Things are a sloppy mess of aggression, grilled veggies, and bad plumbing at ABC No Rio, and have probably been so for 20 years, “a collectively-run center for art and activism” (read: Aimless Punk Collective) in the Lower East Side on this blistering heat of the day before July 4th, a humid wave that tests any punk’s commitment to latex and leather. As the bands set up, there’s an obnoxious class struggle in the backyard between the dirt poor kids trying to put on a Saturday Matinee Blowout and their tony soccer apparel hawking neighbors at the Alife Rivington Club trying to watch the World Cup. There’s a big cock-strutting gravel scratch over who threw a brick over the fence or dumped a bunch of green paint on blah-blah-blah, though one of the ABC kids later tells me that the paint was dumped from another building and the brick was thrown by someone from another collective who just happened to be hanging out in the backyard of this particular collective (Wonder how the complex autonomies of self-organizing post-Yippies holds up in the civil courtrooms of Centre Street?)
36 years after The Ramones screamed “Judy is a Punk” at CBGB’s and introduced the world to the power of three chords, Punk (at least this New York punk, not hardcore, nor metal) still seems to come mostly in two varieties--Quoth Lester Bangs in 1982-- Hardcore: “Rolling clods of lumpy excrement with broken bones sticking out” and Oi: “Craters of dribbly gruel with patchy tufts of straw poking up.”
The kids are still handing out buttons that say “Extinct Government” and “Fear is Control” in a rubbled courtyard that plays up to a 90’s era Belgrade aesthetic, but I don’t the hear the biofueled throttle of actual revolution (although they do want to get some photovoltaics, gray water recycling, and a planted green roof if you can spot them $2.6 million, brah). This scene is a cultural favela for millenial Indigo children and people with hyperactive thyroids who need to work out their mondo daddy issues by trapping oneself in a particular decade, sort of like the 40 year-old stoner who still surfs within the confines of AOL because he’s afraid someone will show him, like, a Robotic Pig Heart Jellyfish on Youtube. If you think I’m being hard on the creative output of ABC No Rio, I submit as evidence this stanza from Hobo Bob printed in their zine Stained Sheets (ew).
I have the oil black heart of New York
beating in my breast
I am covered with her street grime
the fuel stench of her yellow cabs
I stopped recording to stop the fight. How's that for gonzo?