“This is Germany! It’s 1933!” Appropriations and Constructions of “Fascism” in New York PunWHardcore in the 1980s James J. Ward Surely one of the surprises in post-Cold War political culture has been the emergence of violent racist and nationalist youth movements in Europe and America, some of them invoking the Third Reich and the Final Solution as cures for all contemporary ills. Retrospectively, even before the opening of the Berlin Wall, stirrings in the ash heaps of fascism and Nazism should have been detected, but hardly anyone was paying attention. While political violence by the new right radical youth-above all in Germany, but elsewhere as well-has captured the headlines, equally disconcerting is the penetration into popular culture by languages and vocabularies, actual and symbolic, from the black- and brown-shirted dictatorships, dead in history as they may be. What does one make, a half century or more after, of Nazi punks and Nazi skinheads and Nazi rock bands? Why, in Germany, in post-Communist eastern Europe and post-Soviet Russia, and in the U.S., has a distinctive right-wing youth scene materialized, combining gang violence, heavy metal music, computer games, videos, e-mail, and any number of other contemporary cultural artifacts? Why do we have the sinister, sometimes lethal mix of swastika flags and baseball bats, of electric guitars and Molotov cocktails? What happened to youth politics and youth culture as a source of liberation, and not a call for enslavement and extermination? What happened to rock music as a protest against authority, discipline, uptight morality, and gettin’ old? Since when has it been cool to be a Nazi? In fact, as a musical form (and cultural formation) whose origins lie in youthful rebellion, rock has always had its politics on the left. In its borrowings from the music of the black underclass, in the folk tradition reaching back to the miseries and inequalities of the Depression, in the working-class ethodprole sensibility from which the Beatles emerged, rock was always the voice of the guy on the bottom. However obscure his lyrics, there was never any question about Bob Dylan’s politics (at 155 156 Journal of Popular Culture least until his motorcycle accident); there was never any doubt about who the Jefferson Airplane was going to put up against the wall. Even when rock exchanged the hard politics of the 1960s for the softer politics of succeeding decades, its conscience remained on the side of the disadvantaged and the dispossessed (Live Aid, Band Aid, etc.). Things may have become a bit muddled lately, since we now have a rock ‘n’ roll President, and the expropriatiodexploitation of rock music by politics and advertising advance at a daily pace. And, to echo one observer, “does anybody care?’ (Grossberg). This paper makes no effort to rewrite the political history of rock. By any reading, the mainstream still runs strongly to the left, whether reformist, populist, or eco-internationalist.’ Yet rock has always had a problematic, if not paradoxical relationship with fascism generally and Nazism specifically. Both in its love of spectacle and in the cult of the charismatic (super)star, rock presents troubling associations with all-too- familiar fascist archetypes.* In its earliest manifestation as “rock ‘n’ roll music,” rock was condemned by hostile (adult) observers for its “brain w ash i n g ” and “thought con t r o 1” cap a b i 1 it i e s- 1 i n g u i s tic attributions drawn from the then-current dread of “totalitarianism,” the latter a direct outgrowth of the World War I1 experience combating fascism and Nazism. Three decades later the conservative cultural critic Allan Bloom (in The Closing o f the American Mind) repopularized these ominous connections by equating MTV rock videos with Hitlerite propaganda and ascribing to rock performers the same demonic powers earlier exercised by the fascist dictator^.^ Even more recently, all the associations between rock and the radicalism of the 60s to the contrary, an English critic still generalizes: “When pop stars really want to inspire political action, they make fascistic gestures” (Thompson 23). And another English writer, arguing for the attraction of the forbidden, finds in rock’s manifold anti-fascist proclamations “a more subtle form of fascination ... fascism is a very sexy enemy” (Singh 52). Mapping the geography of rock’s more than occasional attraction to fascism and Nazism turns up a well-worn set of landmarks: Peter Watkins’ 1967 film Privilege on the collusion of church and state to manipulate England’s youth through neofascist mass politics, with stadium concert sequences deliberately reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph o f the Will; the inevitable American rip-off, AIP’s Wild in the Streets (1968), where everyone over thirty-five is ordered into concentration camps; Eric Clapton’s and David Bowie’s mutterings on behalf of the National Front and the need for “leadership” in Britain (inciting a powerful negative reaction in Rock Against Racism and related campaigns); the relocation to Berlin in the later 70s by Bowie, “This i s Germany! It’s 1933!”... 157 Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and other rock avant-gardists not only for its burgeoning alternative a r t scene, but also its aura of rot, ruin, and the radioactive residue of Third Reich Giitterdiimmerung; the habit Nick Cave (another Berlin transplant) had of beginning his from-the-gallows performances with the Bad Seeds by shouting “Achtung”; lead singer Ian Curtis of Joy Division imploring his audience not to forget Rudolf Hess (“the prisoner of peace”); fascist references that permeate Roger Waters’ work with Pink Floyd and manifest themselves countertextually in “The Wall” (most obviously in the 1990 live extravaganza in Berlin); and many more. Perhaps inconsequential in each instance, the recurrence of these associations alerts us to a darker side in the easy identification of rock and left-wing politic^.^ The appearance of hate music and Nazi rock-inspiring an MTV special on the subject-exceeds what has gone before in both the intensity and specificity of its (targeted) lyric^.^ Attracting media attention in both Europe and America, these new provocations challenge the conventional assumption that rock’s politics, definitionally, have to be progressive and emancipatory.6 It may be timely, then, to look more closely at a few of the moments when “fascism,” however conceived or constructed, became a visible element in the political culture of rock. Open identification with historical fascism generally remained prohibited, at least through the end of the 1960s. But a temptation in that direction could not be altogether repressed. Instead, it found expression in one iconographic image that even today retains both its believability and its marketability. The explosion of punk in the mid- and late-70s shattered earlier inhibitions, in England, in America, and even in Germany-although in the latter case exceptional legal constraints softened the rupture. Nothing better imagized the menace and nihilism punk wanted to convey than its appropriation of Nazi symbols. After the initial shock of the swastika, however, the very blankness of punk could only relativize its chosen imagery; instead of destabilizing rock’s symbolic world, punk merely designified it. Still, this background has to be sketched if we are to appreciate the re-infusion of political meaning into “fascism” by a number of New York City punk and hardcore bands (and their fans) in the 1980s. Repoliticized, fascism could serve as an instrument for radical social analysis and for political/ideological mobilization. The result was a series of increasingly violent public confrontations, the evidence of which can still be read in the streets today and whose after effects have not yet altogether died away. Nights in Black Leather, or, Rock Aesthetics and Nazi Fetishism In the early 1970s one of the most popular films playing the homosexual grind houses off Times Square was Nights in Black Leather, 158 Journal of Popular Culture starring the exquisitely named Peter Berlin. Although shot on the West Coast and lacking any overt Nazi references, the film artfully repackaged a set of associations-voyeurism, homosexuality, narcissism (Peter Berlin’s part was largely passive, the desired object of admiring male lovers), leather-which had been first joined paradigmatically in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) and actually predated to men’s “action” magazines (“I was a Nazi Love Slave!”) and z-grade “Nazi fiend” movies of the 1950s.The same conjunctures-SS men, eroticism, pain-appeared in gay pornographic magazines and films of the 1960s and 70s and occasionally infiltrated heterosexual low culture, e.g., in schlock quasi-pornographic films like Zlsa, She- Wolf of the SS. The most extreme statement came in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo: 100 Days of Sodom (1975), which was rumored to have dispensed with simulation in actualizing the metaphor of fascism as enslavement, torture, and sexual gratification .’ Cleverly contrived to be the “bad boys” of rock ‘n’ roll, it is not surprising that the Rolling Stones should have included a passing aside to fascism during their high Satanic phase (1967-69). In the anthemic “Sympathy for the Devil” on the Beggars Banquet album, LuciferMick Jagger chants: Rode a tank with a general’s rank While the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank .... Even if contraindicated by a more sustained identification with SDS- style radicalism in “Street Fighting Man,” these lyrics would a year later carry the Stones into the dead end of 60s rock culture at Altamont, when Hell’s Angels knifed a narcotized fan to death while a distraught Mick pleaded for everyone to be cool. Witness to a performance by the Stones a few weeks earlier in Los Angeles, Albert Goldman (notoriously) observed in The New York Times: On and on the orgy rolls, until after two shows, eight hours, a couple of buckets of sweat, and a million killing watts of electro-encephalic energy, apocalypse is attained .... Every man, woman, and love child mounts his chair, raises his arm over his head, and makes his biggest, blackest, hardest fist. What a climax! What a gesture! What pure Nuremberg! Altamont may have wised up the Stones (on Let It Bleed Mick Jagger was begging for shelter, perhaps from the Angels who allegedly had put a contract on him); but the smell of burning bodies lingered.8 “This is Germany! It’s 1933!” ... 159 In the 1973 fantasy book Rock Dreams, by Nik Cohn and Guy Peelleart, the Rolling Stones appear in a succession of imagined stages. Most memorable is their portrait as SS officers, entertaining themselves with four naked little girls, two of whom seem to know entirely what’s going on. At one comer, Brian Jones, more vulpine than ever, enfolds one little girl (with the haunted look of a concentration camp survivor) in a predatory embrace, while next to him Keith Richards balances another nymphet by extending an unbooted foot between her legs. At the back, Mick Jagger has stripped off his uniform to vamp, with bulging crotch, in a garter belt and black fishnet stockings. In a single image what the Stones had dared only hint is emblematized-that they are Nazis at heart and have come to steal our children, corrupt their innocence, and (most likely) throw them into a crematorium. At the same time, the Stones are tied to all the artifices of Nazi homosexual threat/thrill, and most immediately to the other subgenre shocker of the moment, Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), with its cast of Nazi drag queens, SS killers, and child molesters. Visconti clearly intended a serious (Marxist- Freudian) interpretation of Nazism. But what his viewers saw was a sensational screen debut by Helmut Berger as a heroin-addicted transvestite in Marlene Dietrich get-up, subsequently to re-emerge, after episodes of pedophilia and incest, in the gleaming black uniform of the SS (and along the way, suicide, murder, a mass homosexual orgy, and the “Blood Purge”). Mick Jagger and Helmut Berger in femme/Nazi transcription: garter belts, eye shadow, and swastikas-twin icons for 1970s fascist chic, or the “eroticization of fas~ism.”~ Twenty years later, the Rolling Stones as SS men is remembered (erroneously) as their finest album cover. Even people with Beggars Banquet somewhere in their attics forget the plain white front with its elegant lettering. The image, after all, is perfect. The world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band as self-appointed exemplars of (Satanic) darkness, rock in its evil (fascist) other self; the rock star as Nazi killer vampire fag-what Albert Goldman (in his 1969 piece) never expected to see, a confession of “the irresistible attractiveness of the fascist ceremonial.”l0 Punk as Primitivist Politics: Right, kj?, Up Yours! Any strictures rock supergroups (or rock aesthetes) may have felt against an overt identification with fascism were not shared, of course, by punk when it erupted in the mid- and late-1970s. Even today, when punk is being recycled as a “style” on the fashion pages, its adoption of Nazi symbolism remains problematic.” Swastikas and SS death’s heads will never make it in Fifth Avenue; but they did make it on punk performance stages and, even more, among punk audiences. Surviving 160 Journal of Popular Culture documents from punk’s “historic period” (1976/77-198~82)remind us how ubiquitous the use of Nazi shock-symbols quickly became. In The Punk Rock Movie by Don Letts (1979), which records performances by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and other of the original English punk bands, swastikas are much on display; and Wayne (later Jayne) County, coming out of the Mercer Arts CenterMax’s Kansas City music scene in New York, performs with Frankenstein face make-up in a boy scout uniform easily interchangeable with an SA brownshirt. Penelope Spheeris’s The Decline of Western Civilization, filmed in Los Angeles in 1980, combines classic punk conceits-nausea, depression, noise, leather, “boiling over”-with footage of Germs’ fans smearing swastikas on vocalist Darby Crash, Fear’s Lee Ving taunting his audience of “faggots” and “homos” with dares to a fight, and L.A. punk “Kenny” explaining his rage and frustration in a Nazi t-shirt. Flaunting Nazi symbols and quoting Nazi references had already been a favored mode for some pre-punk/early punk bands, for example Cleveland’s Rocket from the Tombs in 1974-75 with their “extermination night” performances and often-recorded single “Final Solution”; the Rocket spin-off Dead Boys, who wore American Nazi Party t-shirts for their debut at New York’s CBGB’s; and ex-Stooge guitarist Ron Asheton appearing with a series of self-destroying bands in 1976-77 in jackboots and Nazi leather. America’s seminal punk rock group, the Ramones, contributed to their own legend with catchy songs like “Blitzkrieg Bop” (1976), and England’s archetypal Sex Pistols went even further in outright offensiveness with “Belsen Was a Gas” (1977). What such songs betrayed, however, was the emptying of meaning rather than the exploitation of historical memory. Another prototypical punk band, the New York Dolls, had anticipated this kind of subversion when, their career in trouble, they performed with hammer-and-sickle flags, Maoist slogans, and a Marxist-Leninist red (patent leather) stage look. A few years later, Devo used “Triumph of the Will” as the title for one of their mechanical love/sex songs. In San Francisco the rock saboteur band The Residents tagged a side of Beatles and Stones mock- ups “Swastikas on Parade,” and in L.A. the Angry Samoans sank to frat house silliness with “They Saved Hitler’s Cock.” Considerable critical opinion has been rendered on the meaning (or lack of meaning) in the popularity of Nazi symbolism in English and American punk. Either punk stood for the inversion of values, by extolling that which was still most taboo (the swastika); or punk stood for the negation of all values (even the swastika no longer carried historical or ideological significance). In a 1979 article on “white noise supremacists” Lester Bangs observed that punk’s penchant for self- “This i s Germany! It’s 1933!” ... 161 hatred-“life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit”-made it a “perfect breeding ground for fascism” (275). Dave Laing has similarly criticized the lack-of-meaning interpretation of punk’s use of Nazi symbols. “There is an important distinction to be made between those elements adopted by punk which were already symbolic, already used to stand for something else, and those which weren’t: between the swastika and the safety-pin’’ (96-97). Missing the point, Martha Bayles (who acknowledges intellectual indebtedness to Allan Bloom and Hilton Kramer) in her otherwise dismissive summary of punk, credits the Sex Pistols with inventing the dangerous swastikdS & M combination, ignoring the precedents from which it was taken (309-10). In fact, punk-or at least the “punk look”-simultaneously decontextualized and recontextualized its appropriated artifacts. By mixing (up) bits and pieces of the exotic and the forbidden (leather, underwear, B & D gear) with the political and historical (riot, war, genocide), punk unhinged established hierarchies of meaning and value. If anything, “sadomasochistic clothing styles and fashion accouterments that suggested fascism” created “a deliberate antifashion” resistant to conventional explanation (Henry 72). A recent history of English punk comes close to the mark by noting that you could wear the swastika with complete ambivalence, sometimes being for it, sometimes against it. The point was to get people wondering “What the fuck is happening here?” (Savage 241-42). The overall predisposition of punk, however, was (and is) vaguely, if not specifically, left. The anarchy punks sought to create (at least metaphorically), the anti-authority, and the preference for spontaneous- as opposed to organized-violence put them on the political left, not the right.’* To the degree that punk tended toward an indulgence of rock’s fascist innedalternative self, it was the Futurist provocations and hit-and- run missions of early Italian Fascism and the sweaty amphetamine violence of the SA (and they cross-dressed!) rather than the coldly efficient extermination campaigns of the S S androids-i.e., a “left” fascism rather than the “classical” fascism of the Mussolini and Hitler dictatorships.13The inability of English punk to sustain its relationship with Rock Against Racism, for example, was not the result of some fundamental gravitational pull to the right, but rather of its antipathy to organization of any kind.I4 Because it had no center, or at best an inchoate one, punk could be rendered part of a background urban detritus amidst which more insistent social issues were advanced. Certainly it has this function in the mid-1980’s London films of Stephen Frears, or even in 1993’s far more politically focused In the Name ofthe Father.15 162 Journal of Popular Culture In the U.S. some of the proto-punk groups later found what one critic calls their “flirtation with the imagery of fascism” (Heylin 149-50) an embarrassment and sought to distance themselves from their own history. When it seemed to matter, a few bands put their politics up front. After an ambivalent start, San Francisco’s Dead Kennedys rejected the pseudo-Nazi antics of some of their followers in “Nazi Punks, Fuck Off’ (1981): You still think swastikas are cool The real Nazis run your school They’re coaches, businessmen, and cops In the Fourth Reich you’ll be the first to go Down the Coast, L.A.’s Dils (1980-81) unloaded a fierce left-wing polemic demolishing authority, the state, and the entire capitalist system of wealth and power (“Class War,” “I Hate the Rich”). In 1987, reacting to attempts by the racist/survivalist/neo-Nazi right (Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance) to build a youth following by hijacking punk, the San Francisco band MDC (Millions of Dead CopsMillions of Damn Christians) hammered out “S.K.I.N.H.E.A.D.” to set things straight. Addressing their message to “fascist, fag-bashing” skins, MDC did it by the letters: S is ‘cause you’re so stupid K just like the KKK I because you’re an idiot N a Nazi too There was no place in MDC’s audience for right-wing skinheads. The best thing they could do, with their asshole behavior, was just disappear. Nazi skins, of course, have not disappeared, neither in England nor in the U.S. If anything, the upsurge of “Nazi rock” in Germany has provided an especially powerful new model for far-right music politics, given its proximity to the authentic sources. But the handful of bands who openly back WAR’S recruitment effort are spuriously punk at best, and whatever creativity they can muster is quickly exhausted in a few racist rants.I6 Lacking the instant media magnet of the swastika, anti- racist punk and skin bands have to struggle for visibility. Even then, they are all too often compounded with their political opposites. At least ur- punk Iggy Pop-who for all his fetishistic acting out never trafficked in Nazi symbols-has gotten his politics straight and on 1993’s American Caesar comes out unequivocably in favor of “Mixin’ the Colors” (“It’s what Hitler didn’t Ske”).I7 “This i s Germany! It’s 1933!”... 163 “Do You Wanna Live?” New York Hardcore and the Political Redefinition of the Present Hardcore emerged in the early 80s, first in L.A., then elsewhere, mainly in reaction to the commercialization of punk, e.g., in Hollywood exploitation films like Class of ‘84 (1982). If punk was harsh, loud, and (occasionally) violent, hardcore went several steps further. One (sympathetic) observer defines it as a “fundamentalist interpretation of punk,” deliberately intended “to ensure a threatening unsellable style” (Goldthorpe 39-41). Another calls it “an extreme, frantically American version of punk” (Aaron 9). Bands and fans together projected an alienated, encapsulated attitude (“fuck you, and don’t fuck with me”) and maximized the threat implicit in hardcore performances to guarantee the purity and solidarity of the experience (“dance hard or die”).I8 Semantically, the association with pornography is hardly accidental. In presentation and performance, hardcore music and hardcore films aspire to identical ends-“going all the way,” “nothing left to the imagination,” “in your face” (or “in your eye’’).19 Charting precise distinctions between punk and hardcore is precarious at best. Dismissible by those hostile to its aesthetic as punk played louder and dumber, hardcore is said to become intelligible/intelligent only when “just plain screaming” is replaced by “screaming about current events” (Bayles 315). In New York, hardcore pretty much took over the East VillageLower East Side music scene, where 1970s-era punk was playing itself out or evolving into multiple post-punk repetitions and re-enactments. The urban grittiness of this part of Lower Manhattan (captured in Amos Poe’s 1984 film Alphabet City) helps explain New York hardcore’s social and political radicalism. Performing in small clubs and sometimes in parks and in the streets, living in low-rent tenements or as squatters in derelict buildings, both the hardcore bands and their fans were used to hassles with authority- whether the police, building and health inspectors, or get-tough landlords.20Determined to be “the hardest of the hardcore,” parts of the Lower East Side music crowd “became loyal followers of certain punk bands and seized upon the most violent, hypermasculine, and xenophobic aspects of thrash punk” (Goldthorpe 48). Band names, rough even by punk standards, projected this hard political stand-Raw Deal, Sick of It All, Sheer Terror, Warzone, Outburst, Straight Ahead, Public Nuisance, Cop Shoot Cop. So too did the targets identified in their lyrics-landlords and property speculators, the cops and the courts, welfare bureaucrats, rip-off club owners, phonies, fakers, and bullshitters of all kinds. “Don’t Forget the Struggle, Don’t Forget the Streets,” one of the toughest of the bands, Warzone, instructed its fans.*’ 164 Journal of Popular Culture Sharpening their focus beyond the “fuck everything” swath of destruction lyrics typical of West Coast hardcore, the Lower East Side bands forged their politics from the streets. As part of a protest community organized around issues of housing, justice, and the free use of public space, the neighborhood bands were impelled to political action (as opposed to ranting and trashing music clubs) by New York City’s homeless crisis in the mid- and late-1980s. Homelessness on this scale was not simply a regrettable by-product of short-term economic dislocations and shifts in the real estate market. Rather, the growing numbers of people living in the streets and sleeping in the parks were simultaneously victims of/symptoms of a deliberate political strategy to dispossess and disenfranchise the underclass in America’s urban centers. It was class war, plain and simple, the rich faced off against the poor, and the latter distracted to fighting among themselves for an ever- decreasing share of the social product.2Z Echoing the Dead Kennedys, Agnostic Front scolded its punWskinhead fans for fighting each other while the real enemy went unchallenged: What’s the matter with you What’s the problem [incomprehensible] Stop now Before it’s too late “Fascist Attitudes” Warzone, after a tape of Third-Reich era sieg heils to catch their fellow skins’ attention, made the same appeal: Don’t tell me what you want-unity! Don’t tell me what you want-anarchy! We have to live as one Open your eyes .... “Open Your Eyes” “Punks and skins together,” Agnostic Front preached, “united and strong” (“United and Strong”). The social landscape the New York bands inhabited was an increasingly threatening one, littered with sinister historical associations. Lyrics and slogans articulated these connections. “Empty the Madhouses”-new state laws to “de-institutionalize” large numbers of people from mental health facilities and “mainstream” them into the “This is Germany! It’s 1933!”.. 165 general population; “Back to the Kamps”-police sweeps to force the homeless from the parks and other public places and into tightly regulated city shelters; “Gentrification = Class War”-the relentless advance of real estate conversions and reclamations, as cheap buildings Archaeological evidence of past struggles on the Lower East Side. Photo by the author. 166 Journal of Popular Culture and derelict properties were bought up by investors looking to turn a quick profit; “Drown (or Kill or Eat) the Rich”-the need to fight back, with all means necessary: in short, what one observer calls “urban warfare imagery” (Smith 77). While dozens of Lower East Side properties seized for tax arrears were sealed or demolished, tenants and squatters were forced into the streets or had set up housekeeping in Tompkins Square Park. On the streets around the park, the conversion of low-rent buildings into high-priced co-ops and condominiums exposed class interest at work. Squatters occupied buildings that could otherwise be reconditioned or, more likely, demolished to make way for new construction. The homeless-and the political activists and noise bands who supported them-were both an eyesore and a potential source of trouble whose presence depressed property values by scaring off up- scale renters and buyers. Solutions to these problems, forceful if necessary, were inherent in the economics of the situation. Another slogan said it all: “Gentrification = Gen~cide.”’~ Of numerous bands for whom the Lower East Side was home, none was better prepared to illuminate the class war and preview the coming crackdown than Missing Foundation. A loose collective of activist politico-rockers rather than a tight stage band, Missing Foundation specialized in a particularly fierce brand of industrial noise (World War I11 fought w i t h junkyard car crushers) punctuated with gloomy apocalyptic lyrics. Performances carried an air of incipient, if not actual, violence and Posters reproducing Peter Missing’s cryptic pronouncements and a graffiti campaign that spray-painted the band’s logo, the upside-down martini glass (“Party’s Over”), across building fronts and metal shutters throughout the Lower East Side gave Missing Foundation a presence much larger than its actual following. The band’s political vision, however, reached considerably deeper than the “smash everything/fight/destroy” ethos of the typical hardcore group. In 1988 Missing Foundation released an album entitled 1933-i.e., the year Hitler became German Chancellor. An insert explained the reference: “This is NYC. The USA. It’s 1988. The signs are all around us. Systems close in. Methodic surveillance and numerization .... The system in one of its forms has or is classifying you. If you are outside of it you are a threat to the system. This is Germany. It’s 1933.”25 On the album, the final cut reinforced the argument. Against the murmur of crowd noises, pushing and shoving, and a metallic clatter, Peter Missing wanted to know how much those on the bottom and in the dust were going to take. What more did they have to see? It came down to one thing: “This is Germany! It’s 1933!”... 167 0 0 c a c) B E N 168 Journal of Popular Culture This is Germany It’s 1933 This is Germany Do you wanna live “1933” By the mid-summer of 1988, with 200 or more homeless people living around the concrete bandshell where Missing Foundation and other neighborhood bands put on their agit-prop performances, Tompkins Square Park in fact looked (and smelled) more like Calcutta than Berlin. Record-breaking temperatures kept people out of their stifling apartments and in the streets, and the approaching presidential campaign (decorated with pop star endorsements) added to the political energy circulating in the city. Under increasing pressure to clean up the park, police in the Ninth Precinct were ordered to enforce a 1:00 a.m. curfew, ousting everyone except the homeless. After some preliminary skirmishes, the real confrontation occurred on Saturday night, the 6th- 7th of August. When the police attempted to end an impromptu demonstration against the curfew, a large crowd of punks, band followers, and street activists spilled out of the park onto Avenue A, blocking traffic and banging on automobile windshields. Attracted by the commotion, the crowd swelled to several hundred. The police captain in charge called in reinforcements, including “emergency service” (riot control) units. Along Avenue A, officers on horseback made repeated advances, “Cossack-like charges” as one witness described them. Reforming each time the police backed up, the crowd retaliated by tossing bottles, bricks, and M-80 firecrackers. Badges covered and name tags removed, police chased people down side streets and into cafks and nightclubs, roughing up punks, patrons, and anybody else who got in their way. Ambulances, fire trucks called in to extinguish trash fires, and a police helicopter sweeping the rooftops with its spotlight added to the impression of urban war. By the time the police withdrew, more than forty people had been injured seriously enough to require medical attention. Over 100 charges of police brutality were subsequently filed with the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, and both the Mayor and the Police Commissioner promised complete investigations of what most people called the Tompkins Square Park Police In the aftermath, even people who otherwise would have paid no attention to Missing Foundation’s sloganeering might have agreed with the band that “the fascists have arrived.”27 Mayor Ed Koch, on the other hand, defended police conduct and called Tompkins Square Park “a cesspool.” The head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the “This is Germany! It’s 1933!”... 169 A message from Missing Foundation, circa 1988. Photo by the author. police union, blamed the violence on “punks, skinheads, and communists” who had taken over the park.**In an elegy on the night of August 6th-7th, another of the East Village bands, False Prophets, turned the battle lines around. Talking to “Mister Policeman,” the band asked: 170 Journal of Popular Culture Why are you running toward me? Why are you four hundred strong? Why are your horses charging down my street? “Tompkins Square Park” But when, some months later, a sensation-mongering reporter for one of the city’s TV news stations did a special on the Tompkins Square Park Riot, he placed the blame directly on Missing Foundation (identified as a “Cult of Rage”)-ignoring the fact that the band had not been playing that night.29 Still, Missing Foundation had advertised “Don’t Expect Us to Act Civilized in This Fuckin’ City,” and on its next recording, Demise (1 990), proclaimed “A Hunting We Will Go.” If the hyped-up TV report was not enough, attempts to link the band to a particularly horrific East Village murder case in 1989 completed its alienation. A reputation for revolutionary politics and noise-guerrilla tactics was one thing; being branded Satanists and murder-cultists was something else.MNew York City Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward could have been speaking for the band when, at a post-not press conference, he observed of Tompkins Square Park: “Everybody has his own agenda about this place.”31 “The Party’s Just Begun ”: Into the Vault, Into the Bunker The anti-climax to the 1988 riot dragged out over the next few years. After the sweltering summer, a brutally cold winter caused at least two homeless people to freeze to death in Tompkins Square Park. The city nevertheless allowed the homeless encampment to remain. In the meantime, squatter-occupied buildings near the park were cleared and demolished, prompting new protests by the squatters and their allies.32 In the summer, clean-ups began again in the park, with police in riot gear protecting city sanitation workers as they removed the tents and lean-tos of the homeless. More owner-abandoned buildings on the Lower East Side were condemned and razed, their squatter occupants retreating to the shantytowns (“Bushville,” “Dinkinsville” for newly elected Mayor David Dinkins) constructed in the rubble lots even further to the east or to other sections of the city. Inevitably the homeless and their allies filtered back into Tompkins Square, and the stand-off continued until June 1991, when Mayor Dinkins ordered the park closed so that a $2 million renovation program (a bankrupt city budget notwithstanding) could be carried out. Recording the event, a Villuge Voice journalist noted: “Tompkins Square looks more and more like occupied Berlin with each passing day.” When, in August 1992, the park reopened, its bourgeois accommodations offered few reminders of the combat zone it had been .33 “This i s Germany! It’s 1933!” ... 171 Not Berlin in 1945, but the East Village in 1992. Photo by the author. As put by the New York bands, the social and political conflicts around Tompkins Square Park transcend standard-issue punkhardcore gloom-and-doom ideology. The titles of recent album releases say it directly enough: Last Warning, by Agnostic Front; Suck City, by Cop 172 Journal of Popular Culture Shoot Cop; Extinction, by the veteran Lower East Side band Nausea, with the track “Inherit the Wasteland”; Totul Destruction, by Unsane; False Prophets’ Invisible People, with “Plenty of Death for All.” For its part, Missing Foundation recommended its followers to Ignore the White Culture (1990) and Go Into Exile (1992). Pursuing the analogy with Hitler’s Germany, the band recalled Bertolt Brecht’s grim observation of what had happened in 1933. Few realized at the time, Brecht wrote, that demands to silence dissent and control artistic expression marked the start of what would become a drive to exterminate an entire people. Quoting Brecht on the Nazis’ cultural policies, Peter Missing intoned: But these strokes were only preparations For more drastic measures A spiritual preparation for total war Which is the total enemy Of all culture “Assault on Your Life” And then, with an ironic twist on its own political past, “The party’s just begun.”34 With the U.S. in the grip of reaction, cultural and political struggle has to relocate. The future lies instead with tribal war and Third World Resistance, with, for example, Peru’s Shining Path Guerrillas or with the Yanomamij Indians in the Venezuelan Rain Forest. Capitalism and fascism, multi-national corporations and the police state have to be fought at the global level, through the struggle against ecocide, genocide, and the illusory expectation of world peace (“World peace is dead”).35On its most recent recording Missing Foundation rejects the triumphalism that characterized-however briefly-the American mood following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Communism. Far from vindicating American foreign policy and the culture of the national security state, events in the U.S. and around the world have brought the planet to the brink of extinction (“Coming to You in a Ball of Fire”). There is only one recourse: Go into exile The world is a mess There are no solutions Go into exile. “Go into Exile” Chief ideologist Peter Missing appears in fact to have spent most of the past few years in Germany-why remain in America amidst the “This i s Germany! It’s 1933!”. .. 173 i 0 a Q e 174 Journal of Popular Culture derivations when you can get so much closer to the real thing?-while the rest of the band has continued a scattershot performing existence in New York. Despite its reputation Missing Foundation booked a couple of club dates in 1993, and in 1994 the band (along with a spin-off, Disassociate) played at a Tompkins Square Park MemoriaVMemorial Day Concert, which appropriately enough ended in a bottle-throwing clash with the police.MProperty wars on the Lower East Side continue, although the city has managed to disperse major concentrations of the homeless by bulldozing the shantytowns and fencing off empty lots. Squatter struggles are by no means over, despite a tougher policy to empty occupied buildings by the administration of Republican Rudolf G ~ i l i a n i . ~ ’ In the fall of 1994 squatters who had renovated several buildings on East 13th Street succeeded (at least temporarily) in getting an injunction to block the city from evicting them. So much for fascism and the police state on the Lower East Side-thwarted in the courts by an arguable legal claim to “adverse posse~sion.”~~ If “fascism” as a mechanism for social protest has been exhausted in the East Village struggles of the 1980s, what then of fascism as a rock aesthetic? If fascism is irresistible as a temptation (as Albert Goldman suggested), where has it currently relocated? An initial answer may be to look to heavy metal, and particularly its extreme sub-manifestations in death metal, grindcore, and the like. Yet for all the theatrics of violence and destruction, most bands working these genres eschew explicit invocation of fascist and Nazi memory. True enough, Holocaust imagery is frequently part of the overall package-although detached from historical specificity and fused with even more generalized notions of incineration and apocalypse; and at the more obscure edges of metal subculture such exotica emerges as Women of the SS (with a video of “Naughty and Nice Nazis”). But in general, ultra hardcore and metal bands prefer to pick and choose from the repertory of horror films, pornography, and the theater of cruelty than to dig about in the toxic waste of Nazism. When extreme heavy metal expresses politics at all, the presentation is so anodyne as to be irrelevant. By one reading, heavy metal, all its rhetorical excess and carefully constructed abnormality aside, “creates communal attachments, enacts collective empowerment, and wor