How Chinese Food Fueled the Rise of California Punk | Hacker News Reader

How Chinese Food Fueled the Rise of California Punk

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176 pointsb0ner_t0ner52 comments

Great photos. It's so appropriate that they come out swinging with Alice Bag - the Bags were just the best. I must have seen 50 shows at the Hong Kong - not so many at Madame Wongs, but I did see the 1st B52's LA show there (B52's would be Wongs prototypical band - more "new wave" than punk). But EVERYBODY who was real played at the HK. You would get these fantastic lineups, like the Germs, Bags, Fear and Crowd all on the same bill. Early on, the GoGo's were more aligned with pure punk than pop, and so they played at the HK instead of MW's. Won't get into everybody I saw at the HK (which would be, you know, everybody) but I did see Lydia Lunch and James White there - both from New York.

The article was great, I will be interested to see the documentary especially if they've got video footage from some of the shows.

You should check out The Decline of Western Civilization, definitely video footage of some of these shows (LA specific) in that documentary.

Edit: The full documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gc4yrcdAok

Another fun fact is the director also directed Wayne's World.

Wow that looks awesome I will check that out.

There's a video of a Dead Kennedys show at Mabuhay Gardens and at the end the owner or someone working for venue gets up on stage and, exasperated, tells people to go home even though the crowd is still wired.

Also check out the documentary "Los Punks: We Are All We Have" which covers the Latino punk scene in LA. https://www.kqed.org/news/10985167/documentary-reveals-l-a-s...

Punk made its way to China, where .. it did not quite survive as one might have hoped:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/film-review-beijing-punk_b_71...

Just yesterday out of nostalgia I downloaded some classic songs by X - Los Angeles, Under the Big Black Sun, etc.

Fun shows!

I don't have any of my old vinyl anymore. Anybody here still holding onto your old albums?

I stupidly sold all my good albums in the late 90s in a final move to digital. A few years later my uncle gave me his best, and I was smart enough to keep them. So I have original Sgt. Pepper's and Dark Side of the Moon, etc.

X was my one of my dad's favorites growing up in LA, and I got to see them a couple years ago at The Fillmore with him and my brothers. Was a very good time, glad they're still out touring here and there.

Absolutely. I'm always a bit anxious because I haven't digitized most of my records (i.e. made backups of the music at least) but I can't imagine getting rid of the physical objects even once I have. It was such a huge part of my experience growing up. Luckily today most new records also come with free download codes so you get both at once!

I want to know more about the broken toilets!

As someone who's been to plenty of punk shows and plenty of punk clubs, I promise you that you do not.

Now this is the sort of news I can use.

the punks were certainly the most health-toxic sub-culture in post-hippy California.. definitely early pain-killer abusers, plus glue or extreme alcohol, etc. not uncommon to hear of deaths, treachery or jail.. SF Fab-Mab ruler Dirk was later found to be sexually using adolescents pretty regularly .. lead singer of Fang on America's Most Wanted national TV for killing a girl over heroin, things like that .. freedom has a price ! and if the songs regularly invoke violence and madness, guess what, it actually results in violence and madness.. who would have guessed

But if it is 'rap music' violence, madness, drug use, rape, etc. are fine, because if you say otherwise you are racist. Maybe it is racist to not hold all human beings to the same standard of decency?

The key difference is that the Punk subculture sprung up around the music, where much of the 'rap music' was reflective (exaggerated and glamorized) of an existing situation and subculture. I think you can still argue that violent rap music incites or inspires crime though. I think you can generally criticize effects, but you skirt the line with racism when you start projecting that too broadly.

I don't see the difference. Rap music seems to go hand in hand with the subculture. If it wasn't glamorized, I doubt it'd exist, at least to the degree it does. Same with punk. If the punk lifestyle was not glamorized through the music, then the punk subculture would not exist.

My point is that it is racist to not hold all people to the same moral standard, because in effect we are saying those we do not hold accountable are not capable.

You are abysmally misinformed on the history of hip hop.

>My point is that it is racist to not hold all people to the same moral standard,

Ah, in that case you agree that _every_ American slaveowner in the South was a bad, immoral, evil person, right? Same goes for all Germans in WWII.

Yes...does any sane person today think slave owners and nazis were on the correct side of morality?

Minor nit pick:

All slaveowners = people who owned slaves = bad ("complicated" at best)

All Germans during WWII =/= Nazis.

There's plenty of great WWII era Germans who didn't support that Nazis and helped take them down.

But yea, fuck Nazis.

Not that I think this is an interesting point to argue (and I'm not sure exactly what you're getting at) but yea every slave owner was bad because we're categorizing them based on the bad act: owning slaves. Not every German was a soldier let a lone a Nazi during WWII.

I think there's an Axiom of Choice joke in there somewhere.

Every person who buys an iPhone or wears Nikes is immoral and a bad person to a degree, as these products are essentially built upon slave labor.

> these products are essentially built upon slave labor.

Citation needed.

AFAIK, the labor is entirely voluntary and reimbursed. Wages are much lower, but so is cost of living.

Chap-hop star Mr B, The Gentleman Rhymer, wrote "Hip-Hop Was To Blame, After All", specifically addressing this attitude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkES4anCYOw

Hip hop is different than rap. Rap as a genre tends to glorify the violence, etc. Hip hop tends to glorify a particular culture. Of the latter I am a fan. Of the former, not very much, mostly because it has become pretty boring and repetitive and has lost the creativity, clever wordplay and fun rhythm. Instead, it just substitutes sex, drugs and violence to make up for lack of substance, and sells out the African American community for the entertainment of white rich kids.

That being said, a few of the newer rappers do have some poetic things to say.

If you don't even know the difference between gangsta rap and rap in general, I'm not sure you're qualified to discuss the point.

I used to listen to loads of rap, gangsta rap and hip hop. The less it glorified the gang life the better it tended to be. I think the gang life glorification is just the lazy way of making content, like how people cuss when they don't have anything significant to say.

Cool strawman mate. There's plenty of people who call out rap's shortcomings. Some of them are black. You can do it without being called a racist, I swear.

I don't know why people are calling you a racist, but I have some theories...

Do you also believe that violent video games cause real-world violence? How about movies? Novels?

I don't remember punk lyrics focusing on drugs and violence any more than mainstream rock did. (Which, admittedly, was also blamed for those things.) Which bands/songs are you thinking of? I'm assuming you have some in mind, and aren't just parroting stereotypes?

Also, are you sure you've got the cause-and-effect right way 'round? Delinquents do seem to like punk, but that doesn't mean that punk made them delinquent.

The way I read his comment, the music "invokes" the violence via live shows. If you've ever been to a punk show, there's a lot of violence going on in the audience/pit. I don't think it's a crazy leap to say that people who enjoy beating the crap out of each other in a sweaty pit might be disproportionately inclined towards beating people up outside that pit.

Huh, you think that's it? They're actually saying "mosh pits make you a violent druggie"?

That's...actually even sillier, honestly. I fuckin' loved a good mosh when I was a teen, and I was a kid who never, ever started a fight, and froze up when someone started one with me. I know the pit looks like a brawl, but at every show I went to it was more like a contact sport with no points where everyone wins. If someone fell down, everyone who saw it gathered to help them up and keep folks from tripping until they were back on their feet.

One time a flailing dude caught me in the face with an elbow so hard I staggered and saw stars. He immediately stopped, grabbed my shoulders, and yelled, "dude, are you okay?" He waited for me to nod before he smiled and went back to doing his thing. It was all good.

I know there's guys out there who jump in the pit throwing fists. I can't speak for every scene, but where I come from those guys got shoved out of the pit until they got the point. It's not about winning.

I read the post to suggest correlation, not causation.

To your other points, a close friend of mine loved to mosh as a younger man too, and at his last warped tour he tripped and fell. Unlike the shows you described, everyone who saw it kept jumping and smashing into each other for minutes while his companions struggled to get him to his feet. His head was beaten into the ground repeatedly by people's feet, fracturing his skull.

He's still physically scarred and cognitively not the same and years later it seems like that will linger forever. I wanted to share this counterpoint to your post because I think there is validity to your perspective but it is not fully reflective of reality.

Fair enough. I'm sorry that happened to your friend.

Was that punk as well?

Sounds more like hardcore/hatecore etc.

Usual punk or metal mosh is full of adrenaline and sometimes too many uncoordinated drunk people, who can be dangerous, but I never experienced people intentionally hurting others.

Reminds me of the song by Lyte Funky Ones (LFO)

New kids on the block had a bunch of hits Chinese food makes me sick And I think it's fly When girls stop by For the summer For the summer

Or maybe they're just violent and mad so they sing about it.

yes! I dont think many of these other "outraged" commentators have been sucker-punched or tripped hard at a Black Flag show !! its a complicated thing here, psychological mirror and projection (in the psycho-analytic sense), reinforcement in art, social peer pressures, set and setting, permission by default, enabling behaviors .. many factors.

For anyone who lives freedom (and survives it), it is all the more important to see clearly what is happening in the chains of cause-and-effect, dont you think? instead of romanticizing things, clinging to pure outrage or self-righteous statements, attacking a messenger, etc..

> yes! I dont think many of these other "outraged" commentators have been sucker-punched or tripped hard at a Black Flag show !!

I did ask which songs/bands you were thinking of that promote violence. You haven't answered so far.

Black flag is a band, so your parent already answered your question in the part of the comment you quoted.

Yeah, I know, but I was hoping for something more substantial than "I got hit a couple times at Black Flag shows."

You might enjoy the positive messages purveyed by bands like Operation Ivy.

Edit: Freeze Up and Artificial Life are two tracks from the late 80s containing very prescient and IMO insightful commentary re: man, society, and technology that many on HN could probably appreciate.

It was really hard to resist just spamming the lyrics here but hopefully my description will resonate enough that some readers will check it out. They have something to say and get right to the point. It’s the complete opposite of vacuous.

I know right? I feel like Greg Graffin, Henry Rollins and some of the other guys from that Era of Cali-Punk made some pretty great points in between all the screaming and yelling.

I was shocked - shocked, I tell you! - to find out that people who wear razor blades on necklaces, get drunk, do front flips onto each other, scream about authority figures, and throw fists while they dance, might have attracted some anti-social people.

N.B. it has some confusing passages to people that doesn't know L.A. very well. e.g. "Chinese immigrants had started moving to suburban enclaves like the San Gabriel Valley, bypassing Chinatown and its businesses completely" and then proceed to tell an anecdote from a restaurant in the very heart of downtown chinatown.

But that was the point of the passage -- downtown Chinatown restaurants started renting out to punk concerts because the suburban migration was depriving them of customers.

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