesthetics, might indeed scare the public realm in which flyers appear. In contrast to other media such as magazines, records or videos, flyers generate a lot of expressive potential from the fact that they are by definition extremely mobile. Plastered to telegraph posts or flying over picket fences, the handy format of the flyer elevates its discursive proceedings of signification to the realm of material mobility. It combines style and movement, semiotic mediation and physical presence; thus, it points beyond the codes and stories its imagery conveys.

2.4

THR ASHER : S K ATE P UNK IN M AGA ZINES

2.4.1

A Magazine with “Hardcore Spirit”

“Thrasher came out [in 1981] and they were back to the hardcore spirit, you know, their first issues weren’t even colored, they were just black and white on newsprint,” remembers Brian Brannon, lead singer for JFA and editor of the magazine in the early 1990s (Brannon, Personal Interview). His statement implies a stylistic congruence between the magazine and skate punk flyers as it reveals the simplicity and improvised character the two media shared: back to the plain and simple hardcore spirit. Just like flyers, early issues of Thrasher, in the words of Weyland, were a “black-and-white and scrappy-looking […] transmission of style, attitude, perseverance and rebellion” (167). It is thus possible to attribute it initially to the media category of fanzine, as it bears many of the decisive characteristics that constitute these publications. On the one hand, this helps to point out Thrasher’s connection to the punk and hardcore scenes which massively relied on the production of fanzines as “the lifeblood of punk’s intercultural communication” (Diehl 218) and, on the other hand, it elucidates its enmeshment in a broader context of underground publications. A strictly academic examination of hardcore punk, skateboarding or skate punk fanzines in the Anglo-American realm is yet to be conducted. Duncombe’s Notes From the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture constitutes the most comprehensive monograph analyzing and interpreting fanzines with a focus on alternative scenes and punk culture in particular. Additionally, almost every

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publication that deals with punk and related subcultures on a more general level mentions fanzines as an important medium within the respective scenes emphasizing their importance for the participants (cf. e.g. Hebdige; Sabin; S. Thompson). The far-reaching historical developments that influence fanzine culture are “tied to the English radical tradition of pamphleteering,” which again, implies their affinity with flyers and their common origins in early modern times (Shuker 119; also cf. Todd and Watson 12, 19). Duncombe summarizes this trajectory: Zines are the most recent entry in a long line of media for the misbegotten, a tradition stretching back to Thomas Paine and other radical pamphleteers, up through the underground press of the 1960s, and on towards the Internet. (19)

This rough chronology illuminates the fact that fanzines provide an important tool in “writing for an audience of like-minded misfits” and thus establishes a link to Thrasher’s self-conception as a magazine that “was made by skaters, for skaters, with no-bullshit articles” (Duncombe 7; Vitello in Thrasher, Skate and Destroy 9). It elucidates why the magazine was perceived as a “punk zine” rather than a professional publication (Weyland 167). Just as “fanzines are usually totally concentrated on a particular artist or group” (Shuker 119), Thrasher addresses a specific audience by “combining coverage of skate culture and Hardcore” (Blush 19). Lance Mountain, professional skateboarder and member of the infamous skate group Bones Brigade adds, “The thing is, Thrasher are the same guys as the skaters” (Mountain, Personal Interview). His statement emphasizes the do-it-yourself attitude he senses behind the magazine’s modes of production as it were skaters themselves who were responsible for its creation. As a reaction to the demise of SkateBoarder magazine and its brief resurrection in the form of Action Now, Thrasher represented an initiative of skateboarders to establish an approach “from insiders’ perspectives.” (Vitello in Thrasher, Skate and Destroy 9). Weyland adds that “Thrasher was an unexpected beacon that lit up the dreariness of no national skate magazine,” while adding that he “had no idea what a voice Thrasher was going to be, and how, in its first few years, it would define and be skateboarding” (159). The magazine enters into a long tradition of fanzines as a medium for aficionados of a certain activity who could not find any publications concerned with their particular passion. Duncombe traces this phenomenon to the first half of the 20th century: While shaped by the long history of alternative presses in the United States, zines as a distinct medium were born in the 1930s. It was then that fans of science fiction, often through the clubs they founded, began producing what they called “fanzines” as a way of sharing science fiction stories and critical commentary, and of communicating with one another. Forty years later, in the mid-1970s, the other defining influence on modern-day zines began as fans of punk rock music, ignored by and critical of the mainstream music press, started printing fanzines about their music and cultural scene. (Duncombe 11)

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It is not too surprising then, that the first issue of the New York publication Punk in 1976—even preceding English punk fanzines—sported a caricature of Lou Reed as a mixture between alien and Frankenstein’s monster on its cover, a visual allusion to the medium’s roots in the science-fiction genre (cf. Colegrave and Sullivan 82).80 That these roots would also influence flyer imagery alongside a much broader mediation of disaster fiction and its pervasion of skate punk has already been indicated; Thrasher’s reliance on similar fictionalizations and its enmeshment in the broader context of 1980s popular culture will be illustrated in the following. A focus on the magazine’s early publications is of special interest, as Weyland’s statement about the defining first few years has already suggested. The coincidence of the magazine’s debut and the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1981 implies that it is especially the first volumes which represented a new medial approach to skateboarding during this “reactionary period” (Malott and Peña 5).

2.4.2

The First Issues: Radical Images and Skate Punk Fiction

Thrasher, from its very beginning with the initial pages of Issue One, fosters the image of skateboarding and its protagonists as rebellious and aggressive. In the first editorial, Kevin Thatcher (usually referred to as KT) welcomes the readers of the new magazine with the introductory text “Grab That Board” (Thrasher Jan. 1981, 6). He begins with the thesis that in 1981, after decades of commercial skateboarding success, there “is a lack of understanding of what skateboarding is all about” (6). Thatcher explains: The average individual was never properly exposed to the unlimited possibilities of a platform with four wheels under it—a simple basic mechanical device which serves as an energy-efficient mode of transportation, a basis for a valid sporting activity, and as a vehicle for aggressive expression. (6)

The citation emphasizes the unlimited potential that Thatcher ascribes to the skateboard. It ends with the possibility of an “aggressive expression” that pervades Thrasher’s media version of skateboarding and distinguishes its participants from the “average individual.” Thatcher continues his diagnosis of contemporary skateboard culture with a remark about official skate territory: [A]t the height of the skatepark explosion, the skaters have been virtually swept off the streets and deposited in the parks, where the action is radical but lacks the inspiration of a knock-down, drag-out backyard pool session or a skate cruise down the boulevard with the crew. (6)

80 | Cf.

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He characterizes pool sessions and skate cruises outside the officially accredited skateboarding terrains as “knock-down” and “drag-out,” connecting them to radical and aggressive attitudes. Again, skateboarding fulfils the criteria of an attack on the normalcy of the suburban backyard or the order of the urban boulevard rather than those of a “sporting activity” within a prescribed and stable framing. Thatcher simultaneously implies the creative aspect of skateboarding by mentioning the “inspiration” he attributes to the aggressive sessions and thus indicates another important congruency between skating and punk activities. Thrasher editor and graphic designer Pushead, in the May/June issue of 1982, summarizes this connection and emphasizes the magazine’s position as an interface between skateboarding and hardcore punk, or hardcores, as he calls the respective participants: With the past decline of the skate generation due to the rise and fall of greedy parks, mags and merchants, a lot of skaters turned their hyperactive aggression towards hardcore music. The sound is fast and furious, like powerful teeth gritting grinds against the concrete dimensions. Rapidly lunging out in a chaotic movement as protest to the current lifestyle conditions and big profitable corporations who pull the plug when there is no profit ratio. Hardcores have combined efforts and formed their own creativity, a different way of life than one that is programmed at birth. Generating an escape from accepted boredom, skaters/hardcores have put forth their talents into bands, fanzines, independent record labels, and support of this hardcore explosion. (Thrasher May/June 1982, 32)

Pushead suggests that it is “hyperactive aggression” which connects skateboarders and hardcore punks. He emphasizes their attempts to distance themselves from profit-oriented industries and the boredom of a predetermined life and thus parallels the attributes that characterized the song lyrics of hardcore punk and the imagery of flyers. A homologous transition from the inquiries about flyers can be established by the fact that they also heavily rely on images in combination with text. Flipping through the first issue of Thrasher magazine immediately reveals the importance that imagery and especially photography holds for this medial representation of skate punk culture: More than 50 per cent of the content is graphic with most of the depictions being photographs, a stylistic setup that pervades the entire 1981 volume of Thrasher and basically continues today. Forty-nine photographs in the first issue show skateboarders either in action, i.e. on their boards, or posing with a skateboard. Five images are portrait photographs and the rest either show landscapes such as urban or suburban terrain, drainage pipes, empty swimming pools (cf. 17, 22, 23, 24, 27) or contest crowds (cf. 15). The front cover of the magazine is hand drawn and depicts a skateboarder grinding on the coping of a swimming pool with his board. The drawing does not show the swimming pool in its totality but only presents a piece of concrete that seems to be torn out of a larger construction. Five of the other eleven issue covers from Thrasher’s first year similarly include depictions of pool skateboarding (all of them photographs), emphasizing the im-

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portance that this special terrain held for the visual representation of skateboarding and its attitude (cf. the 1981 issues from Feb., Apr., May, June, Oct.). The remaining covers either show skaters in half pipes (July and Sep.), a concrete skate park (Mar.) or downhill skating (Aug. and Oct.), while one cover shows a skater (Steve Rocco) performing a freestyle maneuver in a kitchen (Dec.). The only cover that does not make use of photography or drawing at all shows bold lettering that reads “Caution: Contains 100% Aggression Inside” (Nov.), a statement summarizing what the first cover graphically signified and what the other issues carried in their depictions of skateboarding action under the title of Thrasher Skateboard Magazine. Cover of the first issue of the resurrected SkateBoarder (1975). / Cover of the first issue of Thrasher (1981).

Courtesy of Grind Media. / From Thrasher Jan. 1981 (artwork by Kevin Thatcher).

It is with Barthes and his analysis of “The Photographic Message” in the press photograph, that the paradigmatic significance of Thrasher’s cover design becomes manifest. Despite the obvious difference in visual presentation, what Barthes observes concerning the press photograph also applies to the imagery of the Thrasher cover. Its public reception is influenced by the text, the title, the caption, the lay-out and, in a more abstract but no less ‘informative’ way, by the very name of the paper (this name represents knowledge that can heavily orientate the reading of the message strictly speaking: a photograph [or drawing in this case] can change its meaning as it passes from the very conservative L’Aurore to the communist L’Humanité). (Barthes, Image 15)

Barthes discusses the difference in reception with reference to French newspapers, a comparison that can be paralleled with a juxtaposition between the first issue of

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SkateBoarder magazine in 1975 and the first issue of Thrasher magazine in 1981. Both publications present a pool skater on their covers; however, “the very name” of the two magazines already implies an entirely different mode of reception and thus entirely diverse contextualizations of the content. The blond smiling skater on the cover of SkateBoarder is branded as exactly that: a skateboarder. The activity of skateboarding is pragmatically incorporated into the publication’s title which renders the magazine a neutral representation. The drawn skater on Thrasher’s cover, in contrast, receives a highly stylized connotation by the very name of the magazine. He not only skates; he thrashes. He is not only a skateboarder; he is a Thrasher. The two covers and the respective magazine names epitomize what Brooke describes as the “more aggressive turn” that skateboarding took by the end of the 1970s (71). That this turn is literal might be a coincidence, but both publications depict a skateboarder in a moment of turning on inclined walls of concrete. The young boy on the SkateBoarder cover seems to represent a closer connection to surfing culture. Blond and barefoot, he glides on the smooth surface of a swimming pool, evoking associations with a wave that he surfs backside (his back facing the pool’s coping). The skater on Thrasher’s cover, in comparison, appears much more aggressive. He does not turn half way but pushes to the very edge of the swimming pool in order to grind on its coping with the truck (axle) of his skateboard. His turn is much more aggressive as it causes friction. It is not a smooth glide; he performs a frontside grind (facing the pool’s wall) on the striated tiles of the pool’s coping, evoking the “Skate and Destroy” attitude that Thrasher would represent in the years to come. The fact that the drawing only insinuates the location of a swimming pool by presenting the action of the grind on a levitating piece of concrete that seems to be torn from its original environment additionally emphasizes the aggressive attitude prompted by Thrasher. The sunny locale of a swimming pool that the SkateBoarder cover presents gives way to Thrasher’s vision of a destroyed swimming pool whose skeletal structure rather evokes apocalyptic associations with human bowels than the organized stabilization of a concrete basin. It is disincorporated from its ‘identity’ as a swimming pool. Whereas sun, surf, and suburbia still seem to reverberate on the cover of SkateBoarder—a magazine that is explicitly marked as a “Surfer Publication”— Thrasher isolates the activity of skateboarding from these surroundings and focuses on the f(r)ictional moment of destruction. It thus builds a parallel that resonates with the apocalyptic landscapes and their connection to chaotic skate punk disruption evoked in flyer imagery. The “graphic style that made [Thrasher] more like a punk zine” and the mediated allusions to postmodern fragmentation and (sub-) urban change that might literally tear a swimming pool out of its original locale—a situation that has already been discussed with reference to Joel Sternfield’s photograph After a Flashflood—provide a discursive background that implies how the different media create skate punk homology (Weyland 167). Leafing through Thrasher’s first issue shows how these stylizations are continued. The full-page advertisement of the truck company “Independent” on page

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five constitutes a telling example that alludes to the aggressive development skateboarding experienced at the turn of the decade. It presents a photograph of skateboarder Rick Blackhart who is shown behind the window of a wooden house breaking the glass with the front truck of his skateboard. He is wearing sunglasses and apparently screaming into the camera. The shot catches the precise moment of the window breaking as it depicts the flying glass shards in midair. The photograph is placed above the inclined lettering of the word “Independent,” the company’s address in Capitola, California, and the company logo, which resembles the militaristic decoration of the Iron Cross. The advertisement builds on a variety of tropes that pervaded skateboarding and punk at the time and thus constitutes an important example of skate punk culture’s mediations. The activity of skateboarding itself becomes secondary in the photograph’s setting. The skateboard is diverted from its intended use in order to become a tool or rather a weapon with which to perform an act of destruction. Whereas one might expect an advertisement for a skateboard accessory to depict a skateboarder performing a maneuver, this photograph avoids any causal relation between the skateboard itself and skateboarding as an activity. The board and its trucks become a piercing object of destruction and thus render the scenario an attempt to escape the restrictive boundaries of a house (or a prison?) rather than a setting illuminating the qualities of Independent’s skateboard trucks. The advertisement corresponds to the lyrics of songs such as “Home is Where” or “Suburban Home” as it points towards the restrictive boundaries of suburbia while presenting an act of “Noise and destruction” that had been so important for the Adolescent’s “Wrecking Crew.” Additionally, it incorporates the notion of border-crossing and transgression that has already been discussed in view of flyer imagery and the depiction of fences and barriers. The company name itself furthers the impression that the advertisement promotes an act of radical escapism and not the technical advantages of a skateboard product. Riding this company’s trucks is therefore associated with the gaining of independence while it is linked to an aggressive moment of destruction, which reflects the image with which skateboarding was associated in 1981. The incorporation of a militaristic symbol in the form of the Iron Cross as the company logo establishes a link to Dogtown’s guerilla-like “warfare” around empty swimming pools and graphically mirrors the military jargon these activities entailed.81 It is also fully congruent with the bricolage of early (hardcore) punks and their subcultural deployment of World War II insignia for shock value, most notoriously the swastika (cf. Hebdige 116/117).82 The Iron Cross attributes the notion of radicalism to Independent trucks and becomes part of a homologous skate punk culture that 81 | For a detailed account of the introduction and creation of the Independent logo and initial doubts that it might be “too Nazi” see “Birth of a Skate Icon” by the logo’s graphic designer Jim Phillips in Denike’s Built to Grind (Phillips 22-25). 82 | For examples of the usage of the swastika and the Iron Cross within hardcore punk cf. e.g. Belisto and Davis 70/71; Blush 30; Mullen, Lexicon Devil 245.

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again provides visible parallels to the radical connotations of flyers and their allusions to military jargon and insignia. Since Independent is closely connected to the publishers of Thrasher via Fausto Vitello as the co-founder of both enterprises, its advertisements also pervade the magazine’s following issues while they set the style for other companies’ ads. Vitello’s involvement in skateboard media as well as skateboard hardware production points toward the corporate considerations that anticipated the magazine as a commercial tool and reveals that the aggressive turn epitomized in Thrasher was first and foremost a calculated media construction.83 This assumption goes along with Olson’s following comment about the magazine: But to tell you that that magazine was out there to do one thing, it was to do one thing: It was for them to have a fucking tool to fucking sell skateboard products that they did. So, it was just another business tool for them with the mystique… (Olson, Personal Interview).

While implying doubts about Thrasher’s credibility as a magazine only “by skaters, for skaters,” as Vitello claimed, Olson’s account describes the commercially-oriented construction of a marketing tool and reveals its radical and aggressive allusions as a mere business strategy. That this strategy would pervade Thrasher from its very beginning, throughout the 1980s and beyond, incorporates the magazine within a pop-cultural discourse that also brought forth destructive and militaristically connoted characters such as Rambo, the Terminator, and the guerilla youth presented in Red Dawn. Aimed at predominantly white suburban middle-class adolescents, it was not only these products of Hollywood’s culture industry that marketed an image of exaggerated masculinity in a decade characterized by backlash politics and conservative Reaganites versus civil rights and feminism. The niche media of skate punk also built on the same tropes, and the success of Thrasher proves that many young kids bought (and still buy) into them. An interview with L.A. punk band FEAR in Thrasher’s August 1982 issue illustrates the homologous connection of skateboarding, punk, and military allusions in the magazine. Singer Lee Ving is asked, “What are your thoughts on American youth?” and his answer is, “I dream of Skinhead Armies” (Thrasher Aug. 1982, 37).

83 | A flyer promoting a concert by Social Distortion, The Faction, Living Abortions, and Los Olvidados tellingly incorporates Independent’s company logo (Turcotte 220). In this context, it is not part of a commercial advertisement for Independent trucks but, especially in combination with the band names, adds a signifier of militaristic radicalism by the depiction of the Iron Cross. The Independent brand is detached from the business institution of a company and deployed as a subcultural sign. The flyer thus exemplifies both the flyer technique of bricolage as well as Independent’s success in infusing skate punk culture with a corporate identity.

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Crewcut and Iron Cross: Duane Peters in the first issue of Thrasher.

Courtesy of Reginald Caselli.

A photograph of skateboarder Duane Peters in the first issue exemplifies how the image of skateboarding as radical and aggressive is constructed within the interplay of image and text. It shows Peters in midair on his board, jumping over a crack in a concrete wall, sporting an Independent T-shirt with a highly visible Iron Cross on its back (23). The militaristic symbolism and rebellious attributes that Independent fosters are thus inscribed into the activity of skateboarding on various different levels. It is connected to an act of destruction that had been established in Independent ads such as the one that shows Rick Blackhart breaking a window, which semantically loads the action with the logic of an attack: The skateboard and skateboarding are presented as radically aggressive, destructive, and independent (i.e. liberating). The photograph of Peters is constructed around these attributes and transfers them to the very activity of skateboarding. A jump (the trick presented in the photograph is usually referred to as an ollie) over a concrete gap is rendered inherently radical through its symbolic liaison with a military decoration. The Iron Cross constitutes the center of the photograph and thus not only reveals the way a skateboarder’s clothing may function as a highly visible advertising surface but also illustrates to what extent a physical effort, i.e. the bodily technique of jumping with the board, is inscribed into a narrative of radicalism. The fact that the protagonist in the picture is Duane Peters, “an early proponent of Orange County hardcore” or “the consummate punk rocker” of skateboarding (Weyland 176; Olson, Personal Interview),84 emphasizes the homologous framing that is at work here: Skateboarding is tied to a hardcore punk life-style via the personality of an early proponent who dresses within the insignia of a radical chic promoting aggression, destruction, and independence. His extremely short bleached hair thereby adds a further notion of nonconformism as it not only opposed the 80s’ 84 | Peter’s later bands are called US Bombs and Gunfight, both sustaining the militaristic stylization that pervaded skate punk from its very beginning.

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obsessions with hairstyle (cf. Batchelor and Stoddart xii), but also as it anticipates the “Skinhead Armies” of Lee Ving’s dreams. The article accompanying the photograph of Peters picks up on the representations that preceded it and inscribes it into a broader context of the year’s popular culture. The text describes the terrain in the depictions around which it is organized as “secret spots” that require a certain insider knowledge on the part of those who want to skate them. It opens as follows: Every skater knows of at least one or two of those secret spots that were discovered in the early days of the urethane wheel and some that were found many years before. Seek and you shall find, for these places exist anywhere. They might be in your neighbor’s backyard or they might involve hours of driving backroads through mountainous terrain, topped off with a hike through jungles of poison oak, or up-and-down steep rocky slopes. More often than not, a rumored pipe or pool does not even exist. But the hardcore skater is not deterred from his final goal. The next day brings new possibilities and maybe even skate realities. (Thrasher Jan. 1981, 22)

Whether in the suburban backyard of the neighborhood or deep in the mountains, skate spots (i.e. skateable terrain) are inscribed into a mythical narration of ambiguous expeditions into the unknown.85 The reference to “the early day of the urethane wheel” adds a historic notion to skateboarders’ encroachment into new territories and alludes to the story of Dogtown that similarly builds on Frank Nasworthy’s invention of the urethane wheel. Following the quoted abstract, the drainage pipe that Peters skates in is named a “holy ground” whose discovery required “uncovering the long-hidden map to this secret spot,” which was apparently “written in Hindu” (23). Again, the actual act of skateboarding becomes secondary in this fictionalized description, which focuses instead on a highly stylized account of the great efforts that preceded Peters’s jump. The narrative technique developed here, however, hardly introduces a new and original plot but corresponds with established storylines that also characterized contemporary films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark or Tarzan. Whereas Indiana Jones would be looking for a lost ark and frequented the same exotic jungles that might provide the setting for the new Tarzan, the skate punks of California paralleled such fictitious accounts and transferred them to their suburban landscape and the hunt for a “holy ground.” Picking up on ‘traditional’ tropes of American literature and mythology, the text constitutes a very simple reiteration of established narratives that link back to frontier tales such as Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder or the lighting-out-for-the-territory trope in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Westward movement and the longing for a Virgin Land are basically reenacted in

85 | For a comprehensive account of skate spots see Thrasher: Epic Spots – The Places You Must Skate Before You Die (2008).

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the suburban locale and thus might be closer to the American Dream of its inhabitants than the rebelling skate punks would acknowledge.

Duane Peters at Marina Del Rey Skatepark, West Los Angels, circa 1979.86

© Glen E. Friedman

Peters and the other accompanying skaters are finally described as an “urban band of terrorists in their assault of this holy ground” without mentioning a single skateboarding trick or maneuver they perform (23). In parallel to Independent’s ads and the imagery that characterizes skate punk flyers, the article shifts the focus from skateboarding as a sporting activity to a destructive force that seems to nourish on its protagonists’ aggression: They not only skate a spot; they “shred the shrine” (23). The religious allusions and the fictitious inscription of spot search into Hindu mythology reflect the exoticism that had already been so important 86 | In 1967, Scott McKenzie strongly influenced the hippie movement by singing “be sure to wear some flowers in your hear” in the song “San Francisco” (originally written by John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas). Southern California skate punks such as Duane Peters turned their back on this peaceful ideal in the late 1970s/ early 1980s and even replaced the flowers with swastikas as shown in this photograph.

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for the establishment and commercialization of surfing culture. It reveals how the protagonists within skateboarding narratives are written into an exoticized margin that presents them as adventurous explorers of unknown terrain or rebellious participants in planned attacks on their concrete environment. It adds to a narrative of search and destroy or more precisely of “Skate and Destroy” as manifested by the eponymous article in Thrasher’s December issue of 1982 (24-29). Just as flyers created the impression that nuclear destruction and death linger behind the picket fences of suburbia, Thrasher homologously incorporates a destructive momentum that it ties to skateboarding activity, especially when hardcore punk rockers such as Duane Peters are involved.

2.4.3

Pools and Nightmares

The destructive and aggressive images created in Thrasher are most prominently furthered in the activity of pool skating, which receives outstanding coverage in the magazine. Four photographs presented in the January 1981 issue exemplify the significance that the mere depiction of a swimming pool holds for skateboarders (24): While one image shows a self-made wooden mini-ramp on which a skateboarder performs a frontside air, the other three smaller pictures each depict an empty concrete backyard swimming pool without any skateboarding action. Despite a short note that the skateboarder on the ramp is Scott Foss, there is no textual information on the page. It completely relies on the notion of (photographic) image and thus emphasizes the importance that this element holds for the mediation of skateboard culture.87 In congruence with the wooden ramp, the three photographs of swimming pools emphasize the do-it-yourself attitude that connects skateboarding and hardcore punk. The structure of the wooden ramp appears extremely improvised. The wooden skeleton and its balks lack any visible and organized structure, and the ramp is constructed out of various fragments that were possibly found and put together bit by bit. In combination with the skateboard maneuver being performed on the ramp, the photograph mediates a simple message: Anyone can do this. It parallels the founding momentum of early (British) punk rock mediation or “perhaps the single most inspired item of propaganda of punk’s do-it-yourself philospophy” (Hebdige 112): The fanzine Sniffing Glue providing the fingering charts for three guitar chords and encouraging its readers, “‘Here’s one chord, here’s two more, now form your own band’” (qtd. in Hebdige 112). Thrasher seems to say the same about skateboarding and swimming pools, and the postmodern landscape of prosperous suburbia for that matter. It presents an empty swimming pool; it presents two more; and it implies the possibility to go and skate them. The images of the empty swimming pools address the readers’ imagination and locate skate87 | For detailed comments about photography in skateboarding see Borden’s Skateboarding, Space and the City (114ff).

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boarding precisely between Moore’s conception of punk’s development to hardcore as enmeshed in a “culture of deconstruction” and a “culture of authenticity” (317). Thrasher represents skateboarding’s potential to literally deconstruct architecture by stripping off its “original connotations” (e.g. by skating swimming pools) (Hebdige 104), while simultaneously implying the chance for “cultural production” in the form of authentic creativity (Moore, “Postmodernism and Punk” 314). It thus shares the fundamental characteristics of hardcore punk between bricolage and DIY ethics. Two articles that specifically concentrate on pool skating in Thrasher’s November 1981 issue provide perfect examples of how the radical and aggressive connotations of this activity are textually implemented and narratively enhanced within the magazine’s documentations. The first article is entitled “Operation Infiltration,” which alludes to the militaristic implications that pervade the magazine as it combines notions of espionage, border crossing, and exploration. Labeled as “Skate Fiction,” the text tells the story of first-person narrator “Johnny Tough” and his friends who set out to skate the “12’ kidney” pool in the backyard of the Webster family (Thrasher Nov. 1981, 15). It starts with a narrative account of how the boys carefully plan their “operation” and surmount the “Webster’s back fence” (15), a scene that already found graphic manifestation in the medium of flyers: The backyard fence as a key element of skate punk mediation that materializes the interface between suburban desolation and rebellious pool skating, between placid surface and skate punk expression or, as later depicted in Lynch’s Blue Velvet, between idyllic veneer and a dark underworld. After “monitoring the Websters for three weeks,” the skaters come to the conclusion that the family must be “devout members of a satanic cult” (15). Participating in a “weekly Satanic ritual,” the Websters regularly leave their home, which provides an opportunity for the protagonists to skate their empty swimming pool (18). During the boys’ skate session the Websters return. Their appearance as “hooded figures” and zombie-like “occultists” with a “bloodied spiritual knife that was still dripping” resembles films such as George A. Romaro’s Dawn of the Dead (16, 18, 16). Shot in 1978, the film relocates the epidemic attack of flesh-eating zombies, which Romero had introduced in the 1968 Night of the Living Dead, to the setting of a suburban shopping mall, basically the epitome of the hyperreal consumer society that would dominate the 1980s. Not only Thrasher picks up on this narrative and renders the Websters as emotionless zombie-like suburbanites, also a whole number of films follow and constitute interesting parallels to hardcore punk culture. Dan O’Bannon’s 1985 Return of the Living Dead is exemplary in this context as its soundtrack heavily relies on punk rock music in the form of contributions by groups such as Los Angeles’s aptly named Flesh Eaters or Orange County’s TSOL. The latter’s wish to “fuck the dead” illustrates how skate punk culture puts the tropes of zombie and horror movies into play and enters into a circulation of films and stories that reach from mainstream movies to subcultural fanzines. In addition to the zombie motif that pervades “Operation Infiltration,” the description of a family as satanic devotees evokes associations with the Manson Fam-

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ily murders (which had already pervaded the Black Flag flyers by Pettibon) and adds to the “popular mythology” that gave California—and in this case the state’s suburban backyards—“a tantalizing sense of danger” (Weyland 33). The text supports this impression by explaining that the boys were “[r]eady at all times for the sudden dash for the seeming sanctuary of the suburban landscape” (Thrasher Nov. 1981, 16), which again evokes notions of a changing suburbia between peaceful retreat and encroaching danger. Grindon sees such narratives within specific literary currents of the 1980s that especially reverberate in contemporary film: John Powers and Fredric Jameson saw in this trend a “New American Gothic,” an expression of the disturbing underbelly of social fissures and malcontents. Though these films fail to offer alternative values, they testify to a division within the United States, and a willingness to confront the darker side of human experience necessary in unmasking the social fantasia that often characterized American popular culture in the 1980s. (166)

Similarly to Grindon’s contestation that the films of a “New American Gothic” fail to offer alternative values, the implementation of uncanny and horrid motifs in skate punk media remains stuck within a pop-cultural reiteration of established clichés and narratives. In “Operation Infiltration,” after a wild chase, physical confrontations in which the boys use their skateboards to fight off the “hooded things,” and a seemingly dead-end entrapment of the first person narrator, he wakes up in his bedroom realizing it all had been a dream. This abrupt end of the story is enhanced by a last mysterious turning point: Although the narrator had only dreamt the events, his skateboard is actually “covered with blood” (19). Ever since Victor Fleming’s 1939 movie version of L. Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the waking from a dream (or nightmare) has been part of popular narratives’ attempts to provide closure while maintaining a touch of speculative and frightening openness. Pushed to extremes in slasher films such as Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980) and its protagonist Alice’s awakening from a nightmare in a hospital at the movie’s ending, dreams become a narrative device that had not only been used in preceding productions such as Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), but constantly recur in 80’s horror and slasher movies such as An American Werewolf in London (1981) or A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Ill Repute’s song “Sleepwalker” seems as much indebted to these mainstream templates as it copies the story of “Operation Infiltration”: In the end, there are always traces of blood and confused teenagers. Thrasher’s trivial narrative of a conflict between skaters and satanic creatures is thus inscribed into well-known scenarios that question the differentiation between reality and fiction. It provides a fictionalized account of the particularities that were associated with the activity of pool skating in the postmodern, if not hyperreal, world of suburbia. These descriptions resonate in the subsequent article “On Being A Pool Mercenary” (20).

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Once more characterized by military vocabulary, this text gives instructions on how to find swimming pools to skate in. It recommends visiting “[r]un-down areas of the city” to look for unused pools or checking high school pools that had to be drained due to “fund cut-backs” (21), advice that implicitly reflects the deterioration of city centers and the privatization of public services that abounded with the rise of Reaganomics. The article emphasizes the importance of “possible escape routes” and thus links back to the fictional account of “Operation Infiltration” (23). Interestingly, it ends with the warning that skaters “should obey the law” as trespassing might get them in trouble if they are 18 and over (23). Although such a statement seems to contrast the attitudes that followed from the military descriptions of “invaded space” and an “attack” on pools, it is put into perspective by the graphic design of the article. Dominated by photographs of active pool skaters—e.g. a bare-chested and aggressive Keith Meek who “slashes one over the splash gutter tiles” of an empty pool on his board (22)88 —the page design incorporates stylized depictions of barbed wire. They create the impression of a heavily fenced space and communicate that the documented action in fact is trespassing. It is an invasion of private property that needs careful planning and relies on the guerilla tactics associated with skateboarding since the emergence of the Dogtown crew. Returning to Thrasher’s first issue and Thatcher’s editorial, the exemplified characterizations are linked to the mindset that the magazine represents: Thrashing is an attitude, a skate attitude. Thrashing is part of a lifestyle, a fast-paced feeling to fit this modern world. Thrashing is finding something and taking it to the ultimate limit—not dwelling on it, but using it to the fullest and moving on. (Thrasher Jan. 1981, 6)

Skateboarding as thrashing is elevated to the level of a lifestyle at this point. It apparently enables its participants to encounter the challenges of “this modern world.” Thatcher’s remarks are graphically enhanced with a photograph of a skateboarder performing a maneuver—a laid-back surf-inspired Bertelman slide on a paved inclination. The skater takes up only minimal space in the overall depiction of the scenery which is dominated by four steel hydrants in the foreground and the wall of a huge windowless building in the background. Almost trapped in between the horizontally structured elements of the building and the vertically arranged hydrants, the skater introduces the notion of movement to an otherwise stable and highly organized setting. The photograph transfers Thatcher’s remarks to a depiction of practical realization: The modern world is “fit” with the “fast-paced feeling” of a Bertleman slide that momentarily seems to interrupt the order of a found space by “using it to the fullest and moving on.” It is the medial image that Thrasher es88 | As a professional skateboarder for Santa Cruz Skateboards, Meek earned the nickname “Slasher” due to his skating style. The graphic under his skateboard shows a monstrous creature with a blood-covered knife, constituting an interesting analogy to the story in “Operation Infiltration” and the decade’s filmic genre of the slasher movie.

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tablishes through all its allusions to skateboarding as a rebellious act of aggression that renders the skater’s movement meaningful. The homology that frames skate punk culture unfolds a setting in which the hardcore punk appearance of Duane Peters, the military presence of the Iron Cross, the aggressive expression on a platform with four wheels, the significance of thrashing, the “dangers” of suburban backyards, and the exotic description of skateboard “terrorists” all interlock and provide a cultural code in which movement on a skateboard counts as a subcultural sign signifying aggression, rebellion, and resistance.

2.4.4

Hegemonic Masculinity: Bikinis, Betties, and Wild Riders of Boards

Bikinis and Betties A close reading of Thrasher’s first issue reveals that—except for the very few photographs in which females can be spotted among the audiences of skateboarding events—there is only one single photograph that centers on a young woman. In striking resemblance to the single skate punk flyer with girls in it that Turcotte’s books show and which presents them as bikini-clad, sexualized spectators admiringly looking up to a performing skateboarder (cf. Turcotte 221), the image that is part of a four-page article on “Downhill Racing” presents a blond, smiling girl in a bikini in front of a white van. Two other pictures frame the photograph. They are labeled with short textual information while the image of the girl remains uncommented upon, suggesting that the girl’s name is of no interest and that her presence in a bikini speaks for itself. The photograph to its left shows three boys (two of them with skateboards) ‘hanging out’ at a rail. It reads, “Peter Gifford, Duane Peters and Tony Alva checking the action” (Thrasher Jan. 1981, 18). The one to the right depicts a downhill skateboarder ducked down on his board while the blurred background suggests that he is moving fast from right to left. It reads, “Rick Blackhart always headed in the right direction” (18). The two photographs of the skateboarders and the accompanying text lines are arranged around the image of the girl in the bikini in a way that implicitly suggests that she is part of the action that can be “checked” and that she embodies the direction worth “heading” for. Resonating with Blush’s remarks about women in American Hardcore, the three photographs show how females are constructed and presented as passive spectators deprived of an “active voice” (Blush 35; cf. “Mascutlinity in Hardcore Punk” in 1.2.5). While a girl in a bikini alone would hardly account for such an interpretation, the context in which she is presented justifies this critical reading: The article reveals that the downhill contest it documents also included a women’s division. It indeed held a platform for female’s active participation, which renders the editors’ choice to include the girl in the bikini as the only visual representation of female ‘participants’ as affected by a distinctively sexualized gaze. The fact that her photograph is the

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only depiction of a female character in the entire magazine emphasizes the male dominance that is mediated here. The juxtaposition to another image on the same page plays into the preceding evaluation. The three pictures are placed above the article text at the top of the page while the bottom includes a further photograph whose size equals that of the upper three. It shows the winner of the race, the bare-chested John Hutson, victoriously spreading his arms, presenting a skateboard—tellingly decorated with a sticker of Independent’s Iron Cross—in one hand and a helmet in the other; apparently he just won the race. A younger boy to the right admiringly looks at the triumphant skateboarder. Read in combination with the sexualized presentation of the girl, the imagery on this page constitutes a niche medial example of a reinforcement of what R.W. Connell calls “hegemonic masculinity,” albeit presented within a context of mediated marginalization. Usually understood “as the pattern of practice (i.e., things done, not just a set of role expectations or an identity) that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue,” hegemonic masculinity “did not mean violence, although it could be supported by force; it meant ascendancy achieved through culture, institutions, and persuasion” (Connell and Messerschmidt 832). The photographic representation in Thrasher provides a mediation of ascendancy through the sexualization, objectification or overall exclusion of female characters. It indeed constitutes an institutionalized form of (sub-) culture that implies men’s dominance over women. As Connell and Messerschmidt postulate concerning the original usage of the term “hegemonic masculinity,” it described a social position that was “certainly normative” (832). Although it “was not assumed to be normal in the statistical sense; [as] only a minority of men might enact it,” hegemonic masculinity represents the exact opposite of the rebellious anti-mainstream stance that skate punk otherwise set out to represent. The article text in Thrasher describes downhill skateboarding as rooted within a “vigorous underground existence” and consequently positions it far away from any mainstream normativity (19). A critical reading of the photographic documentation, however, reveals the signification of male dominance. Far from holding positions of “marginalized masculinities” that Connell sees subordinated to hegemonic masculinity as a consequence of race and class impacts, Thrasher rather mediates self-marginalized masculinities that deploy markers of underground radicalism in order to position the white middle-class skaters outside the social norms they are obviously part of (cf. Connell 80/81). The fact that participant Rick Blackhart—the same skater who destroys the window in the Independent ad—announces “a fully catered bash at his sprawling shoreline villa in Santa Cruz” at least disrupts the image of rebellious outcasts lingering at the social margins (Thrasher Jan. 1981, 19). A look at the other 11 issues of Thrasher’s first volume clearly supports this conclusion and emphasizes the male dominance that it medially maintains. While the April, June, September, and November issues do not include depictions of women at all, the remaining issues of 1981 together only include five photographs that show active female skaters on their boards: Carabeth Burnside

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is depicted in a skate park and introduced as a “young lady with a passion for vertical” in the February issue (17); Peggy Turner is depicted grinding in a half pipe with a caption informing us that she “competed against the guys in every event” (Thrasher Mar. 1981, 22); the May issue shows Elisabeth Lovgren, who participated in “women’s slalom” (21); and, in an article about another slalom contest, Carol Elliott is presented as the “lone female entrant” (Thrasher July 1981, 19). It is noticeable that all four mentioned depictions of females include captions that present explicit gender ascriptions. The only exception of a photograph showing an active female skateboarder that simply describes how “Debbie McAdoo wheels off the top of the Ranch Ramp” without additionally gendering the information, tellingly appears in an article written by McAdoo herself (Thrasher Oct. 1981, 23). The other images seem to make a point of emphasizing the skater’s gender classification and thus rendering them as exceptions. In addition to these five photographs of active female skateboarders, within twelve issues of Thrasher there are only three other depictions that directly focus on female characters. One picture shows skateboarder Mike Folmer in the company of a blond girl; the text line describes how he is “enjoying beautiful sunny California” (Thrasher May 1981, 13), clearly presenting the girl as a mere accessory representing a clichéd version of the California lifestyle. A depiction of a girl in ‘hot pants,’ also blond wearing sunglasses, and apparently sitting on the side of a downhill racetrack is presented with the text line, “Obviously this fan knows what’s happening” (Thrasher Aug. 1981, 14). The December issue includes an advertisement that shows a photographer hugging a girl with long blond hair and sunglasses. The accompanying text reads, “He doesn’t even skate, yet there he is at every contest with his Nikon grabbing all the betties” (32). It becomes evident that female characters are only incorporated as passive spectators or fans who adore the male skateboarders and their actions. Viewed as “betties”—a term that alludes to “[a]ny manner of skate groupies of the female persuasion” as defined by Thrasher (Thrasher, Skate and Destroy 25)—women are excluded from active skateboarding. It would not be until the February issue of 1988, i.e. seven years into the magazine’s existence, that the first woman, Katrina Baumgartner, appeared on the cover of Thrasher; tellingly, she is a model and not a skateboarder. The manipulated presence, or better, the absence of girls and women from Thrasher sustains traditional gender hierarchies, while the depictions and descriptions of skateboarders as aggressive rebels provide an attempt to distance its male protagonists from positions of normativity. This gender hierarchy and the politics of female representation constitute a further—obviously unfortunate—interconnection with punk and hardcore punk culture. In her essay “‘Lady’ Punks in Bands: A Subculturette?” Hellen Reddington explains: There is perhaps no better example of male hegemonic control over popular cultural history than the rewrite of punk to exclude the very large and productive presence of young women in the subculture from its very beginning. (239)

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Reddington’s statement emphasizes that there is indeed a very multifarious number of women who are actively involved in subcultures, however, as already pointed out with reference to Blush’s remarks about female activism, they are often ignored and excluded from the subcultural media. Whereas British punk merely seemed to acknowledge the presence of young women “as fishnet-clad dominatrixes” (Reddington 239), the Californian version of skate and hardcore punk paralleled this portrayal with bikini-wearing “betties” who resembled the ‘Surfer Girls’ introduced in early Beach Boys songs (cf. Beal 1996; Chivers Yochim; Kelly, Pomerantz, and Dawn). That a band called Bikini Kill fronted the emergence of the Riot Grrrl movement— an explicitly feminist approach to punk and do-it-yourself culture at the end of the 1980s—seems to emphasize that it was exactly the clichéd versions of ‘California Girls’ which spawned young women’s disassociation from and resistance against the male dominated skate and hardcore punk scenes of the Reagan years.89

Wild Riders of Boards The gendered mediation continued in a “different take on the skater as social pariah” that would contribute a further important element to Thrasher’s consolidation of skateboarding and hardcore punk culture (Weyland 181). Morizen Foche, under the pseudonym Mofo, started a series of fictitious skateboarding adventures entitled “Wild Riders of Boards” in the March issue of 1981. Initially, his short stories revolve around two rival skateboard gangs, the “Zekes” and “El Vatos Bandidos De Vario X,” that competed for their neighborhood skating turfs (Thrasher Mar. 1981, 28). The male skateboarders engage in fights that are again stylized with reference to military allusions. Confrontations about “disputed terrain” are described as combats “to be fought on a mutual battleground” (Thrasher June 1981, 26). “Assembled in the parking lot of a savings and loan in the middle of a large suburbia,” the male protagonists are figured as “some of the most fierce skaters ever known” (Thrasher May 1981, 29). Their boisterous characterization implies a dialectic tension between suburban order and their aggression, which is then masculinized in juxtaposition to the following incorporation of a female character. Relying on the figure of the “betty,” Mofo includes a girl, Naomi, in the story who is labeled a “Zeke Deb” and described as one of the gang’s “chick groupies” by first person narrator Eddy Boy (Thrasher Mar. 1981, 28). After he accomplishes a spectacular skate maneuver that Naomi witnesses, Eddy Boy expresses how “[s]he waved, blew me a kiss and pulled the curtains close. Boy. I’ve wanted access to her for a long time. Maybe now I’ll have a chance” (28). In congruence with the photographic depictions of girls and women in Thrasher, the story reverts to conceptions of passive and decorative femininity as a background for acts of male achievement and aggression. Mofo transfers these accounts into a context of actual skate punk discourse, as the graphic enhancements he adds to his stories are full of hardcore punk insignia. 89 | For a comprehensive account of the Riot Grrrl movement cf. Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front – The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010).

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Weyland notes that although “the writing was clunky, […] it worked with Mofo’s drawings of Eddy Boy wearing torn-up jeans and a fedora in an urban wasteland where Black Flag and Circle Jerks graffiti was scrawled on the walls along with ‘Bow to No Man’” (Weyland 181; cf. Thrasher Mar. 1981, 28). The incorporation of direct references to South Bay bands such as Black Flag and Circle Jerks are coupled with depictions of insignia such as the swastika or anarchy symbols that imply homologous connections to hardcore punk and add notions of radicalism to a story in which the protagonist skates to attract the attention of his favorite “Zeke Deb” (cf. Thrasher June 1981, 26). Mullen describes Californian hardcore punk concerts in the early 1980s as “bizarre post-pubescent all-male warrior bonding rituals” (Mullen, Lexicon Devil 159), a description that seems to summarize the narrative that Mofo creates in “Wild Riders of Boards” and which links back to the “Wrecking Crew” invoked in the examined song lyrics. Similarly introduced as warriors, the skateboard rivals in the story engage in manly tests of courage, which indeed resemble the struggles of pubertal rascals. Outnumbered in a conflict situation, Zeke member Blade informs his possible attacker, “You have us outnumbered four to one. What kind of BIG MAN do you think you are? I wouldn’t doubt if you would shoot a man in the back, or, worse yet, you probably beat up girls. You must have some sort of honor!” (Thrasher May 1981, 29). Totally indebted to a gender hierarchy that relies on male dominance, Blade’s statement constructs his conception of honorable manliness on the alleged vulnerability of girls. In the September issue, Mofo introduces a new “cast” of characters in “Wild Riders of Boards.” The members of the (non-fictional) Texas skate punk band Big Boys are incorporated in an account of their experiences as a music group that consists of skateboarders. Protagonist Biskut opens the story with the line, “I ride a skate. I’m in a skate band” (24). Voiced by a character that is based on Randy “Biscuit” Turner (the real Big Boys’s lead singer), this statement arguably represents the first written and published coinage of a term that consolidates the activity of skateboarding and the foundation of a musical group. It constitutes the harbinger of what would become known as “Skate Rock,” especially with the institution of the Thrasher Skate Rock tapes in 1983. Brian Brannon, who also worked as staff writer for Thrasher, shares this estimation. He states that the term “skate rock” goes back to Mofo and his introduction of the Big Boys as a “skate band” (Brannon, Personal Interview). The fact that Mofo chooses a punk band for his episodes of “Wild Riders of Boards” parallels the musical references that the rubric “Notes from the Underground” provided within the magazine. As Weyland argues: It wasn’t a coincidence that the bands written about were overwhelmingly of the punk and hardcore variety. Some of the first “Notes from the Underground” were the Circle Jerks, Social Distortion, and the Jam. The Thrasher World Chart was a wish list of subterranean sounds: The Clash’s Sandinista!, X, T.S.O.L., the Sex Pistols, the Specials and Adolescents were all mentioned early on. (184)

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The punk-oriented soundtrack Thrasher promoted resonated with the incorporation of the Big Boys and medially manifested the mergence of skateboarding and (hardcore) punk into skate punk. Although the Big Boys were from Texas, close ties to California’s hardcore punk culture pervade the story. The first scene of their story is set in the “outskirts of Austin. Suburbia. It’s a Sunday afternoon and it’s burly hot” (Thrasher Sep. 1981, 25). This introduction picks up on the suburban theme that similarly pervades early Californian hardcore punk and had already proved to be highly influential for skate punk mediations. Additionally, it is important to note that the Big Boys’ story revolves around a road trip to California. As mentioned in Thrasher number 10, the boys “were soon on down the road, contemplating transitional environments and California betties” (40), a description that not only evokes the importance of California for the skate punk narrative but also sustains the image of male activity opposed to female passivity and the imagined availability of women that underlies Thrasher’s construction of a skateboard lifestyle. The fact that one episode of the Big Boys story ends with the citation of the lyrics to their song “Identity Crisis,” directly resonates with Robinson’s idea of a male identity crisis and its traces within other mediations of skate punk culture. The band sings, “Identity crisis, who am I? Identity crisis, I wonder why. Identity crisis, what’s my name?” and thus presents a mindset of alienation that Robinson later identifies as symptomatic of post-60s masculinity.90

2.4.5

Conclusion: Established Patterns with a Hardcore Surface

“Wild Riders of Boards” summarizes the self-image that Thrasher provides as a desirable identity for its readership. It promotes attributes of toughness, radicalism, aggressiveness, bonding, adventurousness, and hegemonic masculinity, while inscribing them into discourses of skateboarding and hardcore punk. The magazine claims to constitute an alternative to the mainstream through its “Skate and Destroy” attitude and, while co-founder Vitello denies the existence of “bullshit articles,” many of the published texts merely copy and reiterate pop-cultural narratives that circulated during the 1980s. Although personal accounts and articles about contests and skate sessions introduced the “irreverent walk-on-the-wild-side, everything-besides-the-actual-skating school of skate journalism” (Weyland 182), which indeed constituted a diversion from the dull reporting in sports magazines, the simple and banal tropes that were time and again deployed to emphasize the 90 | Ironically, besides their role in Thrasher, the Big Boys are remembered for breaking up the oftentimes restrictive narrow-mindedness of hardcore punk. Considering their musical style that went far beyond hardcore punk’s simple high speed beats and the fact that Randy Turner was an openly homosexual singer it appears particularly interesting that they are stylized in this heteronormative fashion. Singing about an identity crisis within a gay context certainly evokes other connotations than its presentation in the narratives of Thrasher magazine.

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rebellious coolness of the involved skaters did not reach the gonzo style of writers such as Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe, who might have served as role models here. A writer with the pseudonym Jimi-Joe-Jake Johnson Jr., in his account of a “skateboard concert in Hollywood” and a following trip to San Francisco (Thrasher Aug. 1984, 28), summarizes the scope of many of Thrasher’s articles and stories. He recounts a moment in the tour van that he shared with members of JFA and Big Boys: I passed out and could give a shit about living in a Third World country. Don’t know why I thought of that, living in California and all. Well, it’s almost the same. Everywhere I go, there’s refugees from someplace—Filipinos in the laundromat, Middle Easterners running the 7-11s, Vietnamese behind the grocery store counters… Not that that’s bad, but shit, I gotta know a whole different language just to say that I don’t want cheese on my hamburger. And still it comes back with an orange, dripping, synthesized square of cheese. But what that has to do with skateboarding or rock ‘n’ roll, I don’t know. Maybe Andy Warhol, William Burroughs or Chuck Bukowski knows. They should, they’re men of extreme knowledge because they have grey hair and know how to spell. (Thrasher Aug. 1984, 33)

The statement reads like a status report of 1980s skate punk culture. It implies the close connections to the lyrics and imagery of hardcore punk, which similarly allude to the demographic changes of the suburban environment and enter discourses of clichéd notions of non-white citizens and immigrants. The narrator seems to be aware of the advantages that his life in “California and all” provides but tries to establish a marginal position by comparing it to “Third World” conditions. Revealing the consumerist attitudes of the decade, the main problem in the statement centers on the adequate preparation of his fast food diet. The narrator does not even know how all of this fits into skateboarding or music. Pointing towards a realm that surpasses the face-value semantics of Thrasher’s articles and stories, he thus exemplifies to what extent skate punks often simply float with the current of a pop-cultural fabric which provides the basis for many of their allegedly rebellious narratives: Sometimes not even knowing (or caring?) about the respective connection that link the images, music, and texts of their media with the actual activities of skateboarding and punk expression, they plainly deploy and reproduce the commodities and discourses of the time and space as a contextual background. Mentioning of the likes of Warhol, Burroughs, and Bukowski does not seem random in this respect. Warhol had suggested: What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the

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Rombes uses this quote to point out that Warhol’s artistic explorations and celebrations of an all-encompassing consumer culture “made it possible for the Ramones to sing about movies, TV shows, cereal, and all the rest of ‘junk’ culture” (305). Paralleling this development, California skate punks were able to invoke and implement Cokes and Snickers, suburban dreams and nightmares, zombies, monsters, and synthesized squares of cheese in their medial manifestations. The aesthetics that underlie these mediations certainly do not reach the complexity of the literary cut-up techniques of a William S. Burroughs or the voluminous accounts of L.A.’s working class by Charles Bukowski, however, just like Warhol’s art they remind us that “context is everything” as their pop-cultural allusions correspond to the specificities of the 1980s (305). It is important to read Thrasher in view of this context as it helps to reveal that what was constructed and perceived as the “rebellious bible of skateboarding” functions along the same patterns as the mainstream it set out to disrupt (Fox 2006: n.pag).

2.5

S K ATE P UNK V IDEOS

2.5.1

Video (R)evolution

In 1979 British new wave band The Buggles announced that “Video Killed the Radio Star” in their eponymous hit single. Two years later, the accompanying video clip was the first of its kind ever to be shown on MTV. The anticipated pessimism concerning radio broadcasting, however, need not have worried the skateboarding punks of Southern California too much: With the exception of a few fringe radio shows that played punk rock, most prominently Rodney Bingenheimer’s Rodney on the Roq on L.A.’s KROQ (cf. Spitz and Mullen 57ff; also cf. Muir in Thrasher May 1987, 60), they did not expect much airplay of their favorite tunes anyway and, consequently, there was no one really to be killed in the first place. The fact that MTV did not provide much punk rock was not really surprising either and although its New Wave approach tapped into punk style and provided the background for the daily lives of 1980s teenagers, it would take a few years until Suicidal Tendencies provided MTV’s first hardcore punk appearance with the video for their song “Institutionalized” in 1984 (cf. Blush 97); in 1986 they would follow with the first skate punk video for the song “Possessed to Skate.”91 Despite hardcore and skate 91 | The band DEVO from Ohio, associated more with the New Wave side of punk, preceded Suicidal Tendencies with the inclusion of skateboarding action in their video for the 1980 song “Freedom of Choice,” which was partly shot in the skatepark of Marina del Rey in Los Angeles (cf. Zarka 37).

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punk’s restricted access to MTV, the Buggle’s media-savvy implication of video’s importance proved accurate in the years to come and just as the Xerox machine had proven foundational for flyer development, video production and technique had its impact on the burgeoning scene of skateboarding punk rockers. The “Video Revolution” of the 1980s not only changed the film industry’s distribution channels and established the home-video as an additional marketing tool to the conventional movie screen, it also created a “stimulus […] for independent filmmaking” and fostered the emergence of directors such as Jim Jarmusch, the Cohen brothers, and Spike Lee (G. Thompson 92-96). Whereas the technology of the VCR and “the home video boom was a nightmare come true for the Hollywood majors” due to their fear of unrestricted private copying and distribution (Prince, A New Pot 99), the growing availability and affordability of portable cameras and recorders also changed the narrative styles, spawned new approaches to directing, and entailed the emergence of alternative productions ranging from the innovations of the mentioned directors and video art to amateur films and pornography. The opportunities for self-made video productions offered new ways to escape the dictate of mainstream cinema. Korean artist Nam June Paik, who had been using video equipment since the 1960s, summarized the emancipating potential of the medium by claiming, “Television has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back” (qtd. in Elwes 5). The essence of this statement accompanied the development of video technique and, in the 1980s, met with the DIY ethics that characterized the skateboarding and punk cultures of the decade. An article about “The Making of a Skate Video” in Thrasher’s January issue of 1985 fittingly invoked the possibility to “go get your camera, point, shoot and the rest is up to you. Why watch television when you can make your own” (17). It paralleled the ‘now-formyour-own-band’ incitement presented in punk fanzines such as Sniffing Glue, while offering a narrative account that introduced a distancing from mainstream Hollywood productions and inscribed skateboarding into emancipatory do-it-yourself activities: On a side street in Alhambra, California, a professional Hollywood video cameraman lay in the gutter bleeding. Standing next to him laughing were the ever so guilty looking Lance Mountain, Steve Caballero, and Mike McGill. The inspiring tale just why Lance had chosen to rock’n’roll curb slide into the lens, through the camera and off the videoman’s face would take too long to relate here. Suffice it to say he was the wrong man for the job and he had just been given notice, streetstyle. The professional resigned from the crew moments after Stacy Peralta fired him. Also now absent from our scenario was “Soundo,” the bleeding pro’s ace assistant. At this moment Peralta uttered those famous words, “you guys aren’t making this any easier,” trashed the Hollywood crews pristine professional video take and promoted Lance to director. From then on nothing else was ever the same. People took turns being camera man. (Thrasher Jan. 1985, 17)

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The excerpt shows how Hollywood, and thus the mainstream, was violently rejected and replaced by skateboarders themselves. Lance Mountain, one of the skateboarders to be filmed for the video, was “promoted to director” on the spot as the work of the professional film crew did not meet the needs of the skaters. Just as Thrasher claimed to be produced by skaters for skaters, the shooting of skate videos was fashioned in a proclaimed do-it-yourself style from the very beginning. Borden suggests that “videos are then perhaps the most accurate way of reproducing the sound and movement of skateboarding, portraying skateboarding at its most prosaic, ordinary in its accessibility and location, extraordinary in its appearance and context” (Skateboarding 118). He implies the possibilities for video representations to offer a genuine account of skateboarding while mentioning the importance of appearance and context, which calls attention to the stylizations that characterize skate videos. Before expanding on the possibilities and limitations of reproducing the experience of skateboarding itself, these stylizations, i.e. the narrative implementations and contextual allusions of skate videos, need to be analyzed as they provide a further mode of skate punk’s attempt to position itself within the popular culture of the 1980s. Combining moving images of skateboard action with musical soundtracks, skate videos medially exemplify the interconnection between (hardcore) punk music and skateboarding culture. Hardly any skate video from the 1980s gets along without songs that represent the Californian hardcore punk scene and, as a look at the narrative implementations of these videos reveals, they share many of the same tropes that have already been constitutive for the representation of skate punk in song lyrics, flyers, and Thrasher magazine. Skate videos thus not only provided an additional medium in the development of skate punk culture, they also filled the gap that existed due to the lack of punk music on the radio. Alba, referring to the soundtrack of Santa Cruz Skateboards’ video Streets on Fire (1989) which almost exclusively includes bands from Black Flag’s SST label, explains: “They kind of licensed [their songs] out to Santa Cruz so Santa Cruz could use them and they’d get more exposure for SST” (Alba, Personal Interview). His statement exemplifies how skate videos could replace the function of radio shows by distributing hardcore punk music to a receptive audience. Skate videos did not necessarily kill the radio star in this regard, they rather created “a hybrid cultural form, encompassing elements of both television and radio” by making use of the video as a carrier for images and music (Shuker 200).92

2.5.2

Skate Video Narratives: Old Tropes and a New Medium

Although there had been movies that included skateboarding before—Noel Black’s short film Skaterdater (1965) had even been nominated for an Academy Award 92 | Appropriately enough, in 2002, Transworld Skateboarding released a video with the title Videoradio. It is only one example of the sustaining relevance that skate videos and their function as carriers of both moving image and music hold until today.

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and won the Golden Palm in 1966—the first highly visible skateboard scene on (the big) screen in the 1980s was probably Marty McFly’s wild chase in Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (1985). Played by Family Ties star Michael J. Fox, the time traveling McFly basically reenacts skateboarding’s foundation myth, i.e. the invention of the skateboard by breaking off the handle bar of a milk crate scooter in order to use the toy as a getaway vehicle (cf. Brooke 16, Chivers Yochim 27). He thus imports his 1980s skateboarding skills into the small town life of the 1950s and successfully escapes the villains trying to beat him up. Weyland explains that the popularity of the film “led some to confusedly think that the movie was responsible for the upswing” of skateboarding in the mid and late 1980s (258). However, Back to the Future was preceded and paralleled by a number of skate videos that bore witness to much more sophisticated maneuvers than McFly’s escape on four wheels, while introducing and promoting a skateboard culture that existed beyond the clean cut image of Michael J. Fox. One of the first skate videos that also alluded to punk style was Vision’s promotional video Skatevision. It came out in 1984 and its entire soundtrack consisted of songs by Orange County surf and skate punk band Agent Orange. Powell Peralta’s Bones Brigade Video Show, directed by former Z-Boy Stacy Peralta, premiered in the same year and, according to Borden, “‘blew open’ the skateboard world” (Skateboarding 117). It was the first in a sequel of Bones Brigade follow-ups called Future Primitive (1986), The Search for Animal Chin (1987), Public Domain (1988), Ban This (1989), and Propaganda (1990). These videos certainly presented skateboarding in a light other than the short scene in Back to the Future. The guest roles that the Bones Brigade skaters played in Jim Drake’s Police Academy IV: Citizens on Patrol (1987) as a gang of skate kids who disobey the police’s instruction “No skateboarding in my district!”, indicate that they represented the image of rebellious outcasts rather than the nostalgia of 50s small town life. However, the fact that it is the shopping mall (of all places) where the Bones Brigade is headed for in Police Academy IV already implies that the rebellious narratives constructed around the video versions of skateboarders are once again deeply imbedded in the normative suburban discourses of 1980s teenage life. Batchelor and Stoddart note that in Back to the Future “Marty McFly (Fox) navigates the terrain of teenaged hell,” including annoying parents, corny nerds, violent bullies, and the obligatory rivalries concerning girls (150). Although stylized in a fashion which promotes images of rebellious punk resistance and incorporates hardcore punk soundtracks, the skate videos of the 1980s tap into the same narratives as the decade’s teen films while, unsurprisingly, relying on the same tropes of marginal outcast positions that already pervaded other media of skate punk culture. In the following, I offer examinations of two videos, Santa Cruz Skateboards’ 70-minute film Streets on Fire (1989) and Suicidal Tendencies’ three and a half minute music clip for the song Possessed to Skate (1986), in order to show how they contribute to the medial image of rebellious adolescents.

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Streets on Fire With its release in 1989, Streets on Fire (directed by Howard Dittrich) not only marked the end of a decade but also incorporated many of the tropes and images that pervaded skate punk culture during the 1980s. The video weaves these into a narrative that exemplifies the different positions skate punks may adopt in their performances and thus emphasizes the social mobility they enjoy as white males of the American middle class. The story is relatively simple: The protagonist, professional skateboarder Jason Jessee, is arrested and sentenced to death for skateboarding in public. He is incarcerated on Death Row. Cutting back and forth between shots of Jessee in his cell and short clips of different skateboarders, the storyline is divided into two strands: The viewer sees Jessee in prison while the video also documents skateboarding maneuvers at different locations. There is hardly any narrative coherence between the two strands, although the latter is incorporated into the plot as the skateboarding clips are presented as memories, dreams or thoughts of Jessee himself or as accounts of the various friends, all of them skaters, who come to see him in prison and report on the actions they took on their boards. The story thus revolves around the experiences of a convicted skateboarder in prison, which provides the framework for a series of sequences that present him and various other skateboarders performing maneuvers. Although the skateboarding action constitutes the focus of Streets on Fire, the narrative frame indicates the way skateboarders perceive themselves. It picks up on a variety of modes of self-stylization that correspond to the characteristics of hardcore punks. Right from the beginning, the video inscribes the activity of skateboarding into the realm of criminal and disobedient behavior. It begins with a blank black screen and the rhythmic sounds of skateboard wheels on a sidewalk. Followed by sounds of a helicopter, sirens, and radio equipment it sonically creates the impression of a police operation. From off-screen the voice of Jason Jessee laments, “Ouch, that’s real skin, man,” and, “I’m just skating. I’m not doing anything wrong.” Apparently, he is arrested and the first shots support this interpretation as they depict a prison hallway in which a jailer—played by former Z-Boy Skip Engblom—leads Jessee, already wearing a prison uniform, through a lattice door and off into the darkness ahead of them. A deep voice, apparently that of the jailer, announces that this is “Death Row” and that Jessee is “going down.” The jailer informs him that there are “certain rules in this house” and adds that Jessee committed a “serious offense against society” and perpetrated “a serious crime: the crime of illegal skateboarding” for which he is “going to the chair” (0:01:25). The camera pans along prison bars before we see how Jessee is pushed into and locked in a cell. A zoom into the cell presents a close-up of Jessee looking disbelievingly into the camera and screaming. A sharp cut follows accompanied by nondiegetic music—the song “White Cross” by Sonic Youth—and various extremely short shots of skateboarders in action present a variety of completely new and ever changing settings: concrete pools and walls, ramps, streets, and parking lots where skateboarders perform various maneuvers.

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In the story, Jessee can hardly believe what is happening to him. His reactions emphasize the absurd situation of being sentenced to death for skateboarding and the rather improvised way of acting implies that the video’s producers did not intend to present the narrative as a realistic situation. However, the story alludes to the real encounters that skaters had (and have) with the authorities and the police in the aftermath of official skateboard bans, its medial representation as an “irresponsible and vandalous activity,” and its dismissal as “criminal damage” (Borden, Skateboarding 253)93 . A description of the constant disturbance by the police that skateboarder Rodney Mullen experienced during the filming of the skate video Future Primitive illustrates the situation: On thirteen other occasions the boys in blue showed up to bust. Mullen kept on skating, a man possessed by the desire to excel at an activity frowned on by the establishment. How many pimps, whores, thieves, drug addicts, psychos, knife men and potential mass murders were unobserved while the Jack Webb types chose to fight the crime of skateboarding? (Thrasher Jan. 1985, 18)

Streets on Fire fosters this image of skateboarding and through the persona of a convicted Jason Jessee renders it a rebellious activity that locates its participants at the social margins. Although the police force’s harsh reactions to skating activity do not prove the rebel credibility of skate punks but rather reveal the extremely conservative attitudes that characterized suburban California, the video conveys skating action as a “serious offense” that needs to be punished while the shots of the prison interior enhance the image of skateboarders as disenfranchised outcasts. The maintenance of such a dichotomous differentiation from a social norm is based on similar modes of self-marginalization that were located within hardcore punk through the work of Traber. The environment of the prison juxtaposes Jessee in opposition to the suburban space in which much of the documented skateboarding activity takes place. It detaches the white skateboarder from this locale and turns him into a sub-urban character, which is racially connoted through the video’s following allusion to African-Americans. One scene shows Jessee in conversation with the convict in the cell next to him, the dreadlocked Big Mike, whose character might be read as a realistic allusion to the fact that the majority of inmates in US penitentiaries are African-Americans. We learn that Mike is sentenced to five years in prison; “one year for every man I wasted,” as he proclaims (0:24:30). Contrasting him with the character of an African-American murderer, the video seems to emphasize the innocence of Jessee and his misdemeanor of skateboarding while the subsequent dialogue between the two 93 | For further thoughts on skateboarding as a criminal activity cf. the subchapter “Skateboarding is not a Crime” in Borden’s Skateboarding, Space and the City (247-260) or the essay collection No Comply: Skateboarding Speaks on Authority edited by Chris Long and Travis Jensen.

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prisoners conveys a different message: Mike wants to know what Jessee is “in for” and can hardly hold back his contempt when the latter informs him that he was arrested for skateboarding in public. “Are you degenerate?” Mike asks scornfully, and with a shake of the head immediately ends the conversation. Jessee is thus rendered even worse than the convicted killer in a way that positions him and the activity of skateboarding at the utmost margin and in the most contrary opposition to normative American society. While the end of the 1980s saw the rise of gangster rap (e.g. NWA) and hood films (e.g. Dennis Hopper’s 1988 Colors) that offered various paragons of African-American thugs and villains, Streets on Fire claims an outcast position that even surpasses these portrayals and employs Big Mike as a contrast to the characterization of Jessee. Ridiculing the exaggerated policing of skateboarding teenagers, at the same time the sequence establishes Jessee as both a disenfranchised degenerate and the victim of a brutal judicial system that allegedly treats harmless skaters worse than dangerous criminals. Following Robinson’s argument, Jessee’s imprisonment renders him visible, since the characterization as a minority provides the “symbolic currency” that distinguishes him from the invisibility of a universal and normative mainstream (Robinson 3). He is no longer the innocent, normal, white adolescent but takes on the characteristics of an imprisoned renegade. A scene of Jessee having a nightmare about his court hearing supports this interpretation. It shows him neatly dressed and well-groomed in the dock with his defense attorney, who seems more interested in the female bailiff than in Jessee’s case. The judge, played by Santa Cruz Skateboards co-founder Richard Novak, is a drunkard introduced as Richard Hangman. The prosecutor pronounces that Jessee is charged with violating the law against skateboarding in the street, which is followed by disbelieving and indignant groans from the audience. Without paying much attention to the defense attorney, the judge declares Jessee guilty. The verdict is accompanied by the audience chanting, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” while several shots show the attending people pointing towards Jessee and giving him the thumbs-down sign. Many of them wear suits and ties, which marks them as members of mainstream society. Interestingly, except for one more scene where women are included as spectators (i.e. as stereotypical “betties”) of skateboarders, this scene is the only one that incorporates female characters. Jessee takes on the role of a victim of society who falls prey to the despotic sentence of an uncompromising judge and the prejudiced loathing of the American public. The judge even strengthens this interpretation as he proclaims, “You are a menace to society. I sentence you to hang by the neck until dead.” After the bailiff informs the judge that they “don’t hang people anymore” he reformulates the verdict and commands, “Just send him to the electric chair.” Although highly exaggerated, obviously improvised, and intentionally absurd, this scene provides a telling example of the self-perception of many skateboarders. While authoritarian regulations and police brutality indeed concern active skateboarders in their everyday practices, it is interesting how the medialized versions of their experiences often employ stereotyped allusions that rely on intersectional

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categories of differentiation. Becky Beal, in her essay “Disqualifying the Official: An Exploration of Social Resistance Through the Subculture of Skateboarding,” quotes from a skater’s letter to the editor of a newspaper: Skaters have a completely different culture from the norms of the world’s society. We dress differently, we have our own language, use our own slang, and live by our own rules. People feel threatened by foreign attitudes. Everyone has his own views on different types of society and their own stereotypes….Please stop viewing us a totally negative race of people. (quoted in Beal, “Disqualifiying” 256)

This statement recounts what holds true for every youth or sub-culture. It is only one example of what Hebdige had already examined as the Meaning of Style in 1979: a distinct fashioning of a group of people who try to distance themselves from the mainstream by dress, talk, and behavior. While mirroring the way that skaters intentionally take on positions that oppose them to alleged “norms,” it reveals how racialized connotations are deployed in order to postulate a difference that is subsequently signified through subcultural style. Just as Streets on Fire tries to enhance the credibility of Jessee’s rebelliousness by a visualized juxtaposition to the clichéd version of an African-American convict, the preceding citation interprets the views of “world’s society” as racially profiled. The reactions that skateboarding provokes are paralleled with the experiences of racial minorities. White males totally dominate Streets on Fire; however, its narrative tries to put this dominance into perspective by inscribing its protagonist and the activity of skateboarding into a position of ideologically justified inferiority or a “totally negative race.” The (self-) ascription of the victimized role is topped off in the last scene before the closing credits. It presents Jessee’s walk to the electric chair and conveys what appears to be his last thoughts. We hear his voice saying, “Skateboarding is not a crime, is it? No way, not in the 80s,” while flashbacks to his talk with Big Mike and the angry court attendees reemphasize the contempt Jessee faced. The words “degenerate” and “guilty” are repeated over and over again and dramatized by an acoustic effect. Jessee is tied to the chair by the jailor who is quite compassionate but apologizes that he is just doing his job. After a shot of a ticking clock informs us that it is 12 o’clock, we see the jailer with his finger on a button followed by a closeup of Jessee staring into the camera with wide eyes. The picture—paralleling the signature freeze-frame ending of a John Hughes film—comes to a halt, a buzzing sound suggests the flow of electricity, and the words “to be continued” are faded in. The absurdity of the video’s narrative finds its climactic closure in the implied execution of its protagonist. Jessee’s disbelief concerning the whole situation parallels the impression one has as a viewer of Streets on Fire. A close analysis of the incredible story that is told here, on the one hand obviously indicates the way skaters stylize themselves through acts of self-marginalization and, on the other hand, the plot hardly leaves any option other than an ironic reading of the depicted events.

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The producers of the video are aware of the way a rebellious image can be constructed. The role of the victim that is consciously enacted here suggests that skateboarders at the end of the 1980s had a very informed sense of the social changes, including the rise of feminism and the Civil Rights movement, which had occurred during the preceding decades; after all Jessee emphasizes this awareness by articulating that skateboarding cannot be a crime, at least “not in the 80s,” suggesting that he receives the decade as liberal and free. The fact that skateboarders most often remain an exclusive group of white males, however, indicates that they were not able to incorporate that knowledge productively. The narrative of Streets on Fire thus does both, it exemplifies how marginalized subject positions are constructed while itself relying on this construction. It seems to say that Jason Jessee surely would not be killed for skateboarding, while it illuminates how a good deal of his persona and skateboarding’s attraction are connected to the fact that it provokes reactions of opposition and contempt. Streets on Fire exemplifies how white male adolescents can move between stylizations of victimized outcast positions and rebellious embodiments of masculinity, between innocent pariah and marginalized athlete. The skateboarding scenes interspersed in the story of the incarcerated Jessee complement the video by adding a further element pointing towards moments that escape its narrative. A short collage of different skaters performing different maneuvers follows the introductory scene of Jessee’s incarceration and foreshadows the skate action that will be presented in the video. Before the first longer sequence of skateboarding action starts, there is another short episode of Jessee in his cell, which shows the prison hallway and a scared Jessee in his cell. From off-screen we hear his thoughts: “I got claustrophobia. This isn’t for me. I’m civilized, I gotta get out of here” (0:04:00).94 He is thinking about a skateboarding ramp, while a cut creates the impression that we are seeing his memories which take us right to the respective ramp. A few shots show Jessee sitting in front of his car and talking into the camera. He states, “I like to fall on my face. I like to hurt myself. I like everything,” while the bass intro of the next song slowly fades in. As he starts skating a huge wooden half pipe,the nondiegetic music develops and we hear the Minutemen’s song “Paranoid Chant” (1980). In a short scene Jessee talks about his facial hair and shows off his tattooed arm and back. Subsequently, he goes on skating the half pipe while the song “Surf and Destroy” (1986) by B’last plays. The combination of music and skateboarding is crucial for a reading of the depicted action, as it creates a homologous connection that picks up on the elements that had already been constitutive for skate punk flyers. It exemplifies how movement on a skateboard is medially inscribed into a discourse that connects skating with attributes of punk. Jessee’s oscillation, the movement back and forth, on the 94 | Implicitly, this statement raises questions about who, in Jessee’s view, would belong in there, i.e. who is not civilized. It furthers his stylization as a victim by juxtaposing him in opposition to uncivilized inmates and thus emphasizes the antagonistic role embodied by Big Mike.

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half pipe constitutes the central focus of this section. The camera always pans along with his movement, while fast cuts constantly present shots from different locations in front of the ramp, on the ramp, and in the ramp with Jessee skating around it. The tricks or maneuvers happen whenever Jessee is catapulted out of the ramp with his board. He jumps into the air, performs a maneuver or just pushes as high as he can before gravity takes hold of him and pulls him back into the ramp. The moments that show Jessee above the ramp are presented in slow motion, artificially prolonging the time he is in midair and creating the impression that he is literally flying out of the half pipe. In between his jumps, Jessee is necessarily bound to movement from one side of the ramp to the other while the jumps he performs at the respective copings constitute little climaxes. The scene is particularly interesting as it contrasts Jessee as an actor in the video’s narrative and Jessee as a skateboarder at a half pipe that has nothing to do with the story being told. His expressed bias for falling and pain picks up on the masochistic and destructive tendencies in hardcore punk that were lyrically enhanced in the Descendents’ song “Suburban Home” and the Adolescents’ introduction as a “Wrecking Crew.” It implies how skateboarding and hardcore punk are connected through the enactment of and engagement in physical encounters and bodily pain. The video’s incorporation of music additionally provides a direct example of how the two cultures interlock, while illustrating the necessity for an examination that incorporates the material and corporeal side of skate punk. During the performance of his skating maneuvers, the nondiegetic music provides a thematic addition that emanates from the song “Paranoid Chant” by the Minutemen, a band from San Pedro that did not chose its name for the fact that many of their songs barely exceed one minute in length, but rather as a provocative and ironic allusion to the eponymous guerilla-like militia that fought in the American Revolutionary War.95 The lyrics of the song are literally chanted by the band’s lead singer D. Boone, who states, “I try to work and I keep thinking of World War Three / I try to talk to girls and I keep thinking of World War Three / The god damn six o’clock news makes sure I keep thinking of World War Three,” a listing of situations that couples the depicted skateboarding action with the threatening symbolism of nuclear danger and the Cold War threat. Just like the atomic clouds in the flyer imagery , the song musically provides the same background for the half pipe and the skateboarder that uses it, while the cited lines pick up on hardcore punk’s constant deployment of allusions to cold warrior Ronald Reagan, a masculinized uncertainty concerning girls, and a critique of mass medialized conformity epitomized by the “six o’clock news.” The angst that pervaded 1980s suburbia is amplified by the lines “I keep thinking of Russia, of Russia! / Paranoid stuck 95 | San Pedro’s Minutemen opposed the conservative and right-wing positions that romanticize the militia to this day. As Moore points out, the band used their music as a “forum for sociopolitical criticism” while showing a strong interest in left-wing working-class politics (“Postmodernism and Punk” 325; also cf. Moore, Sells Like 71-74).

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on overdrive / Paranoid scared shitless,” which furthers the impression that skate punk culture taps into the ecology of fear that characterized Southern California. The inscription of the filmed skateboarding action into this discursive environment is particularized by the rhythmic synchronization of the filmed sequences and the accompanying music. The fine-tuning that blends slow motion parts and cuts with rhythmic breaks underlines the relevance that the music holds for skateboarding. It proves that it provides an important rendering of skateboarding that inscribes the bodily activity into modes of hardcore punk signification. The song “Surf and Destroy” by Bl’ast that follows on the Minutemen’s contribution to the soundtrack continues the described stylization and incorporates the skateboard theme in its lyrical expression. Together with the video’s depiction of half pipe skating, it exemplifies how skateboarding and hardcore punk correspond on a variety of levels. Accompanied by heavily distorted guitar sounds and a fast paced beat that resembles the musical style of SST label mates Black Flag, Bl’ast vocalist Clifford Dinsmore screams the first verse: Skating down the street I can’t help but see the fear in peoples eyes Self-destructive race - it doesn’t take a fool to realize that tension runs high Skate right by - look at the beach and leave the whole world behind Block out the tension - block out the fear Surf and destroy while I still have time “Surf and Destroy.” Bl’ast. The Power of Expression. Green World Records/Wishingwell Records, 1986.

The song lyrics deal directly with skateboarding as well as surfing, which—in combination with the mention of the beach—is the California setting that underlies skate punk culture. The ‘board sport’ activities are juxtaposed with a threatened society that suffers from self-destructive conditions. Similarly alluding to the Cold War threat and the changing situation within suburban California, it records “that tension runs high,” which unfolds a highly significant parallel to Jessee’s jumps within the half pipe. While the 1980s demarcated a decade of change with highly rising tensions, skate punk’s response transfers these developments into expressive modes that include rising jumps within the activity of skateboarding. As a line in the second verse of Bl’ast’s song suggests, skateboarding punks prefer to “watch people surf instead of the news,” which links back to the Minutemen’s chant about a paranoid media and foregrounds the corporeal engagement of one’s environment through surfing and skateboarding maneuvers. Watching Jessee perform his upand-down movements in the half pipe while listening to the refrain of the song that reads, “I know the world - it might end / it won’t stop me from going out to

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shred,” musically and lyrically positions him against a doomed mainstream—“the world”—and presents his skateboarding as an alternative to a fearful society that will not stop him from “going out to shred.” The ‘shredding’ experience in Streets on Fire is again tied to physical pain by the incorporation of a slam section, a depiction of falling skateboarders that has always constituted an integral part of skate videos. As Chivers Yochim specifies, these “slam montages” or “slam scenes” mediate the “difficulty, the challenge of skateboarding;” they convey that the filmed skateboarding is “real,” and they show that “pro skaters simply work hard, endure physical pain, and try and try again to achieve their skating prowess” (147). In Streets on Fire the slam scene is accompanied by Black Flag’s song “Wasted” (starting at 0:15:05). As indicated in the preceding analysis of hardcore punk lyrics, the song substantially deploys the position of the marginal. A direct connection to skateboarding develops when its singer Keith Morris screams, “I was a surfer / I had a skateboard / I was so heavy man, I lived on the strand.” The video, in fast-paced cuts that match the song’s driving beat, strings together numerous falls by skaters who are literally “wasting” themselves, i.e. injuring their bodies, during their failed skateboarding maneuvers. The lyrical implementation of living on the “strand”—not only referring to the beach in general, but also alluding to the paved path along the South Bay coast of Los Angeles—links back to Traber’s findings concerning the self-marginalization of hardcore punks and ties it to the falling skateboarders. Just like “kids coming from comfortable lives earn hipness by playing dress ‘down’” (Traber, “L.A.’s White Minority” 53), living on the strand mediates a “heavy” lifestyle that is physically reenacted in radical skateboard maneuvers and the accompanying accidents. Since the slam scene in Streets on Fire ends with a cut back to the incarcerated Jesse behind bars, it even furthers its marginalizing effect: Slamming skateboarders are paralleled to the outcast prisoner who proudly states that, “I like to fall on my face. I like to hurt myself,” while Black Flag’s song lyrics characterize the whole scenery within the discourse of self-marginalized hardcore punk and ultimately renders skateboarding as “wasted.”

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Possessed to Skate 96 The examination of Suicidal Tendencies’ “Possessed to Skate” (directed by Bill Fishman) links back to the introductory paragraphs of this book. The story of the dorky teenager who turns his parents’ house into a raging skateboard session is predestined to constitute the concluding example of skate punk media. It provides a condensed account of the discourses, tropes, and stylizations that characterize Southern California skate punk culture, ranging from correspondences to broader pop-cultural discourses as well as implementations of intersectional categories and their importance for the creation of images of rebelliousness and individuality. The shots of a suburban environment—palm trees, single family houses, wide streets—in the opening sequence of “Possessed to Skate” (reffered to as “Possessed” in the following) localize the song and the depicted protagonists within the specific culture of suburban California hardcore punk. The scenario can be interpreted as a recitation of the front cover of the 1978 7” record Out of Vogue by the band Middle Class, which creates a connection to my reading of their song “Home is Where” and hints at how hardcore punk generates influences reaching beyond lyrics and which can be traced in other media, in this case a music video. The front cover photo of the Middle Class record “depicts a mundane Southern Californian suburban scene” and focuses on “two young girls [that] stand in the middle of a street, surrounded and almost dwarfed by the still life of a housing tract with Big Wheels, a basketball backboard, and a VW bus in a driveway” (MacLeod, “Social Distortion” 126/127). The image not entirely matches the scenery of the video, but evokes similar associations of a prosperous middle-class neighborhood. MacLeod refers to Out of Vogue as the “first suburban punk rock record” and thus helps to locate “Possessed” within this youth cultural development and its ties to California suburbia via its deployment of suburban imagery; it relies on signifiers that can be traced back to this seminal record and the early days of the hardcore punk scene. Additionally, the introductory shots of “Possessed to Skate” appear to present an almost one-to-one recitation of the TV documentary We Destroy the Family: Punks vs. Parents that was aired on Los Angeles’s KABC in 1982 and presented the suburban punk scene as a dangerous threat to American family life. The documentary introduces a middle-class couple whose son and daughter turned from high school football star and cheerleader into punks while narrator Paul Moyer claims, “Punk may well be dead in London and New York, but it’s alive and well in suburbia.” The home depicted in the documentary matches the style of the single-family house in the Suicidal Tendencies video and even the minivan in the driveway matches the model depicted in “Possessed.” The video thus exemplifies the correspondences between subcultural stylization and mass medial accounts of punk in California: Both present the phenomenon as a disruptive element in the suburban space.

96 | For a condensed version of this analysis of “Possessed to Skate” see my essay “Backyard Drifters: Mobility and Skate Punk in Suburban Southern California” (2012).

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It seems crucial that the protagonist of “Possessed” remains within the suburban environment while his parents depart on a vacation. Enmeshed in the discourse of tourism—symbolically signified by the Hawaiian shirts they are wearing—the parents have the most mobile positions within the narrative: They leave. The son stays behind and is faced with the boredom and bleakness of his suburban home. Sticking to his father’s authoritarian instructions concerning his homework he seems trapped behind his desk, surrounded by nothing but a secluded living room and the desolation of a suburban backyard. The video presents suburbia as a space of ultimate immobility, while the departure of the parents in their motor home emphasizes the particular ramifications for the youths in this environment of “antipedestrianism” (Kling, Olin, and Poster x): Whereas the parents enjoy the mobility that their middle-class prosperity provides, their son is faced with the fact that “[l]ife in the suburbs [is] limited and dull to young people who [are] anxious to experiment and explore the world” (Sobin 80). Rebellion against a locale where shopping malls and fast food chains should function as sufficient entertainment for the young, thus would seem to be centered on matters of mobility (cf. Sobin 85). In a fixed and immobile suburbia, movement connotes an attitude of resistance. Sean Brayton supports this interpretation by tying it to skateboard culture and the writings of Beat-author Jack Kerouac. In Kerouac’s On the Road, movement is “repeatedly imagined as an escape from white suburbia as referenced through the fixity of middle-class employment, domestic responsibility, and authority” (Brayton 362). In “Possessed”, such an escape is played out or at least indicated within the boundaries of the suburban realm. In contrast to the protagonists of On the Road, the teenage son remains within the strictures of domesticity. As Brayton notes, Kerouac’s protagonists literally leave behind “the confusion and nonsense” in order to perform the “noble function of the time, move” (Kerouac 134), whereas in “Possessed” the skateboard provides the only opportunity to move given the imposed fixity of the restrictive middle-class surroundings. The characters of On the Road become literal drifters who roam the entire country; the son and the skate punks in “Possessed” become backyard drifters through their involvement in skateboarding. The category of middle-class prosperity intersects with the spatial organization of suburbia and thus creates an environment that paradoxically fixes them in their mobility. The introduction of suburbia in “Possessed” builds heavily on the role of the parents whose absence pervades the video’s narrative by implying the immanent ‘danger’ of their return and subsequent discovery of the son’s deviant behavior. It copies the well-known formulas of the plots of larger productions and teen films such as John Landis’s National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) or John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), which established patriarchal supervision versus secret partying and ‘hooky playing’ as narrative standards. In “Possessed,” the parental ‘grip’ of authority is installed at the very beginning while the father’s instructions anticipate the son’s disobedience; the parents’ return at the end of the video completes the framing of the narrative and symbolically captures the restric-

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tive mechanisms the son sees himself as faced with. It becomes evident that the parents’ mobility and motorized movement is not comparable to the home-bound skating of the son but rather highlights the rigid fixity of their conservative values: They do not move to get away from their home but rather to come back to it. By writing them into the realm of tourism, their mobility is far from a juvenile escape but instead is inscribed into modes of capitalist exchange mechanisms. The portable (or mobile) TV they carry with them offers crucial evidence of the fact that they do not escape the postmodern, mass-mediated consumer culture of suburbia but, on the contrary, take a journey that takes place precisely within this discourse. In this way, the “Possessed” video picks up on a critique of 1980s media, particularly television, which is constantly articulated in hardcore punk lyrics. Agression, for example, use their song “Brain Bondage” (1983) to criticize people who “Spend all [their] time in front of the T.V. set” while warning that “they” (presumably media corporations) “try to shape the way America lives.” Even more explicit is Black Flag’s satirical “TV Party” (1981), which ironically claims that “We’ve got nothing better to do / Than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews.” The TV becomes a signifier of domesticity and fixity, which inscribes suburbia and its residents within the realm of a bourgeois utopia. It foregrounds the privileges associated with an environment that “made the home more sacred to the bourgeoisie than any place of worship” (Fishman 4). Although these features of idyllic suburban family life began to change with the beginning of the 1970s (cf. Baldassare viii), the video implies the privileged financial situation associated with the prosperous suburbs of Southern California. In order to distance oneself from such a context, it is not only necessary to counter the fixity of the place with alternative deployments of physical movement as indicated through the activity of skateboarding; the rebellion of skate punks also needs to incorporate a reversion of the position of wealthy white middle-class suburbanites, which requires mobility within the discursive field of race and class performativity. Traber describes his conception of “self-marginalization” through a diction that helps to locate this phenomenon within the discourse of a mobility turn, which makes it especially valuable for the video’s depictions of the protagonists in different conditions of movement.97 He explains that the middle class, tending to strive for upward movement, experiences “mobility as an unspoken birthright” and thus illuminates how downward movement within the discursive realm of race and class signification provides an important component in hardcore punks’ rebellious performances (“L.A.’s White Minority” 45). In “Possessed” the protagonists’ physical movement on the skateboard seems to provide a way to counter the fixity of the suburban landscape, while the cultural mobility of race and class positions—in congruence with the characterization of Jason Jessee as both criminal and innocent skateboarder—adds a discursive form of movement to the culture of skate punk

97 | For further comments on the mobility turn cf. Urry’s Mobilities (2007).

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that apparently distances the participants from the normative aspects of their social positions. Analyzed through the lens of intersectionality, it becomes evident that the narrative of “Possessed” is informed by this dynamic of physical and discursive mobility in suburbia and its reference to race, class and gender aspects. The disruption of the immobile and boring desolation of the suburban home is enacted by a gang of male skateboarders who not only re-appropriate the furniture and swimming pool of the house in order to make them physically accessible and indeed moveable and mobile, it also draws on a variety of discursive significations that replace the suburban symbols of prosperity with markers of urban decay and attributes of lower class marginality. Traber describes a scene from the 1980 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization by Penelope Spheeris in which Black Flag is portrayed in their practice (as well as living) space, “a room brimming with signifiers of extreme poverty” that include “decrepit furniture” and “walls covered with spray-painted band names and profane slogans” (“L.A.’s White Minority” 35). The fact that Traber reads these attributes as signifiers of poverty helps to argue that what appears as the total destruction of the house’s living room in “Possessed” actually constitutes a coded recitation of the preceding images of punk that ultimately positions the protagonists within a discourse of urban poverty. Punk graffiti, Jon Lewis records, calls attention to “the dreadful landscape of decaying urban America” (89). Characterizing this landscape as dreadful picks up on the fear of middle-class suburbanites who, with the beginning of the 1970s, experienced “the influx of inner-city populations” or, put more drastically or in a downright racist manner, the “further tension of ‘encroaching’ blacks or other nonwhites” as a direct threat to their privileged status as suburban homeowners (Traber, “L.A.’s White Minority” 35; Parker 11). The graffiti in “Possessed” parallels an Independent advertisement in Thrasher magazine showing skateboarder Steve Rocco in a tunnel covered with similar scratchwork and creates the same impression of urban decay (Thrasher Feb. 1981, 5). It homologously connects skateboarding (Rocco) and hardcore punk (Black Flag) and helps the literally ‘invading’ skate punks in the video to localize themselves within this discourse of dreadful urbanity while the gang insignia such as bandanas and in this case the Suicidal Tendencies logo sported by the band and the accompanying skateboarders, further the impression of a racially connoted threat in the form of inner-city criminality.98 The skate punks’ disruption of middle-class normality is entangled in a pattern of intersectional signification as it mediates a distancing from this privileged environment through the evocation of cultural markers of marginality. Basically staging the “encroachment” or “influx” of exactly those populations and developments that their parents “fought [in] battles over taxes, property values, and neighborhood boundaries” (Traber, “L.A.’s White 98 | Blush describes Suicidal Tendencies as a “loose-nit gang with cholo-style bandanas” and hints at their close identification with the Orange County scene and thus the epicenter of suburban hardcore punk (97).

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Minority” 35), the protagonists in “Possessed” exemplify how the intersectional categories of space, race, and class can be deployed to indicate a distancing from the privileged normativity of white middle-class suburbia.99 They not only move within the “external world” of Californian suburbia on their skateboards, but also and simultaneously within “discursively mediated sensescapes” demarcated by vectors of race and class differentiation which ultimately “signify social taste and distinction, ideology and meaning” (Urry 48). The fact that these interconnections are necessarily bound to the further category of gender becomes evident by analyzing the way in which women are incorporated into the video’s narrative. The only female character who is directly involved in the video’s plot is the protagonist’s mother. She is part of the narrative’s framing as she enters the story, together with the father, as a component of parental supervision. Whereas the father represents the authoritarian head of the family, the mother is full of worries about her son staying at home alone. Barely managing to leave him behind, she babbles advice concerning prepared sandwiches and possible emergencies. This almost Oedipal scenery is only resolved by the father’s statement about the son being a “big boy.” The gestures with which he leads the mother to the passenger seat of the van—needless to say that he is driving—indicate how the father manages to reinstall the symbolic order of patriarchy: The mother is reduced to his supplementary as a front seat passenger, while his authoritarian power is reinforced through the final instruction he addresses to his son—“No Skateboarding until you’ve done your homework!” The mother is introduced as a passive character who only serves to complement the ‘traditional’ structure of suburban family life. The implications that follow from the casting of this character, additionally, carry intertextual (i.e. intermedial) allusions as the actor, Mary Woronov, appeared in various 1980s cult films and thus represents a certain image of conservative femininity. Most notable in this context is her appearance in the 1979 movie Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, in which she plays the role of school principle Miss Evelyn Togar, a strict and authoritarian administrator who confiscates the ticket for a concert by New York punk rock band The Ramones from protagonist Riff Randell.100 Despite her ‘real’ ties to the seminal alternative scene around such acts as the Velvet Underground in New York City, 99 | Despite the fact that members of the band Suicidal Tendencies come from a Latino background, the protagonist and most of the participants depicted can be described with reference to the forementioned categories of intersectional privilege, i.e. middle-class whiteness. While it is hard to say how the skateboarding and punk scenes look demographically in ‘reality,’ “Possessed” exemplifies how the medialization of the respective cultures creates an image of white dominance. 100 | In addition to the Ramones, the film also incorporated guest appearances by Darby Crash and Lorna Doom, both members of Los Angeles’s prototypical hardcore band, The Germs. For The Germs’ role in skateboard culture see the chapter “The Skate Connection” in Mullen’s Lexicon Devil (203-205).

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Woronov’s fictional character is thus associated with an anti-punk attitude that emphasizes her depiction as a representative of conservative California suburbanites in “Possessed.” The video reveals the patriarchal organization of suburbia, while articulating an ironic comment on the sexist heteronormativity of the American middle class in the 1980s. However, the narrative depends on—and thus reinforces—this positioning of femininity as it constitutes the alleged counterpart to the skate punks’ ambitions. Remaining within the rigid fixity of what is considered to be a ‘traditional’ woman’s role, it seems as if the protagonists of “Possessed” cannot offer a serious alternative that might unhinge the static matrix of patriarchal gender hierarchy and thus offer a truly mobile escape from these social restrictions. The only other female characters depicted in the video are two girls in bikinis who—almost too obviously complementing the image of femininity that has already been deduced from similarly ‘clad’ girls in other skate punk media—do not really participate in the skateboard session at the empty swimming pool but are presented as cheering and admiring spectators who squirt some water from the adjoining Jacuzzi while the guys are skating the pool. In this overly clichéd sequence of only a few milliseconds, it becomes evident that the physical movement of the performing skate punks might indicate a way that challenges the suburban landscape and the interlocking middle-class values while the reliance and reinforcement of stereotypical and sexualized femininity hinders the protagonists’ escape from the hegemonic gender politics that render this environment a force field of white middle-class masculinity. Whereas the lyrics of the song “Possessed to Skate” suggest that “he” (presumably the son) becomes an “outcast of society” through skateboarding, the video’s incorporation of female characters reveals to what extent the image of skate punks at least in part remains within the logic of this very society’s ideology. The intersectionally informed approach shows how the skate punk body is constituted and enacted through the interlocking vectors of space, race, class, and gender categories which delineate its discursive engagement of and enmeshment in patriarchal white middle-class suburbia. It is along these vectors that skate punks move in order to escape and distance themselves from the environment into which they were born. The intersectional character of these vectors, however, puts their rebellious mobility in perspective as the differentiating categories always entail ties to restrictive discourses of hierarchical Anglo-American society: While skate punks might escape the fixity of the suburban landscape, they rely on racial binaries in order to position themselves as social outcasts; while they might challenge middle-class conservatism by physically disrupting signifiers of prosperity, they remain within the logics of hetero-normative gender hierarchies. After all, the intersectional differentiations of space, race, class, and gender would seem to obstruct the attempts of skate punks’ to escape their normative environment, as they constitute a discursive field within which the participants inevitably have to operate.

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2.5.3

Conclusion: Moving On

The critical reading of skate punk videos exemplified how the respective participants used the medium in the creation and formation of rebellious personae. It goes along with Elwes’s account of video specificities and their role in identity formation in her monograph Video Art – A Guided Tour (2005). She recounts: Almost without exception, every generation and nationality has used video as a personal medium, an electronic mirror with which to investigate social identity—femininity, masculinity, ethnicity, and sexuality. The formation of identity has been linked to the influence of social stereotypes promoted by television, print media and the cinema. These popular cultural forms produced a narrowly defined human typology that promoted social prejudice— racism, sexism and homophobia. Video artists from the 1980s onwards, appropriated and manipulated those same stereotypical images as a deconstructive strategy for exposing the distortions and iniquities of media representations. (Elwes 3)

This statement points towards the reinforcement and re-appropriation of stereotyped discourses that are articulated within mass media channels. It corresponds to the various influences of established narratives—e.g. crime movies, teen films, and other Hollywood productions and their sustaining influences within subcultural productions such as song lyrics, flyers, and magazines—which pervade skate punk culture and similarly incorporate racist, sexist and homophobic tendencies. Elwes’s indication of artistic trends in the 1980s, however, includes the development of a counter-initiative that works against such trends and deploys video art as a deconstructive strategy. As the examples of Streets on Fire and “Possessed” reveal, skate punks’ narratives, despite their claim to be anti-mainstream and anti-establishment, are far from being a deconstructive intervention; in fact, their narratives seem to form a rather conservative equivalent. Chivers Yochim recounts in her analysis of contemporary skate videos—she takes a look at DC Shoes’ The DC Video (2003) and Hurley’s Hallowed Ground (2001)—that they comprise what she calls “‘documents of identity,’ which define the boundaries of skateboarding culture and the individuals participating in it” (141). The videos “tell skateboarders who they are” and thus their narrative setup influences the recipients’ self-stylizations (141). As the examination of Streets on Fire and “Possessed” revealed, the identities created in these productions deploy categories of intersectional differentiation and use them to present the media-dominating white male adolescents as rebellious outcasts. They create narratives of marginality while deploying plots that show influences from the vast context of 1980s (popular) culture. Elwes’s very basic understanding of video as a contemporary phenomenon, however, helps to consider a reading that points beyond the narrative interpretation of the plots presented in skate punk videos. She states:

2 C ONTENT Video is the default medium of the twenty-first century. It is everywhere, trapped on monitors and computer screens and projected, cinema-style, onto pristine gallery walls, across public spaces and onto the hallowed surfaces of national museums. (Elwes 1)

While recording its impact as a medium that “is everywhere,” Elwes’s description of the video as “trapped” on its respective players/projectors (monitors, screens etc.) reveals a variety of characteristics important to the depiction of skateboarding and punk activity. If videos—including skate punk videos—are trapped, it can be concluded that they are inherently restricted in their mobility, i.e. that they are forced into a kind of fixity. Although she merely uses the word “trapped” in her book’s introductory sentence without further comments in that direction, I consider Elwes’s word choice highly suggestive since it not only describes the technical limits of video’s ability to capture real life events, but also because it implies the restrictive effects that narrative stylization might produce in a video production. Streets on Fire and “Possessed” can both be described with reference to a dialectical tension which exists between their narration of fictionalized events, on the one hand, and the mediation of skateboard action, on the other: The succession of allusions to established tropes and cultural codes that, semiotically speaking, count as “already-seen” (Barthes, Semiotic Challenge 288), is opposed to the depiction of skateboarders’ movements and maneuvers on their boards. The activity of skateboarding might be the reason for conflict in both examples, however, the respective plots’ dialogic enmeshment in discourses ranging from teen film humor to racist stereotypes and hegemonic masculinity, works apart from a specific concentration on the actual movements and maneuvers. It is the kids’ deviance from social expectations in suburban Southern California that gets them into trouble and builds the starting point for the rather traditional plots of exposition, climax, and resolution, while the actual movement on their skateboards and to the sounds of their music remains trapped within these narrative structures. On the level of narration, skate punk videos constitute what Jameson might call “pastiche,” i.e. a “blank parody” that mimics preexisting styles and turns them into “postmodernist codes” that, lacking “satiric impulse,” can turn into “badges of affirmation of ethnic, gender, race, religious, and class-factional adhesion” (Jameson, Postmodernism 17). With Jason Jessee as a character circulating somewhere between the antics of ‘surfer-dudes’ such as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the attributes of an urban gangster image on the one hand and the intertextual allusions of “Possessed” and its recitation of teen comedies á la Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and the youth-versus-parents stories of John Hughes on the other hand, skate punk videos invoke well-established codes and deploy them as a pattern, i.e. a pastiche, in which the depiction of physical skateboard activity and action is subjected to established codes. Although some of the elements presented in the video plots certainly produce moments of parody that escape the critique of blankness and lack of satire—the burning pentagram in the exercise book of the protagonist

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in “Possessed” is one example, which Suicidal Tendencies singer Mike Muir explicitly qualifies as a parody of heavy metal (cf. Thrasher May 1987, 62)—the satiric potential of the videos is diminished by a strong reliance on patterns, plots, and discourses that have already been seen and thus turned into adhesive codes, as one might say with Jameson. Offering skate punks an identity and showing them who they are, the videos in question here fit into what Andrew Goodwin emphasizes as “the enormous number of video clips that do provide a position for the viewer and which do offer realist narrative resolution,” in his essay “Music Video in the (Post) Modern World” (46). Reacting to Elizabeth Ann Kaplan’s seminal book Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (1987)—a publication that can be credited as the first comprehensive monograph on MTV and the form of the music video—Goodwin juxtaposes such productions with the postmodern, i.e. ahistorical and non-narrative successions of apparently random images, which might disrupt and disperse the stable position of the viewer. He accuses Kaplan of over-estimating “the degree of destabilisation and incoherence in MTV” and thus implies a tension between non-narrative and narrative videos that is sometimes overlooked by postmodernists who “seem to be arguing that music video is not just beyond realism, but somehow outside the world of representation altogether” (46, 42). Although Goodwin attributes to Kaplan an overemphasized focus on postmodernity, his thoughts on music videos imply that both narrative positionality and postmodern incoherence are possible and at times overlap. This tension characterizes Streets on Fire and “Possessed” as the two videos include moments in which the narrative structure is surpassed and destabilized by the depiction of skateboard maneuvers and the (slam) dancing of bystanders: Jesse’s skating in a half pipe in Streets on Fire or the pirouettes of the skateboarders presented in “Possessed” do not add to but rather destabilize or at least escape the crime and prison movie or teen film narratives which ‘surround’ them. From the recipient’s perspective, Goodwin explains, “The sense of destabilization induced by some clips is almost a literal, physical, one, as we are not so much ‘sutured’ into the text as torn from it bodily” (46). This statement helps to describe the special stance that the respective performances take on within the videos: Torn from the plot, they constitute moments of bodily technique that surpass the narrative flow and emphasize a side of skate punk action that escapes interpretation. Implying the “use of performed, embodied experience to induce a somatic response on the viewer” that video clips—especially those that depict bodily performances themselves—can generate (Elwes 12), these scenes of non-narrative disruption point towards the material aspects that pervade the discursive setup of skate punk media. One of the interviewees in Chivers Yochim’s ethnography describes his experience of watching skate videos as follows, “I actually felt the trick happen as I was watching it” (162). Apart from any claims about identification, the skater is not drawn into a narrative development here but experiences a momentary feeling of somatic engagement. The stylizations in a skate video, of course, have their own

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impact on the respective viewers—it has already been mentioned that they provide a screen for self-identification and tell skateboarders who they are—however, these attributes are constructed by cultural codes. The skateboard maneuver itself—and I argue that the same holds for the (skate-inspired) movements punks perform on and in front of the stage, as well as with their instruments—is detached from such a coding and generates a moment of physical presence. From a cinematographic point of view, skate videos have offered, invented, and deployed camera techniques that have pointed towards this direction since the very beginning of the ‘genre.’ The more surf- and hippie-oriented 1970s-style predecessors of the Bones Brigade videos and the likes of Streets on Fire, e.g. Scott Dittrich’s Freewheelin’ (1976) and Julian Pena’s Skateboard Madness (1980), had already incorporated scenes in which the camera is obviously held by active skateboarders moving on their boards. In these sequences, the POV-shot leaves its static position, i.e. the trapping of a stable frame, and thus enables the recipients to literally follow the camera work into the skateable terrain that it explores. In this way, “seeing skateboarding on the small screen, skateboarders imagine and desire the experience of skateboarding in real life” (Chivers Yochim 162). These moments can generate somatic affections and experiences of movement. However, as my interpretative analyses have shown, they are constantly interacting with the narrative stylizations that accompany them and ultimately constitute a framing, trapping, or fixing which ties skate punk videos to the discursive ramifications of the time, space, and culture from which they emerged.

2.6

C ONCLUSION

“[P]opular culture is tied fundamentally to America and the dreams of its people,” explains Browne in a statement introduced at the beginning of this chapter (Browne vii). It illustrates the importance of popular culture for the American people and describes the context and discursive field in which skate punk and its medial productions evolve and exist. My analysis of exemplary song lyrics, flyers, magazines, and videos has shown to what extent they relate to the dreams of Americans, while often seeking to evoke their worst nightmares at the same time. As utterances within the dialogic process of popular culture, they strive for positions of the extreme and thus perfectly fit within the tensioned decade of the 1980s. What Batchelor and Stoddard describe as “dichotomies” or the “extremes of the 1980s” and Thompson summarizes as an era in “which national cultures move in several different directions at the same time” (Batchelor and Stoddart xii; G. Thompson 5), reverberates in the media products of skate punk culture: They seek an individual identity of opposition while simultaneously reproducing the contradictions of the decade and its tensions between “uniformity and diversity” (G. Thompson 5). It was with a view to the intersectional categories of differentiation that I approached the way in which skate punk media created the images and styles of an

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oppositional movement. Douglas Kellner’s understanding of what he calls media culture helps to summarize and evaluate my examinations as it illustrates the interconnections between media, identity, and culture: A media culture has emerged in which images, sounds, and spectacles help produce the fabric of everyday life, dominating leisure time, shaping political views and social behavior, and providing the materials out of which people forge their very identities. Radio, television, film, and the other products of the culture industries provide the models of what it means to be male or female, successful or failure, powerful or powerless. Media culture also provides the materials out of which many people construct their sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality, of “us” and “them.” (1)

Kellner’s account makes a crucial point by elucidating the way that identities are forged, i.e. made or constructed. He reveals that the concept of identity itself is at best vague if not entirely empty. There is no such thing as an essential identity. A comment by Traber emphasizes this conclusion: “All identities are performances of approved categories (ways we are either taught or adopt)” (“L.A.’s White Minority” 53). Together with Kellner’s assumption that it is a media culture, i.e. “images, sounds, and spectacles,” that constitutes the fabric for the construction of identities, it can be argued that it is through a medially articulated deployment of approved categories such as whiteness, middle class, masculinity, and suburbia, that the identities of skate punks are created. I have shown that it is these intersectional attributes in particular which “articulate the full range of representations of identities, domination and resistance that one finds structuring the terrain of media culture” (Kellner 55). Furthermore, my inquiries have revealed that it is specifically within the dialectic scope of “domination and resistance” and the differentiation between “us” and “them” that skate punk creates meaning. The presented media products deploy race and class allusions in order to provide positions outside the middle-class environment that most of skate punk’s participants came from. While they reveal class-consciousness through the names of their bands and the scenarios of their stories, they rely on essentialist binaries in order to inscribe skate punk at the opposite end of what is perceived as American normality, i.e. the normative white suburban middle class. Although enjoying the privileges of white masculinity, within mediated portrayals skate punks adopt the roles of outcast characters that deploy tropes of victimized masculinity while still holding patriarchal power. In doing so, they create narratives that move along plots that pervade popular culture on a much broader scale and reproduce mass-mediated characters, ranging from heroic figures to murderous monsters, as templates for the highly stylized personae of skate punk rebellion. Playing with the anxieties of conservative suburbanites, skate punk media, whether as song lyrics, image, text, or video, tap into an ecology of fear that likewise structures mainstream representations of a dystopic California and builds the basis for adventure stories of destructive encounters and militaristic vigor. The suburban landscape is thereby

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constantly incorporated as the backdrop for the self-marginalizing personifications of skate punk, functioning as the antagonistic milieu for the backyard chaos and havoc-wreaking that the participants set out to cause. Constituting a literal intersection for attributes of whiteness, masculinity, and middle-class origin, suburbia provides the spatial realm that unites all those aspects of American culture that skate punk actually claims to resist and rebel against; hence, suburban living is under constant attack within the medial productions of the subculture. The reliance upon established narratives and dualistic stereotypes often re-articulates conservative, at times even racist and sexist, positions that—in congruence to the antipedestrian traffic pattern of suburbia—fix skate punk within the same discursive frame as the mainstream it claims to disrupt. As “[p]opular cultural texts,” the medial productions of skate punk risk “naturaliz[ing] these positions and thus help[ing] mobilize consent to hegemonic political positions” (Kellner 59). The answer to my initial question concerning the articulation of effective resistance within the products of skate punk—at least in view of these interim findings—calls for a rather critical, one might even say pessimistic, conclusion. Reapplying Lowe’s programmatic implementations from which I departed at the beginning of this chapter, it can be said that skate punk media do not create a transgression of discourse. Their rebellious endeavor is not “semiotically sophisticated in its counter-practices” (Lowe 176), but rather sustains the cultural codes that organize suburban middle-class life and dominate the context of 1980s popular culture. This critical reading, however, does not apply solely to the medial products I introduced as examples of skate punk. In quite a different context Siegle explains: To speak or act, even in the most ironically positioned intervention, is to risk becoming assimilated like a feedback loop in a self-regulating mechanism, discharging excess energy and occasioning minor adjustments in the social engineering. Or, even worse, to be used outright by precisely what we oppose. (4)

Referring to the aforementioned Suburban Ambush as an example of what he describes as Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency, Siegle thus illustrates the difficulties that arise in any attempt to articulate effective resistance: Assimilation, cooptation, and exploitation in the form of dominant discourses always work as counterforces that hinder discursive transgressions and pervade interventions. Especially in view of postmodern and poststructuralist theories, it seems questionable whether such an articulation is possible at all, and Siegle’s addition that “language is divided against itself, its every move a contradiction that marks the position of the speaking subject at the end of the twentieth century” illustrates the problematic of any semiotically sophisticated critique (4). It becomes evident that inquiries into skate punk’s possibilities for effective resistance must exceed the coded and semiotic mediations of the subculture and seek for its potentiality in transgressing discourse; i.e. it has to fathom skate punk’s potentiality to find ways out of, or at least to, the discursive boundaries that delineate its medial representations.

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It is the realm of the body, of the corporeal, the material, and the physical that I will turn to in order to anticipate these possibilities in the following chapter. Lowe’s additional hint that resistance “as counter-practice must seize and recode issues of bodily needs” points towards this shift (Lowe 176), while a statement that Howard N. Fox makes about the development of art in California from the 1980s onwards specifies it. Harking back to the already referenced reversion to the body and materiality in Neo-Expressionism (see subchapter 2.3.2), the following quote establishes a link to Kellner’s understanding of media culture as a structuring element of identities and thus fosters inquiries into a more corporeal and material approach to skate punk without neglecting its discursive and semiotic medializations. Fox records: Identity starts with the body: Nothing could be more universal or personal. Any discussion of the determinants of self-identity must necessarily address the body, and a correlative of identity politics was the emergence of corporeality as a central issue in the 1980s and 1990s. (H. Fox, “Many Californias” 250)

This statement picks up on the identity politics, i.e. the discursive stylizations, that skate punk articulated in the song lyrics, flyers, magazines, and videos that I analyzed so far. The emergence of corporeality as their correlative will constitute the focus of the following.

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Movement always happens behind the thinker’s back, or in the moment when he blinks. Gilles Deleuze101

Disaffection finds its pure form in the barrenness of speed. Jean Baudrillard102

3.1

I NTRODUCTION

“Two hundred years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential,” records Craig Stecyk under the pseudonym Carlos Izan in an epigraph to his article “Aspects of the Downhill Slide” in the fall 1975 issue of SkateBoarder magazine (29). He adds, “But it was the minds of 11 year olds that could see that potential” and thus alludes to the emergence of the Dogtown skaters and their early skateboarding sessions at the playgrounds of Paul Revere Junior High School in Los Angeles (29). Implying a way to take a step back, to distance or even resist this American environment by reinventing or deconstructing it with juvenile creativity, Stecyk’s much-cited statement withholds an important aspect that plays into this otherwise very vigilant observation: It might have been the minds of children that saw the potential of concrete (i.e. cement) America, but it was with their bodies that they actually challenged, i.e. felt, it. Set into movement on skateboards they not only sensed potential in paved playgrounds, 101 | From Deleuze and Parnet’s Dialogues II (1). 102 | From Baudrillard’s America (5).

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concrete swimming pools, and the surface of the streets, they turned this potential into material reality by meeting it with their bodies. Félix Guattari’s thoughts on what he calls Molecular Revolution provide a mode of thinking that helps to interpret Stecyk’s epigraph in a way that enhances and possibly surpasses the imagination he attributes to skateboarding children. Guattari explains: “Archaic” societies that have not yet incorporated the capitalistic process, children who have not yet become part of the system, or people who are in psychiatric hospitals and are unable (or unwilling) to enter the dominant system of signification, have a perception of the world utterly different from what is customary within the dominant schemes. (Guattari, Molecular Revolution 38)

This description of children and other subjects that (still) exist outside the modes of capitalist organization emphasizes their “utterly different” perception of their surroundings and thus provides an explanation for their extraordinary (re-) interpretation of—or, to use a less cognitive term, their relation to—the environment they are faced with. Guattari’s statement implies that a different perception of the world allows for an existence beyond “capitalistic process,” outside “the system,” and independent of “the dominant system of signification.” This establishes a link to Lowe’s premise of effective resistance and its reliance on the transgression of existing discourses; it points toward a mode of perception that transgresses discursive meaning and opens up to immediate presence. Whereas I used the second chapter of this book to point out skate punk’s entanglement in dominant discourses of American popular culture and the white suburban middle class, Guattari’s remarks would suggest the existence of a realm that escapes these discursive ramifications or at least allows for transgressive moments. I have conducted a detailed analysis of skate punk media in order to present to what extent they rely on a system that skate punk claims to attack. My intersectionally informed approach revealed the extent to which aspects of race, class, gender, and space are deployed in the semiotics underlying “the dominant system of signification,” i.e. Southern California’s white middle-class discourse. Escaping that system or transgressing its discursive organization would open skate punk activity to a realm that exists beyond its medial representation and affects its participants’ minds and bodies in an immediate way that might not necessarily generate “unlimited potential,” as Stecyk terms it, but at least fosters a potentiality that momentarily disrupts the stable and fixed discourses dominating suburban California. To what extent the body plays a crucial role in this regard becomes evident in Lawrence Grossberg’s approach to youth and youth culture: Youth is not merely an ideological construction and what is at stake is not merely a question of what it means to different groups. There are real material stakes in the struggle to construct youth in particular ways. Youth has not, in the first instance, to be located within

3 C ORPOREALITY a meaningful system of social differences; it has to be organized, disciplined, controlled, distributed, and subjugated to the spatial and temporal maps of the dominant socal [sic] formations. For youth is always more than childhood, more than a time of growing up, more than the innocent passing of time. Youth involves an excessiveness, an impulsiveness, a maniacal irresponsibility which escapes time and potentially goes on forever. Youth is a material problem; it is a body—the individual body and the social body of generations—that has to be properly inserted into the dominant organization of spaces and places, into the dominant systems of economic and social relationships. As a body, it has to be located in its own proper places and its movements have to be surveyed and constrained. And as a body, its gendered and racial identities have to be neatly defined, its behavior regulated and its sexuality policed. (Grossberg 34)103

By introducing youth as a “material problem” to be disciplined and incorporated into dominant ideology through the body, Grossberg emphasizes the importance that materiality and corporeality hold for potential resistance within youth cultures. Resisting restrictive forces of dominant ideology seems to require activity beyond the attribution of meaning, while relying on counter-movements to fixing and policing formations. A disruption of fixation and stability presupposes an antagonistic activity that generates an alternative to conditions of stasis. With reference to Foucault, I have explained how the body is politically invested or disciplined by power relations (cf. subchapter 1.1.1). He illustrates these restrictive forces by explaining that “it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities” while specifying that “one of the primary objects of discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique” (Discipline 218). Foucault’s thoughts suggest that resistance against discipline, i.e. against fixity, relies on the notion of the nomadic, mobility or—even more fundamentally—free and uncontrolled movement. This ascertainment not only picks up on several allusions to movement that also pervade my inquiries about skate punk media in the preceding parts, but also draws back to the introductory remarks about the body. “The body especially senses as it moves,” I recorded in view of Urry’s explications about mobility, and the fact that this statement includes both the discursive or mediated realm, as well as what he calls the “external world,” led to the assumption that an epistemology of movement might constitute an alternative to the Cartesian bipolarity between mind and body 103 | Pardon the pun, but the typographical error in the quote at hand, although accidental, appears highly significant for my purposes: Grossberg mentions the “dominant socal formations” that youth is subjugated to. Although apparently referring to social formations, the [S]o[C]al, i.e. short for Southern California, implies the particular space in which skate punk developed. It emphasizes the importance of the site-specific environment which needs to be disrupted in order to generate moments of youth cultural resistance. Within the scope of my book, Grossberg might indeed have said that (skate punk) youth operates within the spatial and temporal maps of the dominant SoCal formations.

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(48). It similarly retraces the overall framing of my book as it implies the twofold tension that develops between the second and the third chapter while simultaneously suggesting a conciliatory moment in the navigation, i.e. the movement, “backwards and forwards” between the two alleged polarities (48). While the second chapter focuses on the interpretation of skate punk’s mediated messages and texts, the move to the “external world” now suggests a methodological addition that exceeds a pure hermeneutics. This necessarily includes a proceeding that approaches a realm outside the ‘strictly metaphysical’ considerations of the interpretative turn while simultaneously pointing towards a potential way for skate punks to escape (or at least disrupt) the discursive field through the material presence of their actions.104 The work of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht provides inspiration for a way to specify a consideration of skate punk beyond and even before the interpretative level.105 In Production of Presence – What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004) Gumbrecht explains: I think that the “beyond” in metaphysics can only mean doing something in addition to interpretation—without, of course, abandoning interpretation as an elementary and probably inevitable intellectual practice. It would mean to try and develop concepts that could allow us, in the Humanities, to relate to the world in a way that is more complex than interpretation alone, that is more complex than only attributing meaning to the world. (52)

This statement is of special significance as it includes an affirmation of the importance of an interpretative approach while suggesting that further relations “to the world” enhance this intellectual practice. Gumbrecht’s account emphasizes the importance of my second chapter and its interpretation of skate punk media and simultaneously introduces the attempt to find concepts that go beyond a preoccupation with meaning. Since it was within meaning—a meaning I attributed based on highly interpretative contextual readings—that I located the contradictions within skate punk mediation, Gumbrecht’s endeavor promises a conceptual addition that surpasses this level and generates the possibility of revealing skate punk’s potential beyond meaning and, at best, to transgress dominant discourses. But where can we look for this “beyond” in metaphysics when it comes to skate punk culture? I suggest remaining within Gumbrecht’s argument on the Production of Presence and departing from his introductory remarks about “[m]aterialities of com104 | For a summarizing outline of the interpretive turn cf. the respective chapter in Bachmann-Medick’s Cultural Turns (58-103). 105 | It is also with reference to Gumbrecht that I deploy the term “metaphysics.” Explaining that he avoids those meanings that attribute “metaphysics” to concepts of “transcendence” or “religion,” he notes: “‘Metaphysics’ refers to an attitude, both an everyday attitude and an academic perspective, that gives a higher value to the meaning of phenomena than their material presence; the word thus points to a worldview that always wants to go ‘beyond’ (or ‘below’) that which is ‘physical’” (Production xiv).

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munication,” a concept that he and his colleagues had already developed during a colloquium of the same title in the mid 1980s and whose discussions “seemed to promise an alternative to the endlessness of interpretation and of narrating the past in ever-different ways” (7). Gumbrecht argues that the notion of “communication” allows for a much broader field of what is otherwise “too narrow and too traditional a focus of literary studies on ‘literature’” (6). He thus provides a useful extension of my interpretive approaches to the rather “traditional” medialization of image, music, and text to more material modes of communication, performance, and expression in skate punk culture. The flyer as a skate punk medium showed that there is a material or physical aspect of movement involved beyond the semiotic meaning mediated by the imagery depicted. This illustrates Gumbrecht’s question of “how different media—different ‘materialities’—of communication would affect the meaning that they carried” (11). The flyers’ involvement in spatial movement demonstrates to what extent the medium is directly affected by signifiers of meaning in interconnection with a physical presence, which might indeed add a component beyond metaphysical interpretation. It generates the question whether there are other aspects and conditions in skate punk culture incorporating this interplay. A statement that Stephen Greenblatt articulates in the recent anthology Cultural Mobility – A Manifesto (2010) helps to specify this question: Only when conditions directly related to literal movement are firmly grasped will it be possible fully to understand the metaphorical movements: between center and periphery; faith and skepticism; order and chaos; exteriority and interiority. Almost every one of these metaphorical movements will be understood, on analysis, to involve some kinds of physical movement as well. (250)

Greenblatt thinks precisely along the lines suggested by Gumbrecht’s explications with regard to an “addition to interpretation” (Gumbrecht, Production 52). Greenblatt similarly argues that metaphorical movement—i.e. the metaphysical realm— needs to be related to physical movement—i.e. the realm of presence. Whereas Gumbrecht helps to conceptualize this differentiation by speaking of “effects of meaning and effects of presence” (18), Greenblatt connects this relation with the notion of movement and thus delineates an approach that appears to be especially fruitful for a consideration of skate punk culture beyond its medial generation of meaning. He picks up on the interplay between “center and periphery” that is crucial for the mediation of rebellion in subcultures dominated by intersectionally privileged protagonists and thus includes a specific characteristic of California skate punk and hints at its relation to both the discursive and physical aspects of mobility. A consideration of the Californian body in rebellion, i.e. the skate punk body and its potential for effective resistance, consequently must focus on the body in movement. Accordingly, in order to consider the aspect of presence, it is necessary to turn to those moments of skate punk activity that rely on movement and involve a physi-

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cal engagement of the body. This approach links back to the Foucauldian idea of the “anti-nomadic” as a core characteristic of discipline because it parallels the equally disciplinary and rigid discourses that pervade 1980s suburban California. The nomadic seems to constitute a subversion of such an environment of immobility. According to Richard Osborne, nomadic thought, or more precisely the nomadic subject, “transgresses boundaries,” while it is, most importantly, seen as “fluid, transgressive and resistant to hegemonic discourses of fixity” (194). This marks its mobility as the exact opposite to the discursive order—for example, personified in the parents in the “Possessed to Skate” video—in which skate punk operates. Movement, it is implied, provides the opportunity for skate punk to challenge the discursive boundaries that otherwise hinder it from establishing a real alternative to existing structures. With reference to Geertz’s “Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in the preceding part I analyzed skate punk media “in search of meaning” (5). His enquiries oppose Gumbrecht’s idea of a “nonhermeneutic” approach so that the incorporation of both authors once more emphasizes the attempt to include the interpretative analysis of skate punk culture as well as the consideration of its material ramifications (Gumbrecht, Production 12). Geertz’s work is meaning-oriented, which locates his explications at the site of interpretation that Gumbrecht wants to enhance by a focus on presence. The explanation that Geertz articulates concerning the methodology of a thick description, however, allude to the notion of movement itself and thus emphasizes the connection his anthropologic approach offers for the intended consideration of skate punk’s corporeal features. Geertz refers to Gilbert Ryle’s account of “two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes” in order to introduce the potential of a thick description (Geertz 6). It is certainly not by mere chance that he emphasizes the boys’ actions as “movements” (of the eyelids) which, read only through “a public code” can be differentiated as either “twitch” or “wink” (6). As apparently identical movements, the “‘phenomenalistic’ observation of them alone” would not reveal the significance of one movement as a mere contraction and the other one as a purposeful wink; it is only in “a public code in which [the contraction of eyelids] counts as a conspiratorial sign” (6). Either way, the factual physicality of movement pervades the situation as a matter of presence, which is subsequently, and maybe even simultaneously, enhanced through a cultural, one could say a discursive, interpretation in the form of a thick description. Geertz summarizes: “That’s all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of culture, and—voilà!—a gesture” (6). It is the notion of gesture which seems most relevant for my approach to skate punk as it precisely frames the interplay between physical movement in “the external world” and movement in “discursively mediated sensecapes” (Urry 48); i.e. it conceptualizes the tension between (sheer) presence and (cultural) meaning, between “tangibility” and “the structures of signification” (Gumbrecht, Production 17; Geertz 9). Consequently, it is the gestures of skate punk that I must look at if I want to generate comprehensive validations about the opportunities offered its partici-

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pants to resist and distance themselves from their social (i.e. SoCal) and physical environment. This requires an additional description of skate punk presence and its moving bodies that goes beyond my earlier interpretations of (skate punk) culture. These previous inquiries into the “public code” or the cultural context of skate punk media need to be extended by a consideration of its interconnections to dynamic (i.e. moving) presence beyond its purely semantic impact in a cultural milieu. For Geertz, the “phenomenalistic” approach to movement emanates from what he calls an “I-am-a-camera” perspective that does (or can) not grasp the semantic level of contextual meaning (6). The difference between twitch and wink, he argues, is “unphotographable” (6), a statement which implies that movement and presence in general when being photographed, as the very moment of movement, the moment of a present and tangible body in motion, is always already over, i.e. frozen, fixed, extinguished and not photographable or, in view of Gumbrecht, not interpretable. Geertz’s notion of “I-am-a-camera” observation thus helps to describe the presence effects of skate punk beyond the attribution of semiotic meaning analyzed in the second part of this book. This stance does not suggest a shift that turns “against interpretation”—after all it is one aspect of Geertz’s interpretative approach—but it promises an additional perspective that traces effects of presence which might be “transgressive against existing discourses” and thus crucial for the generation of credible and effective resistance within skate punk culture (Gumbrecht Production 2; Lowe 176). As Geertz notes, a “phenomenalistic” observation alone cannot account for semantic interpretations; it does not interpret meaning. It seems, however, that such a view could be helpful to approaching the physical movement and the bodily presence that Gumbrecht is interested in and which promises enhancing features for the generation of skate punk expression beyond the strictly discursive realm. The phenomenal preconditions that provide for the emergence and amalgamation of skateboarding and hardcore punk mark important elements within a comprehensive analysis of skate punk culture. There must be certain moments which cannot only be read as discursive, cultural, historical or temporal, but also approached as locational and material phenomena that foster the convergence of skateboarding and punk. As the previous chapters showed, a discursive similarity between skateboarding and punk can be located within the respective culture’s reliance on mediations of rebellion, deviance, and (self-) marginalization. It is useful to look for an approach that—like a ‘phenomenalistic reduction’—momentarily brackets off these attributes and tries to unravel a more concrete nexus of the skateboarding and punk amalgam.106 I want to find out where the lived body—i.e. living, corporeal movement—concretely encounters a moment that constitutes a condition for 106 | I understand this bracketing as a methodological necessity in order to make a point about skate punk’s potential beyond (or at the borders of) discursive representation rather than as a reinforcement of a strict and essential binary between mediated discourse and material action.

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skate punk expression and consequently for potential opportunities of resistance. In this way, such an approach to the topic does not entirely depart from culturally and historically induced examinations but rather tries additionally to consider concrete situations that can ultimately help to relate the phenomenon of skate punk to its historical and discursive context, as well as its physical and material presence. In accordance with Gumbrecht and his colleagues, who saw their discontent with the humanities’ preoccupation with hermeneutic traditions anticipated in the famous 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” by Susan Sontag—“probably the only Harvard-educated philosopher who digs punk rock,” as Victor Bockris stated (69)—it is her conception of the Happening that can help in specifying the moments in skate punk which constitute the focus in the following (cf. Gumbrecht, Production 10). Happenings, according to Sontag, don’t take place on a stage conventionally understood, but in a dense object-clogged setting which may be made, assembled, or found, or all three. In this setting a number of participants, not actors, perform movements and handle objects antiphonally and in concert to the accompaniment (sometimes) of words, wordless sounds, music, flashing lights, and odors. The Happening has not a plot, though it is an action, or rather a series of actions and events. (264)

While alluding to the broad realm of art in New York around the early 1960s, the notion of the Happening can be fruitful for a consideration of those moments in California skate punk that similarly surpass plot by action and thus promise possibilities to disrupt the narratives that otherwise characterize the culture’s medial stylization. Paralleling Sontag’s further characterization of Happenings as “[l]acking a plot and continuous rational discourse,” I want to anticipate moments in skate punk that “are always in the present tense” and thus characterized by their presence (266). To be precise, rather than being interested in skate punk as a Happening, I want to consider the moments when it is happening.

3.2

A PPROACHING THE C ONCRE TE

Returning to Suicidal Tendencies’ “Possessed to Skate” as well as to the paradigmatic position of Dogtown’s Z-Boys and their rebellious ‘guerilla’ attitude, I implement a starting point that is set within discourses of rebelliousness and thus interesting for a ‘phenomenalistic reduction’ bracketing off these discursive ramifications and striving towards an understanding of the material preconditions that pervade them. As both examples prove, skate punk at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, seems essentially centered around the (empty) swimming pool and the activity of pool skating, which suggests that zooming into the concrete activity of skating in empty water basins can generate knowledge about the presence effects involved. As seen in the example of the Z-Boys, the “mass trespassing”

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that accompanies pool skating inherently and immediately imbues the participants with an image of rebelliousness and thus an obvious linkage to punk’s rebellious self-conception (Weyland 51). But what happens apart from this conception? What remains when we bracket off the surroundings, the skater’s clothes, the music that might be played during skating, the act of trespassing and, last but not least, the skater’s complex construction of her or his identity? In short, what can we learn if we bracket off the “speck of behavior” and the “fleck of culture” that always accompanies the activity—the gesture—of pool skating? The very act of skateboarding can be reduced to the movement of a body on a board on wheels on a given surface, in this case the surface of the swimming pool’s inside, its bottom. Because of the nature of the swimming pool as a basin, however, this movement is restricted to the point where the moving board encounters the walls that constitute the pool’s borders and ensure its functionality as a reservoir for water. Given this border, one can expect an abrupt halt of movement, therefore it is necessary to zoom in even closer and focus on the wheels that would indeed stop if they hit a perpendicular wall; the pool obviously does not enforce such a halt. Instead of colliding with the wall at the point where the pool’s flat bottom meets its vertically constructed borders, the moving board ascends on an inclined transition that literally catapults the entity of wheels, boards, and body into—or more precisely onto—the vertical borders of the pool. This close-up reveals a concrete (i.e. again literally concrete) and decisive feature that can be read as a material precondition for skate punk culture: The ‘edges’ in the respective swimming pools are round; they enable the board’s wheels to remain in touch with the basin’s surface and actually roll up onto its walls. The feature of poured concrete creating ‘rounded edges’ within a swimming pool, at first view, appears of only minor importance; however, it represents a site-specific phenomenon that entails the discursive as well as material groundings for a moment in skateboarding culture that is crucial for its convergence with the rebellious stances of punk. In congruence with what Michel Serres, with reference to Lucretius, introduces as clinamen in The Birth of Physics, i.e. “the minimum angle formation of a vortex, appearing by chance in a laminar flow” or a minimal declination from an ideal itinerary (Serres, Birth 6), the inclined walls of California swimming pools constitute a chance curvature that enables skateboarding punks to deviate from established paths. Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, pick up on Serres’s elaborations on atomic physics and specify that the clinamen “as the minimum angle, has meaning only between a straight line and a curve, the curve and its tangent, and constitutes the original curvature of movement of the atom. The clinamen is the smallest angle by which an atom deviates from a straight path” (Deleuze and Guattari 398). Deleuze and Guattari’s delineation of the clinamen maps out to what extent an important prerequisite of skate punk evolves within the microphysical or molecular level, where it constitutes “the smallest deviation, the minimum excess” that provides for a four-wheeled board to be set into motion along the vertical walls of

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pools and thereby fosters the bodies of skate punk into the vortex that is pool skateboarding (409). It is precisely the inclined shape of curved concrete that makes an empty swimming pool ‘skatable’ and it is from this infinitesimal site-specific phenomenon that skate punks depart on trajectories of potential deviance. The rounded concrete constitutes the initial reason for trespassing onto private property and thus fosters a key element of rebellious and deviant behavior and movement in skateboarding. This feature is site-specific in the sense that, referring to Miwon Kwon’s explorations of the “Genealogy of Site Specificity” in (post-) modern art, it belongs to an “actual location, a tangible reality, its identity composed of a unique combination of physical elements: length, depth, height, texture, and shape of walls and rooms” (Kwon 11). The unique shape of ‘skatable’ pools constitutes them as specific sites and these sites are first and foremost physical; they constitute tangible presence. Zooming out again reveals that this defining moment of skate punk fusion is enmeshed in a broader environment and—according to Kwon’s initial definition of site specificity—also relates to “scale and proportion of plazas, buildings, or parks; existing conditions of lighting, ventilation, traffic patterns; distinctive topographical features, and so forth” (Kwon 11).107 A wider angle (i.e. zooming out yet again) reintegrates all the features and characteristics that had been bracketed off and maps them around the site-specific and material features of a ‘skatable’ swimming pool. Initially, it seems as if two features Kwon mentions in the above description of site specificity are of special importance here: “the shape of walls” and, in a generalized sense, the “existing conditions of lighting and ventilation” which can be transferred from her inquiries into the world of art and subsumed under the broader rubrics of weather or climate. Both specificities help to locate the phenomenon of skate punk within a Californian environment which is, first of all, simply a locale where many swimming pools have been built with rounded concrete, i.e. a specific shape of walls abounds in this region, and secondly, California—and especially Southern California—provides the climatic conditions that promote a high demand and, consequently, an extraordinary density of swimming pools. These specificities, of course, also apply to other regions—California certainly is not the only place where individually shaped concrete pools abound because of a mild climate and the concentration of wealth—however, borrowing from Kwon’s diction of site specificity, the described phenomenon of rounded concrete provides a “‘locational’ anchor in the discursive realm” of California (28). It constitutes a material reality that adds

107 | Kwon begins her chapter on the “Genealogy of Site Specificity” with this definition of the concept. However, in addition to such a “phenomenological” approach, she schematizes “social/institutional” as well as “discursive” conceptions and asserts that these “three paradigms of site specificity” are not ordered along a chronological trajectory, but constitute “competing definitions, overlapping with one another and operating simultaneously in various cultural practices today” (30).

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sheer physical presence to skate punk’s enmeshment within the discourses of California suburbia. The previous chapters set out to delineate discursive backgrounds which shaped skate punk’s development within the context of 1980s California. The fact that it is possible to skate up a slope of rounded concrete in a swimming pool demonstrates the extent to which these discourses interlock with a concrete phenomenon of material presence. Skateboarders and punks are acting in and reacting to an often extremely conservative suburban environment; they act and affect within a frame of intersectional differentiations of race, class, gender, and space; they shape and consume fashion and media. All these discursive features hold special connections to the Californian context so that the fact that the phenomenon of a pool with rounded concrete exists within this formation reveals to what extent skate punks and their bodies are not only discursively constructed but, in their movement on the skateboard, also anchored to site-specific concreteness. Apart from the fact that they are enmeshed in the complex intersections of race, class, gender, and space attributes, they move on tangible and material concrete, which simultaneously proves that they tangibly and concretely move. The climatic specificities of California are of exemplary importance as they build a crucial prerequisite for the expressive mode of pool skating. Former professional skateboarder Steve Alba emphasizes the weather conditions in the mid 1970s: California at that point had this gnarly drought that was going on. So, if your pool was empty you could not fill it up. So, a whole bunch of pools were like just empty because once they were, like I say, once they were empty you couldn’t fill them cause there was a law against it cause if you used water, they could actually have a meter at your house and see how much water you used. So, if you filled the pool up you’d have five, six thousand, whatever gallons it takes to fill the pool up, and you would get, you know, a fine and then maybe even go to jail because that’s how serious the drought was at that point. (Alba, Personal Interview)

Alba’s statement illustrates the way in which the site-specific conditions of Southern California favored skateboarders’ advance into new territories and, subsequently, into new mediations of their activities. Interestingly, the allusion to a climatic specificity that binds skate punk’s development inherently to the realm of Southern California finds a parallel in Hebdige’s account of the emergence of punk culture in England. Britain experienced a similar heat wave in 1976 and Hebdige hints at its “almost metaphysical significance”—the adverb “almost” emphasizing that, in fact, it is physical—by describing how “the excessive heat was threatening the very structure of the nation’s houses (cracking the foundations) and the Notting Hill Carnival, traditionally a paradigm of racial harmony, exploded into violence” (24). “It was during this strange apocalyptic summer,” Hebdige concludes, “that punk made its sensational debut in the music press” (25). Hebdige’s narrative of punk’s emergence in the British media indicates how far this subculture resonated with

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the “Last Days imagery” of a press that quickly changed from celebrating good weather during times of economic crisis to interpreting the drought as “a ‘freak disorder’: a dreadful, last, unlooked-for factor in Britain’s decline” (24). His study indicates how concrete site-specific events—a crack in a house or extreme weather—can be medially mirrored (and interpreted) within subcultural style: “Apocalypse was in the air and the rhetoric of punk was drenched in apocalypse: in the stock imagery of crisis and sudden change” (27). Whereas the punks in Hebdige’s account might have incorporated the racialized notions of Reggae culture into their stylistic creations due to the impressions of a (literally) overheated Carnival that turned into a riot (cf. 27ff), the suburban youth of California were simultaneously faced with overheated backyards and the empty swimming pools this drought entailed. Despite the transatlantic differences, the concrete meteorological conditions respectively anchored young people’s subcultural practices to their site-specific and physical surroundings. The bricolage of the safety pins English punk’s incorporated into their style can be read as a subcultural allusion to the “cracking” of the nation that unveiled during the British summer of 1976 as the function of pinning together illustrates and emphasizes the very existence of cracks and voids: Instead of factually reassembling anything, first and foremost, punks’ safety pins indicated that things were falling apart. The skateboard is of similar significance within the Californian context: It is transferred into abandoned swimming pools, the remains of a drought during a decade that turned the dream of suburban prosperity into the nightmare of economic crisis. The skateboard moves along the ecological and economic crack in the concrete pools of 1970s and 1980s California; site-specific features of concrete and physical impact turn it into the ‘Californian safety pin.’ Halberstam’s aforementioned comments on a series of photographs by French artist Helena Cabello and Spanish artist Ana Carceller (known as Cabello/ Carceller) in the essay “Notes on Failure” are highly revealing in this context. Cabello/Carceller document a variety of empty swimming pools in California and, although the examples that Halberstam includes in her text depict rectangular pools that would hardly work for skateboarding, her reading provides crucial insights into the importance of empty pools in skate punk culture. Starting out from the characteristics of a filled pool, i.e. a pool that fulfills its intended function, Halberstam notes that like the shop windows in the Parisian arcades described by Benjamin, the water in a swimming pool reflects the body and transforms space into a glittering dream of relaxation, leisure, recreation and buoyancy. The empty pools, on the other hand, stand like ruins, abandoned and littered with leaves and other signs of disuse, and in this ruined state they represent a perversion of desire, the decay of the commodity, the queerness of the disassociation of use from value—when the pool no longer signifies as a marker of wealth and success, it becomes available to queer signification as a symbolic site of failure, loss, rupture, disorder, incipient chaos and the desire animated by these states nonetheless. (81)

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Emphasizing the symbolic appearance of the empty swimming pool, Halberstam evaluates it in view of its potentiality for queer signification and thus implies that the conversion of its function generates an estrangement of normative structures. Almost resembling gaping ‘wounds of concrete’ in the Californian landscape, the empty swimming pools bear witness to economic crisis, while skate punks twist the knife, i.e. their ‘Californian safety pins’ in the form of wooden skateboards, in the wound by throwing themselves into the void. They transcend the symbolic notion of the site (and their subcultural activity) by foregrounding the physical forces that are involved. Halberstam hints at this physical reality and its effect on the body: The swimming pool is a place of meditation, an environment within which the body becomes weightless and hovers on the surface of a submerged world: it is a site where the body becomes buoyant, transformed by a new element, and yet must struggle, overcome by the new and potentially hostile environment. Like a tiled Atlantis, the exposed pool, filled now with air rather than water, reveals what lies beneath the sparkling surface of chlorine-enhanced blue. It takes us to a threshold and forces us to contemplate jumping into air and space. (81/82)

Deprived of the ease and lightheartedness that suburban living once promised, the “exposed” pool—like a Lynchian zoom into the underworld beneath suburbia’s picket fences—reveals the “sparkling surface of chlorine-enhanced blue” as mere masquerade of a failed utopia. While Halberstam anticipates a forced contemplation of jumping into air and space, skate punks surpass the contemplating moment and, in fact, take a leap: They drop into the concrete spatial void, traverse the empty pool, carve along its walls like a surfer on a wave, and grind on the coping; eventually, they jump out of the pool into the air above the threshold, perform a trick or merely ‘fly’ along before descending back onto the inclination of the concrete slope leading back into the exposed depths of the empty basin. The form of the pool—later abstracted in the construction of the half pipe—initiates the up-and-down movement of the skater’s body and thus centers the activity of skating on the threshold marking the missing surface of “chlorine-enhanced” water. What remains is the memory of, or the nostalgia for, a surface—the memory of a better time—lingering above the empty pool like an invisible membrane. Further echoing the safety pin, the skateboard becomes a piercing device that time and again breaches this imaginary membrane by materially relating the skate punk body to the environment of suburban California. Every drop into the empty basin, every grind on its coping, every jump over the concrete threshold emphasizes a simple fact: This pool is empty, this site is fallow, it has changed due to economic and ecological forces, and its deployment by skate punks emphasizes “the empty promises of utopia” and their concrete remains (Halberstam 80). The fact that it is its relation to concrete presence which renders the skateboard a symbol of rebellion thus underlines the extent to which interpretation and meaning interact with perception and presence. A strict division of these interconnected

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realms would diminish skateboarding’s effects on both the level of meaning and the level of presence. A complex medial construction is necessary in order to inscribe skateboarding into a rebellious punk context; however, the tangible presence of the board, the concrete ontology of the swimming pool, and the physical motion of bodies in movement are of equal importance for skate punk’s emergence in Southern California. In view of Gumbrecht, this description of the skateboard and skateboarding is involved in the generation of what he calls “presence effects”: [P]resence phenomena cannot help being inevitably ephemeral, cannot help being what I call “effects of” presence—because we can only encounter them within a culture that is predominantly a meaning culture. For us, presence phenomena always come as “presence effects” because they are necessarily surrounded by, wrapped into, and perhaps even mediated by clouds and cushions of meaning. It is extremely difficult—if not impossible—for us not to “read,” not to try and attribute meaning to that lightning or that glaring California sunlight. (Gumbrecht, Production 106)

This account not only picks up on the mediated meaning that, like a discursive cloud, surrounds skate punk, but also indicates the impossibility of ignoring, i.e. not reading, such meaning into the phenomenon. However, it integrates the notion of presence into this effective moment and thus parallels the material factuality that built the physical prerequisite for pool skateboarding. The fact that Gumbrecht deploys the example of California sunlight makes this quote even more valuable as it incorporates the site-specific features of skate punk’s locational surroundings and presents them in view of their effectiveness beyond meaning attribution.108 He explains how the sudden appearance of certain objects of perception diverts our attention from ongoing everyday routines and indeed temporarily separates us from them. Nature turned into an event often fulfills this function: think of lightning, above all, the first lightning in a thunderstorm, or remember the aggressive sunlight that almost blinds you when, coming from central Europe, you deplane at any Californian destination. (Production 103)

Gumbrecht’s invocation of these examples of natural events helps to render the activity of pool skateboarding (to remain with this example) an aesthetic experience. He gives a useful characterization of this concept by pointing towards “the intrinsic feeling of intensity it can trigger” and thereby not only alludes to it as a “lived experience”—one could also say ‘lived intensity’—and thus a bodily sensing, but also implies the ephemeral character, which unhinges the event from stasis and places it in challenging disruption of rigid discourses (97, 107). In an aesthetic experience, according to Gumbrecht, one is “lost in focused intensity” (104). But 108 | Also cf. Baudrillard’s comments on the “primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California” (Baudrillard, America 9).

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what does this moment of intensity look like in skate punk culture? Can we get hold of it? Can we describe the “lived experience” and its ephemeral effectiveness? In order to generate validations of skate punk’s rebellious and resisting potential, in the following I need to delineate the traces of experience—“aesthetic or not”— that skate punk fosters and which push its participants to a “state of focused intensity” (104). The body thereby holds special relevance as the main implementation of Gumbrecht’s argument illustrates: The title of his book reveals that it is the production of presence that pervades his approach to tangibility within cultural phenomena and cultural events. He deploys this notion “according to the meaning of its etymological root (i.e., Latin producere) that refers to the act of ‘bringing forth’ an object in space” (xiii). Gumbrecht specifies that the phrase “production of presence,” therefore, “points to all kinds of events and processes in which the impact that ‘present’ objects have on human bodies is being initiated or intensified” (xiii). This description suggests a focus on those moments in skate punk culture that— like the described activity of pool skating—relate the body to present objects, i.e. its concrete environment.

3.3

P RODUCING P RESENCE THROUGH S K ATEBOARDING AND H ARDCORE P UNK

3.3.1

Adding “Volume”

Returning to the video Streets on Fire and its protagonist Jason Jessee helps to point out in what way the physical activity of skateboarding, i.e. its moment of pure presence, adds a material realm to its hermeneutically described meaning. The narrative of the video is necessary to inscribe Jesse into the rebellious stance of skate punk resistance, while the actual maneuvers on the skateboard escape the plot of the story and constitute an element of physical mobility. Jessee’s half pipe skating and the subsequent slam section of the video provide telling examples of presence effects that Streets on Fire evokes. It is important, however, to emphasize the fact that the video cannot really depict or represent these effects but really only evokes or rather reveals ‘traces’ of a presence that remains, with reference to Geertz, “unphotographable” (6). Jessee’s statement “I like to fall on my face. I like to hurt myself. I like everything,” not only provides a meaningful connection between his skateboarding action and the narrative attempt to create an outcast character, but also hints at an aspect of physical presence in the moment of falling. While the linguistic message qualifies the event of falling, and by using the verb “like” (implying an appreciation of the pain) creates the context in which it can be read (or interpreted) as a mode of masculinist and macho as well as masochist stylization, the actual falling seems to disappear behind this medial representation. As part of the popular medium of a skate video, the bodily engagement that underlies skateboarding is rendered meaningful and presented in a narrative array which ultimately distracts

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from the physical process involved. What the video shows is Jason Jessee, an apparently rebellious outcast who skateboards in a half pipe; what it does (or can) not fully account for is the “lived experience” in Gumrecht’s sense, namely the experience outside interpretation and outside of “acts of meaning attribution” (100), which is generated when somebody uses a board with four wheels to briefly defy gravity or simply to move in any direction. Borden points out that such a conception of lived experience would necessarily link back to skateboarders’ bodies. The traces of material movement that might be represented in the images of the video can only unfold their effects of presence when they are bodily engaged: [S]kateboarders use imagery less as pure image, and more as an integration and representation of that imagery through skateboarding practice. The lived representation of skateboard images occurs when skaters undertake the moves themselves, reliving and re-producing photographs, video footage and the internet movie clips through the agency of their body. (Borden, Skateboarding 120)

It is thus not through mere interpretation that a medial representation such as Streets on Fire generates meaning. It additionally evokes a physical or bodily approach, a “somatic response” (Elwes 12), by skaters who move themselves and use their bodies. Every time skaters make moves they are at once replaying photographs and video clips through their own bodies, reliving and reinventing them, and—ultimately—rendering images, moves and themselves into social, fleshy, living entities. (Borden, Skateboarding 125)

This statement on the one hand alludes to what Gumbrecht calls “aesthetic experience,” as it precisely describes the “oscillation between presence effects and meaning effects” which he attributes to this conception while (Production 107), on the other hand, it suggests that it is via the body that a “reliving and reinventing” of media can be established (Borden, Skateboarding 125). Borden hints at the potentiality that the material side of skateboarding offers for its actors: It enables them to live out alternatives to the medial constructions that render their culture meaningful according to prevailing discourses. The movement on a skateboard in moments of “fleshy” and “living” presence points beyond its discursive boundaries, although it is important to keep the discursive ramifications in mind: Race, class, gender, and space attributes are crucial for the discursive constituency of the body and cannot just be bracketed off, but must be considered in oscillating interplay with material bodily presence. The bodily presence, however, incorporates an opportunity to react upon the discursive ramifications by momentarily disrupting them and ideally fostering their transgression. Instead of “just bracketing the presence side, as we seem to do, quite automatically, in our so very Cartesian everyday lives,” Gumbrecht thinks that his

3 C ORPOREALITY thesis about the oscillation between presence effects and meaning effects is close to what Hans-Georg Gadamer meant when he emphasized that, in addition to their apophantic dimension, that is, in addition to the dimension that can and must be redeemed through interpretation, poems have a “volume”—a dimension, that is, that demands our voice, that needs to be “sung.” (Production 107)

Transferred to the topic of skateboarding and punk one could adopt Gadamer’s metaphors and, instead of poems, describe skate punk media as a realm that in addition to its “apophantic” renderings (which I traced along the lines of intersectional categories) has “volume,” i.e. a materiality that needs to be sung or, more precisely, skated (and in view of hardcore punk: screamed). Just as you have to sing a poem to grasp its effectiveness beyond the written language that fixes it as text, you have to actually skate in order to get an impression of the “aesthetic experience” that can never be fully depicted by medial representation.109 Consequently, skating as such, i.e. the physical movement of the body, seems to provide the possibility to surpass the medial representation and with it the contradictions that entail from a subculture whose media rely on the discourses of an environment it actually seeks to resist.

3.3.2

Falling and Slamming

The possibility of falling or slamming which is constantly addressed in representations of skateboarding and hardcore punk seems to incorporate one of the most forceful relations of the body to its concrete surroundings. Considered on a symbolic level, it is no surprise that falls and slams hold such a prominent position in media depictions. They seem to pervade American mythology in the same way as the entrepreneur spirit that Chivers Yochim detects in the story of Cadillac Wheels inventor Frank Nasworthy and the following allusions to rebellious skateboarding history in interconnection with the American Dream (cf. Chivers Yochim 72). Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise provides a primary example for the postmodern appeal that such encounters of physical extremity have within US culture and its preoccupation with the automobile. DeLillo’s character of the college professor Murray Jay Siskind constitutes a personification of America’s fascination with speed and its most abrupt ending in the crash. Offering a “car crash seminar” (DeLillo 217), Siskind is interested in the medial representation of automobile accidents. He expounds:

109 | Baudrillard, in the quite different context of driving, i.e. moving, with a car, establishes a similar argument and extends it to an implicit critique of the shortcomings of academic research. “The point is not to write the sociology or psychology of the car,” he claims, “the point is to drive. That way you learn more about this society than all academia could ever tell you” (America 54).

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Centered on a moment when movement suddenly terminates, this fictional approach to the crash foregrounds an interpretative analysis and renders it a uniquely American obsession pervading the country’s normative discourses of exceptionalism and self-fulfillment. Borden, in congruence with this example, also references a literary work to define skateboarding and the physical impacts it generates as “a Ballardesque crash and rebirth of self, body and terrain” (Skateboarding 135). While carrying allusions to the symphorophilia that similarly seems to accompany the crash interpretations by DeLillo’s Siskind, Borden’s reference to J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash focuses on the corporeal aspects involved beyond a purely symbolic charge. Particularly in view of its implementation of body and terrain, the ‘skateboard crash’ that is invoked by Borden constitutes a paradigmatic example of Gumbrecht’s conception of a production of presence as it initiates or intensifies the impact between the body and objects of the Californian landscape. The bodily injury, constantly anticipated or at least accepted as a possible result in skateboarding, adds moments of focused intensity to the culture of skate punk. Skateboarders’ wounds bear witness to this intensity, and their representations—e.g. as photographs of severely wounded limbs in Thrasher or the slam sections in skate videos—are very important for the medialization of the culture (cf. Zarka 30, 129n28). A “Best Of” photo-compilation of gruesome images that Thrasher revealingly labeled “Hall of Meat” is exemplary in this regard: It shows broken arms, dislocated legs, open wounds as well as encrusted and ulcerous scars (cf. Thrasher, Skate and Destroy 238/239). The accompanying caption reads, “What teaches people how to skate?” and the following answer is simple: “The concrete” (239). Although showcasing this disturbing imagery as a further illustration of its Skate and Destroy stylization—and thus as part of Thrasher’s conveyance of a rebellious image of risk-taking bravery as well as “American optimism” (DeLillo 218)— the appended caption implies the existence of a concrete momentum of intensity that cannot be captured medially, i.e. that only develops within the ephemerality of lived experience, the “Ballardesque” encounter of flesh and cement. The shortness of the falling moment produces a bodily presence that time and again becomes manifest in skateboarders’ wounds. The skate injuries are paralleled by the corporeal encounters, risks, and violations of the body that occur in hardcore punk as the following account of stage diving from Bruce Caen’s autobiographical novel Sub-Hollywood indicates: Stage diving was spontaneously initiated at around this time [i.e. the late 1970s and early 1980s]. Typically, a punk kid or two would hop up on stage when the band was playing to the

3 C ORPOREALITY chagrin of the bouncers and insurance carriers, maybe dance around a little, and before they could get grabbed by a heavily muscled meatball security man and ejected from the club, they would dive off the stage and somersault in flight, landing (sometimes) softly on the audience below where they immediately blended into the energized crowd, their own kind. These new audience expressions of thrashing, moshing and diving were sometimes the cause of dislocated shoulders, punches in the solar plexus, black eyes, and other injuries. (168)

Stage diving, the slam dance, and the self-mutilation of the likes as Henry Rollins or Darby Crash directly illustrate the analogy to the consequences of skateboarding accidents. Although not necessarily leading to serious injuries, the possibility of hurting oneself or other people always accompanies hardcore punk concerts. As Alba explains, the “pulling each other down and hitting each other and tackling each other and sliding into each other” was often brought into punk rock by skateboarders, so that falling and slamming became part of both cultures and made injuries and consequently the human skin and its vulnerability a combining element of skate punk activity (Alba, Personal Interview). David Bloustien, in his essay “‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’ Or Here’s Three Chords, Now Form a Band: Punk, Masochism, Skin, Anaclisis, Defacement” (2003), offers a way to further the notions of falling, slamming, and resulting injuries within the context of punk culture. He deploys Julia Kristeva’s notion of “the abject” to comment on identities that are “radically individual, and therefore suit punk’s meta-narrative of social autonomy” (Bloustien 58). Bloustien explains that “[s]ocial, political and biological abjection is an integral part of punk’s (limited) public image” while reading it in combination with Traber’s work on self-marginalization. He points out that, in his opinion, “the abject (or marginal) does not truly exist as outside the parent culture. Rather, it is as a limit case, or along the skin of the parent culture, that subculture operates” (59). Although convincingly emphasizing that punk culture does not or, better, cannot exist outside of what its participants perceive as the mainstream—which goes along with Traber’s approach to L.A. punk and parallels the conclusion concerning my analysis of skate punk media—Bloustien’s equalization of the abject and the marginal seems to foreclose an understanding of abjection that might point towards skate punk’s potentiality in transgressing discursive structures. “Punk,” Bloustien specifies, “names itself as the waste and excrescence of the post-industrial world;” its participants “place themselves outside the parent culture;” and they “demonstrate [their] marginality, or abjection” (59, my emphasis). The word (i.e. verb) choice suggests acts of meaning attribution—of naming, placing, and demonstrating—which definitely work for a description of (self-) marginalization. As I have pointed out, punks and skateboarders seek outcast positions by conveying cultural codes of marginality that work along contemporary discourses and narratives which help attribute meaning to their subcultures. The notions of the abject and abjection, however, appear to undermine meaning altogether. Kristeva defines:

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The collapsing of meaning that characterizes abjection, its “weight of meaninglessness” (2), differs from the self-marginalization of a subculture that “aestheticizes identity for capital in a symbolic economy of signification” and functions as a vehicle for often privileged teenagers to convey signs of intersectional differentiation in order “to give a substantive meaning to their cultural practice” (Traber, “L.A.’s White Minority” 50, 54, my emphasis). What causes abjection, by contrast, is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva, Horror 4). This disturbance and this “in-between,” I argue, can only be located in the moments of lived experience and focused intensity that pervade skate punk culture, in addition to its discursive setup. They become particularly evident in moments of falling and slamming, in moments of jumping from a stage or of dropping into a swimming pool. Anticipating death as the ultimate abject, Kristeva includes comments on the corpse in her thoughts on “Approaching Abjection”: The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. (Horror 3)

The notion of cadere or to fall that Kristeva introduces picks up on the moment of falling that occurs in skate punk culture, while the bloody and pussy wounds on its participants’ bodies bring forth “what life withstands.” Although not “irremediably com[ing] a cropper,” the jumps of skateboarders into the concrete voids of suburbia and the leaps of hardcore punks in front as well as from the stage point towards this ultimate state of cadaver. Halberstam’s aforementioned observation that the empty swimming pool in California becomes a “site of failure, loss, rupture, disorder, incipient chaos” and “forces us to contemplate jumping into air and space” plays into this moment (Halberstam 81, 82): By actually jumping into the empty swimming pool—now rather a cesspool “littered with leaves and other signs of disuse” (81)—

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and by physically taking a leap into this ‘dead’ pool, into this “morgue’s full sunlight, in[to] that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything” (Kristeva, Horror 4), skate punks produce a presence which momentarily disturbs their subculture’s “symbolic economy of signification” (Traber, “L.A.’s White Minority” 50). The instant of falling, of slamming, and of slam dancing seems to produce a presence, a relation of the body and the objective environment it moves in that, as Gumbrecht might say, cannot be conveyed by meaning. The potentiality for effective resistance or an actual change in skate punk, i.e. a transgression of existing discourse arising from this momentum can be illustrated with reference to two prosaic accounts of slam dancing experiences. In their form as literary writings, i.e. as literature, these examples cannot but be interpreted and, of course, they first and foremost convey meaning. However, they seem particularly helpful in thinking about moments of lived intensity as both descriptions focus on the field of the corporeal, bodily, and fleshy. In her novel Blood and Guts in High School (1978), Kathy Acker includes a sequence in which her protagonist Janey observes a concert in New York’s seminal punk rock venue CBGB’s: One night I wandered into a rock-n-roll club named CBGB’s. The lights went boomp boomp boomp the drum went boomp boomp boomp the floor went boomp boomp boomp. Boomp boomp boomp entered my feet. Boomp boomp boomp entered my head. My body split into two bodies. I was the new world. I was pounding. Then there was these worms of bodies, white, covered by second-hand stinking guttured-up rags and knife-torn leather bands, moving sideways HORIZONTAL wriggling like worms who never made it to the snake-evolution stage. (120)

Within the description of Acker’s protagonist the participants in the concert situation lose their traits as human subjects and turn into a moving, wriggling heap that almost holds abject proportions as a pre-evolutionary mass; i.e. they are without identity, “opposed to I” (Kristeva, Horror 1). Gina Arnold, in her book On the Road to Nirvana (1993), gives an account of a similar concert setting: Then BOOM; BOOM! The band begins the verse, and we leap heavenward again. My feet don’t find the ground for a full minute and a half, and by the time they do I’ve been carried away on a tide of flesh. Everyone’s bumping heedlessly into one another, skin slapping sinew and then—schwack!—sticking. And yet our bodies have suddenly lost all sexual properties and have become mere tissue. It has happened at last. We are finally free of suggestion. (xii)

The two authors’ almost identical implementation of onomatopoeia points towards a corporeal and material realm. They come close to what Barthes called “writing aloud,” a concept he associated with the antique notion of “the actio, a group of formulae designed to allow for the corporeal exteriorization of discourse” (Pleasure of Text 66). Not unlike the blanks I located within the lyrics of skate punk music,

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Acker and Arnold indicate a “volume,” a physical presence of sound waves or noise, that in fact “demands our voice” (Gumbrecht, Production 107), i.e. that we can only perceive when we really use our vocal chords to corporeally exteriorize and enunciate: BOOM! Carrying traces of a material level, the descriptions of concert scenes map out to what extent the instants of lived intensity constitute possibilities to momentarily break out of, or at least reach, the borders of dominant discourse, i.e. to exteriorize it or at least move along its exterior, and disrupt the notions of intersectional differentiation that skate punk otherwise relies on in its medial representation. As the quote from Arnold’s novel implies, there is a moment in slam dancing that turns the participants into something different, something corporeal. She evades the notion of being a body or of being somebody by introducing a less essentializing term that is particularly important for Deleuze’s philosophy: What Arnold describes is a moment of becoming—a moment where the concert-goers become ‘mere’ body in slam dancing.110 She asserts that this moment is “free of suggestion” (xii), generating a situation in which existence is detached from ascribed properties like sexuality—against the backdrop of my intersectionally informed analysis, I would add the potentiality to momentarily detach existence from aspects of race, class, gender, and suburbia—and becomes “mere tissue.” It is useful to further the deployment of a Deleuzian, or more precisely a DeleuzoGuattarian, diction in order to specify the event of the slam dance as well as that of the skateboard slam and relate them to the conception of a “smooth space,” i.e. “a space of affects, more than one of properties,” a space that fosters “haptic rather than optical perception” (Deleuze and Guattari 528). The “pounding” in Acker—i.e. the generation of a haptic experience—and the emancipation from “suggestion” in Arnold—i.e. the eclipsing of properties—exemplify to what extent the potential Deleuze and Guattari locate within the production of smooth space as a disruptive alternative to its opposite of striated space (i.e. a highly ordered space of normative organization) pervades the physical encounters of skate punk culture. Deleuze and Guattari juxtapose smooth and striated space by specifying them as “nomad space and sedentary space” (524), a description which picks up on Foucault’s evaluation of the nomadic as a mobile technique countering discipline’s tendency to fix. The production of smooth space, it follows, constitutes a possible mode of resistance within the highly ordered space of sedentary, i.e. suburban, California and its “stri-

110 | Cliff Stagoll provides a compressed definition of Deleuze’s conception of becoming: He explains how it is used as a term that describes “the continual production (or ‘return’) of difference immanent within the constitution of events, whether physical or otherwise” (21). Its conception as “pure movement evident in changes between particular events” is especially important in the context of skate punk, as it implies an opportunity to locate a becoming-different, i.e. a change and a production of difference that disrupts existing structures, within the moments of movement that the subculture generates (21).

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ations of money, work, or housing” (Deleuze and Guattari 531).111 Moments of falling and slamming, i.e. movements that develop from extreme loss of control, constitute particularly flexible examples of mobility that disrupt the order of striation. The generation of movement, consequently, promises a way to strategically counter striated space.

3.3.3

Producing a Suburban Seascape

A very recent application of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “deterritorialization […] as a strategy to contravene ‘striated’ space and produce ‘smooth’ space (spaces that escape structuration and normative control), and thus to oppose hegemonic regulations of fixity” (Ganser 78), is introduced in Alexandra Ganser’s 2009 monograph Roads Of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970-2000. Ganser demonstrates how Deleuze and Guattari offer a vocabulary that helps to define (feminist) resistance in view of an appropriation of “space in non-normative ways” (79). While locating this strategy within women’s road narratives, Ganser’s approach is particularly interesting for my work as its focus on gendered space not only foregrounds one important category of intersectional difference, but also because it presents movement as “central to resistance to normativity” (74). “[I]f we imagine interventions into restrictive spatial patterns that inhibit the freedom of choice of motion or stasis,” Ganser explains, “practiced physical mobility […] always appears to at least potentially disrupt such patterns” (74). Implying a relation of body and material space, the disruptive element in mobility, i.e. a “physical movement that constantly defies geographical and symbolic centers” (77), emerges as a highly important factor within skate punk’s potential for generating moments of resistance. For these moments to subvert solidification and rigidity, they need to disrupt the anti-nomadic, i.e. they need to become nomadic and produce smooth space. Does skate punk translate this into action? In order to locate moments of production of smooth space or moments of smoothing within skate punk action, it is helpful to reference Deleuze and Guattari’s initial conception and consider what they regarded as “a smooth space par excellence”—the sea (Deleuze and Guattari 529). “Of course, there are points, lines, and surfaces in striated space as well as in smooth space,” they write in explaining this “Maritime Model” but then specify that “[i]n striated space, lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another. 111 | Henry Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, indicates the striations that follow from capitalist organization by elaborating on the “economic wish to impose the traits and criteria of interchangability upon places. The result is that places are deprived of their specificity – or even abolished” (343). Implying the homogeneity of suburban living, he traces the spatial consequences of capitalist development and thus provides an important example of ordering striations, which work “to reduce all the world’s richly particular spaces to a single homogeneous gridded landscape,” as Duffy aptly summarizes (Duffy 34).

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In the smooth, it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the trajectory” (528). Paralleling the ever shifting and moving seascape, a space where “the ground constantly changes direction” (545), this model foresees an ‘in-between’ indicating trajectories of movement which counter the striated immobility of fixed and stable points. As opposed to the sea, Deleuze and Guattari define the city as “the striated space par excellence” and (531), with the extreme order of conservative housing in mind, it would seem that suburbia receives a particular role in this attribution; it constitutes the epitome of striation, discipline, fixity, and thus the opposite of smoothness. Deleuze and Guattari suggest to what extent such a sedentary environment can in fact be challenged: Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. (551)

Although cautioning that one should “[n]ever believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us” (551), their statement introduces movements, speed and slowness, i.e. variations of mobility, as programmatic options that, if they will not save us, should at least foster moments of resistance against fixity. Mobility, it seems, constitutes an important prerequisite for the production of smooth space and, while the mentioned confrontation of “new obstacles” and the invention of “new paces” already seems to parallel important aspects of skateboarding and skateboarders’ approach to their surroundings, it is Deleuze himself who prepares an almost direct connection to skate punk by mentioning surfing in his work on “Mediators.” “Many of the new sports—surfing, windsurfing, hang gliding—take the form of entry into an existing wave,” Deleuze states, explaining: There’s no longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of putting into orbit. The basic thing is how to get taken up in movement of a big wave, column of rising air, to ‘come between’ rather than be the origin of an effort. (“Mediators” 281)

What he describes here is the injection of the human body into smooth space. The ‘coming between’ an already existing wave in surfing constitutes an entry into a trajectory that is not defined by two points, but rather shoots across the smooth space of the sea as a line of flight without a fixed origin or terminal point. As I have pointed out in the first chapter, the activity of surfing had a tremendous influence on skateboarding both culturally and in view of its maneuvers and movements. It is thus possible to transfer Deleuze’s anticipation of surfing as a new sport characterized by its occupation of the ‘between’ to the activity of skateboarding within the context of suburban California. A decisive difference, however, becomes manifest in the role of the body, which is crucial for both actions: While the body in surfing is

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literally entering a flow of energy in form of the wave, in skateboarding the energy is brought to a static place by the body itself. The skateboarder brings movement to an otherwise striated space, e.g. the concrete swimming pool of a suburban backyard, and thus operates precisely along the notion of the production of smooth space. The striations of suburbia are met with physical mobility and skateboarding “gives rise to smooth spaces” (Deleuze and Guattari 551). Borden’s implications concerning the mobility that skaters induce in seemingly static, i.e. striated, architecture illustrates this point: By focusing only on certain elements (ledges, walls, banks, rails) of the building, skateboarders deny architecture’s existence as a discrete three-dimensional indivisible thing, knowable only as totality, and treat it instead as a set of floating, detached, physical elements isolated from each other. (Skateboarding 145, my emphasis)

Describing skateboarders’ treatment of their surroundings as “floating” elements, Borden suggests the way in which they perceive their environment as, or indeed make it, mobile. The bodily engagement of the California landscape momentarily turns striated space into a floating seascape and, thus, into the ultimate paradigm of smoothness. As Deleuze and Guattari define it, smooth space is “a space constructed by local operations involving changes in direction” (Deleuze and Guattari 528), and the movement on the four-wheeled board constitutes precisely that: an activity that constantly produces a change of direction—up, down, left, right, into the pool, out of the pool, into the air, and onto the concrete—which simultaneously connects the activity to hardcore punk and its slam dancing participants who similarly expose their bodies to intense and at times uncontrolled, in the case of Acker’s example it is “sideways HORIZONTAL” (120), movement. “Because we’re from SoCal and we’ve grown up surfing and skating and skiing, we have a bit of aggressiveness to us,” claims Black Flag’s Keith Morris, who adds: “If you look at the slam dance itself, if you look at the configuration, it’s basically a kid riding a skateboard” (qtd. in Spitz and Mullen 199). His statement implies that skate punk, i.e. the amalgamation of skateboarding and hardcore punk, is anchored in moments of lived intensity, in moments where bodies enter movement and its smoothing effects. Jeff Lewis, in his essay “In Search of the Postmodern Surfer: Territory, Terror and Masculinity,” sets out to evaluate the “relationship between the phenomenal world of surfing and its representation in language and text” (59). He refers to Deleuze’s comment on surfing and explains in what way the activity “can be seen as part of a ‘de-territorializing’ process in which institutional power is effectively deconstructed by the nomadic experiences of new subjectivities” (61). Lewis points towards surfing’s resisting potential by describing it “as a rebel flow [that] contrasts with the ossifying of institutionalized language which would fix identity and ideas into specific ideologies and structure” (62). “[T]he act of surfboard riding,” he explicates, “becomes transgressive inasmuch as it unleashes an aesthetic of imme-

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diate pleasure and ‘immersion’ in the experience of the phenomenal (everyday) world” (65). While the immediacy of the aesthetic he ascribes to surfing parallels Gumbrecht’s notion of “aesthetic experience[s]” as ephemeral “moments of intensity” (Production 100), Lewis’s allusion to pleasure establishes a link to John Fiske’s analysis of the beach and surfing and its reliance on a semiotic approach in the vein of Barthes.112 Fiske, under the chapter heading “Reading the Beach” in his monograph Reading the Popular, departs from a clear and exclusive differentiation between the sea and nature and the city and culture. In the establishment of binary diagrams, he ascribes body, physical sensation, and the signifier to the former, while classing mind, conceptual construction, and the signified to the latter. He thus introduces a setting within which surfing becomes a subversive journey from culture to nature, from mind to body, from city to sea. “The subversion of surfing,” Fiske states, “lies in its apparent escape from the control of the signified, from social power” and thus prepares an approach paralleling the experience of surfing with Barthes’s descriptions of blissful moments in the reading of text (Fiske 60; cf. Barthes, Pleasure of Text): The wave is that text of bliss to the surfie, escape from the signified, potential reentry into nature, constantly shifting, needing rereading for each loss of subjectivity. It contradicts, defines momentarily, the ideological subjectivity through which discourses exert their control. The beach, however, is a text of mundane pleasure, not sacred bliss. It is laden with signifieds, it controls the desire for freedom and threat of nature by transposing it into the natural. It is pornography rather than eroticism, desire institutionalized, given a social location subject to the power of the other who produces its signification, its meaning. (Fiske 62)

By contrasting the ocean to the controlled and controlling site of the beach, Fiske allocates the subversive momentum of surfing within the wave, i.e. on the water and away from the land. Lewis summarizes the situation by reading it in view of the binary opposition of nature and culture that Fiske described: In surfing, “the body and the sensory (nature) are wedded in opposition against the reasoned hegemonies of domination (civilization),” and “in this sense, [surfing] becomes a strategic immersion which enables surfers to escape, however briefly, the controlling powers of work, state, capitalism and institutional regulations” (Lewis, “In Search” 66). This reading implicitly suggests that a transfer of surfing to the land and the city would carry and import possibilities of subversion that oppose discourses of surveillance and ultimately generate “a tactical attempt to evade the social control of meaning” (Fiske 62). Pointing towards meaning as an element of social control provides an important enhancement of Gumbrecht’s argument about presence as a realm beyond meaning, as it implies resisting potential in moments of lived inten112 | For further comments on Fiske’s analysis of beach and surfing culture cf. Ford and Brown (16ff).

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sity that escape such attributions and their entailing mechanisms of surveillance. Before approaching skateboarding and its interconnection with hardcore punk as a possibility to provide a transfer of surfing’s liberating potential to the four-wheeled device and thus to the locale of suburbia however, it is important to question the dichotomy that follows from Fiske’s inquiries and his analysis of “surfie journals.” Fiske’s juxtaposition of the actual activity of surfing as “physical sensation” on the one hand, and the surfer who is drawn “back into dominant culture by the very journals, competitions, and manufacturers that apparently serve his interests” on the other (49, 56),113 resembles the findings concerning skate punk I introduced in the second chapter: The medial (self-) stylization similarly undermines the potentially rebellious subculture of surfing. Lewis tries to outline this opposition by labeling surfing’s immersion in the ocean as “pre-discursive” and thus diametrically opposed to the “institutionally constrained language” of media such as the “surfie journal” (66). This dichotomous distinction not only contradicts the conception of lived bodies as “contingent formations” combining material and discursive notions in a dynamic interplay, as I discussed at the beginning of chapter one (cf. Lock and Farquhar 2), it also takes away from the evaluation of surfing’s subversive potential beyond a strict localization within and on the waves of the ocean. The installation of a definite border between sea and city that follows from the differentiation between “pre-discursive” surfing and its linguistic-discursive medialization, fixates and immobilizes the potentiality of the activity and the moments of lived intensity that it possibly generates. It isolates the mobilizing potential of surfing within an essentialized space of strictly defined otherness: the sea as essential nature. Particularly with regard to Deleuze and Guattari, the strong dichotomization that Fiske introduces and which reverberates in Lewis’s introduction of the “pre-discursive” appears extremely confining. It is important to note that Deleuze and Guattari do not establish the antagonistic concepts of smooth and striated space through a strict polarity, but emphasize that “we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari 524). This statement puts the “primordial duality between the smooth and the striated” in perspective and in fact provides the prerequisite for an approach to surfing that unhinges its mobilizing, nomad, and smoothing generations from the oceanic wave and makes it applicable to other, more striated environments in the first place (547). It proves that an essentializing binary of sea and land ignores the potentiality that lies within their interconnection. While Fiske’s description of surfing seems very invested in a “Romantic image of the sea” that positions it in essential opposition to the land and the city (Ford and Brown 13), Deleuze and Guattari point towards the fact that despite its paradigmatic 113 | Although otherwise very aware of the “blatant male chauvinism” that pervades surfing (60), Fiske, interestingly, refers to the surfer in the masculine.

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role as smooth space, the sea was “the first to encounter the demands of increasingly strict striation” (529), which was imposed by navigation, bearings, and the cartographic plottings of the map. They reveal to what extent smooth and striated spaces interact and mix, while implying that the dualistic differentiation between sea and city falls short of the translations, transversals, reversals, and returns that constantly interconnect them, or at least prolong the trajectories of lines of flight that emerge in either locale. Only with reference to such a flexible understanding of smoothness and striation in dynamic oscillation, does it become possible to understand skateboarding as a continuity of the trajectory that the movement of surfing launches—a trajectory “sometimes causing a passage from the smooth to the striated, sometimes from the striated to the smooth, according to entirely different movements” (524). Skateboarding embodies such a passage. It relies on surfing’s floating in the smooth space of the ocean and imports it to the striated space of suburbia by deploying a new approach to movement. It constitutes a passage from the ocean to the city and indicates a potential line of flight that cuts across both spaces. The early sobriquet of sidewalk surfing summarizes skateboarding’s role in such a passage, as it emphasizes the floating element that the activity carries and introduces to the striated space of suburbia where it interconnects with the evolution of hardcore punk.

3.3.4

Speeding Through Suburbia

It is another reference to a car crash which helps to include a focus on the notion of speed, while simultaneously emphasizing its importance within the scope of youth culture. The medial attention that followed James Dean’s lethal accident with his Porsche 550 Spyder in 1955 not only illustrates America’s mythological fascination with car crashes personified in DeLillo’s Siskind, it also tragically enacted the expression “Live fast, die young,” which “has passed—along with the figure of Dean—into cultural history” after its original coinage by Humphrey Bogart in Nicholas Ray’s 1949 film, Knock on any Door (Tomlinson 53). “The phrase seems so elegantly to summarize the reckless, intuitive insouciance of modern youth culture” (53), John Tomlinson concludes, and the fact that Hermosa Beach’s Circle Jerks released the eponymous song “Live fast, die young” on their 1980 debut album Group Sex emphasizes the mantra’s influence on the burgeoning youth culture of skate punk.114 The song’s 93 seconds illustrate how speed pervades the very structure of skate punk music and just like the “transgressive challenge of a fastshort life is the implicit refusal of a slow-extended life of plodding, cautious, mortgaged, humdrum material acquisition” that particularly characterizes California 114 | The aforementioned concert flyer that proclaimed, “Skate tough or die!” (cf. Turcotte 221), seems to suggest that explicit skate punk adaptations of the ‘Live fast, die young’ expression were probably already circulating long before the Swedish band E.T.A. (Epileptic Terror Attack) in fact released the song “Skate fast, die young” on their 2001 record No Faith.

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suburbia (54), the ephemerality of skateboard moves and hardcore punk outbursts implies a speed-induced moment of resistance against conservative restrictions. Returning to the example of the swimming pool and the striations of suburbia, it becomes evident how skateboarding reverses the fixed forms of hardened concrete and momentarily turns them into floating elements that are mobilized through bodily-generated intensities of movement and speed. The lyrics of the song “Intense Energy” (1983) by Agression imply this deterritorialization as they pick up on the idea of surfing a pool, i.e. treating it as a floating seascape rather than a stable part of the fixed totality of suburban architecture. In accordance with the conception of an ideal building of “moving, coursing, interacting individuals” that architectural theoretician Bernard Tschumi introduces in his book Architecture and Disjunction, skateboarders imply the opportunity to appropriate suburban architecture as “buildings that […] move like their users, becoming themselves accelerators of traffic flows” (Duffy 33). While the evaluation of modern architecture such as Le Corbusier’s concrete ramp, “as in the ramp which branzenly cuts through the Carpenter Center at Harvard, his only American commission,” points towards architecture’s potential to interject “kinetic power” into buildings and foster flowing movement (Duffy 33), the “carefully planned, middle-class, suburban utopia” in California is in need of active bodily engagement in order to be unhinged from its striated inertia (Kling, Olin, and Poster, “Emergence” 22). In contrast to Le Corbusier’s ramps, California suburbia was not constructed in view of free movement, coursing, and interaction, but rather for individual privacy that, despite being connected to artificial networks and flows of (automobile) traffic, remained immobile and restrictive if not isolated in its antipedestrian fragmentation. Again, the swimming pool is of paradigmatic significance in this context since its originally intended function as a reservoir for water marks it as a structure intended to keep fluidity in place. As opposed to a ramp that accelerates flows of movement, a pool opposes this opening element and foregrounds the characteristics of an enclosed construction that in fact prevents water from flowing away and is thus rendered static, solidifying, and controlling. In their lyrics, Agression ask, “Have you ever seen a skate boarder / Surfing in a pool / Flying over the coping / With a skateboard as his tool,” introducing the skateboard as an instrument with which to impose the mobilizing forces of surfing on the empty pools of suburbia. The “Intense Energy” that is attributed to the activity seems first and foremost linked to the notion of speed that is necessary to “flow on the transition,” as the lyrics continue. Baudrillard, in his book America (originally published as Amérique in 1986), not only locates speed within American mythology thus making it an important aspect for the discipline of American Studies, he also provides a definition of speed that links back to both the conception of the production of smooth space and the production of presence that could contribute to the generation of a potentially transgressive or resistant moment in skate punk:

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Baudrillard’s description of speed as a pure object inevitably links “objectality,” as he calls it (6), to corporeal movement and thus to the body, as—particularly in the case of skate punk—it is often precisely through the body that speed is brought to a certain locale (e.g. the pool). If there is no body that drops into the pool, that skates down the hill, or that simply pushes in any direction whatsoever, there is no generation of speed. Consequently, speed evokes associations with a production of presence in Gumbrecht’s sense as it intensifies the “impact that ‘present’ objects have on human bodies” (Gumbrecht, Productions xiii). It triggers moments of lived intensity and holds the characteristics of a presence effect as it “runs ahead of time to annul time itself,” thus becoming “inevitably ephemeral” (Baudrillard, America 6; Gumbrecht Productions 106). Just as speed outstrips cause, it seems as if it might also overcome meaning since “its only rule is to leave no trace behind. Triumph of forgetting over memory, an uncultivated, amnesic intoxication” (Baudrillard, America 6/7). Particularly in view of the context of Southern California and its extreme climate, Baudrillard’s observations add to an approach that aims beyond interpretative accounts of meaning. His comment on “pure traveling” (9), which comes close to the notion of nomadic movement, seems to parallel the conditions unfolding during heated backyard pool skate sessions under the California sun or in the sweaty and hot surge of a crowd at hardcore punk concerts. By explaining that “it is best done in extreme heat, the orgasmic form of bodily deterritorialization,” Baudrillard not only evokes the impression of a blissful momentum that counters territorial restrictions, he also claims that “[t]he acceleration of molecules in the heat contributes to a barely perceptible evaporation of meaning” (9), which ultimately underscores to what extent the attribution of meaning, at least on a molecular level, is disrupted by accelerative instants of physical speed. Baudrillard’s approach equally reveals in what way speed provides a possibility to produce smooth space according to the Deleuzo-Guattarian conception: It cancels “the ground and territorial reference-points” and thus precisely creates a smooth space that is dominated by trajectories and lines of flight which subordinate the fixed points of an otherwise striated landscape to the smoothing potential of movement. The fact that it is through the human body that speed is brought to striated space emphasizes the resisting potential of skateboarding: Smooth space can in fact be produced within striated space and thus strategically anticipated as a contravention (cf. Ganser 78), e.g. when the stifling environment of suburbia is disrupted by the flow of moving skateboarders. In contrast to surfing, however, the moment when somebody starts moving on a skateboard differs from the entry into an existing wave or an entry into smooth space, as the skateboarder actively produces smoothness by moving within striated space. One could argue that skateboarders thus fall back into being “the origin of an effort,” which would oppose the

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idea of “coming between” that Deleuze attributes to surfing (Deleuze, “Mediators” 281). However, with reference to the interplay that he and Guattari recognize between smooth and striated space, the active momentum brought onto the scene by skateboarders instead exemplifies how “a smooth space emanated, sprang from a striated space” and how “a correlation between the two, a recapitulation of one in the other, a furtherance of one through the other” is put into play (Deleuze and Guattari 526). With reference to Paul Virilio, certainly the most dedicated and persistent theoretician of speed and its ramifications within cultural modernity and postmodernity (cf. Tomlinson 8), it is possible to elaborate on the moment of production that is involved in the creation of smooth and liberating flows within the stifling environment of suburban organization and middle-class order. Starting his monograph on Speed and Politics with thoughts on the street as a space of political dispute, Virilio offers a number of parallels helpful in specifying the role of speed in skate punk action. Although he is particularly interested in speed and its importance for military conflict and warfare, his highly complex elaborations offer a way to comprehend speed as an important factor in the potential generation of resisting mobility. “Can asphalt be political territory?” Virilio wants to know with respect to the street, and he implies the potentiality of resistance that might emerge from skate punk’s activities within the asphalted environment of postmodern America (Virilio 30). Including considerations of the relations of production in a Marxist sense, he locates a successful revolution outside the factory, on the streets: “The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production,” he states, “but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed” (29). Virilio’s description of the street as “a new coastline” in this context not only retraces the possibility of transgressions between surfing movements and suburban skate punk action (33), it also emphasizes the possibility of turning seemingly static and striated spaces into floating seascapes of instantaneous change. While it probably exceeds the scope of skate punk resistance to talk of its participants as a “revolutionary contingent,” the notion of a producer of speed can be paralleled to suburban punks’ rapid movement on skateboards and their creation of extremely fast and short songs: They produce speed in the streets, backyards, and garages of their neighborhoods. “If the fortified town is an immobile machine,” Virilio argues in the context of armed conflict, “the military engineers [sic] specific task is to fight against inertia” (38). Transferring this strategy to the situation of skateboarding punks in suburban California helps to illustrate the countermovement that their bodily engagement fosters. While suburbia might indeed be read as a “fortified town” due to its politics of exclusion and its ideological as well as visible and tangible barriers against encroaching undesirables—the gated community constituting the most extreme example—the fight against inertia emerges as a reasonable strategy to counter these fixed structures of immobility. Flowing through an empty swimming pool

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or grinding on its coping are acts of smoothing that withstand fixation and, at least on the micro or molecular level, generate potential for nomadic liberation that escapes the restrictions of an enclosing fortification. A closer look at the grind can illuminate this argument: When grinding on the edge or coping of a concrete pool, on the curbstone of a sidewalk or any other surface, the skateboarder maneuvers at least one of the skateboard’s two trucks (i.e. the axles that hold the wheels) onto the obstacle and slides along. This movement causes friction and the coarser the surface the higher the drag opposing the slide. The only way to minimize the drag is through speed: the faster the board, the smoother the grind. Raphaël Zarka’s description of the skating style of Z-Boy Nathan Pratt is illuminating in this regard as Pratt is known for “clearing expanses of stairs or other kinds of gaps, without actually ollieing [i.e. jumping over them] […] by virtue of sheer speed” (Zarka 30). Speed, it follows, can bridge gaps and consequently allows for the smoothing of striations. Although extremely static, the concrete and asphalt of suburban California can be (re-) turned into “an environment within which the body becomes weightless and hovers on the surface,” not necessarily of a “submerged world,” as Halberstam states for the filled swimming pool (81), but on the striated surface of a discursively rendered environment in suburbia. The moving body, at least for a moment, “stops being a cog” in the machinery of suburban immobility and thus also (potentially) moves away from the vectors of differentiation that otherwise construct and fix it within attributes of identity (Virilio 29). Movement and speed are smoothing both the striations occurring on the concrete surfaces that are met with the skateboard’s trucks, as well as the discursive striations that construct the identities of skate punk participants by attributing them with differentiating meaning. Just as the small irregularities of the blunt edges of a concrete pool are cancelled out by the smooth slide of the skateboard, the notions of race, class, gender, and suburban background disappear during this short and ephemeral moment of lived intensity. Skateboarders’ actions bring forth speed within the space of suburban striation and through this injection of the smoothness of oceanic waves into a concrete environment, implement moments of agency that are not bound to properties of identity but emerge from the generation of intensity. Steve Alba’s memories concerning his first encounter with skateboarding exemplify a moment in which identity is eclipsed by a material presence, although the entire situation is rendered in a highly discursive narrative that picks up on the stories that constantly reappear in skate punk media. In his case, the highly ephemeral presence of sound (waves) provides a momentary disruption of the subcultural stylization that otherwise characterizes the situation. Alba remembers how he and his friends had followed a skateboarder from their neighborhood: [W]e kept following this guy around and one day we’d follow him to like this alleyway. And this alleyway was called “Stoner Alley” and we were like, you know, sixth grade at this point I think. So, like, we just knew you shouldn’t go down that alley because the Mexicans were

3 C ORPOREALITY at one end and the stoner whoever kids were at the other end. And they were always kicking people out and get in fights. So, we were tripping out, we’re like, “What’s going on down that alley?” So, he came in with his little buddies just following him. And they jumped over this fence. And we were like, “What are they doing?” So, we kind of like walked up to the fence and we didn’t jump over cause we couldn’t see them but we could hear them. You could hear them. And you could just hear that whoosh of, you know, pool skating. It’s like, it’s a weird sound. I don’t know, you actually need to hear it. It’s kind of hard to describe it but once you actually hear the whoosh of pool skating you don’t ever forget what that sound is. So every time you hear it, you know…, that’s the thing about skateboarding: You can’t even see it but you can hear it and you know what it is. If you can’t see the guys even skating in the street or, like, in a city or what have you, you can still hear the skateboard. You hear it click-clack on a sidewalk going down the street, you know. It’s gotta very distinctive sound, you know, so, anyway, we just kind of like went back home and later that day we went back and jumped over the fence and kind of checked it out and saw the little pool there. So, we start riding it, too, you know what I mean. In the very beginning we would start like half way up and just try to just carve around [the] deep end and that’s all we did. (Alba, Personal Interview)

Paralleling the narrative accounts of explorations and adventurous journeys into unknown terrain that pervade skate punk media, Alba’s statement illustrates a material level of sound that accompanies the activity of skateboarding. The “whoosh” with which he illustrates the sound of skateboarding, like Acker’s “boomp” and Arnold’s “boom,” at least in the written representation at hand, falls short of the actual noise produced when a body transfers energy into speed and pushes a skateboard into the frictional encounter with a specific surface. “I don’t know, you actually need to hear it,” Alba emphasizes and thus indicates that you have to be there, that you have to be present, to fully grasp the impact of skateboard action.115 His references to noise incorporate an element that escapes the narrative structure of his account. As Barthes notes, “a narrative is never made up of anything other than functions: in differing degrees, everything in it signifies” (Barthes 1978, 89). Whereas Alba and his friends are “tripping out” about their expedition into the forbidden territory of an alley that takes on the characteristics of an esoteric or exotic place of drug abuse and ethnic difference—a story that would be reproduced in flyers or magazines such as Thrasher time and again—the mention of the “whoosh” bears witness to a material element that works beyond these descriptions. Serres observes that hearing works “without clear frontiers, without divining an isolated source, hearing is better at integrating than analyzing, the ear knows how 115 | Sontag comes to a similar conclusion in the context of punk music, which, once again, highlights the parallels that connect it to skateboarding. In an interview with Victor Bockris she foregrounds the importance of being present or of experiencing presence by stating: “When you mentioned the word energy, of course if I can see punk rock in that way I can feel it, and of course it’s not possible to get it by playing a couple of records on this inadequate stereo; you have to be in an audience” (Sontag qtd. in Bockris 81/82).

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to lose track” (Serres, Genesis 7). Alba’s perception of the “whoosh” marks such a losing of track because it foregrounds an unfiltered integration of noise rather than introducing a hermeneutically guided analysis: It conceives skateboarding even “if you can’t see the guys” that practice it. The sound waves in question emerge when skateboarding is happening and get lost when it is retrospectively analyzed or described in narratives and stories as a Happening. The identity constructed around skateboarders and the attributes that render the locale of “Stoner Alley” a specific cultural milieu, like an evaporation sparked off by an acceleration of molecules, for a brief moment, disappear behind a “whoosh” that leaves Alba as speechless as Barthes when he encounters his favorite music and—lacking adjectives that might describe his impressions—faces “the impossible account of an individual thrill that [he] constantly experience[s] in listening to singing” (Image 181). Barthes establishes a connection to music that is bound to the materiality of the body and, by introducing what he calls the “grain of the voice” (181), provides a concept with which to anticipate skate punk as a musical phenomenon as well as a concrete activity of movement. “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs” (188), he summarizes, and thus implies a juncture that conflates skateboarding and hardcore punk music in a ‘grainy’ moment of material bodily presence.

3.3.5

The Grind of the Voice

“I don’t know why it turned rebellious at a certain time,” explains Scott Radinsky when asked his opinion on skateboarding, punk, and the rebellious edge of the skate punk amalgam. Being involved in the skateboarding and hardcore punk scenes for almost 30 years now, he assumes that it was just like anything in the world, there was just a need for some sort of violent change and that’s kind of what the music, the speed, the energy, what the screaming, you know the whole state [provided]; the fact that you see a band on stage just sound like shit but playing their asses off. (Radinsky, Personal Interview)

By connecting speed and energy with screaming, Radinsky designates the forces in skateboarding and hardcore punk music that pervade both activities and particularly emphasize their involvement in a material and physical realm that interacts with but also potentially disrupts and escapes the respective content of their representations in different self- and media stylizations. The example of the character Zed in the 1985 film Police Academy 2 already indicated the element of screaming and the breaking voice as a material ‘surplus’ that goes beyond the subcultural style of punk (cf. subchapter 2.2.2). His barely comprehensible utterances vividly exemplify an integral part of hardcore punk music: A screaming and shouting that adds another dimension to the lyrical content of the genre and escapes the notion of a definite message. The focus on voice and noise illustrates the potential of resistance and

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change that might be identified within these moments of semantic blankness and their development of a presence beyond meaning paralleling the lived experiences and intensities generated in skateboarding. In her novel Coloring Outside the Lines – A Punk Rock Memoir, which presents an autobiographical retrospective of 80’s punk culture in California, Aimee Cooper finds an interesting description for the way Germs singer Darby Crash, who was “dear to the skateboard/surfing crowd” and an early proponent of what would become known as hardcore punk (Mullen, Lexicon Devil 202), approached the articulation of text in music: “His lyrics had always been like an audio Rorschach test,” she claims adding that “everyone heard what they wanted to hear” (Cooper 24). While providing an innovative characterization of the way that myriad following hardcore punk singers would scream and shout their lyrics—namely as hardly intelligible noise that often made interpretation very subjective and random if not impossible—Cooper adds a particularly important description of the burgeoning suburban scene around bands such as the Adolescents and Black Flag: Like the fifteen year olds who flocked to the gigs, punk rock was younger, harder, and faster than any of its progenitors. It was the skateboard wheel grinding on the edge of a swimming pool and the teenage boy’s hand shoved away for groping previously uncharted territories. (30)

Her characterization of punk rock is explicitly tied to or, more precisely, equated with skateboarding, and while she recognizes that teenage boys dominated the development of the subculture, her parallelization between punk rock and the grinding skateboard on the edge of a swimming pool indicates that material friction played a decisive role in the moment which combined both phenomena. “Punk rock had tapped a nerve in the beach communities,” Cooper specifies and, while locating the 80s scene in Southern California’s coastal suburbs, notes that “the kids showing up now were even younger, tougher, and more physical” (104). This physicality is often tied to the site-specific activities of surfing and skateboarding, as Black Flag founder Greg Ginn illustrates: I think with skating and extreme sports in general, if you wanna use that term, […] you just have a really going for it, going all out in a physical kind of way that definitely Black Flag […] operated on. Kind of just physically trying to push it as far as possible with the music. (Ginn, Personal Interview)

He adds that skateboarding “was just kind of part of the surfing culture, I think, skateboarding kind of came out of that. And that was something that I was always around growing up in Hermosa Beach” (Personal Interview). Ginn differentiates this suburban environment from the downtown scenes around Hollywood and their more art-oriented approach to punk: “I think that’s one thing that Black Flag

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brought to it […], just a physical power when it was kind of a little bit artsy” (Personal Interview). Joe Nolte, whose band The Last released several albums on Ginn’s SST Records during the late 1980s, remembers the intensity of this early hardcore punk music: It was very agro. It was about getting close to the edge of sanity, near the maelstrom of potential chaos. It gives you tremendous energy, when you’re playing, if you get a sense that things are about to fall apart. I’ve never surfed, but that’s what I imagine it’s like: hanging on for dear life. It was that thing that Black Flag did so well: the sound of danger. (qtd. in Chick 82)

The potential chaos that Nolte associated with Black Flag’s music evinces the disruptive moments that could be generated during hardcore punk performances. By evoking the generation of “tremendous energy” that simultaneously signals that “things are about to fall apart” and leading to “chaos,” Nolte implies an entropic momentum that accompanies skate punk music. His allusion to surfing additionally ties it to a site-specific spatiality, which opens the possibility of considering an example from the late 1960s and early 1970s American art movement of Land Art or Earthworks—particularly coined by its best-known representative Robert Smithson— as specification of the physicality at hand. A look at Smithson’s work promises to be fruitful not only because his works, especially the 1969 Asphalt Rundown, “emphasized ‘entropic’ aspects of roadbuilding and also parodied, in terms of its size and gravitational flow, the large-scale drip paintings of such Abstract Expressionists as Jackson Pollock” (Hobbs 103), relating it to both the disruptive potential of movement in the street and to the Neo-Expressionist works of the 1980s that reverberate in skate punk productions, but also because “he was a prominent member of the group of artists who congregated at Max’s Kansas City, a New York restaurant and bar” that was important in the development of the influential pre-punk scene around rock musicians such as Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop (Hobbs 9; cf. McNeil and McCain). For Asphalt Rundown, Smithson “arranged for a dump truck to unload asphalt down the side of an abandoned gravel and dirt quarry” where the fluid material would spread in contingent flows before setting and hardening (103). His artwork can be described as “Entropy Made Visible” (cf. Flam 301ff.), rendering the momentum of pouring, i.e. the momentum of free and uncontrolled flow, a material instant of disorder: “While energy describes the state of a dynamical system,” explain Haddad, Chellaboina, and Nersesov in their book Thermodynamics – A Dynamical Systems Approach, “entropy refers to changes in the status quo of the system and is a measure of molecular disorder” (1). Transferred to the constructed slopes and inclinations of empty concrete swimming pools in California, the skateboarder who drops into this void, like a surfer charging a wave and “hanging on for dear life” (Nolte qtd. in Chick 82), constitutes an embodied version of Smithson’s land art implying a challenge to the status quo, an ‘attack’ on the system. Creating a ‘corporeal rundown,’ the

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skateboarder enters into a material engagement of suburban surroundings that not only retraces Smithon’s gravitational artwork but also parallels Joel Sternfeld’s photography of a landslide in suburbia: Physical energy reverberates in the work of both artists and constitutes a disruptive element which not only indicates but in fact entails that things are falling apart (cf. Nolte qtd. in Chick 82). Skate punks act within this scope and, on their wheeled boards and by translating the invoked chaos into (musical) sound, import the contingent flow to California’s suburbs through their physical activities: The outcomes of their drops down into inclined concrete and the incredibly fast performances of their songs are never the same. Although practice and training might establish certain routines, the move on a skateboard or the performance of a band will never follow the exact same paths. Be it in a slam, a stage dive, an aggressively struck guitar chord or a breaking voice, there is always a moment of chance, a moment of declination, which implements a purely physical experience directly affecting the body.116 “There is no escape from the physical,” explains Smithson, “nor is there any escape from the mind. The two are in a constant collision course” (qtd. in Flam 194). Skate punks in their corporeal activities move precisely along this course. They carry discursive notions that ‘occupy’ the minds of the respective actors, while the physical impacts of their actions ‘collide’ with and thus disrupt the discursive striations of their environment. Zarka underscores this account by stating: “Skateboarding leaves traces of paint behind, it erodes and sometimes even breaks stone benches and concrete curbs. It is undeniable that skateboarding is an accelerator of entropy” (118). The same holds for the musical side of skate punk and bands “sounding like shit but playing their asses of” (Radisnky, Personal Interview): They leave marks of physical encounter on the bodies of performers and audience members as well as on the employed instruments. Operating at the “edge of sanity” (Nolte qtd. in Chick 82), the entropic moments of skate and hardcore punk performances question the conveyance of meanings and messages. Marcus’s analysis of a performance by Darby Crash accentuates this idea and implies a production of presence that might emanate from the maelstrom of hardcore punk chaos. Darby Crash would often hand a felt pen to the crowd and allow (or at least accept) attendants to write and draw on him (cf. e.g. Mullen, Lexicon Devil 86; The Decline of Western Civilization). Marcus states: It was as if he had wired his body for sound, wired it such a way that circuits made audible noise out of the scrawls on his skin, as if, when he passed the magic marker, which might have been the microphone, into the crowd, the voices of others came out of his mouth—or as if, when he took the marker, the microphone, back, he heard his voice coming out of other mouths. Or was it that, lying on the stage, he destroyed the commodified subjectivity of the performer and became an absolute object, no theoretical objectification, but a thing? 116 | Villa aptly remarks: “[A] movement is never an exact copy of another” and consequently, bodies are “not static entities but ongoing transformation” (180, 181).

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This account suggests that what takes place during the described scene amounts to an initiation or intensification of impact that relates or merges body and object and thereby picks up on Gumbrecht’s understanding of a production of presence (cf. Gumbrecht, Production xiii). Foregrounding his corporeal presence, Darby Crash becomes the “body in the voice” that escapes semantic attribution and emphasizes sound and noise as moments of lived intensity in hardcore punk (Barthes, Image 188). The fact that people write on him, in that instant, becomes more important than what they write. Although challenging and implying a critique of “commodified subjectivity,” which certainly implements the conveyance of a specific (anti-mainstream) message, by turning himself into “an absolute object,” Darby Crash first and foremost presents himself as materially tangible while eclipsing the generation of meaning. Rombes comes to a similar conclusion concerning California hardcore punk in general by claiming that it “never really coalesced into meaning” (136). He, however, does not refer to its purely material presence at this point but initially reads this diagnosis in the context of a cultural critique of capitalist cooptation, as he attributes the meaninglessness of hardcore punk to its occurrence at the dawn of the digital age, when the speed at which dangerous and radical ideas are absorbed into the cultural mainstream is so rapid that they have no time to ferment into something of real social consequence. (Rombes 136)117

While foregrounding hardcore punk’s lack of social consequences due to a co-opting and commodifiying cultural mainstream, it is in a further statement that Rombes provides an opportunity to establish a more affirmative evaluation of the phenomenon. “Punk had no serious ‘message’ to convey” he reemphasizes, but then elucidates: “[I]ts sound was its message” (111). Considered as a specific example, the 117 | Duffy, in accordance with Rombes’s comments on the speed of absorbtion, includes a Marxist perspective and locates “the most concisely political definition of speed yet available” in Marx’s Capital where he “described how capital desired to ‘annihilate space with time’” (23). A statement by Marx not only proves that speed is of special importance for this process, it also pinpoints California as a locale within which this phenomenon unfurls especially fast: “California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed” (qtd. in Soja 190). Soja furthers Marx’s estimation and specifies its localization within the environment that is crucial for the emergence of skate punk: “The rise of Southern California, the region centred on the city of Los Angeles, has confirmed the prescient intuition of Marx” (Soja 190).

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noise of the scrawls on Darby Crash’s skin described by Marcus constitutes precisely such a sound without a “serious ‘message.’” It demarcates a moment of corporeal presence that makes the body audible and tangible, a noise that reverberates in the sound waves emanating from the distorted guitar screeches, the pounding drumbeats, and the driving bass lines of skate punk music. Incorporating a comparison to Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow published in 1973, “the year that CBGB opened,” Rombes qualifies his argument about the meaninglessness of punk and states: “Like Gravity’s Rainbow, the secret or key to its structure was in fact its structure” (111). The text passage that Rombes subsequently chooses from Pynchon’s novel not only supports his elaborations on the importance of sound for punk in general, but also picks up on the material and site-specific elements that characterize California skate punk specifically: “The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise” (Pynchon 341). Hardcore punk, and particularly skate punk, can be described as such a “great surge of noise” which, like a tidal wave, spills over quiet and peaceful suburbia and launches on a concrete and acoustic passage, an entropic Asphalt Rundown, of grinding vocal chords and skateboard trucks. Just as the trajectories of surfing were furthered by and transferred to the asphalted landscape of suburbia by skateboarders, the breaking waves of the Pacific reverberated in the fast and raw sounds of hardcore punk created in garages, warehouses, and abandoned buildings. The musical expression of skate punks paralleled the smoothing effects of the speedy skateboard attacks on suburban striations and thus entailed similar moments of mobilizing counter movement. In their essay “What I Hear is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop” (2001), Timothy S. Murphy and Daniel W. Smith hint at this parallel. They provide a very useful reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to the music of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould who, when speeding “up the performance of a piece, […] is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate” (Deleuze and Guattari 8). “Something similar happens in the hyperkinetic form of punk rock known as ‘grindcore’,” Murphy and Smith observe before explaining how “simple chords and rhythmic patterns are played so fast that they begin to form higher-level gradients of sonorous density and diffusion in which the original chord patterns are rendered imperceptible” (n.pag., n22). Rombes, in an attempt to visually describe a song by the Adolescents, illustrates this phenomenon by claiming that the “sheer force and speed” of hardcore punk suggestthatitshouldbewrittenaboutinablurofwordswithnopauseandnowaytocatchyourbreathinbet weenwordsbecausehumanbeingscanonlyplayinstrument sandsingsofastandthenitisuptoyourimaginationtogofaster (4).

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Parallel to the continuous effect that bridges the blank spaces in Rombes’s ‘sentence’ by turning single words into one condensed line (of flight), Murphy and Smith see the technique of playing fast as a manifestation of a “form of smoothness emerging from extremely rigid striation” and thus prove in how far the notion of speed implements a smoothing momentum in fast punk music, just as in skateboarding, that disrupts an otherwise striated environment (n.pag.). The fact that they refer to this form of punk rock as grindcore provides a direct link to the maneuver of the grind in skateboarding and explicitly supports Cooper’s description of punk rock as the “grinding on the edge of a swimming pool” (30). The shouting, screaming, and yelling voice in skate punk prominently plays into this description and, just as the antics of Darby Crash, foregrounds the role of the body. The lyrical content might be discernible on record although the speed of songs such as Ill Repute’s “Sleepwalking,” JFA’s “Cokes and Snickers” or The Faction’s “Skate and Destroy” (just to invoke a few of the examples already mentioned) makes it almost impossible to understand every (if any) word. During live performances this effect is intensified, as the vocalists (as well as the audience members) jump around on and in front of the stage and constantly move the microphone while the noise level is higher and not as carefully adjusted as in recording sessions. Spheeris’s film The Decline of Western Civilization, tellingly, provides subtitles of the song lyrics to many of the hardcore punk performances it depicts. While complying with the standards of a documentary and adding information for viewers who are not familiar with the music, this retroactive addition of legible lyrics distorts the actual experience of a live concert. The camera, of course, cannot grasp the situation in its entirety, but the provision of lyrics, although factually adding something to the filmic recordings, actually subtracts from the fact that there are moments during hardcore punk performances in which the content of the lyrics fades into the background and rather emphasizes the singer’s voice and the band’s and audience’s noise. Although insiders who know the lyrics are usually able to recognize certain lines and phrases, the voice—just like the guitar chords in combination with other instruments such as the usual setup of drums and bass guitar—develops a “sonorous density” defying striation through volume, through the materiality of vocal chords that crack under the intensity invested by the performer, and particularly through speed. Duffy’s approach to speed as an essentially modern phenomenon underscores the importance of its ramifications within skate punk. The advancement of new technologies in the 19th century and especially the development of the motorcar, according to Duffy, mark “the moment at which individual people were allowed to feel modernity in their bones: to feel its power as a physical sensation, through their sensing of speed” (Duffy 4). Towards the end of the 20th century this new experience had saturated the everyday aspects of Western and especially California’s driving culture: The car had become omnipresent and with high-speed trains, airplanes, and space shuttles, speed turned from a modern experience into a postmodern “familiarity” (5). While “[ f ]or a brief moment, roughly the first quarter of

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the twentieth century, the thrill of velocity at any speed was vividly palpable,” in subsequent decades “the shock of the new” abated or at least lost some of its “directly physical” allure (5).118 With skate punk and its musical figuration, it seems, we encounter a striving for and a reemphasis upon the more physical side of speed that simultaneously taps into its symbolic ramifications. The movement on a skateboard in itself constitutes a very obvious example of physical sensation that literally allows people to feel something “in their bones,” a state that pervades skate punk culture on various levels from its very beginning. While the previously mentioned representation of wounds and fractures in different skate punk media provides solid proof of speed’s ‘raw-boned’ consequences, the naming of the famous 1980s skateboard team Bones Brigade is particularly telling in this context. Equipped with the signet of the “Ripper,” one of skateboarding’s most popular symbols that had been designed by Vernon Courland Johnson in the form of “a skeleton ripping out of canvas,” the respective members established skulls, bones, and skeletons as constant signs that “burned into most skaters’ brains from the 1980’s” (Brooke 102). As important elements within skate punk mediation, these images correspond to Virilio’s elaborations on speed as time: Speed is Time saved in the most absolute sense of the word, since it becomes human Time directly torn from Death—whence those macabre emblems of decimation worn down through history by the Assault troops, in other words the rapid troops (black uniforms and flags, death’s heads, by the uhlan, the SS, etc.). (Virilio 46)

Although Virilio’s argument obviously cannot readily be placed on the same level as the phenomenon of skateboarding punk kids in California, it is noticeable that skate punk, time and again, deploys exactly those (military) symbols which Virilio attributes to “rapid troops.” The black flags, skulls, WWII paraphernalia, and Nazi symbols that constantly appear in skate punk bear witness to a symbolic incorporation of speed.119 While the fast playing and screaming in skate punk music is always located within the semantics of such symbolism, the incorporated speed adds a further dimension: Duffy specifies the modern ramifications of new physical sensations by explaining that it was not offering “the frisson of new kinds of telling, but an actual experience. This experience—of speed—could in the first instance be felt: it did not need to represent itself” (4). The situation at a hardcore punk concert and during a skating session parallels this description. The fast shouting, the grinding guitars, the rampant drum beats, and the slamming participants all act within instants that render speed corporeally palpable.

118 | Just consider the ease with which we drive on highways at 70mph nowadays. 119 | Additionally, of course, they still mirror the radical, at times racist and outright (neo-) fascist attitudes that pervaded conservative suburbia as well as the subcultural media of adolescent male skate punks.

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With reference to Barthes’s essay “The Grain of the Voice,” it is possible to analyze these moments and focus on the materiality involved, i.e. the corporeal ramifications. Setting out from the claim that in “the moment we turn an art into a subject (for an article, for a conversation) there is nothing left but to give it predicates,” Barthes anticipates the notion of the body with regard to music and singing (Image 179). Implying a moment that surpasses the attribution of predicates and thus suspends an interpretation in search of meaning, Barthes conceives of the “grain” of the voice as “the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue” (182). Writing about the genre of church music and referring to the example of the voice of a Russian bass, Barthes detects that something is there, manifest and stubborn (one hears only that), beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their form (the litany), the melisma, and even the style of execution: something which is directly the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages […], as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings. (Image 181/182)

Barthes locates the “grain” “beyond (or before) the meaning of the words,” which makes his conception particularly useful for an approach to skate punk music that seeks to anticipate the generation of lived intensity working apart from a specific meaning attribution. Although the singing of a church bass could not differ more from the musical expression of punk, the fast shouting and the feeling of “vocal cords breaking up” that—just as in the case of Police Academy’s Zed—often accompanies the screaming of the respective performers, bears witness to the “cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages” that are involved in both cases (Marcus, Lipstick Traces 198; Barthes, Image 181). Barthes goes on to explain: The voice is not personal: it expresses nothing of the cantor, of his soul; it is not original […], and at the same time it is individual: it has us hear a body which has no civil identity, no ‘personality’, but which is nevertheless a separate body. (Image 182)

While the notion of unoriginality certainly holds true for a whole number of hardcore punk vocalists, who are shouters rather than cantors, and their repetitive and monotone screaming, it is the focus on the body apart from “civil identity” that is most important at this point. Barthes’s assumptions imply the potential breaking out from the grip of discursive stylization that is so strongly represented in skate punk media and the self-stylizations of its participants. While on stage performance is an integral part of this stylization, the ‘grainy’ moment in the voice and noise of the music generates a direct presence that eclipses the construction of identities

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and indicates a momentary entrance into a smooth space beyond meaning attribution, a short break of lived intensity that foregrounds noise over language.120 A statement by Brian Brannon supports this view and simultaneously indicates the moment as a constitutive nexus for the amalgamation of skateboarding and hardcore punk: You know, we used to say, “We don’t do tricks. We do moves.” Which is, a trick is something you practice and do over and over again until you get it and learn how to do it a certain way and do it just right. That’s not how I skate. I just skate. I just go as fast as I can and throw it up there and try to pull it back in and it’s like anything could happen. And that over the years, you know, it’s what I meant with less like tricks that I do but when I’m in the groove and I’m like feeling it, you know, my flow, I can really flow, you know. And same thing with the music is, you know, we just give it kind of give it our all and, you know, even my singing, I will just, sometimes, I will just be screaming my head off and not even worry about what key it was in or anything like that and then people criticize us for that but that wasn’t really what we were doing it for. We just put it all out there. Putting the maximum amount of energy into it and just seeing where it took us. (Brannon, Personal Interview)

Energy, Brannon implies, foregrounds the material and instantly present side of skate punk. The restrictive notion of a defined trick is mobilized by perceiving of it as a move, an approach that is transferred to the realm of music production and, in Brannon’s case, to the way of singing. Just as the outcome of a skating maneuver is subjected to speed and going as fast as possible, the sound of the voice in skate punk music becomes an incalculable element that is tied to purely physical and corporeal contingencies: Brannon does not or maybe even cannot aim at a certain key as he leaves the timbre of his voice open to the way the vocal chords react when he screams his “head off.” Although, undoubtedly, guided by lyrical content and framed by the structure of the respective song, skate punk music thus implements moments in which its stylization, one could also add its striation, is defied by the contingent flow of speed and energy, which simultaneously parallels the musical side of hardcore punk with the movements of skateboarding. While reemphasizing the important influence of surfing, Brannon specifies how the physical impact of energy in fact influenced what he and his friends recognized as style:

120 | Dave Laing, in his essay “Listening to Punk” (1985), comes to a similar conclusion in view of the singing style of Sex Pistols’ vocalist Johnny Rotten: “By hearing those elements of a singing voice which are surplus to the communication of a message, such as Rotten’s embellishments…, the listener escapes identification with the voice as ideal ego” (458). Laing explicitly points towards a realm beyond meaning in punk music and thus indicates the potential of this “surplus” as a way to eclipse the construction of identities.

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G RINDING C ALIFORNIA [W]hen we skated we wanted to flow and move like we were surfing and have good style. So, there was that influence. We tried to take the good things from surfing and stay away from the, you know, the kind of thing, where there’s somebody who would surf and just wear some…just look really crazy and flail around out there, you know, we weren’t down with those guys. We were down with the hardcore people that would charge the big waves, you know… The thing about doing things where it’s really serious, where you’re really going fast, you can’t… it eliminates any extra movement, any extra arm flapping, anything stupid because you’re committed. You gonna actually pretty much have to have good style. The ugly catches wind. You know, if you’re doing something, like having your arm straight out or something like that, that’s not gonna really work in a heavy situation whether it’s a big wave or your going down a hill or you’re in a deep pool or something. Just by virtue of what you’re doing you’re gonna have a certain amount of style. (Brannon, Personal Interview)

According to this statement, it is heavy situations that influence style. Style, in this sense, is nothing that can be artificially created. It is inevitable, a necessity, an unconscious reaction to physical reality: something you do first, and think about later. In view of Geertz, this conception of style is closer to a twitch than to a wink. It eclipses the fleck of culture (and subculture) that renders it meaningful. While the analysis of skate punk media proves to what extent it is constructed around stylizations that rely heavily on established narratives and discourses, the lived intensity that Brannon seems to find in moments of extreme physical encounters points towards a less restrictive influence that pervades these respective activities. Ginn summarizes the interconnection between style or a stylized expression and the contingent moment of lived intensity by thinking about his experiences as a member of Black Flag: How it feels for me is speed, power. You can have control on one end, recklessness on the other end and those kinds of extremes are very apparent in let’s say skating or Black Flag. So to me it’s a very natural connection in that way that it didn’t surprise me that somebody would wanna skate all out and listen to Black Flag music. Because I think we approached the music in a way that went all out physically, which you have to do to be a good skater. You have to pretty much go for it. (Ginn, Personal Interview)

In accordance with Brannon, Ginn emphasizes the physical impact of the music and mentions speed and power in order to draw a parallel to the activity of skateboarding. His description, however, implies the oscillation between a reckless, more unconscious and less fixed mode of the music on the one hand, and a controlled and thus intentionally stylized form on the other hand—and these two seem to constantly interact. The fact that he identifies both notions in hardcore punk implies that the music never fully escapes stylization, organization, and fixation but generates moments of recklessness, i.e. moments of physical intensity, that are, in turn, always framed by more organized, more controlled techniques and performances.

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Skate punk, in analogy with Ginn’s comment, seems to circulate between Barthes’s conception of pheno-song—covering “the rules of the genre, the coded form of melisma, the composer’s idiolect, the style of interpretation: in short everything […]  which forms the tissue of cultural values”—on the one hand, and geno-song—“the volume of the singing and speaking voice, […] having nothing to do with communication, representation (of feelings), expression”—on the other hand (Barthes, Image 182).121 Extending Barthes’s evaluation of the singing voice to skate punk music in general, Ginn’s statement illustrates that it is in (often infinitely) short instances that physical intensity, e.g. in the form of speed, generates potentially disruptive forces that point beyond representation and thus beyond a definite attribution of meaning by adding or, more precisely, filling the performance with “volume,” as Gumbrecht would call it with reference to Gadamer. Furthering the conception of an oscillation between control and recklessness, between represented meaning and lived intensity, Barthes in his approach to what he calls The Pleasure of the Text, detects a “redistribution” in language that creates “two edges;” specifically, “an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge […] and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours), which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed” (Pleasure of Text 7). It is this second edge that the voice (and noise) of skate punk seems to grind on in its moments of intensity. Just as Fiske had read the oceanic wave as the blissful text of surfing, the moment of voiced skate punk as a “sonorous density” comes close to “the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss” which Barthes finds in texts of ultimate pleasure (Murphy and Smith n.pag, n22; Barthes, Pleasure of Text 7). “The pleasure of the text,” he explains, “is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do” (17). A hardcore punk concert with the screaming singer, the ultra-fast guitar player, and the slam-dancing adolescents that become “worms of bodies” seems to be enmeshed in moments of such loss and bliss (Acker 120). However briefly, speed and energy generate an “amnesic intoxication” that momentarily loosens the intersectional attributes of whiteness, masculinity, and suburban middle-class origin from their ‘ideological grip’ (Baudrillard, America 6). Skate punks lose themselves in the production of noise, screaming, grinding, falling, and slamming: They are momentarily “lost in [the] focused intensity” of a blissful moment that seems to funnel material “volume” into the blanks their lyrics might create through ostentatious and repetitive simplicity (Gumbrecht, Production 104, 107). Their often privileged backgrounds certainly do not disappear and any representation of such moments will bear witness to the fact that the persons involved first and foremost constitute a homogeneous group of white males, however, the potential for change and a more 121 | Barthes models his conception of geno-song and pheno-song on Kristeva’s theories about genotext and phenotext (cf. Barthes Image 182; also cf. the chapter “Genotext and Phenotext” in Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language).

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heterogeneous formation of individuals that reverberates in the ephemeral instants of bodily bliss should not be overlooked. For a twitch of a second there seems to be sheer presence, sheer physical energy, sheer speed, and sheer movement, which loosen the striations of “the tissue of cultural values” and thus create a moment of intensity in skate punk that ephemerally ceases to be a culturally coded gesture and becomes an instant in the process of an un-representable presence effect (Barthes, Pleasure of Text 182).

3.4

G E T TING C LOSER

3.4.1

“Adrenaline Aesthetics” and the Reduction of Distance

How can we specify the presence effect in skate punk? How can we grasp this moment and its material and corporeal ramifications? And how can we evaluate it with regard to the potential for resistance that follows for the participating adolescents? In the introductory chapter of this book, I implied that the Cartesian dualism of body and mind could be challenged by an epistemology of movement that ultimately reads the differentiated poles in an oscillating—i.e. moving—mergence which renders the strict bipolar division obsolete and emphasizes the importance of an ongoing interconnection between discursive sensescapes and the material, external world. Duffy, in The Speed Handbook, offers a starting point from which to develop methodological reflections concerning the elaboration and the deployment of such an approach and a focus on movement that anticipates the specificities of skate punk. He introduces the notion of an “adrenaline aesthetics” which is particularly helpful in view of the bodily movement characterizing skate punk actions. Starting with the observation that previous approaches to modernist art always remain within the understanding that “the object world as perceived by the subject is in fact illusory, a mirage, a simulation, an element of the ‘society of the spectacle,’” which entails that “these critical narratives still maintain […] the story of critical distance,” Duffy argues that the “experience of speed as individual pleasure, however, refuses distance” (9). He goes on to explain: This speed gives us pleasure as sensation, not as the contemplation made possible by critical distance. Thus, too, it does not need desire. What it needs—and what has not yet been given it—is what I am calling adrenaline aesthetics. This would be a new grammar of culture which overrides the imperatives of Western models of representation and aesthetic reception in modernity at least since Kant: a protocol which subsumes aesthetics under rationality by adhering to a model of critical distance and rational contemplation. Refusing this, adrenaline aesthetics works to delineate a pleasure that is effected first on the body and its sensorium. (Duffy 9)

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Duffy’s approach to modern art can be extended and applied to skate punk within the scope of my analysis since it implies a perspective corresponding to Gumbrecht’s elaborations concerning the production of presence. Duffy specifies that “speed was modernism’s greatest shock: the only one that, in altogether refusing critical distance, might refuse […] the mirage offerings of the standard subject-other protocols of the Western post-Cartesian consciousness” (10). By suggesting an “adrenaline aesthetics” as a valuable alternative to contemplations of critical distance, he picks up on Gumbrecht’s contestation that, in favor of hermeneutic meaning we tend to bracket off presence “in our so very Cartesian everyday lives” (Production 107). Favoring an approach that precisely focuses on physical presence, the delineation of bodily sensing that Duffy ascribes to adrenaline aesthetics meshes perfectly with the notions of “lived experience” and “focused intensity” that are so central for Gumbrecht’s elaborations. This approach emphasizes the moments of ephemeral presence produced by tangible movement, moments that make speed a palpable, material, and corporeal experience. Rather than adapting the notion of adrenaline aesthetics as a “grammar of culture” and reading the phenomenon of skate punk within such a far-reaching framework, I take it as a hint towards a methodological direction that works in favor of Gumbrecht’s call for the development of “concepts that could allow us, in the Humanities, to relate to the world in a way that is more complex than interpretation alone” (Production 52). Following Duffy in his tackling of distance as an inadequate mode of contemplation when it comes to speed, I try to envision an approach that moves in the opposite direction and reduces distance by zooming further still into the phenomena at hand. Far from denying the essential importance of critical—and for that matter distanced—analyses of culture, I regard this step as an enhancement of the preceding examination and interpretation of skate punk media; it complements a comprehensive, in accordance to Gumbrecht a “more complex,” approach without claiming to replace previous analyses. Duffy’s adrenaline aesthetics are understood as an implication of the possibility to critically approach phenomena such as skate punk while simultaneously describing them in their direct, material, corporeal, and ephemeral modes of operation. Related to the philosophical projects of Deleuze and Guattari, who are similarly “concerned with overcoming the dualistic framework underpinning western philosophy” (Parr 67), a return to the notion of a “Molecular Revolution” helps to undergird this endeavor. Drawing on Guattari’s elaborations on this conception provides a fruitful basis for a descriptive evaluation that implies an approach to the microlevel, the micropercepts, and the micropolitics of skate punk that does not adhere to ‘traditional’ contemplations of distance but rather moves elementarily close to the phenomenon.

3.4.2

Molecular Revolution

The term “bliss,” introduced by Richard Miller who translated Barthes from French into English, originally picks up on the latter’s notion of jouissance, which reappears

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in Kristeva’s aforementioned comments on abjection and her particularization of the moment of loss that accompanies it: “[W]hen I seek (myself), lose (myself), or experience jouissance—then ‘I’ is heterogeneous,” she explains (Kristeva, Horror 10), implying the potentiality of blissful moments to produce instants of heterogeneity which not only disrupt the homogeneity of a striated space such as suburbia, but also indicate an opportunity to disrupt and suspend the exclusiveness of the male dominated scenes of white skate punks.122 Against the backdrop of Guattari’s understanding of heterogeneity, it becomes evident that it is precisely at the microlevel that one can begin to look for—and ideally support—the production of heterogeneous developments, which includes the very short and at times infinitesimal instants of a grind, a shout, a fall, or a slam. Guattari argues that it is “essential to organize new micropolitical and microsocial practices” that do not work to “homogenize various levels of practice or to make connections between them under some transcendental supervision, but instead to engage them in processes of heterogenesis” (Three Ecologies 51). It is important to note that he sees heterogenesis as a process and not as some kind of state to be reached, as this specifies the respective practices within the scope of a becoming which does not essentialize new orders and organizations but instead mobilizes existing striations. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, the translators of Guattari’s Three Ecologies, support this estimation by providing a summarizing definition of heterogeneity as “an expression of desire, of a becoming that is always the process of adapting, transforming and modifying itself in relation to its environment” (Three Ecologies 90n49). Skate punk fosters such becomings as it relies on the adaptation, transformation, and modification of its environment, be it an empty swimming pool, the fretboard of a guitar, a palm-lined driveway, or the relation of human bodies on and in front of the stage. Moments of physical movement and thus moments of constant proceeding and heterogeneity—at least on the microlevel of grinding, screaming or slamming—reach nomadic dimensions that turn the environment into deterritorialized formations of potential change and thus stimulate instants of potential resistance against the discourses of a (pseudo-) normative Anglo-American background. Kenneth Surin, in an entry on the scope of micropolitics within the DeleuzoGuattarian oeuvre, introduces the conception in opposition to a “politics of molarisation” within which the molar designates structures and principles that are based on rigid stratifications or codings which leave no room for all that is flexible and contingent, [whereas] the molecular which is the basis of micropolitics allows for connections that are local and singular. (162)

122 | Both Barthes and Kristeva derive the term jouissance from Jacques Lacan who, particularly since the late 1950s, associated it with notions of orgasm and later on describes it as transgressive to the “pleasure principle” and linked to pain (cf. Evans 93).

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Surin indicates to what extent micropolitical action, based on the molecular level, generates disruptions of ordered stratifications, i.e. molar striations. Whereas the analyses of skate punk media have shown that many of the respective stylizations, products, and images are entangled in cultural codes that have been “already-seen,” “already-read,” and “already-done” (Barthes, Semiotic Challenge 288), the notion of micropolitics and the molecular allows for a possible escape from such codings. This adds an uncontrolled element of flexible contingency, which in its extreme case is entropy. The molecular level offers a possibility to question and counter the vectors of differentiation which ascribe identities to people along such categories as race, class, gender, and space by loosening these rigid constructions. The reproduction of established codes, i.e. their reiteration, marks an important factor within the establishment of intersectional differentiations and their socio-cultural ramifications, “as what is repeated is regulated by logics of identity” (Surin 163). Constructions of identities are thus organized through a repetitive mode of cultural codes and striations, through “performances of approved categories,” as Traber puts it (“L.A.’s White Minority” 53). In order to challenge the restrictive character of such categories, a Molecular Revolution, i.e. radical change which emanates from the microlevel, needs to disturb the ‘routine’ of repetition by incessantly implementing something new and contingent. Gumbrecht notes that “the difference between interpreting the world and an immediate access to the things of the world is, in reality, the difference between familiar inferential patterns und [sic] the shock of the new” (Gumbrecht, “My Present” 342), which, once again, emphasizes that this is not first and foremost a matter of meaning attribution but of immediate and lived experience, of direct “access.” Skate punk, through its affirmation of fast and uncontrolled movements of the body makes a constant commitment to such a “shock” of newness, at least in view of Duffy’s definition of speed as “the sensation you get when you drive at a speed you are not used to” (Duffy 3). Exposing the body to ‘speedy’ situations, or moments of bliss, it is “not used to” has not only been “the most empowering and excruciating new experience for people everywhere in twentieth-century modernity” (1), its newness and its sensation, on the microlevel, i.e. apart from ascriptions of meaning and identity, also work in favor of heterogeneity, that is a process of constant adaptation, transformation, and modification that pervades skate punk activities. Specifically, grinds adapt swimming pools as breaking waves, fast strokes transform guitar fret boards into smooth spaces of sonorous density, and intense screaming modifies genre conventions and lyrical narratives by adding a grainy (or grinding) voice that foregrounds the presence of the body beyond properties of identity. The reduction of distance that goes along with a consideration of the microlevel and its molecular setup seems to pick up on Gumbrecht’s intention “to stay close to the things of the world” (Gumbrecht, “My Present” 343). He connects this strategy with the attempt

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G RINDING C ALIFORNIA to see the world from an angle of “contingency” (in the philosophical sense of the German “Kontingenz,” that is, randomness), i.e. to be open to react to events, surprises, epiphanies (including moments of pain and the ensuing scars) and their meandering developments, rather than controlling and conceptually neutralizing, by all kinds of rational prognostics, what Wlad Godzich once called ‘the microphysics of history.’” (Gumbrecht, “My Present” 343/344)

Just as in Surin’s definition of micropolitics, Gumbrecht’s call for moments of contingency implements the microlevel as a realm that might offer a certain openness, as opposed to the controlling and rationalizing “prognostics” of interpretation. By invoking “moments of pain and the ensuing scars,” Gumbrecht incorporates the instants of bodily encounters that are almost omnipresent in skate punk activities. While on the one hand, these effects of pain and scars are discursively included within the stylizations of skate punk culture, on the other hand, they bear witness to the contingency that accompanies skateboard maneuvers and hardcore punk performances. The recklessness that Ginn attributes to Black Flag’s music, the chaos and collapse that Nolte senses in this sound, Brannon’s style of skating and screaming in a way that “anything could happen,” and the whooshes, booms, and boomps that pervade skate punk: All of these amount to moments of contingency in which molecular intensities eclipse attributions of meaning and foreground the events that initiate and intensify the impact that “‘present’ objects” have on human bodies” (Gumbrecht, Production xiii), in short, productions of presence which can hardly be fixed within constructs of identity. Thrasher, in an article on “The Art of Dropping In,” describes one of skateboarding’s basic maneuvers and provides a summary that holds true for skate punk’s moments of lived intensity in general: No amount of planning or practice can precede a drop-in maneuver. You’ve got to go for it now and ask questions later, and in the meantime, let instincts take over. That’s what skating is all about—the detachment factor—the split second of not knowing whether one is in control of his or her own destiny. Riding the razor’s edge provides the rush and dropping over the edge intensifies it. (Thrasher Mar. 1981, 19; also cf. Weyland 172)

Can this moment be charged in terms of rebellion? That is, can it in fact foster a credible resistance that surpasses the ideological contradictions pervading skate punk culture?

3.5

C ONCLUSION : G RINDING ON THE M OST TENUOUS B ORDERS OF D ISCOURSE

Resistance, it was stated with reference to Lowe, not only needs to engage categories of intersectional difference but must also be “semiotically sophisticated in its counter-practices” (176). The analyses in chapter 2 have shown that this re-

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quirement is not fully met because the medialized form of skate punk relies heavily on codes and narratives of the social center in order to be distanced from the discourse of patriarchal middle-class suburbia. Despite the apparent movement to the rhythms of hardcore punk and on the mobile platform of the skateboard, the respective participants remain fixed within the discursive restrictions of their ideological surroundings or, more precisely, the capitalist conformity of California suburbia. To revisit and borrow Traber’s words, I, however, “do not accuse them of a ‘failed rebellion’ because they cannot get outside that system” (“L.A.’s White Minority” 50). Rather, I intend to circumvent a too-pessimistic conclusion by acknowledging that this system is a given that obviously defines the discourse we are living in, but which does not necessarily foreclose a critical contestation of its restrictive characteristics. “There is only one culture: capitalist culture,” Guattari states (Molecular Revolution 33). “It is a culture that is always ethnocentric and intellectocentric (or logocentric), because it separates semiotic universes from subjective production” (33). This contestation reveals to what extent Lowe’s conception of successful resistance is always already undermined by the capitalist exploitation and instrumentalization of semiotic representation. Guattari’s conception of change on the “molecular level” offers the opportunity to read skate punk as an “apparatus [that is] changing the life of the neighbourhood” (Guattari, Chaosmosis 21). It is within a local space, the neighborhood of suburban California, that skate punk operates and fosters “processe[s] of singularization” (Molecular Revolution 91). Guattari defines these processes as “simply being able to live or to survive in a particular place, at a particular time, and to be ourselves” (94), which embraces skate punks’ re-appropriation of their conservative environment: Skateboarding and hardcore punk music constitute their ways of being themselves. Guattari adds that this has nothing to do with identity (things such as: my name is Félix Guattari, and I am here). It has to do with the way in which, in principle, all the elements that constitute the ego function and are articulated; in other words, with how we feel, how we breathe, how we want to speak or don’t want to, being here or going away. (Guattari, Molecular Revolution 94/95)

Guattari here avoids any kind of identity politics and thus indicates a momentum that also challenges the categories of race, class, gender, and space differentiations. He shifts the focus to bodily sensing, feeling and breathing, to aspects of agency in speech and, ultimately—via the notion of “being here or going away”—to mobility. Linking back to Urry’s remarks about bodily sensation through movement, Guattari’s inquiries into micropolitical processes indicate the option of analyzing skate punk in its momentary relevance as a Molecular Revolution. Despite the inflationary use of the term ‘revolution’ by youth cultures (which often just cater to mainstream conceptions of marginality in order to present themselves as credible ‘outcasts’), Guattari’s Molecular Revolution provides a useful metaphor for the potentiality of skate punk, as it implies change or differentiation on a microlevel.

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The term ‘revolution,’ additionally, references the movement of spinning or rolling, which makes it even more adequate in connection to the movement of a skateboard (i.e. the literal revolution of the wheel), the slam dance (i.e. the literal revolution in the ‘circle pit’)123, and even the rotation of records (i.e. the literal revolution of vinyl). Micropolitics, or “[t]he attempt to assemble things in such a way that the processes of singularization are not mutually neutralized, not coopted in the reconstitution of molar pseudoentities,” not only disrupt the essentializing fixity of a normative and masculine white middle-class suburbia, but they also open up “the existence of an entire world of unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects, fine segmentations that grasp or experience different things” (Guattari, Molecular Revolution 110; Deleuze and Guattari 235). “There is a micropolitics of perception, affection, conversation, and so forth,” which can be located in those tiny moments of skate punk expression which loosen the ties to the discursive restrictions that hinder its escape from suburban normativity (Deleuze and Guattari 235). Butler notes that “there is an ‘outside’ to what is constructed by discourse” and thus implicitly hints at the possibility for skate punk to enter into this realm in order to counter and escape the discursive realities of normative America (Bodies 8). However, she explains that this is not an absolute “outside,” an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive “outside,” it is that which can only be thought— when it can—in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders. (Bodies 8)

Applying this conception of the discursive and the “extra-discursive” to the physical movement and mobility of skate punk helps to localize its very potential at a transgressive momentum between discursive restriction and material contingency (11). The skate punks who skate within the concrete swimming pool, move their hands over the fretboards of their guitars, or slam into each other with their bodies produce actions in instants of lived intensity that literally grind on the “most tenuous borders” of discourse and thus create micro or even molecular moments of possible disruption (8). Despite being enmeshed in the restrictive discourse of California suburbia and thus also in the contradictory ramifications produced by the intersectional categories of race, class, gender and space, the skate punk body, through its mobility and movement, keeps these restrictive boundaries in vibration. The potentiality of skate punk culture is characterized by the moment when gravity is challenged in a skateboard maneuver, the moment when it no longer counts what clothes the skater wears and what music the skater is listening to because he/she is incorporated into the contingency of the maneuver’s outcome, into the blissful moment of the “detachment factor” (Weyland 172). Will the skater land the move? Will the skater fall? The move or the maneuver will never be the 123 | The ‘circle pit’ constitutes a special formation in slam dancing: All participants run, dance, slam, and jump around more or less randomly while roughly following a common circular trajectory.

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same. At least on a microlevel it develops infinitely different forms and outcomes. The same holds true for the millisecond between two guitar chords in a punk song. The faster a band plays the shorter these moments become but the more of them there are. They similarly push the borders of discourse within the contingent flux between two otherwise defined poles: the fixed frets of the guitar. The movement between them, this grinding momentum, constitutes the micropolitical and molecular condition, which provides for the possible expression of mobile and corporeal rebellion. However, just as gravity pulls stagedivers back into the slam pit or skateboarders onto the concrete surface of a swimming pool, the discursive grip of suburban normativity will constantly affect skate punk mobility in its disruptive potential and the utopian desire to freely drift into the realm of a completely autonomous alternative to the given society. In order to combine this argument with Gumbrecht’s notion of presence, it is helpful to implement Rosi Braidotti’s contestation of the “gravitational pull of metaphysics” (7), which she sees as opposed to nomadic fluidity. It mirrors Gumbrecht’s interest in the “beyond” in metaphysics and its location within productions of presence, while suggesting that a discursive integration always diminishes it to infinitely short moments of ephemerality. Discourse restricts and pulls skate punk rebellion back to a short instant of disruptive relevance. However, as Rudolph Lablan notes, “[m]ovement can say more, for all its shortness, than pages of verbal description” (qtd. in Adey 142), which indicates that the shortness of skate punk’s transgressive momenta at the boundaries of discourse can be regarded as its most important feature. These momenta cannot be coopted; they can hardly be represented or linguistically grasped; they are unphotographable; it is difficult to interpret them; and, for these reasons, they do not dissolve into the restrictive and fixed normativity of “molar pseudoentities” (Guattari, Molecular Revolution 110). The lyrics, flyers, magazines, and videos that have been analyzed in the previous chapter offer accounts of a medialized version of skate punk. This representational mode relies heavily upon the discursive organization of 1980s California suburbia and thus incorporates the contradictory fact that a youth cultural practice seeking to establish rebellious alternatives to the society it comes from remains trapped within the privileging and oppressing ramifications of race, class, gender, and space categories. Whereas the rather homogeneous group of male middle-class adolescents that dominate skate punk reminds us that alternatives to a normative environment are always pervaded by this very environment’s ideological discourses, hierarchies, power relations, and force fields, this should not prevent us from acknowledging the potential that skateboarding or physical movement and hardcore punk or sonorous mobility hold for disruptions of the given structures of our everyday life. Skate punk’s representations and stylizations may be fixed on a certain medium; the moments of movement and mobility, the productions of presence, and the lived intensities that can hardly be grasped in a text, an image, or a video (at the utmost they pervade them as traces) are at our disposal. We do not, of course, depend on a skateboard or a punk rock song to

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make a difference, to make a change. These are just examples. The very contradictions that deprive skate punk culture of so much innovative potential by making it a practice that mainly attracts young white men, however, emphasize the importance of Guattari’s request that “[i]ndividuals must become both more united and increasingly different” (Guattari, Three Ecologies 69). The examples of molecular intensities within skate punk show that, even while drifting in the delimited space of a suburban backyard, it is possible to strive for this ideal—as long as we move.

CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK: It’s All About Access

“It is no surprise that every kid with a skateboard got into punk rock,” read the liner notes of the record Listen To This by San Jose skate punks Los Olvidados, “Pure adrenaline (well, almost pure) pure motives, pure fun! All outside the view of mainstream society, I’m sure every suburban town had a band like us. Anyone could do it, and everyone did” (Los Olvidados n.pag.). The adrenaline aesthetics Duffy suggested in view of the volatile phenomenon of speed seem to underpin this statement: Given that both skateboarding and punk rock, through their investment in fast movements, have direct effects “on the body and its sensorium” (Duffy 9), it is not surprising that youthful interest spanned (and still spans) both activities. They both equally release a palpable “thrill of velocity” that is felt directly (5). This account of pure fun, however, seems to be inconsistent for it was in fact not “everyone” who participated. The stylizations, narratives, and discourses I analyzed in the preceding chapters bear witness to the dominance of white middle-class males in skate punk and draw a different picture while putting the notion of the subculture as a “pure” activity into perspective. Rather than being pure in the sense of an uncorrupted activity of youthful innocence, the pureness that the liner notes praise seems to exemplify a homogeneity which invalidates the claim of being open to “everyone.” This dominating homogeneity interferes with the attempt of young skate punks to create a rebellious subculture by truly distancing themselves from their socio-cultural environment in California. Taking youth culture seriously, I sought to avoid both celebrating it as innocent counter culture as well as, in the vein of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical approaches to the Kulturindustrie, condemning it as an entirely commodified bearer of exchange value that lacks any chance of challenging the capitalist setup of suburbia and the privileging elements of race, class, and gender, which make this locale an advantageous retreat for the beneficiaries of white masculinity. In chapter 2, I pointed towards the contradictions undermining the rebellious potential of skate punk, while in chapter 3 I implemented a material approach that focused on the corporeal movement and the bodily encounters which allow for transgressive

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moments that indeed disrupt those cultural constructs that time and again bind the subculture to the dominant discourses of the white Anglo-American middle class. By focusing on moments of lived intensity that escape appropriating interpretations as well as meaning attributions and representation, I argued, skate punks face the chance to loosen those axes of differentiation that are crucial when it comes to the construction and attribution of identity. The evaluation of these moments— admittedly guided by the conviction that an ultra-conservative environment like the Reaganite suburbs of California indeed deserves a highly resistant and deviant youth—however, is in dire need of critical restriction. Locating possibilities to generate nomadic mobility, to produce spaces of smooth fluidity, and to enter into becomings that foster processes of heterogeneity in skate punk’s micropolitical, microphysical, and molecular movements, adds an important insight to the discursive analysis of its medial representations and its entanglement in the tissue of cultural values. Nevertheless—no matter how fast and unrestricted a body moves, flows, and floats—this entanglement always exercises control. Kwon pinpoints this circumstance and interposes: The understanding of identity and difference as being culturally constructed should not obscure the fact that the ability to deploy multiple, fluid identities in and of itself is a privilege of mobility that has a specific relationship to power. (Kwon 166)

Picking up on Lowe and Harvey’s assessment that intersectional categories have real effects on the lived body where they are marked as distinctions, and in many cases as restrictions (cf. subchapter 1.1.2), Kwon emphasizes to what extent such differentiations support or constrain access to liberating modes of mobility and movement. Duffy endorses this argument by making a similar point concerning speed, i.e. “the rates of movement” (20): “Speed politics, in the first instance,” he underlines, “was a politics of access: this newly intense experience was offered to citizens on their ability to pay, on their gender, proximity to centers of production, consumption, and power” (Duffy 7). This statement, although geared towards modernity and the invention of the automobile, holds true for the postmodern environment of California suburbia. It reveals the effects of different axes of differentiation functioning as what one could label ‘intersectional gatekeepers,’ which order and organize access to the mobile features which render those who enjoy the advantages of suburban living privileged and powerful. The notion of “preemptive speed,” i.e. preemptive measures in law enforcement, which Tomlinson discusses in his chapter on “Unruly Speed” provides a significant example for the power structures involved as it picks up on the exclusive politics that characterize suburban living (63). Racial and ethnic profiling, in this context, seems to constitute the most obvious strategy of preemptive speed as it precisely delineates the struggle against what suburbanites perceive as encroaching minorities. Aldama’s aforementioned comments on “The Timeless Color of Violence” indicate such measures of preemptive

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speed in the form of “being snubbed in restaurants, followed in stores, tailed by the police, [or] pulled over in ‘nice’ or white dominant suburbs” (n.pag.). White suburbia is the perfect example for the fact that speed and movement, and especially the control over speed and movement, are linked to positions of power. Braidotti elucidates this within the context of identity construction: The definition of a person’s identity takes place in between nature–technology, male–female, black–white, in the spaces that flow and connect in between. We live in permanent processes of transition, hybridization and nomadization, and these in-between states and stages defy the established modes of theoretical representation. (Braidotti 2)

This statement points out to what extent the access to “in-between states,” i.e. to processes of flow and connection—in short, access to movement—is tied to the ability to define and thus to challenge, question, and change identity. Generating the possibility to defy established modes of representation, the entry into the ‘between’ constitutes an important threshold that regulates political power. Consequently, access to movement, access to speed, and access to fluidity, nomadism, and unrestricted flowing, is policed and restricted by the dominant forces of normative power. Not “everyone” can easily partake in the advantages and pleasures of corporeal and cultural mobility, as the extremely homogeneous group of white males in skate punk exemplifies. What does that mean for the potentiality of skate punk and my overall question about American, or more precisely, Californian teenagers’ opportunities to resist and rebel against the normative structures of middle-class conservatism and their social, cultural, and physical environment in suburbia? Following a top-down approach, my analysis of skate punk departed from a contextual examination and a consideration of highly visible media representations in order to subsequently locate its emancipatory disruptions within the microlevel of molecular revolutions. It zoomed in on the tiny moments of lived intensity, which produce presences that foster immediate escapes from discursive restrictions and ascriptions. In this way, I was able to peel back the different axes and layers of differentiation that appear to always be prefixed to any kind of corporeal and material encounter. To anticipate skate punk’s potential, I bracketed and ‘pushed aside’ these ‘gatekeepers,’ i.e. the categories of identity that restrict access to truly uncontrolled bodily movement. This procedure, however, only constitutes a methodological strategy which lacks an effective equivalent within the realm of political reality and interventionist activity. In congruence with the impossibility of an escape into the extra-discursive, outside of academic analysis there is no way to simply peel back the culturally constructed notions and conceptions of race, class, gender, and space, that ultimately, or at least in the eyes of others, define who we are or who we are supposed to be.124 When people, i.e. the indefinite group of subjects that seems 124 | Cf. Villa, who argues that “we are supposed to act not as persons or individuals in the endlessly complex meaning of the word, but always in the name of a subject position,”

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to be addressed through the notion of “everyone,” want to attend a hardcore punk concert, when they happen to encounter a gang of adolescent males screaming and slam dancing, when they want to approach a group of skateboarders gathered around a spray-painted concrete pool sharing heroic stories of conquered backyards, it requires a certain idealism, if not cynicism, to invite them to concentrate only on the tiny moment of a grind, the micropercepts of a body in midair, or the material contingency of the grain of a voice, rather than being deterred by the homogenous and exclusive unity these skate punks mediate. As already mentioned, the movements that accompany the activities around skate punk are at everyone’s disposal; their access, however, is restricted and policed. It requires more than a phenomenalistic reduction of an academic consideration to peel back, i.e. to resist, such forceful powers of discipline. For the scope of my book this means that its ending really is a new starting point. I have worked my way down to the level of molecular relevance which equips any body with the potential to move freely and to enter into moments of nomadic liberation. But the axes of intersectional differentiation reach into this level: As Duffy writes with regard to speed, it comes with “blatant sexism (in that speed has almost wholly been presented as a male desire)” (53), which similarly holds true for the culture of skate punk that additionally encompasses a textually and medially articulated favoritism for certain attributes of class affiliation, gender ascription, racial profiling, and spatial association. The structure of my book was not meant to imply a binary conception of skate punk, but rather to indicate that modes of discursive representation are constantly interacting with moments of corporeal presence. They influence and affect each other and as Grossberg’s quote in the introduction to chapter 3 pointed out, bodies are always enmeshed in definitions of identity, regulations of behavior, and the policing of sexuality and gender. Rather than perceiving and realizing the potential of the molecular revolutions that pervade the intensities of extreme movement, it is not surprising that, today, when we think of surfers we still tend to think of buff and blonde athletes such as Kelly Slater or Laird Hamilton; when we think of skateboarders we think of role models such as Tony Hawk or Danny Way; and when we think of American punk bands we think of Green Day or Blink 182. These (and other) icons of popular culture, all more or less fitting into the category of seemingly ageless white middle-class males, elevated the activities of Californian ‘board culture’ and punk rock music, which were starting to merge during the late 1970s and early 1980s, to levels of international popularity. They are the prime examples for the fact that those categories of intersectional differentiation that pervaded skate punk from its very beginnings infiltrated each and every of its current maneuvers and moves, which ultimately includes the material moments of ephemeral intensity. As a conwhich she ties to “social structures of inequality and/or difference,” i.e. categories of intersectionality (172). Differences of space, race, class, and gender entail that “[w]e speak, talk, act, and are recognised as someone” (172).

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sequence, it would seem that the grind on a concrete edge, the sound of an amplified electric guitar, and slam dancing stagedivers have become attributes and codes of white male middle-class expression in themselves. Intersectionality, or intersectional differentiation, it seems, became part of skate punk(s’) movement. It would be the challenge for further enquiries to rethink the organization of skate punk along the lines of a bottom-up approach that does not zoom into the molecular revolutions that might take place under layers of discursive inscription, but which in fact departs from these revolutions in order to evaluate a single moment of movement and its potential to create something new, different, and unprecedented; something that is not filtered through the gatekeepers of differentiation but which factually generates the potential to alter and become different by evolving from a movement that is accessible for everyone. Locating and conceptualizing such movement within “lived experience” which, according to Gumbrecht, seems to evade meaning attributions and thus offers ways to undermine the implemented differentiations of intersectionality, might constitute a first step in that direction. However, such an approach comes with difficulties. Gumbrecht assumes: Keeping things at suspense on the level of “lived experience” (“Erlebnis”), as I have already said […], is key for what I want to achieve. In principle, however, having concepts to describe a phenomenon (and using them) is incompatible with seeking their immediacy in the dimension of “lived experience.” Using concepts then, as we cannot help but doing […] is always going one step too far. But while we of course can neither teach nor write without concepts, there might be room to increase the proportion between deictic gestures, i.e. of moments when we point to epiphanic events (or epiphanic potentials), and transforming them into meaning. (“My Present” 345)

What is important in this supposition is that its anticipation of an increased proportion between deictic gesturing and meaning attribution points precisely towards an ‘in-between’ moment that not only delineates the oscillation that Gumbrecht detects between meaning effects and presence effects, but also reveals a connection to Deleuzian theory and the incorporation of a material approach through the idea of “get[ting] taken up in movement” and “‘com[ing] between’ rather than be[ing] the origin of an effort” (Deleuze, “Mediators” 281). Gumbrecht’s quote seems to suggest that a suspension of conceptualizations might add to and in fact might increase the proportion relating meaning and presence. His suggestion appears to link the endeavors summarized in Production of Presence with the scope of a rather pragmatist approach, at least in view of Baudrillard’s observation in America, where he asks his European readers to consider that [w]e criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for

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Paralleling Gumbrecht, who seems to be equally skeptical towards transcendence and rather wants to concentrate on “an immanentism without metaphysical counterbalance” (“My Present” 343)—a statement that indicates that many of his ideas are preceded by the works of Deleuze, who claims that “[t]ranscendence is always a product of immanence” and therefore inevitably linked to material presence (Pure Immanence 31)—Baudrillard locates the possibility to suspend conceptualizations in a pragmatism he perceives as uniquely American: the realizing of concepts, the materializing of ideas and, probably most important, the act of “[m]aterializing freedom, but also the unconscious” (America 84). Deleuze’s understanding of the immanent as “actualized in a state of things and of the lived that make it happen” supports the link to Gumbrecht’s preoccupation with lived experience and once again emphasizes the material realm, which is characterized by an “immediate consciousness” within “between-times, between-moments” (Deleuze, Pure Immanence 31, 29). These in turn foster processes of singularization rather than individuation and thus point toward the possibility of escaping attributions of identity and meaning.125 The materialization Baudrillard invokes in opposition to conceptualization and the ‘traditional’ focus on transcendence, might provide the means for a thorough bottom-up evaluation of movement that starts from a tangible moment of material motion rather than going “one step too far” and developing it in dependence on a preceding concept (Gumbrecht, “My Present” 345). Perhaps, then, what I have been looking for was not a body in rebellion. After all, what I might have anticipated in my search for potential resistance is a body in literal revolution: spinning, turning, somersaulting, rotating, and moving. This might, of course, be found in skateboarders who perform ‘kick-turns’ on the concrete of an empty pool or in slam-dancing hardcore kids who participate in that “swirling violent vortex at punk shows all over Southern California” (Caen 168); but it only might. These movements, interacting and corresponding with layers of discursive ascriptions, medial constructions of identity, and self-imposed stylizations, often seem as distanced from “everyone” as the superior athletic skills of Tony Hawk and the platinum records of Green Day. It is useful to learn from Guattari’s interest in the molecular and to apply Gumbrecht’s attempt “to stay close to the things of the world” (“My Present” 343), for if there is no concrete swimming pool around; if the next hardcore punk show won’t take place before Friday; and if the roaring surf of California is far from reach, they will remind us that there is still a body at our disposal: our body. This body moves, imperceptibly or molecularly, and in every case, constantly. We have access to its movements and, however small they 125 | Deleuze refers to the example of “small children [who] all resemble one another and have hardly any individuality, but they have singularities: a smile, a gesture, a funny face— not subjective qualities” (Pure Immanence 30).

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are, there are infinite potentialities for what they might become. The small deviation from the level bottom of a Californian concrete pool might have sparked off the youth cultural movement of skate punk, which emphasizes the importance of the molecular level and its potential for change. Serres summarizes, “Question: how does rotation appear? Answer: the clinamen is the smallest imaginable condition for the original formation of turbulence” (Birth 6). The turbulences and rotations that are conditioned by the clinamen and deviation can be found within the infinitesimally small movements of our bodies. It is in these movements that we might look for molecular revolutions. In a twitch, maybe.

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Turcotte, Bryan Ray. Punk Is Dead Punk Is Everything. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2007. Turcotte, Bryan Ray and Christopher T. Miller. Fucked Up + Photocopied: Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1999. Twain, Mark. Roughin It. Vol. II. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1913. Updike, John. Self-Consciousness – Memoirs. London: Andre Deutsch, 1989. Urry, John, ed. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. ---. “The Mobilities Paradigm.” Urry, Mobilities 44-60. Villa, Paula-Irene. “Embodiment is Always More: Intersectionality, Subjection and the Body.” Framing Intersectionality – Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies. Eds. Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, and Linda Supik. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2011. 171-186. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006. Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of Surfing. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 2005. ---. Photo/Stoner: The Rise, Fall, and Mysterious Disappearance of Surfing’s Greatest Photographer. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006. ---. Surf Movie Tonite! Surf Movie Poster Art, 1957-2004. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2005. “The Week in Review.” Los Angeles Times 14 June 1959. SG2. Weyland, Jocko. The Answer is Never – A Skateboarder’s History of the World. London: Century, 2002. Wheaton, Belinda. “Introduction: Mapping the Lifestyle Sport-Scape.” Wheaton 1-28. Wheaton, Belinda, ed. Understanding Lifestyle Sports. New York: Routledge, 2004. Wiegman, Robyn. “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity.” Boundary 2 26.3 (1999): 115-150. Willard, Michael Nevin. “Cutback: Skate and Punk at the Far End of the American Century.” America in the Seventies. Eds. Beth Bailey and David Farber. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 181-207. ---. “Duke Khanamoku’s Body: Biography of Hawai’i.” Sports Matters – Race, Recreation, and Culture. Eds. John Bloom and Michael Nevin Willard. New York: New York University Press, 2002. 13-38. Wohlrabe, Marc. “Preface.” Riemel, Flyer Soziotope 5-6. Wolfe, Tom. “The Pump House Gang.” Zero Break – An Illustrated Collection of Surf Writing 1777-2004. Ed. Matt Warshaw. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004. 167-188. Zarka, Raphaël. On A Day With No Waves – A Chronicle of Skateboarding 1779-2009. Paris: Éditions B42, 2011.

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Films & Videos An American Werewolf in London. Dir. John Landis. Universal Pictures, 1981. A Nightmare on Elm Street. Dir. Wes Craven. New Line Cinema, 1984. Back to the Future. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Universal Pictures, 1985. Blue Velvet. Dir. David Lynch. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986. The Breakfast Club. Dir. John Hughes. Universal Pictures, 1985. Carrie. Dir. Brian De Palma. United Artists, 1976. Colors. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Orion Picture Corporation, 1988. The Decline of Western Civilization. Dir. Penelope Spheeris. Spheeris Films, 1981. Die Hard. Dir. John McTiernan. Twentieth Century Fox, 1988. Dogtown & Z-Boys. Dir. Stacy Peralta. Sony Pictures Classics, 2001. Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Dir. Amy Heckerling. Universal Pictures, 1982. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Dir. John Hughes. Paramount Pictures, 1986. First Blood. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. Orion Pictures, 1982. Freewheelin’. Dir. Scott Dittrich. Scott Dittrich Productions. 1976. Friday the 13th. Dir. Sean S. Cunningham. Paramount Pictures, 1980. National Lampoon’s Animal House. Dir. John Landis. Universal Pictures, 1978. Gidget. Dir. Paul Wendkos. Columbia Pictures, 1959. Gleaming the Cube (aka Skate or Die). Dir. Graeme Clifford. David Foster Productions, 1989. Lords of Dogtown. Dir. Cathrine Hardwicke. Columbia TriStar, 2005. Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment. Dir. Jerry Paris. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1985. Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol. Dir. Jim Drake. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1987. “Posessed to Skate.” Dir. Bill Fishman. Video Clip. 1986. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount Pictures, 1981. Red Dawn. Dir. John Milius. United Artists, 1984. Return of the Living Dead. Dir. Dan O’Bannon. Orion Pictures, 1985. Riding Giants. Dir. Stacy Peralta. Sony Pictures Classics, 2004. Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. Dir. Allan Arkush. New World Pictures, 1979. Skateboard Madness. Dir. Julian Pena. Hal Jepsen Films. 1980. Skaterdater. Dir. Noel Black. United Artists, 1965. “Straight Outta Compton.” Dir. Rupert Wainwright. Video Clip. 1988. Streets on Fire. Dir. Howard Dittrich. Santa Cruz Skateboards. 1989. Suburbia. Dir. Penelope Spheeris. New World Pictures, 1983. Tarzan, the Ape Man. Dir. John Derek. Metro-Golwyn-Mayer, 1981. The Terminator. Dir. James Cameron. Orion Pictures, 1984. Wall Street. Dir. Oliver Stone. Twentieth Century Fox, 1987. We Destroy the Family: Punks vs. Parents. KABC-TV. American Broadcasting Companies, 1982. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939.

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Magazines and Newspapers Juice – Pools, Pipes & Punk Rock Magazine The Los Angeles Times The New York Times SkateBoarder Thrasher

Personal Inter views Alba, Steve. Interview. 24 March 2010. Fontana Skate Park, Fontana, CA. Brannon, Brian. Interview. 17 March 2010. Cafe Del Sol, Los Alamitos, CA. Ginn, Greg. Interview. 31 March 2010. Blue Cafe Parking Lot, Huntington Beach, CA. Hammer, Fred. Interview. 1 April 2010. IN-N-OUT Burger Parking Lot. Oxnard, CA. Mountain, Lance. Interview. 24 March 2010. Fontana Skate Park, Fontana, CA. Olson, Steve. Interview. 17 March 2010. Olson’s Studio on Melrose Avenue,’Los Angeles, CA. Radinsky, Scott. Interview. 8 February 2010. Skatelab Skatepark and Museum, Simi Valley, CA.

Songs “Abolish Government/Silent Majority.” TSOL. Self Titled. Nitro Records, 1997. “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.” Ice Cube. AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. Priority Records, 1990. “Beach Blanket Bong-Out.” JFA. Blatant Localism. Placebo Records, 1981. “Brain Bondage.” Agression. Don’t Be Mistaken. BYO, 1983. “Brats in Battalions.” Adolescents. Brats in Battalions. S.O.S. Records, 1987. “Cokes and Snickers.” JFA. Blatant Localism. Placebo, 1981. “Code Blue.” TSOL. Dance With Me. Frontier Records, 1981. “Fast Food Diet.” The Faction. No Hidden Messages. IM Records, 1983. “Fuck the Police.” N.W.A. Straight Outta Compton. Ruthless Records, 1988. “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie.” Black Flag. Damaged. SST, 1981. “Great Equalizer.” JFA. Valley of the Yakes. Placebo Records, 1983. “Hang Ten in East Berlin.” D.I. Ancient Artifacts. Reject, 1985. “Home is Where.” Middle Class. Scavenged Luxury. Torture Garden, 1980. “Home is Where the Heart is.” Elvis Presley. I Got Lucky. Sony, 2008. “Identity Crisis.” Big Boys. Where’s My Towel. Industrial Standard, 1981. “I Hate Children.” Adolescents. Self Titled. Frontier Records, 1981.

W ORKS C ITED

“I’m White and Middle Class.” The Urinals. Another. Happy Squid, 1979. “Join the Army.” Suicidal Tendencies. Join the Army. Caroline, 1987. “Let’s Have a War.” FEAR. The Record. Slash Records, 1982. “Lexicon Devil.” Germs. (GI). Slash Records, 1979. “Live fast, die young.” Circle Jerks. Group Sex. Frontier Records, 1980. “Locals Only.” Agression. Don’t Be Mistaken. BYO, 1983. “Middle Class Hell.” White Flag. Third Strike. Gastanka Records, 1984. “Money Machine.” Agression. Don’t Be Mistaken. BYO, 1983. “Moral Majority.” Circle Jerks. Wild in the Streets. Faulty Products, 1982. “Not Guilty.” RKL. It’s a Beatiful Feeling. Mystic Records, 1984. “OC Life.” D.I. Ancient Artifacts. Reject, 1985. “Paranoid Chant.” Minutemen. Paranoid Time. SST, 1980. “Police Story.” Black Flag. Damaged. SST, 1981. “Possessed to Skate.” Suicidal Tendencies. Join the Army. Caroline, 1987. “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” Scott McKenzie. Sony Music, 1991. “S.A.T.C.” Agression. Don’t Be Mistaken. BYO, 1983. “Senseless Violence.” RKL. Keep Laughing. Mystic Records, 1985. “Skate and Destroy.” The Faction. No Hidden Messages. IM Records, 1983. “Skate Babylon.” Adolescents. Brats in Battalions. S.O.S. Records, 1987. “Skate Fast, Die Young.” E.T.A. No Faith. Deranged Records, 2001. “Skate Harassment.” The Faction. Collection 1982-1985. Beer City Records, 2001. “Slaves.” Bad Religion. The Original Bad Religion 12”. Epitaph Records, 1981. “Sleepwalking.” Ill Repute. Oxnard – Land of No Toilets. Mystic Records, 1983. “Spineless Majority.” The Faction. Collection 1982-1985. Beer City Records, 2001. “Spray Paint (the Walls).” Black Flag. Damaged. SST, 1981. “Suburban Home.” Descendents. Milo Goes to College. New Alliance Records, 1982. “Surf and Destroy.” Bl’ast. The Power of Expression. Green World Records/Wishingwell Records, 1986. “TV Party.” Black Flag. Damaged. SST, 1981. “Video Killed the Radio Star.” The Buggles. Video Killed the Radio Star. Island Records, 1979. “Wasted.” Black Flag. Nervous Breakdown. SST, 1978. “We Destroy the Family.” FEAR. The Record. Slash Records, 1982. “We Got the Neutron Bomb.” The Weirdos. We Got the Neutron Bomb. Dangerhouse Records, 1978. “White Minority.” Black Flag. Jealous Again. SST, 1980. “World War III.” TSOL. Self Titled. Nitro Records, 1997. “Wrecking Crew.” Adolescents. Self Titled. Frontier Records, 1981.

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