Politics as Sound: Washington, DC, Hardcore 1979-1983
Uncompromising and innovative, hardcore punk in Washington, DC, birthed a new sound and nurtured a vibrant subculture aimed at a specific segment of the city’s youth. Shayna L. Maskell explores DC’s hardcore scene during its short but storied peak.
Led by bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat, hardcore in the nation’s capital unleashed music as angry and loud as it was fast and minimalistic. Maskell examines the music’s aesthetics and the unique impact of DC’s sociopolitical realities on the sound and the scene that emerged. As she shows, aspects of the music’s structure merged with how bands performed it to put across distinctive representations of race, class, and gender. But those representations could be as complicated and contradictory as they were explicit.
A fascinating analysis of a punk rock hotbed, Politics as Sound tells the story of how a generation created music that produced–and resisted–politics and power.
Hosted by the Penn Club. This event will be held on Zoom. You will receive your link upon registration.
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Shayna Maskell
Shayna Maskell is an Assistant Professor in the School of Integrative Studies at George Mason University. She received her Ph.D. in the American Studies Department from the University of Maryland. Her book Politics of Sound: Race, Class, and Gender in Washington DC Hardcore Punk 1978-1982 (2021) explores how and why cultural forms, such as music, produce and resist politics and power. Her areas of research include popular and youth culture, popular culture, and social justice. She has previously been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, as well as chapters in I Am Already Dead: Essays on The CW’s iZombie and Vertigo’s iZombie, Routledge’s History of Social Protest in Music, Everyday Nationalism in North America, and Music at the Extremes: Essays on Sounds Outside the Mainstream. Shayna has taught for over a decade at such institutions as the University of Southern California, California Institute of the Arts, University of Maryland, and Corcoran College of Art and Design, before coming to George Mason. Her classes often focus on intersectionality and the ways in which concepts of self and society are constructed through a multitude of popular texts.