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Inside out
A film about what blackness means to punk rock
BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN

James Spooner, director of the documentary Afro-Punk: The "Rock N Roll Nigger" Experience, spent a long time trying to live what he calls the "American ideal" — that is, the illusion that race doesn’t matter. "Like most people who live like that," he says over the phone from Atlanta, "it ends up kicking you in the ass. It’s not a reality." After spending 10 years immersed in the punk scene in California and New York, Spooner realized he wasn’t "addressing the issues that were right there in front of me, namely race." So he decided to document his experience, as a black American and a punk, through the voices of more than 80 persons.

With the relentless force of a hardcore show, Afro-Punk takes a challenging look at racial identity within the punk scene. Punk’s DIY creed was more than an æsthetic: it drove the entire production. Spooner had no formal (or informal) film training. He maxed out a couple of credit cards to buy a computer and a camera, harvested a list of persons to interview, took two cross-country trips, and taught himself how to edit. The result, which screens next Saturday at the Lucy Parsons Center, follows four protagonists who, like Spooner, define themselves as black and subscribe to the punk-rock lifestyle; all of them are in different stages of confronting what it means to be black in an almost exclusively white scene. Episodes from their lives are interspersed with performances by Bad Brains, Tamar-Kali, and Ten Grand, and interviews with members of Fishbone, the Dead Kennedys, Candiria, and TV on the Radio.

What’s immediately apparent is the duality that blacks in the punk scene face. Punk is touted by Spooner’s subjects as being welcoming, inclusive, the only context in which they can express themselves. Yet the same people describe the alienation they’ve felt being the only black person in the audience. In Spooner’s words, "total dedication to the scene often equals total disregard for racial identity." There’s an inclusive/exclusive dichotomy that Spooner sees mirrored in America as a whole. "I think every subculture is a reflection of the culture it’s residing in. In a lot of ways, the United States is that way — welcoming if you play by the rules. The thing that’s unique about the black experience in the United States is that we have a way of inventing something and then being alienated from it."

Spooner confronts this alienation, and his project has proved an antidote to it. "It wasn’t a gift I was trying to give or expected to give in such a big way," he says, and yet a real community has developed around the message board on the film’s Web site, which offers forums on race, gender, politics, and movies plus a "Punks Meet Punks" section. A coffee-table book is even in the works. But for Spooner, the most affirming consequence was being invited by New York’s New Museum to create a high-school curriculum on race identity in the new media age. He describes his goal as "expanding the idea of what Afro-punk can be. It’s a metaphor for black rebellion — anything that pushes the boundaries of the mainstream perception of what black is can be considered Afro-punk. I want to get that message out there, to give people of color an alternative to all the crap that’s being fed to them."

Afro-Punk: The "Rock N Roll Nigger" Experience screens next Saturday, November 20, at 7 p.m. at the Lucy Parsons Center, 549 Columbus Avenue in Boston. Donations will be accepted; call (617) 267-6272, or visit www.afropunk.com


Issue Date: November 12 - 18, 2004
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