Out of Step: A Comparative Approach to Local Music Scenes

In 1981, Ian MacKaye penned the words to hardcore punk band Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White” as a response to his experiences at Wilson High School in Northwest Washington, DC. When asked if the song might be misconstrued as racist, MacKaye offered an unreflective response: “Not at all, I don’t think. But I’ll explain it. I live in Washington D.C., which is 75% black [and] I’ve been brought up in this whole thing where the white man was shit.”[1] As a white student at a majority black school with a history of racial tension, MacKaye gave an explanation that he felt represented his life in Washington DC, a distinctly black city. Like the purported democracy on which the United States stands and the undemocratic reality of its capital, the contradictions of Washington DC can be heard in music. At the end of the twentieth century, as markedly black and white music scenes, go-go and hardcore punk, respectively, embodied diverging but not unrelated histories in the capital. Analyzing hardcore punk alongside go-go and in a local and historical context impels considering what made each scene of and about DC and the political environments out of which they grew. Taking a comparative approach to understanding punk history, this project will account for the entanglement of music scenes and broader political conditions out of which they formed and developed, represented by white anxiety and black hope by the end of the 1970s and start of the 1980s. Employing lyrics, fanzines, news sources, and oral histories, it will contend that while often not expressly political, music scene members within DC could not escape systemic and contradictory political realities that defined the city and, consequently, helped define their scenes.