The History of Punk in Los Angeles: Dewar MacLeod's Kids of the Black Hole

Future historians are quite likely to look back at the period from the late 1970s through the early 1980s as a pivotal time in the transformation of Southern California, along with the transformation of American society and global capitalism at large. In Kids of the Black Hole, Dewar MacLeod illuminates this time and place by reconstructing the history of California punk rock in an age of “postsuburbia.” MacLeod refers to postsuburbia in several different contexts, but in broad terms it is used to denote the consequences of spatial de-centering and the fragmentation of social life within the Southern California suburbs as they were being transformed by emergent modes of post-Fordist capitalism in the 1970s. MacLeod examines the punk scene not only as a symptomatic reflection of the social conditions of postsuburbia but also as a collective response to those conditions; he describes the local punk scene’s DIY institutions as a “modernist response to postmodern consumerism and fragmentation” (100).

MacLeod provides a comprehensive and balanced history of a punk scene that has not received as much attention as its New York or British counterparts but still represents an important and influential moment for this music and subculture. His methodology includes interviews with some of the key participants in this scene and a seemingly exhaustive collection of local punk fanzines. MacLeod’s writing style is accessible and lively, and it should satisfy fans who are looking for a book that captures the energy and fun of the scene instead of just another academic treatise. In the first chapter MacLeod discusses his own experience with punk as a kid who grew up in the L.A. suburbs, drove to Hollywood’s Sunset Strip to see the Ramones in 1977 and yet was initially confused by punk; only later did he become fully immersed in the punk scene as a college student in the Bay Area. MacLeod was also in attendance at the Elk’s Lodge on Saint Patrick’s Day 1979, an infamous event where the LAPD arrived at a punk show (headlined by the Go-Go’s) in full riot gear and proceeded to administer a vicious and indiscriminate beating on the punks; one of Kids of the Black Hole’s highlights is MacLeod’s vivid description of these events at the beginning of chapter 5. 

 

As MacLeod traces the history of punk in Southern California, the first few chapters of Kids of the Black Hole portray some key individuals and bands that were crucial in shaping the music and subculture but have not received much attention in other books about punk. Among those who MacLeod’s history touches on: Greg Shaw, the rock writer who created Bomp! Magazine and Bomp Records; Claude Bessy, aka Kickboy Face, who edited the zine Slash, sang for the band Catholic Discipline, and helped create the record label that released the music of the Germs, X, and other L.A. punk bands; Iggy Pop, the singer who helped shape, and literally embodied with his self-mutilating antics, the style of punk performance after he moved to L.A. in 1977; Richard Meltzer, the rock critic, songwriter, radio host, and “musician” who formed the joke band Vom (short for Vomit); the Runaways, the all-female rock band, managed and promoted by Kim Fowley, that anticipated punk and the postsuburban aesthetic. Perhaps the most important figure in all was Rodney Bingenheimer, whose English Disco on Sunset Boulevard had become a central spot for the L.A. music world during the 1970s, and who brought the latest trends in British music to L.A. via the English Disco as well as his radio show on KROQ.           

 

The key contribution of MacLeod’s book is that it follows the migration of punk from its regional origins in Hollywood and bohemian Los Angeles out to the suburbs, where a “hardcore” subculture that was more violent and macho, and less artsy, compared to the original punk scene took root in Huntington Beach, Fullerton, and other beach towns and suburbs across Southern California. In Huntington Beach, for example, swarms of young men who called themselves HBs would come to hardcore shows with the intent of starting fights and intimidating everyone around them. The music of the hardcore scene was faster and more aggressive, and MacLeod’s lyrical analysis also reveals the recurring themes of boredom and alienation in the social context of postsuburbia, consumerism, and the disintegration of the family. While Ronald Reagan was the most frequently vilified and parodied figure in hardcore lyrics and visual art, in MacLeod’s reading he “was more like the absent patriarchal father, one who supposedly ruled with an iron fist in a velvet glove, but who in fact did not rule at all.”    

 

In this sense, MacLeod is able to describe hardcore punk as both a form of resistance and a reflection of the social conditions of postsuburban Southern California during the Reagan years.  One of MacLeod’s sharpest theoretical insights is to situate the spatial practices and tactics of punk—from skating to surfing to squatting—within the geographic environment of postsuburban fragmentation, fetishism, and hyperreality.  Developing in the context of an atomized form of everyday life organized by a triangular route between the tract home, the office park, and the shopping mall, Southern California’s hardcore punks created a subculture that fashioned itself as rebellious but in reality was simply anti-social; comparing it to Northern California’s more politicized punk scene, MacLeod writes that “in postsuburban Southern California, the politics were diffuse, inconsistent, cohering only vaguely around such words as ‘anarchy,’ ‘destroy,’ and ‘my rules.’” Above all, the hardcore scene was characterized by a search for authenticity within an inauthentic social environment, which put the subculture in stark contrast to something like the glam metal scene that was celebrating artifice, materialism, and hedonism on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip at roughly the same time. It in this sense that MacLeod’s history of Southern California punk illuminates the postsuburban social conditions that spawned it, at least insofar as this environment provided the negative point of departure for punk’s symbolic practices and politics.