It's Gonna Blow!!! San Diego's Music Underground. 1986-1996 (Billlingsate Media, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later in the evening, after the Usual Suspects on MS-NBC, my husband Charles and I ran a copy of the 2014 documentary It’s Gonna Blow!!! about the San Diego punk-rock scene between 1986 and 1996. Charles had heard some of the San Diego punk bands during his stint with the unlicensed Free Radio San Diego (since the statute of limitations for operating or being involved with ah unlicensed station has long since expired, I can write in these pages that Charles was involved with one), and I wrote about the movie when we first saw it in 2016 at the new San Diego Public Library downtown. (I miss the free movie screenings at the Public Library downtown; it’s yet another casualty of COVID-19.) The link to my archived blog post on this movie is https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/01/its-gonna-blow-san-diegos-music.html, and that will give you a thumbnail of how the music scene evolved and how it got corrupted by A&R (artists-and-repertoire) men from major record labels who in the early 1990’s were convinced San Diego was going to be “the next Seattle” and generate a new crop of unsigned bands they could be developed into superstars.

It didn’t happen, of course, and today with the rise of YouTube and social media in general the way you launch a music career has changed dramatically. Also, the rise of new musical forms like hip-hop (which at least one local punk band tried to incorporate into their style and got racist comments from their audience to the effect that they should leave that “‘N-word’ music” alone) and electronic dance music has pretty much, if not eliminated the mass audience for punk, at least relegated it to the back benches of the musical scene, to the point where Jack White has told interviewers that he was actually looked down upon by music fans his age for learning to play guitar instead of scratching and remixing from turntables. I once read a rather snarky book I checked out of the library that was an attempt to do with popular music what Harry and Michael Medved had done with their books on bad movies, and one of the statements the authors made was, “Punk happened. (Note tense.)” When I read that I was convinced that punk was going to keep happening as long as the world kept producing the right kind of young people with the right sort of alienation from the values of their peers – which I guessed would turn out to be forever – and in fact I once compared the young white jazz musicians who took it up in the 1920’s because it was easy to play and a spit-in-your-eye response to their elders to the punk rockers of 50 years later, and even dubbed a cassette of some of the major jazz records from this school as “Chicago Punk Jazz.”

Today I’m not so sure that the spirit of punk will keep reproducing itself, at least not in enough alienated young people to create the scene shown here. In fact, as much as I hate to say this, the Right-wing crazies who showed up at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 wearing T-shirts that read “Camp Auschwitz,” “Work Makes You Free” (the literal translation of the infamous slogan above the gates of the real Auschwitz, “Arbeit Macht Frei”) and “6MWE” (meaning “Six Million Weren’t Enough”) and this weekend called in bomb threats at historically Black colleges and universities and targeted Brigham’s and Women’s Hospital in Boston and passed out flyers with photos of two Black doctors they accuse (falsely) of pursuing genocidal policies against white people are closer to the spirit of punk rock (especially the skinheads in the movie who successfully disrupted a show by the Vandals by literally stealing their equipment in mid-performance) than the relatively polite pretend-punks of today’s music scene. Remember that in punk’s original heyday in London in the late 1970’s, the Sex Pistols played a benefit for the Right-wing British party, the National Front, and as a response Elvis Costello and Joe Strummer founded Rock Against Racism and literally risked getting beaten up for doing shows to expose the racists other punks were supporting. (That’s when I got upset when people like Linda Ronstadt, from the safety of an anti-racist bubble in the U.S., criticized Elvis Costello for being a racist. Ronstadt had never literally put her life on the line to combat racism – but Costello had.)