sub03 - PUNKINTERN - a preamble to the new barely human zine and tape
+++wherefore art thou punkintern? feat. DICKS, THE STALIN, KINA and ZOUNDS___
The ‘new’ zine and tape that was supposed to release in September 2023 is almost ready to ship (in March 2024) — thanks for waiting! For those who missed it: paid subscriptions have been switched off since I keep failin’ to deliver, but all existing subscribers are covered for the PUNKINTERN tape. If you’d like a copy of this zine/tape, and/or missed out on any back catalogue, shoot me an email to arrange one at max@barelyhuman.info ($15AUD each + P&H, or three tapes and zines for $50AUD, postage included if in Oz). Some news on what’s to come in 2024 way down bottom of this email, but in the meantime, hum the internationale and envision an organised international punk community as we peek inside the next zine ish!
Another zine, tape, preamble… and a return to force-fitting some bands through tangential connections to see if anything is revealed. For the final issue of ‘Vol. II’ of the BH Zine & Tape series, we move from philistinism and band discipline to… images of anarchocommunism in 1980s punk and hardcore? Long suffering paid subscribers — 43 BARELY HUMAN fans can’t be wrong! — will know that lateness is a virtue here, but the six-month delay on this one is unique for (I hope) obvious reasons.
It’s been hard to find motivation to write about punk music through the existential dread that began in the late months of 2023, when Israel shifted gears from decades of occupation and apartheid in Palestine, to a live-streamed genocide in progress. Beyond the horrific images we’re shown every day, we’ve been forced to witness the mindset and inner workings of western liberalism: a belief system ostensibly predicated on liberty and freedom that, even when channelled through its media and cultural institutions, reveals a depraved need to prop up its own supremacy, at any price, and at any cost. With the unspoken motivation of keeping a military foothold in the Middle East as a third world war threatens, the liberal capitalist ideology headed by the US (and backed by its allies) want us to believe the unbelievable. That a ‘from the river to the sea’ chant for an autonomous Palestine freed of apartheid and occupation is anti-semitic, but that anonymous complaints of the ‘threat’ of a Palestinian flag, pin or shirt isn’t anti-Arabism or Islamophobia. Or that the state of Israel (backed by over $3 billion a year in US funding) is in existential danger from a Palestinian population forced into a region under so much stress that half the population is under the age of eighteen, and thus must be carpet bombed (and we’re asked not to question why the population of Gaza isn’t following global ageing trends.) So if this is the logic of the same western liberalism that gives me the freedom to write this and have my choice of fifteen different brands of plain flour…then fucken sue me if I sound ungrateful.
In this context, thinking, reading or writing about anything but Palestine has felt strange and futile. Six months back, I’d planned a discussion of 1980s punk bands THE STALIN, THE DICKS, ZOUNDS and KINA, made the cover art, mixed down and dubbed all the mix tapes, wrote most of the zine, then in October, sat it all on the shelf waiting for the right time…but I really don’t think a ‘right time’ is coming. Still, a part of me felt there was something in discussing punk’s historical anarchocommunist tendencies in the face of broken liberal ideology playing out in the newspapers. Maybe there’s something there…but if not, I justify the attempt thusly: to anyone in the international punk community making even the most partial defence of Israel, the USA, the EU and their stooge colonies in the face of 30,000+ dead Palestinians… how would you fare in a room arguing that case to Garry Floyd and THE DICKS, Michiro Endo and THE STALIN, the Italian hardcore community surrounding KINA, and the anarchopunk networks that gave us ZOUNDS? I picture this confrontation and ask myself: wherefore art thou PUNKINTERN????
As always, the tape does the talking, and the zine does the (barely legible) walking, but I guess at some point the preamble should discuss the music that shapes the thesis. The four bands here fit as two sides of a coin: Side A features THE DICKS from Texas (a band self-described as “commie fags” who toured Reagan’s America flanked by communist iconography) and THE STALIN from Fukushima (fronted by socialist Michiro Endo, who chose the name due to the Japanese hatred of Joseph Stalin with the rationale: “it is very good for our image.”) Where both THE DICKS and THE STALIN employed the allusion of their politics more as an aesthetic dabbling and back door belief system than anything in practice, Side B flips to two active anarchist groups: KINA from Aosta (Italian hardcore to folk-punk group who dipped in and out of Italy’s squatted social centres) and ZOUNDS from Reading (an anarchist punk group from the UK, famed for having first crossed paths with CRASS after their van broke down a short distance from Dial House.) Whether this is a consistent quaternary, and whether the thesis of some imagined punk international has any credence at all is up to you…but don’t let this rushed little preamble send you astray: the zine & tape is much sloppier.
Just like the calls for reclaiming philistinism in Issue 2 (feat. NO TREND, CRUCIFUCKS, FLIPPER and URINALS), or the calls for a return of the disciplinarian in Issue 3 (feat. THE FALL and DEAD KENNEDYS), the PUNKINTERN thesis began as a joke at my own expense that lost its sense of humour on repetition. To me, the promise of this DIY punk thing has always been beyond just making music without pandering to the pulleys and levers of the market, but also on some level, in locating our politics in solidarity with the ‘underground’ analogues we side with culturally: the working class, the oppressed, anyone forced to subvert and insubordinate from below. That’s what drew me into the DIY ethic anyway: an ethic that led my brain, heart and soul aligning somewhere within the communist and anarchist cloud, and is making me feel absolutely insane whenever those assumptions get sidestepped. So! Wherever DIY communities get used as stepping stones for ascendant media personalities; wherever punk bands adopt the rationale of the music industry to get ahead; and wherever the promise of radical upheaval from below that punk (often falsely) declared gets used as a little edge in the market… I’d like us to answer to a punkintern. Maybe I’m still joking… but is it really that crazy to suggest that some level of oversight by committee should hold us to what we’re supposed to be doing here? (Probably, yes).
— email max@barelyhuman.info to arrange a copy of the PUNKINTERN zine & tape —
+++other updates___ // 2024 preview
__what is to be done in 2024???? i have answers only for this newlsetter: there are a couple of great Q&A’s in the works that will publish in the coming months, and while i hope to keep those coming this year, i’ll try to work in more contemporary DIY coverage, while planning some ~can barely human be a record label~ experiments. and even more hopefully →
__SEASON 2 of the BARELY HUMAN ‘podcast’. while the zines and tapes were supposed to help the writing of a new series, i just ended up chasing my tail for three years instead. so… i’ve started writing some episodes, and will be DIY’ing everything on the recording & production front, which i’m sure will sound just great. the series will release in two episode lots on cassette, CD-R and mp3 first, with the full 12-episode season streamable once it’s finished. don’t wait up for me, but expect some of the episodes to release by the second half of the year!
__and to circle back to the themes above…if you’re doing any work with a DIY, anarch-commun-social-ist, or social justice bent, and i can ever help at no charge with editing, writing, proofreading, or any task you think i could help with from sydney: please email me any time at max@barelyhuman.info