Professor Shayna Maskell offers an engaging scholarly look at the origins of the DC hardcore scene with “Politics as Sound – The Washington, DC, Hardcore Scene, 1978-1983.” She introduces us to foundational bands like Bad Brains, Teen Idles, Minor Threat, State of Alert (S.O.A.), Government Issue (G.I.) and Faith, examining their buzzsaw sound and aggressive, often alienating lyrics.

But she also examines at length how they were shaped by their D.C. backdrop, a setting that sharply contrasted power and poverty, with starkly defined lines for class and race as well as deeply ingrained notions of masculinity.

Many of these themes get chapter-length examinations in the book, with quotes from scene leaders and fans ranging from Henry Rollins to Ian MacKaye. The book also offers a chronology of the scene as it grew and splintered from 1978 to 1983. Maskell carries us along as bands form and dissolve at the same lightning-style tempo of their music. As she does, she shares a sense of a growing cultural movement, one that struggles to find venues to welcome it and that is accompanied by surprising violence, both near the stage and on the streets.

“Politics as Sound” is an academic book at heart–an accessible one, to be sure, but one with extensive analysis of social theory and topics like hegemonic masculinity. As a layperson, I wasn’t familiar with all the language and terminology, but the author did a great job bringing the reader along with her, even in the denser sections. It was like being in class with a favorite professor when she outlined the differences between subculture and social movements or explored how straightedge is an alternative form of dominant masculinity.

If you’re interested in D.C. hardcore or the forces that shape musical subcultures, you will find her book to be an appealing, thought-provoking read.

Quotes

“Straightedge as both a subculture and social movement worked to reinscribe not only what it meant not to imbibe (drugs, alcohol, cigarettes) but also what it meant to be a teenager. The cultural narrative of coming of age and the concurrent expectation of rebellion via excess, the rituals and rules ascribed to high school, were subverted and reworked by straightedge.”

“Being a (straightedge) male meant not drinking, which aligned with the traditional masculine directive of doing your own thing, being an “inner-directed male” instead of the less manly “other-directed” approval-seeking male. The point is not to undercut the significance of straightedge’s no-drinking practice…such temperance was a meaningful and perhaps even risky choice to make as a young man being constantly regulated and measured for one’s manhood. But it is equally important to note the ways in which one form of hegemonic masculinity is traded for another form.”

“For MacKaye and larger swaths of the DC hardcore scene, ‘The structure of society is an oppressive concept. I don’t see self-destruction as a valid form of rebellion.’ Instead, straightedge became that rebellion.”

“Straightedge, from its inception in the heart and soul of Ian MacKaye and its infancy years in the DC hardcore scene, was always-already both a subculture and a social movement. What is the difference? Why does that matter? Who cares if we label it one or the other? To put it simply, what is at stake–as with many a semantic struggle over labeling–is power, agency, and legitimacy. Subcultures are frequently relegated to the realm of youth, and in doing so, afforded with less social and political legitimacy and therefore power. They are just kids. Resisting. Rebelling. They’ll grow up, become adults and change their identity. And if these subcultures do pose a threat to the status quo and to hegemonic norms in some way, those threatening subcultures will be culturally neutered by either commercialization and commodification–what I call, tongue-in-cheek, the Hot Topic-ization of subcultures–or delegitimized by the media, politicians, or adults in general–or both. Social movements, on the other hand, are more often understood as the purview of adults. They are constructed as formal organizations with formal political goals and thus represent a more formal and legitimate type of power. They can still be neutered by the dilution of their values and beliefs into political platforms, but they are still imagined having more (direct) influence on sociopolitical outcomes through their use of more institutional means. Yet, to use a good ole cliche, subcultures and social movements are different sides of the same coin. By understanding subcultural practices as a part of social movements, we can include noninstitutional arenas in which loosely connected individuals enact social change and recognize the resistance of personal value identities connected to collective identities.”

“This identification was not necessarily generalized or nationalized, but instead specific to the often marginalized substratum of DC. Teen Idles’ and Minor Threat’s music, their sound, signified the building of frustration and overlooked disconnect between the upper-class facade of DC and the disparate reality of those less privileged. Repetition and monotony in the bands’ music act as a symbol of the sameness and ennui of working-class tedium. The aforementioned duplication of the same chord progression contributes its part; the recurrence of E/B/G/D/A/E operates as routine and ritual–not only the accessibility of basic chords as classlessness but also the repetition as the slog of everyday life.”

History podcaster Mike Duncan offers a warm, appreciative look at the life of the Marquis de Lafayette with “Hero of Two Worlds.” Lafayette’s life had many acts, including:

• an orphan of obscure nobility
• a rich and awkward teenage member of the court at Versailles
• a general in the American Revolution
• an advocate for French liberty
• an enemy of Robespierre
• a prisoner and penniless exile
• an uneasy adversary to Napoleon
• and finally, a revolutionary once more, outmaneuvered politically in the new French society he helped to establish.

Above all, he was a man of passion and principles, and Duncan does a great job capturing the Marquis’ enthusiasms, errors, and oversights. It’s hard to believe the range of historic moments in which he played a demonstrative part.

Even applying the judgment of our later times, Lafayette shows an admirable depth of character, generally hewing the right path in treacherous times (and calling out the Founding Fathers on owning slaves.) The book is propulsive and readable, but it doesn’t feel slick or shorn of context.

Quote

Mauroy replied the Americans were not some novel species, they were simply transplanted Europeans “who brought to a savage land the views and prejudices of their respective homelands.” He proceeded to give Lafayette a brief moral history of European colonization: “Fanaticism, the insatiable desire to get rich, and misery–those are, unfortunately, the three sources from which flow that nearly uninterrupted stream of immigrants who, sword in hand, go to cut down, under an alien sky, forests more ancient than the world, watering a still virgin land with the blood of its savage inhabitants, and fertilizing with thousands of scattered cadavers the fields they conquered through crime.” This, Mauroy informed Lafayette, was the reality of the “new world” toward which they sailed.

“It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier’s mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”

Reading “The Awakening” now, it’s easy to see why polite society shunned the book when it was published back in 1899. The main character, Edna Pontellier, is part of that very society when the novel begins. She’s a wife, married to a businessman on the rise in New Orlean’s Creole community. She’s a mother too, an affectionate one, but distant, perhaps, and not fully engaged.

While summering on the coast, Edna develops an infatuation with a younger man. We think it may blossom into an affair, but it doesn’t. Instead, it frays that “garment” of convention, leading Edna to ponder what she wants in life and, moreso, to pursue it.

The rest of the book follows Edna as she tries to determine who she is, as opposed to who society has shaped her to be. It’s not a seamless process. Edna isn’t a saint or an activist; she sets up a studio and neglects it, has lazy days, times when she feels stuck and frustrated. But deliberately, she puts down the things that aren’t hers and tries to creates a space of her own, as best she can.

It proves to be a lonely space, prompting the book’s famous ending. But this sincere, likely doomed attempt makes the book a feminist statement, one that still feels unsettling today. As a reader, I can’t grasp the time in which this was written, and as a dude, I am insulated from the frustration coursing through Edna’s every action, a frustration that surely reverberates today. But “The Awakening” conjures this in plain, beautiful language, evoking a feeling that is still fresh and relevant.

I always find Kim Deitch’s graphic novels fascinating. They offer a blend of real-life history, secret societies, forgotten bits of Americana and talking cats or other weird bits of magic. It’s all anchored by his rock-solid art, which features precise black-and-white lines in an expressive early-animation style.

“Reincarnation Stories” fits the mold. We get a hole in Deitch’s retina, a parade of past lives, once-famous movie cowboys, a Native American tribe that relocates to the moon, old alt-comics memories featuring fellow artist Spain Rodriguez, and a bit of torment from his Felix-like antagonist, Waldo the cat.

It’s strange and artistic and weirdly engrossing. As always, Deitch blends the real-life elements with the made-up portions, making it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Maybe a drunk D.W. Griffith really did ID Deitch as the reincarnation of an former drinking buddy when the cartoonist was just 4 years old. It probably didn’t happen, but Deitch makes you wonder, in more ways than one.

In “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” David Mitchell offers what seems to be a restrained novel of manners and expands it into something far more unruly, strange and marvelous.

Our setting is a small island in shogun-era Japan, home to a handful of Dutch traders, the only Europeans permitted contact with the island. Jacob de Zoet is a young clerk, newly arrived with hopes of earning a fortune large enough to make him worthy of marrying the woman he loves back home. He struggles to understand this new place, to make allies, unravel corruption and stay committed to his would-be fiancee.

It seems the book will spend its span exploring this little world and the challenges of fealty and duty. But Mitchell doesn’t limit himself to that. It takes some time, but the world expands beyond the tiny Dutch island, and it also expands beyond de Zoet’s point of view, introducing us to betrayals and conspiracies, cults and cannon fire. There are whiffs of magic too, although whether it’s sorcery or stagecraft isn’t quite certain.

de Zoet is revealed to be more than he seems, as is the whole cast. Many of traders pause the narrative to briefly take center stage. They their own sad histories, from being trapped in a room of hungry orphans to gaining and losing the love of a lifetime in a brief stopover in Cape Town.

Mitchell is a special writer. One scene in particular still resonates in my memory. It centers on a one-sided sea battle, an execution ordered, than rescinded, for reasons that are carefully built but clear only to the person who offers the stay. The emotions in that scene are raw and real, speaking to Mitchell’s skill but also his daring. The book as a whole offers those same rewards.