Originally posted 5/23/2010.
I was in New York City last night with my bass playing partner in crime, Steven Lanning Cafaro, doing a Duende Project show on the Bowery in a bar full of posters hearkening back to the time described in this poem. Had to come back and give it another look…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A black sneaker, a rich man’s
Chuck Taylor knockoff,
on sale for 75 dollars
in a Providence store window.
Along the border
of the sole,
lettered in white thread,
the following words appear:
PUNK ROCK MEANS FREEDOM,
and I struggle with a violent urge
to stretch out my hand, find a rock,
break the window, pull out a knife,
use the point
to tear out that obscene “S”
so I will be able to breathe again.
Walking in front of me
a blond girl, maybe eighteen,
professionally slim,
decked in designer-wrecked rags,
excitedly tells her similar friends
that she wants to get crunk tonight.
By the curb
a Ferrari
as black as a hole
bangs out white streams of bass
as it begins
its slow ostentatious cruise
down Thayer Street.
HIP HOP MEANS FREEDOM.
Again in my head
I subtract the “S”
to get at some truth I can stand,
and the more these metaphors are strained,
the more they seem the same.
It was 1975
in two apartments,
one in Queens,
one in the Bronx.
Two boys thinking the same thing
stretched out their fingers
to touch grimy windows,
each one writing
those same bleeding words
in the gray condensation
on the pane:
MEAN FREEDOM.
The boys who wrote those words
did not know each other
but they each heard a soundtrack
and for each the soundtrack
was as mean as it was free
with a mean reason for its ferocious rhyme
and a mean reason for its sharp scratch,
whether it came from guitar
or turntable.
You had to be there
but
soon enough
there
was
everywhere
and that was that. A snarl,
a linking of arms. A beat,
a charming discord,
freed hands raised
against the Big Slapdown.
Let us proclaim
the mysteries of faith:
To deface a culture
is to create a culture.
Distortion
of a signal
begins with a tight embrace
of its source.
Degradation
of a signal
is a function of distance
from source.
A clean channel
doesn’t exist.
Genre is expectation,
expectation can be packaged
for indefinite shelf life, and
there is a shelf
in the store
for every expectation.
If you are hip hop,
if you are punk rock,
you understand that theft
can be a clean birthright;
when you steal from a thief,
you are washed free of stain.
A tag is reclamation;
a sample is recommendation.
A headspin is a compass in a maze,
a microphone is always aimed at Jericho.
A crunched chord is a fingerprint,
a sneer is an oath sworn in a kangaroo court.
A downbeat is a sustained objection,
a microphone is always aimed at Jericho.
Whatever you call it
is always defined by volume.
It does not matter
that the sound
will be heard
by different people
in different worlds.
It does matter
that those worlds
shake the same way,
and that someone always complains.
It matters that it is not heard
as music
by musicians, that
its instruments are dismissed, that
its clothing is spat on.
It matters that the culture of the cultured
becomes afraid,
that spatter and cut and mix and shred
are chained to the juggernaut
and drag the weight of this mean freedom behind them,
mean freedom inflicting itself with a roar and rumble
of jubilation
at the sound of breaking glass
until someone buys the shards
and the sound,
sells them at a profit,
and we have to begin again.
Mean freedom reminds us
that freedom will hurt
and there will be blood flecked skin
any time a hand travels through glass
to snatch back what was taken.
Mean freedom doesn’t wait
for Independence Day.
Mean freedom lights its fuses
any time a match
is available. Mean freedom
haunts. It spooks
convention. It curses and spits
because it knows it will someday
be imprisoned again
and will have to recall how to survive
as grit in the cogs, static
in the signal
as the signal
degrades, fades
until
it falls like
a rusted bridge.
A supercar goes boom.
A college girl gets crunk.
An old punk
steeped in nostalgia
violently reimagines
a marketing slogan.
Long ago,
I fell into arms
that bent me tight.
I burned holes in my jeans at 18.
I burned my hand with a cigarette at 23,
quit smoking for 25 years,
began again
on that street
as I stood by a store window
while bathed in the sounds of war,
recalling that every riot
starts with the sound of breaking glass
and ends in fire.
God, how I have missed this.
Somewhere back in 1975,
those boys
folded their fingers
back into their fists,
punched out the glass
and in the trickling blood they felt
at last
the cool sting of the real.
Freedom
rocked from side to side,
shouting as it
prepared a counterpunch:
That’s a good start,
but if you come through that window after me,
I will not let you pass any more walls
without a war.
Bring it on,
responded those bleeding boys,
when we scream for freedom,
we mean freedom.
Is that really your name?
Is this really our song?
Thirty five years later,
thinking about them
with glass to break before me,
a season of exploitation before me,
rank appropriation before me,
punk rock, hip hop,
mean freedom before me —
born to lose,
to find and lose
and find and lose
again.
It’s like that.
That’s the way it is.
I reach for a stone.
