"On Becoming a Punk Rock Sociologist"

I've been asked to write an autobiographical essay for an anthology about punk and academia. No idea when it will see the light of day, or more accurately the dust of the library, so I'm putting it here too.

I was born in Long Beach, CA and raised in the adjacent city of San Pedro, graduating from San Pedro High School in 1988. I’d like to be able to tell you all about how I was influenced by our hometown heroes, the Minutemen, or Black Flag or the Descendents or any of the other hardcore bands that emerged from the nearby cities of Los Angeles’ South Bay at this time. I can imagine a really good story about how the radical politics and do-it-yourself ethic of the local hardcore scene would inspire me to become the Marxist sociologist I am today. However, that story would be a lie, because the truth is that my paths to both punk rock and radical sociology were never that direct or linear, and I’m just not that cool.

In high school I was a devout partisan of thrash metal bands like Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and a couple dozen others with a more limited following. By the second half of the 1980s the California hardcore scene had fizzled out. There was this one punk dude who had “Minor Threat” written on the jacket he wore to school every day, but I didn’t know anything about them because the only people I hung out with were other longhairs and stoners. Still, there was a lot of punk influence in thrash metal, which was less about devils and dragons and more about indicting real world authorities, creating a local scene with indie record labels, and maintaining a veneer of authenticity that mocked the posturing and pomposity usually associated with heavy metal.

My headbanging roots notwithstanding, I almost voted for George Bush in the first election I was old enough to vote in, until my mother talked me out of it at the last minute. Like many other metalheads, I was personally rebellious but my half-baked political views amounted to nothing more than simple, knee-jerk libertarianism. I was entranced by power, enthralled by violence, and envious of wealth, and I also hated people I thought were weak or dependent, so it probably isn’t surprising that I almost voted for Bush.

I had begun college during that fall of 1988, as my parents were eager for me to leave my troublemaking metal friends behind and move north to attend San Jose State University. It wasn’t long before I found myself in classes taught by veterans of the New Left. One of them was Professor Douglas Dowd, who had been part of the Monthly Review editorial team with Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy and cofounded the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Dowd would typically begin his classes in Microeconomics with some thoughts about Marx or Ricardo before launching into a series of tirades that indiscriminately covered everything from the wastefulness of capitalism to the insanity of war and nationalism to the cruelty of child labor. This 70-plus year-old man would yell and point and curse and then stop suddenly, look out the window, and silently shake his head while muttering something about the insanity of our world. Many of the students in class were horrified and stopped attending after the first two weeks, but I was captivated. One day Dowd recited the lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and asked the class if that sounded like the kind of world any of us would want to live in, and I was the only student to raise my hand. “Then you’re a God-damn Communist!” he shouted at me.

O.K., so I guess I’m a Communist now. This was admittedly a major political about-face, but to this day I think my metal roots and cultural rebelliousness prepared me to embrace this stigmatized, marginalized political identity. I had grown up in a working-class seaport with a vague sense that the world wasn’t right, and now I was engrossed in my education to try and understand why. I was listening to the Bay Area’s progressive radio station KPFA and reading everything I could get my hands on, especially Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. My identity and style morphed from headbanger to something like a retro countercultural radical as I became absorbed in Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and anything else I could read or watch about the 60s, Students for a Democratic Society, and the counterculture.

I enrolled in a social theory class the following semester, and it was there that I read Marx for the first time and met my friend Mike Roberts, who today is also a sociology professor at San Diego State. Mike and I started a left campus organization and worked on publishing a newspaper that was unfortunately sabotaged by some other students just before it was about to be printed. Our social theory professor, Talmadge Wright, had also started a group called the Student Homeless Alliance that we became involved with. This was late 1990, and the United States was gearing up for our first war with Iraq, so Mike and I began working with other campus activists to create an anti-war coalition and organize an anti-war demonstration. I experienced my first 15 seconds of fame when my speech commencing the demonstration was sound-bitten for the local TV news.

At this time I knew a lot of people who were into punk rock, but my tastes hadn’t progressed that far yet. Some of my friends regularly made trips up to Berkeley to go to the Gilman Street club, but I never went. They played Dag Nasty, Green Day, and Big Drill Car for me but I absolutely hated all that melody. I thought it was cool that Bad Religion could reference Noam Chomsky and the like, but to this day their singer’s voice drives me crazy. One of my roommates was really into Fugazi, and although they’ve since become one of my favorite bands they just didn’t compute to me at that time. What my metal years had prepared me for was grunge and the whole Sub Pop/Seattle scene, so of course I took to Mudhoney and Soundgarden almost instantly. And then more locally there was Primus, Mr. Bungle, Psychefunkapus, the Limbomaniacs, and a bunch of other bands that formed a metal-funk-punk scene in the Bay Area.

By now my career goals had changed such that I wanted to go to graduate school and hopefully grow up to be a tenured radical like my professors. UC Santa Cruz was known to have a lot of Marxist and radical faculty members, especially in the sociology department, and so I transferred there in the fall of 1991. I did an internship with Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, the journal of Marxist ecology founded by James O’Connor, and worked with the Bay Area activist Frank Bardacke on a project about farmworkers. Other than that, however, there were a lot of people who talked radical politics at UC Santa Cruz but there wasn’t a lot of action, a possibly intentional result of the campus’ relatively isolated location in the mountains of central California. I joked with friends: what if a bunch of students demonstrate in the forest and there is no TV crew there to film them, do they make a sound? My only brush with revolution was accidentally getting hit in the side of the head with some sort of firecracker on the night of the Rodney King riots as the Santa Cruz students marched into town and trashed the local police department headquarters.

Nirvana’s Nevermind came out during my first semester at Santa Cruz. I remember that for weeks I would walk around the dorms and count how many rooms were blaring “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or some other song from the album. I knew it was a really big deal when the dreadlocked hippie kids who spent all day playing hacky sack and, as far I knew, listened to nothing but reggae and the Grateful Dead were suddenly talking about how much they wanted to see Nirvana when they came to San Francisco. The next two years or so would represent the pinnacle of the alternative rock/Lollapalooza era. Then the questions began: Did Nirvana sell out? Is alternative the new mainstream? Did I really just see a runway model wearing Doc Marten’s? Does anyone know anyone who likes to be called “Generation X”? Did that douchebag on the TV really just tell me that the new Subaru Impreza is just like punk rock?

At Santa Cruz I took a great class in the history of U.S. imperialism in Central America, read the Frankfurt School for the first time, and wrote research papers about the Black Panthers, American foreign policy, and the Wobblies. But by this time I had also been introduced to cultural studies, both in my courses on mass media and popular culture and in my conversations with activists who were influenced by identity politics and postmodernism. My relationship to cultural studies, as I discuss in more detail below, has always been deeply ambivalent. In the context of all these questions about alternative culture and Generation X, I could see that the issues raised by cultural studies about youth subcultures, hegemony, and resistance were still very pertinent and could not be ignored. I was especially taken with Lawrence Grossberg’s We Gotta Get Outta This Place, which as anyone who’s read it knows is loaded with pomo jargon but still raised what I thought were prescient questions about postmodern society, the ironic cynicism of youth culture, and the role that these had somehow played in maintaining the hegemony of conservatism.

I wrote a senior thesis under the direction of Professor Herman Gray about the media coverage of the movement against the Gulf War and graduated from UC Santa Cruz in the spring of 1993. I was on my way to graduate school and chose to enroll in the sociology program at UC San Diego because it advertised itself as having a strong emphasis in culture, which had quickly become my main field of interest. My first two years of graduate school were a rude awakening. I had chosen to study sociology because as an undergraduate it seemed so interdisciplinary and open-ended, like it was the best of all possible homes for my combination of interests in critical theory, radical politics, social history, and cultural studies. But as a graduate student I quickly discovered that professional sociology was a different animal altogether.

In time I learned that the sociology department at UC San Diego had indeed specialized in culture at one point in its history, but in recent years there had been a major shift toward historical-comparative sociology, and those faculty always seemed to be repeating the mantra that they were trying to make the program more “professional,” “competitive,” and “rigorous.” Yuk. Moreover, what the department did offer in terms of culture was mainly rooted in the apolitical traditions of microsociology like symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. Double yuk. Fortunately, critical theory and cultural studies had made strong inroads in UCSD’s departments of Communication and Literature, and in Ethnic Studies I discovered Professor George Lipsitz, who would serve as a de facto mentor in my study of neo-Marxist theories of culture.

San Diego was home to a bustling alternative music centered at a club called the Casbah, and I began going to shows there on a regular basis. After the success of Nirvana and other grunge bands, the major labels had gone scouting for new alternative rock acts to sign, and San Diego was one of a number of cities that was pegged as a potential “next Seattle.” Seven San Diego bands had signed with major labels during this time, and everyone from Rolling Stone to Details to the E! television network had done feature stories about the local scene. Beyond the hype, I discovered that there was indeed an exciting and musically diverse scene, and I instantly became a fan of the spastic noise of Trumans Water, Drive Like Jehu, and Heavy Vegetable, the retro punk of Rocket From the Crypt, and the cyborg prog-rock of Three Mile Pilot.

I was beginning to envision a dissertation project that brought together the cultural studies focus on music and subcultures with the sociological methods of ethnography and the neo-Marxist inquiry into the place of culture in post-Fordist capitalism. How all those pieces of the puzzle actually fit together would be something I would have to figure out along the way. Unfortunately, most of my sociology professors were vocally unsupportive of this idea. I had impressed many of them with my self-motivated interest in social theory, but for them music was a frivolous concern without any real sociological import. When I told the professor in my field methods seminar what I planned to do, he replied with a snarky tone, “It sounds like you’re just going to hang out with your friends.” Another one begged me to do something else—anything else, really—because I was “too close” to my project, and he eventually removed himself from my committee when I refused.

In actuality, I didn’t have any friends inside the scene, and rather than being “too close” I constantly felt like an outsider because not only was I not a musician, I was this geeky grad student who had all these esoteric theoretical and political questions about music and the scene. Lots of people told me that my project sounded like “fun,” and it was fun to go shows and hear live music in what I thought was a great scene, but it was nerve-wracking as hell to approach these people in a club and awkwardly ask them if we could arrange an interview. Let’s just say I found myself drinking a lot of “liquid courage” during those years.

Getting into the local scene enhanced my political consciousness, not because the bands themselves were concerned with political issues (most of them weren’t), but because I could see how they had formed a community based on creative work and participation. It wasn’t a dogmatic scene of the sort advocated in the pages of Maximumrocknroll, and therefore a great variety of musical styles and influences could be thrown together without apology. And so I began to see the form of democratic cultural production as more significant than the content of any particular political protest or “message.” This understanding of “punk” as a method of production rather than a specific style or sound opened up whole vistas of possibility and informed my belated musical education. Maybe I can explain it this way: Drive Like Jehu led me back to Fugazi and then even further back to Wire and then forward to the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü and then back again to the Gang of Four and Television. See, I told you my path to punk was ass-backwards.

While the Casbah and other local nightclubs were becoming a second home for me, I was still suffering from quite a bit of intellectual homelessness on campus. I was getting a lot more out of the graduate courses I was taking in other departments, so I stopped enrolling in sociology seminars after completing my minimum amount of required coursework and came very close to dropping out of the program. I took a position as a teaching assistant in an interdisciplinary freshman-level writing course, where the levels of overwork were legendary. Before long I had become heavily involved with the effort to unionize the academic student employees at the University of California and would be elected to serve on the strike committee as we planned a number of strategies for work stoppage. This took me further out of the bounds of the sociology department, as my social circle was now mainly composed of humanities students who were involved with me in organizing the T.A. union. Intellectually, however, I never embraced the kind of cultural studies that is practiced in the humanities, where meaning is mainly located in the “text” and acts of resistance are conceived as symbolic matters of reading and style. I was still fundamentally concerned with social process, and the Marxist in me still sought to link culture back to social structure. My experiences in the music scene redoubled these convictions: resistance was a matter of how people organized their community and engaged in creative work, not what people wore, how they cut their hair, or what they sang about in their lyrics.

My intellectual homelessness was glaringly evident and became a huge liability when I went on the job market for the first time in the fall of 1999. It seems that what transpired in my graduate program was something like a microcosm of what was happening in American sociology in general. There has been a great expansion of interest and research in culture among American sociologists since the 1980s, but these cultural sociologists have taken great pains to distinguish and insulate themselves from the broader field of cultural studies. The studies of popular culture and media, much less popular music, are very few and far between. American cultural sociology is significantly more conventional, eager to be accepted within the mainstream of the discipline, and rarely engaged with questions of power and resistance. Don’t take my word for it, listen to what one of the leading proponents has to say in its favor: “American cultural sociology is conservative rather than revolutionary in its academic program, unlike the British cultural studies model which has attempted to transgress disciplinary boundaries and create a completely new academic and discursive field.”

No matter what kind of theoretical and methodological spin I try to put on it, my work reeks of cultural studies simply because it is has the word punk attached to it. I sent out over 100 job applications during my first 3 years on the market without landing a single on-campus interview. I nearly gave up on the idea of an academic career on several different occasions, but a lack of other marketable skills and job experience made me feel trapped, and I still had a deep intellectual passion, not necessarily for sociology but for understanding social processes and contributing to social change. Fortunately I was able to hang on as an adjunct instructor of sociology at UC San Diego, as my courses on popular culture and youth attracted very high student enrollments; I taught a total of nearly 1,000 students during my final year there in 2001-02.

As my contract with UC San Diego and a long-term romantic relationship both came to an end at virtually the same time, I found myself living with my mother and collecting unemployment in late 2002. I was ready to give up on academia once and for all when I miraculously got a temporary position at the University of Kansas that began in the Spring 2003 semester and lasted through the 2003-04 school year. I sent out another heap of job applications but still couldn’t land a satisfactory tenure-track position, so I accepted another temporary appointment at Colgate University for 2004-05.

In 2005 I finally landed a tenure-track position at Florida Atlantic University. It’s not a prestigious school by any means, but it’s a good place for a punk like me: lots of older, “non-traditional” and working-class students, many of whom have roots in the Caribbean. Securing a permanent academic home has afforded me the time to finally finish turning my dissertation into a book titled Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis which will be published by New York University Press in 2009. Meanwhile, American sociology continues to aspire to the status of a science along the lines of economics and political science while attempting to avoid the stigma of the humanities conferred by cultural studies, and so there is no reason to expect that the study of punk or any other form of music will be moving into the center of the discipline any time soon. But somehow this feels like the appropriate place for a punk rock sociologist: screaming from the margins, denouncing the mainstream, and maybe—just maybe—developing the new ideas that are destined to shake up the establishment.