Tag Archives: LGBTQIA

Episode 21: Punk and Pride

Pride Month is rapidly passing and this weekend it’s Chicago’s turn to celebrate, so I thought I’d ponder the connections between punk rock and the LGBTQIA+ community.

First, I talk about Joe Strummer and the band’s support for the community, starting with “The Right Profile” from London Calling. “The Right Profile” is a song about the legendary but closeted actor Montgomery Clift. The song is clearly empathetic, but it focuses on Clift as a tragic figure, which, indeed, he was; but this shows how many allies viewed queer people back then — as sad, lonely people who led sordid lives as a result of societal pressure and rejection. However, Joe’s empathy and support for the community grew and evolved from there, to the point where, some twenty years later in “Diggin’ the New,” Joe celebrated LGBTQIA+ people not as tragic figures but just as people. And, notably, he embraced the trans community long before most straight, cisgender artists did.

But the connection between punk and the queer community is much more than a song or two. To that end, I refer to two fascinating pieces on LGBTQIA+ punk: Jayna Brown and Tavia Nyong’o’s 2020 NPR story, “Queer as Punk: A Guide To LGBTQIA+ Punk”; and Mark E. Moon’s 2022 article “Check Out These 10 Queer Punk Bands” from the Dallas Observer. 

More broadly, though, I talk about the way punk welcomed all comers, especially outsiders of every stripe — including LGBTQIA+ people. Though far from perfect, the world of punk rock gave so many of us who didn’t fit in anywhere else a time and a place to breathe, to be ourselves even if we didn’t know who or what we were. And that was and always has been especially important for queer people.

I also highlight some of the more influential queer and queer-supportive punk acts, like the Buzzcocks, the Slits, the B-52s, Tom Robinson, and the great Joan Jett. (By the way, the B-52s song I mention, “Dirty Back Road,” is from the Wild Planet album released in 1980).

Anyway, please give this week’s show a listen and share your thoughts in the comments below. And remember, as Joe always said, “Without people, you’re nothing.”

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Episode 12: The Original Generation X

After a few episodes of wandering off course and talking about things that were, at best, tangentially related to the Only Band That Matters, this week I return to my core subject. In particular, at the recommendation of my friends Dan and Tammy Domike, retired booksellers from Seattle, I picked up a copy of Martin Popoff’s book, The Clash: All the Albums, All the Songs, which, as the title suggests, is literally about all the albums and all the songs.

One thing in particular that resonated with me is this: in the Introduction, Popoff talks about how the early Clash embraced the sort of anti-hippie sentiment that was common among punk rockers of the day, but, he says, Joe Strummer “would come to understand that the punks and the longhairs were one and the same” and “cut from the same cloth.” As someone who straddles the hippie and punk eras, I really feel that. While I’m technically a late-stage boomer, Popoff’s comment about Strummer’s evolution reminds me of what I think of as the original meaning of Generation X, the name that Billy Idol (born in 1955, not 1957 as I say in the episode) gave his first band, and the name of a somewhat popular, if not universally loved, novel by Canadian writer Douglas Coupland (born in 1961). While the term Generation X has taken on a very different meaning in pop culture, it originally referred to us — folks born in the mid-to-late ’50s to the early ’60s who fell in that awkward gap between the true boomers and their kids.

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed the book very much so far, and I highly recommend it, but I add this caveat: Popoff, as a true music critic, is not afraid to … you know … criticize his subject. I happen to respect that, whether or not I agree with every criticism, but don’t expect this book to be a dewey-eyed, naïve homage to Mick and Joe and the band.

Finally, I mention that March 31 is International Day of Transgender Visibility and I encourage you to give a listen to the LGBTQIA-friendly podcast my wife and I host called In the Shadow of the Evening Trees.  Our latest episode, in particular, talks about trans rights in these challenging times.

So please give this week’s show a listen and share your thoughts in the comments below. And as Joe always said, “Without people, you’re nothing.” 

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Episode 8: Back to the Music

Circling back briefly to last week’s discussion on Joe Strummer’s support for trans rights, I mention Joyce Carol Oates’ recent tweets on the subject, including her observations that (a) privacy concerns about spaces like restrooms and locker rooms have nothing whatsoever to do with the presence or absence of trans or nonbinary people, and (b) those who vilify trans and nonbinary people engage in the same sleight-of-hand that prejudiced people have always engaged in — they take a small number of random acts or (alleged) crimes and use them to slander an entire marginalized group. Well done, Joyce Carol Oates.

But then, because this is supposed to be a Clash-inspired podcast, it’s back to the music. I talk about a couple of other podcasts on the subject, including a 2021 episode of Tom Morello’s Maximum Firepower in which he and Antonino D’Ambrosio discuss the commonality between Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer and the Cash-Strummer cover of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” From there, I talk about a 2019 episode of Consequence’s The Opus podcast titled “London Calling: Radio Clash’s Timeless Transmissions,” which provides an in-depth look at the album and the Clash’s greatness as a rock band, not just as activists who use the music as a vehicle for the message.

Finally, on the Great Artist, Good People segment, I take a listen to Ivan Julian’s new album, Swing Your Lanterns. Julian, a fixture in New York’s punk and post-punk scene, was a founding member of Richard Hell and the Voidoids and played with a number of great artists over the years, including one of my favorites, Garland Jeffreys (but Garland is a subject for an entirely separate episode). If you’re not familiar with Ivan Julian’s music, get the new album (it’s great!) and take a listen to the Voidoids’ Blank Generation LP.

So please give this week’s show a listen and share your thoughts in the comments. And as Joe always said, “Without people, you’re nothing.”

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Episode 7: Joe Strummer Was Ahead of His Time, Part Infinity

One of those top nights of the year

And I see everyone’s here

Oh, took me a long time to get it

But when its taken time

Think and don’t forget it

“Diggin’ the New,” from Rock Art and the X-Ray Style (1999)

Following up on last week’s discussion about Billy Bragg’s evolving views on LGBTQ+ rights, I relate a disturbing interaction I had on Twitter after posting last week’s show in which a random stranger reacted to my defending the rights of trans and nonbinary people in a particularly offensive way. That interaction got me thinking about how Joe Strummer was never afraid to evolve and grow and challenge his own understanding of the world. The song “Diggin’ the New” really embraces this — not only Joe’s drive to understand the world around him, but his embrace of trans rights long before most artists did.

Joe was always ahead of his time. He was ahead of where a good many people are today, even twenty years after his untimely death.

And because America experienced yet another school shooting this past week, this time at Michigan State University, I reflect on the Clash’s, and particularly Joe Strummer’s, running commentary on guns and violence. Although “The  Guns of Brixton” may seem to express pro-gun sentiment, Joe’s and the band’s views on guns and violence were in reality quite different. From their cover of “Police and Thieves” to “Tommy Gun,” an explicitly anti-violence anthem, to Joe’s “Burning Streets”/“London is Burning” track first recorded with the Mescaleros and later reworked and re-released on Joe Strummer 001, their position on gun violence was far more humane and nuanced than the folks who seemingly don’t care if mass shootings continue apace. Meantime, I can’t get over the prophetic words from “Burning Streets”/“London is Burning”:

Too many guns in this damn town

At the supermarket, you gotta duck down

Baby flak jackets on the merry-go-round

(London is burnin’)

There’s too many guns in this damn town

(London is burnin’)

Baby flak jackets on the merry-go-round …

So please give this week’s show a listen and share your thoughts in the comments. And as Joe always said, “Without people, you’re nothing.” 

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Episode 6: Happy International Clash Day

On this week’s podcast, I talk about International Clash Day, an annual celebration of the Only Band that Matters that takes place on February 7 each year. Seattle radio station KEXP began International Clash Day in an impromptu fashion ten years ago when a listener asked, in response to a deejay playing a Clash song, why the station didn’t play more Clash (always a good question!), and the deejay obliged. Since then, the celebration has grown around the world, from the US to Europe to Latin America and beyond.

International Clash Day seems to sneak up on me every year (maybe next year I’ll remember that it’s coming), but it’s always a good time to break out the guitar and give a few Clash tunes a test drive. Don’t worry; I do not torment you with my guitar playing on this episode … except for a few seconds. But those few seconds come from my favorite Clash song of all time, “Spanish Bombs” from London Calling. “Spanish Bombs” recalls the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, the world’s first fight against fascism and in many ways a precursor to World War II. The song focuses on the writers, artists, and musicians who joined the cause to defend the government against Franco’s fascists, which is quite appropriate given the Clash’s own anti-fascist activism. It’s worth remembering, too, that American novelist Ernest Hemingway and British novelist/journalist George Orwell went to Spain to defend the republic against the fascists. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an amazing memoir of his time there.

From International Clash Day I turn to the Grammys, noting that the Clash won exactly one award — the 2003 Grammy for Best Long Form Video for the documentary film, Westway to the World. I also weigh in on Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ performance of and Grammy win for the song “Unholy,” which caused a right-wing meltdown on social media. Petras made history as the first openly transgender woman to win a Grammy, but she was not the first trans Grammy winner of all time. That was Wendy Carlos, the classical artist who won three Grammys under her former name in 1970 for her pioneering Moog synthesizer works. 

I also discuss the Grammys tribute to the 50th anniversary of hip hop, featuring some of the legends of the game (Busta Rhymes, De La Soul, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Missy Elliott, Grandmaster Flash, Ice-T, Method Man, Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, and RUN-D.M.C., among others) and the Clash’s connection to the genre.

Finally, in this week’s Great Artists, Good People segment, I talk about British punk icon Billy Bragg, a close friend of Joe Strummer and an excellent songwriter in his own right. Among many fantastic songs, Bragg’s 1991 hit “Sexuality” was a celebration of gay rights at a time when that was still controversial. But, not to be outdone, Bragg updated the lyrics in 2021 to embrace and celebrate trans and nonbinary people as well, showing tremendous growth as a person and giving a well-deserved middle finger to the haters in the UK. We should all grow old like this.

So please give this week’s show a listen and share your thoughts in the comments. And as Joe always said, “Without people, you’re nothing.” 

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