Liner Notes — Justin Allen

As a teenager, when I first listened to the post-hardcore band The Blood Brothers, I did not like what I heard. I found their music jarring and confusing. Or, more specifically, I didn’t understand its intention. I’d become accustomed to pop punk that centered on hooks, and was used to songs with verses that cradled and offered catchy choruses as the main dish. But eventually, after numerous listens, I grew to love The Blood Brothers. To love the ways the guitar and bass bounce off one another. The sudden shifts in rhythm and tempo. The friction in their songs’ brash and abrupt contrasts.

Soon, I delved into the work of their contemporaries and predecessors on a journey that largely isolated me from mainstream music for most of my high school years. I frequented live punk shows on recreation center basketball courts and at bar-clubs in my suburb’s nearest cities, D.C. and Baltimore. Punk ushered me into my first experience with subculture.

Upon moving to New York City for college, I came into my queer Black identity, surrounded by other queer Black people with bar-clubs, again, as our environment and thumping club music as the soundtrack.

DJs in the scene took collage-like approaches to their sets, bringing together an array of genres and subgenres. Over the years many have attracted international techno audiences, echoing techno’s Black roots, contributing to its experimental thrust, and moving cavernous warehouses and compact dancefloors alike. A number of these DJs, like me, grew up listening to punk. And like with me, the influence of subculture persists into their adult lives.

As my day job in New York, I worked in museums and at arts organizations, beginning with an internship at The Studio Museum in Harlem, a museum focused on work by artists of African descent. After applying for the internship upon the recommendation of a supportive Black school advisor, I was shocked to be offered the position and, truthfully, had no idea what I was doing or what my job was about. I had no previous art historical training. I remember attending my first artist talk and not understanding what exactly an artist talk was. But eventually, over about eight years working at various places, I learned. I learned about the clunky bureaucratic intricacies of museums; the expansive landscape of the city’s small, medium, and large-scale art spaces; and the energetic web they formed across the boroughs.

In New York’s Black art world, I found myself immersed in yet another type of subculture.

In his essay On Afropunks and Other Anarchic Signifiers of Contrary Negritude, Greg Tate writes that “the black bourgeoisie has produced a unique set of discontents, malcontents, miscreants, and class traitors,” to which he includes beboppers, beatniks, Freedom Riders, Black Panthers, poets, jazz musicians and, emerging in the 80s and 90s, Black punks. “Escap[ing] from their class obligations,” these class traitors reject bourgeois politics and decorum with a kaleidoscope of tactics.[i]

We see one example of Black bourgeoisie discontent embodied, loud and clear, in conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady’s persona Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire, a Black beauty queen crowned in Cayenne, French Guiana in 1955. O’Grady developed the persona after entering New York’s art world in the late 70s to find racially segregated spaces and Black artists making “well-behaved” art. In her “guerilla invasions of art galleries” Mlle Bourgeoise Noire dawned a DIY dress and cape made of 180 pairs of thrifted white gloves, a crown, and a sash. In place of a bouquet, she affixed white chrysanthemums to a cat-o-nine-tails whip made of rope that, after handing out the flowers, she used to beat herself.[ii]

“The key moment,” O’Grady says, “was when she would throw down her whip and shout out her poems. They had punchlines like, on the one hand, ‘BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISK!’ And on the other, ‘NOW IS THE TIME FOR AN INVASION!’” As Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady crashed both Black and white art events, notably an opening at Linda Goode Bryant’s legendary Black avant-garde art gallery Just Above Midtown and a New Museum opening for an exhibition on personas that only included white artists.

Raised by Jamaican immigrant parents in Boston in the 1940s among the city’s Black middle class, O’Grady says that to become her persona she “had to strip away everything that had been instilled in [her] at home and at school.”[iii] The symbols in her performance pointed directly to the social constrictions placed on her and peers at their intersection of race and class. “In 1980, black avant-garde art, another middle-class construction, was equally repressed. That’s why Mlle Bourgeoise Noire covered herself in white gloves, a symbol of internal repression. That’s why she took up the whip-that-made-plantations-move, the sign of external oppression.”[iv]

I first heard O’Grady speak at the first artist talk I attended as a Studio Museum intern, during the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver. I was immediately drawn to O’Grady’s work, though I didn’t understand why at the time. As I continued in the art world, her varied job background (government officer, interpreter, rock critic, professor) showed me that a life as an artist was one in which I could combine and express my different experiences rather than subdue them to fit a single professional role. My jobs at arts organizations became a way for me to study art, meet and support artists like me, and invest in my own work.

Revisiting and building on my foundational experiences with punk has felt apt because, like being an artist, punk fits my approach to mixing diverse interests to identify my unique voice—a voice informed by my relationship to my Black bourgeoisie upbringing. Greg Tate describes Bad Brains, Fishbone, and Living Colour as bands composed of “musical virtuosos and black music historians who could have played any single genre they chose…but instead chose a genre that allowed them to mosh them all up as the creative moment inspired.”[v] At the intersection of punk and art, I can mosh things up.

For a commissioned performance in New York in August 2019, I invited S*an D. Henry-Smith, Taja Cheek, and Savannah Harris to play guitar, bass, and drums with me on vocals. In 2021, after S*an moved to Europe to pursue their grad degree, they recommended our mutual friend Tavish Timothy take their place, and the four of us joined under the name Black Boots to make a four-song EP.

The songs on the Ekphrastic Punk EP each respond to a different work by a Black artist, looking to these artworks’ materials and conceptual directions for lyrical, instrumental, and structural guidance. Along with responding to four different works of art, each song is a take on a different punk subgenre.

The opening track, Down My Hole, responds to William Marcellus’s assemblage Pink hole with city miles (2018), and takes its musical inspiration from hardcore. The artwork—a mass of itchy, pink wall insulation spiraled like cotton candy into a large, concentric disk, and held together by a wreath of tire tread and Timberland shoestrings—calls to mind, in its appearance and title, a sphincter. The distortion in hardcore felt like the perfect match for the scratchy material. The lyrics—an ode to bottoming—draw from punk’s blues roots and the sexual innuendos often found in blues songs.

Jetness, taking its musical inspiration from post-punk goth, responds to Kerry James Marshall’s 2009 paintings and 2010 etchings of Frankenstein’s Monster and the Bride of Frankenstein. Upon researching the origins of goth, I learned of the dub influence and bossa nova drumming in Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead and was excited to build on these African diasporic inspirations. [vi] [vii] Lyrically, the work describes a Black couple living in an isolated black house on a hill, and who, despite the haunted appearance of their abode, find freedom and comfort in the black darkness of night, inviting us in to bask in the jetness with them. I was inspired by the way Marshall builds dimension and depth in the skin of his Black figures, intermingling blacks of different shades, and depicting B/blackness’ complexity. I tap dance on the song too, to add to the atmosphere.

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Expliquez-Moi La Totalité responds to Lorraine O’Grady’s photo diptychs The First and the Last of the Modernists (2010) in the style of screamo. The artwork juxtaposes portraits of modernist poet Charles Baudelaire and Michael Jackson, at the same ages and striking mirrored poses, to visually represent O’Grady’s both/and concept. A rejection of the West’s dualistic, hierarchical thinking, she says of her use of the diptych: “With the diptych, there’s no being saved, no before and after, no either/or; it’s both/and, at the same time. With no resolution, you just have to stand there and deal.”[viii]

While researching the origins of screamo, a music critic notes of the band Saetia that their guitarist would "play a riff for only a measure or two then leave them dangling out in the open, unresolved and unexplained."[ix] This lack of resolution, I felt, made screamo the perfect subgenre to pair with O’Grady’s work. Lyrically, the song describes the ways both/and-ness has shown up in my own life: attending mostly white Catholic church services in my suburb growing up, and driving northward to attend Baptist services at my dad’s side of the family’s all-Black church in D.C.

The final track, Mars, responds to Kamille Jackson’s painting Triangle Painting (2020) in a style that falls somewhere between hardcore punk and alternative rock. With geometric and organic shapes both layering with and cascading into one another, the painting’s pink-purple-blue colors allude to bisexual lighting, a lighting scheme used throughout media to represent bisexual and queer characters, narratives, and environments. To interpret the layering of abstract shapes, the song’s chorus employs polyrhythm, the vocals, guitar, bass, and drums all ruled by distinct patterns in time while also working together. Lyrically, I decided to write about the Mars placement in my zodiac chart, inspired by the prevalence of astrology in queer circles I’ve been in. To match the frankness of my Mars in Aries: a direct address to tyrannical former bosses, shitty ex-friends and lovers, and elitist conformists I’ve met working in the art world.

Time to take off the white gloves.

[i]Greg Tate, “On Afropunks and Other Anarchic Signifiers of Contrary Negritude,” in Vershawn Ashanti Young and Bridget Harris Tsemo, eds., From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 155.

[ii] Lorraine O’Grady, Writing in Space (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2020), 8-9.

[iii] O’Grady, 210.

[iv] O’Grady, 111.

[v] Tate, 156.

[vi] Sound Field, “Which Was First, Goth Music or Fashion?” (https://youtu.be/QLlyPaa8978).

[vii] Rob Hughes, “Bauhaus on ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’: ‘It was the ‘Stairway To Heaven’ of the 1980s,’” Uncut, February 28, 2020. (https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/bauhaus-on-bela-lugosis-dead-it-was-the-stairway-to-heaven-of-the-1980s-123408/)

[viii] O’Grady, 140.

[ix] David Anthony, “20 Years Ago, Saetia Defined Screamo in Just Nine Songs,” Vice, March 23, 2018. (https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvnkmv/saetia-lp-1998-the-shape-of-punk).

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