Sam McPheeters - Mutations: Twenty Years Embedded in Hardcore Punk

This is a Genuine Rare Bird Book

Rare Bird
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
rarebirdbooks.com

Copyright 2020 by Sam McPheeters

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited
to print, audio, and electronic.

For more information, address:
Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013

Set in Dante

Cover art by Neil Burke and Sam McPheeters.

Portions of this material appeared in Apology, Punk Planet, OC Weekly , and Vice .
The Touchable Sound interview first appeared in Touchable Sound: A Collection of 7-inch Records from the USA by Brian Roettinger, Mike Treff, and Diego Hadis (Soundscreen Design, 2010).
Reprinted with permission.

epub isbn: 9781644281338

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McPheeters, Sam, 1969, author. | Vail, Tobi, foreword author.
Title: Mutations: The Many Strange Faces of Hardcore Punk / Sam McPheeters; Foreword by Tobi Vail.
Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Genuine Rare Bird Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2020.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781947856981
Subjects: LCSH Punk rock musicHistory and criticism. | Punk rock musicians. | Punk culture. | BISAC MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Punk
Classification: LCC ML3534.3 .M46 2020 | DDC 781.66dc23

For Tolga and Orkun
Thanks again

You cant stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves.

Norman Mailer

Contents

Foreword

by Tobi Vail

Mutations is an anti-memoir by an unsentimental participant of hardcore punk, written during an era when nostalgia for the late twentieth century sells out music venues and festivals on a daily basis and auto-fiction is trending in the publishing industry. Instead of writing a glorified heroic narrative of his own life story told in the predictable chronological order through a narcissistic psychological lens, Sam McPheeters has chosen to reflect on his memories and experiences in their specific cultural context in ways that not only illuminate our understanding of the past but also encourage us to reflect on how history shapes our own lives and has created the current political moment. This is refreshing and also in character, as Sam is an outsider who is definitely not capable of being trendy, is a staunch contrarian, and has never been one to approach a creative work with a market-driven motive such as selling books, as a look at his total body of work quickly shows: hes not in it for the money.

Which brings us to the first question you may be asking yourself as you browse the new bookshelf at your local independent bookseller, or perhaps unearth a dusty copy of this relic in a public library years from now:

Who is Sam McPheeters?

If you know, you know and you can skip this part, but if you dont know (or even if you do), you are in luck, as this book will answer that question in depth. But first, allow me to introduce you to the guy, as he is an old pen pal of mine from the 1990s, when we were both active in what he insists on calling hardcore punk and I, like our mutual friend Aaron Cometbus, prefer to call underground music. We met when Sam was singing for one of the only good political hardcore bands that I knew about at the time, Born Against, and I was playing drums for Bikini Kill, a feminist punk group that was actively trying to reinvent both feminism and punk to be more inclusive of young women. Sam mentions our memorable first encounter when both bands briefly toured together in his essay on The Casual Dots so I will skip that here and he is emblematically self-deprecating about how we eventually became friends despite an initial fissure between our scenes, which intersected and clashed but really it makes sense. We are ultimately both self-reflexive fanzine nerds who take things way too seriously, tend to get stressed out and obsessive about music and its surrounding culture to the point of neuroses, and found a way to escape the existential horror of the world using bands and fanzines as cultural tools to overcome the mundane limitations of everyday life under capitalism. Our friendship was documented and preserved in the letters we wrote each other back then, which I still have, and they are funny little time capsules now.

For example, on November 23, 1993, Sam wrote: It was very good and surprising to get a letter from youI had actually assumed that everyone in Bikini Kill hated us on account of some fanzine weirdness two years ago. I guess not. Born Against had just moved to Richmond, Virginia, from New York City, finding themselves in a geographically isolated, insular punk scene, similar to the one I had recently returned to in Olympia after Bikini Kill had been living in Washington, DC for a year and a half. At that moment we both felt like exiles from scenes we had helped create and were trying to start over. I had written to Sams label Vermiform asking if they wanted to advertise in my fanzine, Jigsaw . Sam declined, claiming that funds were low, but this was the beginning of a lengthy correspondence that lasted for several years and by early 94, after becoming trusted confidantes, he did submit an ad to Jigsaw . I dont remember exactly what the beef was between our two groups, but we wrote it off as a non-controversy at the time of our reconnection. I valued Sams support of Bikini Kill from that moment on, as he perceptively assured me that Born Against had gone through a micro-version of what Bikini Kill went through, namely people adopting rigid interpretations of what they thought the bands approach or attitude or whatever was supposed to be and often making wrong, mean spirited assumptions about us as a kind of punk caricature.

At the time, most guys I knew in bands were definitely not actively going out of their way to support feminist punk, and what has become known as Riot Grrrl, was widely hated, actively demonized, and generally misunderstood as man-hating or separatist, neither of which was actually 100 percent true or false. Obviously, it was more nuanced, specific, and varied than that, but most people didnt get that far because they had ideological blinders on that amounted to fingers in their ears. They couldnt hear us, we couldnt reach them, yet we wouldnt go away. Despite incessant, nonconsensual mainstream media coverage, we were basically invisible and yet punished for simply existing, refusing to conform to societys bullshit rules about what young women could and couldnt do with their bodies in public space. This is what its like to be a woman trying to have a voice under patriarchy, and punk was no exception. Sam will be the first to admit that he didnt necessarily get any of that right away, but eventually he opened his ears and tried to hear to us, and I was grateful for his support. That is the kind of person he is. A tolerant, critical thinker who listens and tries to figure out what things mean beyond appearances and pushes past the status quo to gain a counter-hegemonic understanding of culture and politics.

Bringing us to the next question you might have, as you start to turn the pages:

Why read this book?

We are currently living in a different time period than the one discussed in this book, as Sams focus is mostly on the years of his involvement in hardcore punk, which took place from 19842004. Since that time, we have entered a period of what he aptly calls taste fragmentation. Punk has not ceased to exist, and, in fact, it could be argued that hardcore is more popular than ever before and no less viable as a cultural tool that empowers young people to have a voice and connect with each other outside of the music industry. In the past ten years, women, queers, people of color, and trans kids have moved from the margins to the center of hardcore. There are hardcore punk festivals all over the world that new and old bands play, and as an evolving form, the scene is arguably more all ages than ever before as the kids in eighties bands grew up they weirdly didnt quit playing in bands and you can still see bands like Negative Approach on tour, yet there are also new groups everywhere. I dont pretend to understand any of the nuances of egg and chain, as an old punk, but Sam didnt even know about meme-punk until a few months ago when I asked him about it. His response was classic Sam: Any explanation would ruin this, so I didnt bother to try to decode it for him. So what do us old guys have to say that could be of interest or use to the next generation? I really dont know, but this book is hilarious, amazingly well-written, and asks deep, probing questions about the nature of consciousness (is it a solitary experience?), whether or not music is actually communal, and what it all means. If you need specifics, this book contains the most extensively well-researched piece on Doc Dart from The Crucifucks that I have ever read, amazing insights on Die Kreuzen and Discharge, and celebrates one of the greatest bands in modern memory, The Casual Dots. If that sounds intriguing, you are in for a wonderful treat.