“… Been An Afro Since Birth”*
I just got back from a trip to Washington, D.C.to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and while I’m not really moved by Miley’s twerking, I am still sore about missing the other live music event in Brooklyn this weekend, the AfroPunk Festival.
Last year AfroPunk seemed to have finally arrived. I remember remarking to a friend that the time had come for this nine year old fest that now represented all things left of center in music, art and fashion for Black folk. I recall well its humble beginnings and the tiny screenings of the documentary for which it was named and from which spawned the music festival celebrating and, most importantly, acknowledging the presence of the afro that had always been (marginalized) on the punk scene. The film put the spotlight on punk bands like Bad Brains and Fishbone, and the afros that listened and slammed to them in the moshpits — black like me with fro-hawks (decades before Diddy), piercings, and purple hair, wearing the badges of outsiders in their communities.
Growing up as a New York transplant on the island of Bermuda, a British colony, I was a Muslim American girl who was into an alternative post-punk aesthetic and felt somewhat like an alien on the twenty-six square mile island. Having limited access to Hip Hop, I connected instead with the angst of bands like the Smiths, the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Pixies. When it was released, the 2004 AfroPunk documentary validated the feelings of the outsider status of my teen years and connected me to those of us sprinkled throughout an alternative scene that went unconnected pre-internet. Prior to its release, I had bonded instead with non-black friends over this music that expressed our collective inner struggle as we realized that our roundness did not fit in the square holes we were expected to fill.
This alternative scene, however, left very little room for another side of me: a celebration and acknowledgment of my blackness, a fact that I felt needed to be ignored to fit in. Nonetheless, I wore my doc martens (black oxfords, later oxblood and then brogues), shapeless dresses, and dyed my “natural” all types of colors. Years later after I grew dreds, I attempted to dye one of them purple — a nod to my post-punk past — while I was brand ambassador for Converse, the producer of the punk staple, the Chuck Taylor. The purple dye wouldn’t take and I was told I would have to bleach my hair, completely stripping it down, to get a purple dred — a conundrum for me, a step I was not ready to take and perhaps related to reasons why I and my multi-culti crew eventually found a home in Hip Hop. It was a genre created by another outsider, DJ Kool Herc, an immigrant using a technique developed in Jamaica to connect with a new crowd.
Punk emerged in New York around the same time that Kool Herc was spinning parties in the Bronx, but it adopted a nihilistic ethos that it would take Hip Hop a couple of decades to espouse. Hip Hop had been about making it in society or transforming it rather than opting out, making connections rather than disconnecting. While the fashions were certainly similar to punk in its beginnings, including leather and spiked clothing, Hip Hop was all about community and coherence, and eventually expressed political undertones as it entered the Reagan Era and Afrika Bambatta gave the culture a moral compass. British Punk adopted similar social leanings during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister around the same time and thus the two have always seemed to be kissing cousins, in their subculture manifestations at least.
This is why I wasn’t surprised when the urban community and the genre it spawned took to the punk fashion aesthetic and skull and cross bones replaced diamond encrusted crucifixes in the last couple of years. But growing up, the parallels and appeal of “the punk” brand of angst to the African-American seemed only visible to me. This foresight afforded me an outsider status that I came to wear as a badge of honor. The blues of The Smiths were for me, a modern middle class manifestation of Billie’s, a martyr for her art and, in my opinion, a true AfroPunk. I finally saw Morrissey (of The Smiths) perform live for the first time in 2004 at the Apollo. Yeah, he survived his blues, as did I, and yes, we met on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
I took my two year-old daughter proudly to the AfroPunk Festival last year and marveled in its growth, its acceptance, its very ripeness, and in the post-coverage of the festival in Rolling Stone and Vibe alike. The “afro punk” had arrived and was showing out.
With artists like Questlove, the White Mandingos , Chuck D and Living Color on the lineup this year, it seems that the kissing cousins of Hip Hop and Punk have reunited under the banner of AfroPunk — I hear Chuck D SHUT IT DOWN and I unfortunately missed it. I was instead at the 50th Anniversary March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where heroes, leaders, and foot soldiers of the civil rights struggle came together to honor those that worked so that I would have access to punk music at my elite integrated schools as well as mosh in that pit, and then go to the same ladies room as my girlfriends to freshen up. It was humbling to sit with the thousands that bussed in from across the country, of every hue, denomination, and sexual orientation to commemorate a movement to which we owe so much … and to continue the March.
A weird circuitous path through the music industry, Converse, and school in Europe, led me to my current position as the Marketing Director at the National Urban League, one of the oldest civil rights and urban advocacy organizations in the United States. So it was mainly for work that I traveled to D.C this weekend, producing a “Drum Majors For Justice Celebration.” But with conversations about the dearth of Disney princesses of color at the birthday party for the three year-old daughter of the same friend with whom I bought my first pair of doc martens, and the parents of Trayvon Martin speaking at our event this weekend, I’ve no doubt why the March must continue: so that my daughters can choose to be punks or a princesses; to get decent educations and jobs; to participate in this democracy if they’re so inclined; and to go to and from the store with or without Afros. Despite the celebrations in both Brooklyn and D.C. this weekend, these are paths not yet promised.
*Title from “Afro Connections at a Hi Five,” De La Soul Is Dead, De La Soul 1991
