Punk Planet interview w/Jello Biafra

from We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, The Collected Interviews (ed. Daniel Sinker, 2008)

Things to look into:

congress-sponsored Parents Music Resource Center (p21)

record label: Alternative Tentacles

 

re: outfits making it big

“Punk politics have never had financial clout in this country. What can we do with it? One model is to look at what the Grateful Dead, of all people, did with a good chunk of their money, which was to form a grant foundation [...] it’s helped prop up soup kitchens, rape-crisis centers, Earth First!’s Redwood Summer, and rural school districts in California [...] It was a way of putting ’60s radical politics into practice by granting money to people who knew what to do with it and putting money where it would mean a lot [...] Maybe other [punk] bands who blunder into money can do the same thing.” (29)

re: influences

“I was inspired more by Twink of the PInk Fairies and Sparks than the Sex Pistols or the Ramones anyway. [...] Everything was being updated and reborn, and in some ways that’s what I’m still trying to do.” (27)

 

re: 90’s cultural wars

“I think overall the ’90s is the best time to be around for music. In particular because now you have a choice: If you are not into the crap that’s fed to you by major labels and MTV, you can find any kind of music you like and it’s back in print again. [...] The same goes for early punk or early hardcore- you can get the real stuff or see their imitators and hope to get some inkling of the heart and soul of the original. [...] Besides, being unoriginal is not punk.” (28)

Topic Development 1.0: An Exercise

1. Defining my topic
   1. The intellectual stakes of my “project” will include issues of the representation of certain communities, or spaces. So I guess that means that I will articulate a set of theoretical concerns surrounding these issues.
   2. The aspect of the world that will help me answer this “question” (?) is location (which may also include a review of a certain historical era)
2. Identifying my field
   1. I am working to create a personal library of primary source materials.
      1. documentation of events and exhibitions
      2. literature contained in news sources and the like
      3. scholarship on the representation of communities and space/place
      4. fieldnotes and interviews, eventually
   2. Developing an approach
      1. (my theoretical sources will emerge from)
         1. my intellectual background: ie life? and Marx, Freire…
         2. the subject of your key thesis concerns: identity formation in spaces of community and the intellectual traditions in which i am well versed (street lingo?) (avant garde approaches?). Perhaps the subject of my undergraduate training….