There's this comic artist named Raeghan Buchanan, and she has this lovely little zine-style paperback comic called "The Secret History of Black Punk":
Early punk gets highly narrativized, mythologized really, in this very specific rigid way that excludes a lot of the real-life messiness of a international anticommercial artistic movement. In particular, Buchanan argues, the standard narrative of early punk largely excludes the contributions of Black musicians despite there being quite a few relevant people who were both ground-floor and influential in punk's development. Buchanan's book goes back and fills in the gaps.
Here I try to condense Buchanan's book (and some semi-coherent notes I made when I saw her give a talk about the book at TCAF this year) into a mixtape; every song below except #4 is from an artist Buchanan recommends. By the way, you can get Buchanan's book here if you're in the US, here if you're in Canada, or on Amazon; and she's got a super cool horror comic [she showed us at TCAF] in an upcoming anthology.
- "Noise Addiction", Pure Hell
Some of the most interesting stuff on Buchanan's list is live proto-punk acts in the rust belt in the 70s. Pure Hell formed in Philadelphia in 1974 but had moved to New York and were running in the same clique as Sid Vicious by the time they recorded this album ("Noise Addiction") in 1978. The shows they did around this time were well received but due to some sort of fight with their producer the album didn't get a commercial release until 2006(!). This is tragic, as this album rules. It is super raw.
- "Let the World Turn", Death
And here's oddly almost the same story again: Proto-punk band made of rust belt black teens, legendary live shows, recorded a revolutionary album but it got buried by the label for decades. Death formed sometime around 1973 in Detroit (1971 proper, but for the first couple years they were doing funk music under a different name) and is made up of three brothers; they're incredibly early on the punk timeline, but their sound is mature and fully-formed. I've found people seriously claiming Death invented punk.
This album was recorded in 1975 but saw no commercial release until 2009; apparently the sticking point in this case is that the label insisted they change their name to something other than "Death", but they refused. (Frustratingly, an unrelated metal band formed in LA in 1983 named Death and went on to be so famous that they wash out Death from Detroit completely in Internet searches.) This album goes real hard but I like this one track for its complex ~dynamics~. (And because of the subtle signs, still audible in the edges of the track, that this used to be a funk band.)
- "Skydive", Poly Styrene
Over in Britain, Poly Styrene fronted the punk-plus-saxophone band X-Ray Spex, where she turned in some admirable screaming from 1977 to 1979. But what is of more interest to me is this forward-thinking solo album she recorded in 1980.
Check out this lovely little pop track. Little flashes of clashy punk feels, but also strange currents of what five or ten years later would have been recognizably "ska" or "new wave". I have no idea how a listener in 1980 would have interpreted this but it feels super ahead of its time.
- "So Cold", Rocket from the Tombs
As mentioned, this one track is off-theme. Not from Buchanan's book, this is just some proto-punk I like. White kids from Ohio. Skip if you're here for the history, or listen if you just literally wanted a punk mixtape.
Rocket from the Tombs were a legendary live group in Cleveland that broke up after one year (1975), after which their members either formed other bands or died of drug-related illness. They never recorded an album, but in 2002 this incredible live record got released, "The Day the Earth Met the Rocket from the Tombs". It's stitched together from two live performances and has this lovely nasty feel throughout.
- "Modern Industry", Fishbone
Okay, back to Ms. Buchanan. Fishbone the band has been in continuous operation since 1979 (their most recent commercial release was last year) and were a key step in the process of Ska transitioning from the original, slow-tempo, proto-reggae form that developed in Jamaica in the 1950s, to the rock-ier form you're probably familiar with if you're a Millennial. Buchanan speaks of Fishbone in reverential tones, and talks about Fishbone t-shirts being the standard discovery protocol for Black punk fans in the 90s (apparently Bad Brains is a complicated subject).
Fishbone's discography is a vast ocean I've only skipped the surface of so far. But here's a goofy, really fun 1985 track somewhere near the intersection of ska, punk, and reggae, where Fishbone improvise names of radio stations for four minutes. (Though I'll admit it was a hard choice whether to link this, or the fantastic metal cover of "Freddie's Dead" [originally from the movie Superfly] they did in 1988).
⬇️ Click below for punk from the 2010s-2020s ⬇️
