|
Profile of James Spooner, director of
Afro-Punk: The ‘Rock n Roll Nigger’ Experience
By Lauren Jade Martin
 My
friends and I sometimes bond over the fact that we are punk rock expatriates. Although rock shows and riot grrrl conventions once felt like revolution to us, the racism, classism and invisibility
that we experienced and witnessed as people of color in these spaces left us feeling bitter and nauseous. Many of us dropped
out of our respective scenes, never to look back. Others of us,
like exiles in a foreign country, look back on our former punk
rock and riot grrrl days with bittersweet nostalgia, both glorifying
and condemning a past that no longer exists.
In February of 2004, I went to a screening
of James Spooner’s
film Afro-Punk:
The ‘Rock n Roll Nigger’ Experience at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music (BAM) as part of the African Diaspora Film Festival. Sitting next
to me in the theater was an enthusiastic young Black woman who, prior to the
movie starting, could barely keep still in her seat from anticipation. I asked
her why she was so excited about seeing Afro-Punk, and she gestured
at the blank screen and exclaimed, “This is my life! I’ve been
waiting my whole life for this!” Spooner’s 66-minute documentary
allows punks and ex-punks of color—Black punks in particular—the
chance not only to see themselves represented on screen, but to remember, think
about, and process what it means to be a marginalized member of an already
small, subcultural community.
I recently got the chance to sit down
with James Spooner on a park bench in Crown Heights, Brooklyn
in order to talk with this
punk rock expatriate
about his film. For Spooner, the making of the film was intensely personal,
coming from his own experiences as a Black man formerly involved in the
punk scene. Although it had been years since he’d dropped out of
the scene, he sought a way to validate his time as a Black punk. “It
was my life and I needed to put it out there,” he says. “At
that point I wasn’t taking white validation anymore, and I didn’t
know enough Black people who were involved in [punk] or something similar
to make me feel like, ‘Yeah, I’m still Black even though I
was involved in this thing.’”
 Even
though Spooner was a sculptor with zero training in film, he saw making a movie
as the best medium to access and reach other Black people in a
way that museums and galleries could not. “To me, it felt a lot like
starting a band or doing a zine or whatever,” says Spooner, “like
why wouldn’t I be able to do it? I just had to practice.” Having
grown up with punk’s do-it-yourself ethic, he thought nothing of
maxing out his credit cards in order to buy a camera and a computer and
teach himself how to make a movie along the way.
Though punk rock is not known to be
swarming with people of color, Spooner managed to unearth and
interview scores of Black punks across the United States. Living
in disparate locations, they repeat similar stories of being
the only Black person in their punk community, or longing to
have hair that could be styled into a Mohawk. I asked Spooner
why, with over eighty “kids” to choose from, he decided
to focus his film on four individuals: Mariko Jones, Matt Davis,
Moe Mitchell and Tamar-kali. “All of those people represented
a different stage in Black identity,” says Spooner. “Ultimately
that’s what the film is about, seeking and searching and
finding and holding on to your Black identity in a country that
makes it really hard to even know what that is.” Thus we
are introduced to Mariko Jones, a young, soft-spoken woman in
southern California who is so committed to her scene that she
is willing to sacrifice and submerge her racial identity. At
the BAM screening, Mariko’s interviews provoked the strongest
response. When Mariko uses cringe-inducing stereotypes to explain
why she does not date Black guys, audience members hissed and
called back at the screen, “Oh no, she didn’t!” Yet,
as Spooner puts it, though Mariko’s comments anger a lot
of people, “Mariko was very vocal about a lot of things
that we keep inside. She has a lot of self-hate, and I think
that the punk scene only encouraged that in her.”
At the other end of the spectrum is
the powerful musician Tamar-kali, who finds her punk identity
and aesthetic to be inextricably tied to her African and Native
American ancestry. One of the most striking scenes in the film,
however, belongs to Moe Mitchell. Front man for the band Cipher,
he speaks about how his music, with its revolutionary Black Power
lyrics, is meant for Black people. Cut to footage of Moe at a
show with his white bandmates backing him up, and an all-white
audience thrashing around and singing along right into Moe’s
face. Spooner says he still gets chills every time he watches
that scene. “Just seeing all those kids scream, ‘Lied
to their children while we all raped them.’ Do they have
any concept of what they’re saying and who they’re
saying it to? They’re screaming at the one Black guy in
the audience.” According to Spooner, the scene sums up
so much about what he was trying to get across with Afro-Punk
that he could have made a short with just this one scene. More
telling,
he says, “It’s still funny to me, it’s like
I knew those moments would happen before I filmed them, just
because I’d lived in the scene for so long.” Surely
this scene will ring true with other current and former punks
of color participating in the largely white punk scene.
Spooner no longer considers himself
to be part of that scene, however, and today he would rather
connect with other members of
his Black community
and neighborhood. As creator of Afro-Punk—as well as
a message board on the film’s website—he is, however, forging
bonds and community among Black punks still indebted to their respective
scenes. Those kinds of resources did not exist when he was young and one
of the only Black faces among a sea of white punks. Spooner discusses the
power of the film and message board, saying,
I had a friend in eighth grade, who
was the first punk kid I knew, and he was Black. So, to me,
I thought it was fine, but I lived in this really small hick
town where everybody was racist, like punk kids would wear
swastikas at school and it was no big deal. He was going through
the same shit I was, so we were both kind of hating ourselves.
We were both hanging out with Nazis who thought that we were
different, so it was okay, like “Those are niggers, but
you guys are Black people,” kind of thing. And when you’re
thirteen and you don’t have anyone to say, “No,
those guys are idiots,” it made me just not want to be
Black or not want to be down; I wanted to be down with the
kids who listened to the same music as me, not the kids who
were the same race but hated me because I didn’t listen
to MC Hammer. If I had been able to see a movie with eighty
Black people in it that I could have looked up to, I think
that would have helped. If I could have been part of the message
board—there’s like 600 people on the message board,
you know?—that would have been amazing to me.
Yet it is not only among Black punks
and ex-punks with whom Spooner wishes to make connections. His
film is, ostensibly, for all Black people, no matter what kind
of music they listen to or lifestyle to which they subscribe. “I
really wanted it to be something where people who had no idea
about the punk scene could watch it and realize, and say, ‘Okay
this is the most extreme thing I can think of, and these people
are going through the same shit as me. Maybe all of these Black
people are going through the same shit as me.’ I guess
I’m really about trying to unite all of us Black people,
start fighting on other issues instead of each other.” When
Spooner screens Afro-Punk to largely Black non-punk
audiences, he finds that even if they don’t “get” the
punk aspect, they do get the larger ideas about racism and marginalization
that the film attempts to get across, and respond appropriately
with laughter, booing, and applause at key moments.
Screening for largely white audiences,
however, is another story. Matt Davis, one of the four featured
Black punks in the film, passed away before Spooner finished
making Afro-Punk. To pay his respects, Spooner
decided to bring his film to various Midwest venues where Matt
and his band had played. “I did six shows and all of them
had one Black person in the audience besides myself. For the
most part, it was dead silent. I mean, so quiet I can’t
even begin to tell you how quiet it was. There was no laughter
during any of the funny parts, there was nothing. Even the parts
that weren’t funny like you had to be Black to get it.
Nothing.” In the director’s Q & A session afterwards,
no one asked any questions.
And what happens when Spooner shows
his film to Black punks and radicals? “The last show of
that tour was at the Anarchist People of Color conference. That
was like being a celebrity in the mall,” he jokes. “All
of a sudden, I was in a room full of people who not only got
it because they were of color, but they got it because that was
their thing.”
Currently Spooner is working on two
more documentaries. One of them is about his father, whose “player” lifestyle
has borne him seventeen children from fourteen women. The other
will be about the various neighborhoods that stretch along Bedford
Avenue in Brooklyn, NY—neighborhoods that include Polish
immigrants, Hasidim, white hipsters, Black, West Indian and African
people, and middle-class whites.
“ From a bird’s eye view,
you’re looking at a very integrated street with every culture
on it,” says Spooner. “But the closer you get, the
more segregated it gets. It’s going to be dealing with
the illusions of integration in America, how that illusion really
only benefits white people. It’s going to deal with gentrification
and co-opting of cultures.” Although the topics of these
future films are vastly different from “Afro-Punk,” perhaps
they will provoke similar responses, and Spooner can continue,
in his words: “Doing my job, in making white people feel
uncomfortable, and making Black people feel expanded and closer.”
Check out www.afropunk.com for more info about the film,
to participate in the community message board and to find out
when Afro-Punk will be coming to a venue near
you.
|
Lauren Jade Martin lives, loves, writes, makes art, knits,