White Skin, Black Flag: Hardcore Punk, Racialization, and the Politics of Sound in Southern California

Abstract

The year 1978 was an awfully weird time to be young in Southern California. Perhaps nowhere else at that time could a young person be so well attuned to cultural contradictions of American capitalism, to gap between media's California dreams and their own California nightmares. In summer of that year, in Orange County, which is immediately south of Los Angeles (LA), suburban populist Howard Jarvis led first in what would become a series of nationwide tax revolts. Jarvis's revolt resulted in passage of California's Proposition 13, which severely decreased property tax rates in state for even wealthiest property owners. According to California historian and urban theorist Mike Davis, a contemporary newspaper called passage of Proposition 13 the Watts riot of middle classes.1 It was culmination of so-called slow growth movement and decades of redlining, restrictive covenants, and nimbyism (a prototypically Californian ideology that said, Not in my backyard), and a disaster for region's working poor and its increasingly alienated minority communities (black, white ethnic, Latino, and Asian alike). Indeed, socioeconomic consequences of Proposition 13 are still being felt today, during tax-starved California's perennial fiscal crises and its emergence as United States' preeminent carceral state.Yet, to turn on radio or television in late 1970s Southern California was to be greeted by rictuses of politicians like Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown; saccharine disco of Bee Gees or Donna Summer, whose most LA-centric and aesthetically inconsequential song, MacArthur Park, was a number-one hit in 1978; or television programs promoting aspirational fantasies of New West, like Dallas and Vega$, both of which debuted in 1978. Films set in Los Angeles, such as Heaven Can Wait and California Suite, both among top-grossing films of 1978, offered audiences a breezy respite from one-two punch of post-Vietnam War movies that dominated Academy Awards and were also commercially successful in that year, Ccnning Home and Deer Hunter. California Suite, which was filmed mostly at Beverly Hills Hotel and featured painter David Hockney's pastel LA dreamscapes in its credit sequence, was only film besides Coming Home or Deer Hunter to win a major Academy Award that year, for Supporting Actress Maggie Smith. Nowadays, LA-centric commercial culture of this ilk- MacArthur Park, California Suite-has been nearly erased from our collective memory, perhaps because its anodyne fantasies sting when recollected alongside socioeconomic disaster that was about to befall Los Angeles, and eventually rest of United States, with election of Ronald Reagan, a Southern California export, who starved nation's inner cities and arguably produced socioeconomic conditions that led to 1992 LA riots.However, in California at that time, there were also stirrings of an existential and political revolt against these anodyne fantasies beginning to emanate from Hollywood, East LA, Orange County, and South Bay, in form of LA's nascent punk scene. In 1977, Brendan Mullen had opened his Hollywood club, Masque, which would provide LA punk scene with its incubator and home for next two years. In 1977 and 1978, all of most important LA punk bands debuted-the Germs, X, Screamers, and Bags, among many others. In 1978, Santa Ana band Middle Class would release its debut EP Out of Vogue, usually thought of as first West Coast hardcore record, and, later that year, a new band called Black Flag released its debut EP Nervous Breakdown on band's own SST record label, which bandleader and guitarist Greg Ginn founded with money he had earned by running a mail-order electronics business for ham radio operators.2 The label name was a remnant of this period-Solid State Transmitters. Over next eight years, until it broke up in 1986, Black Flag would emerge as perhaps most emblematic hardcore punk band not only in Southern California, but also in United States more generally. …