Political Media Review

The DIY Bandits collective are many things: a record label, a distro, a booking agency, and a bunch of cool people from many walks of life who are tired of the status quo. The Bandits do not see themselves as anarchists, as they say on their website, “DIY Bandits do not belong to the anarchist scene, punk scene, underground scene, or mainstream scene.

Thursday, September 22, 2011, I headed out by bike to ride up to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where my buddy Ron and I planned to attend the book party for Stephen Duncombe and Max Tremblay’s new work, White Riot, a collection of first-person writing, lyrics, letters to zines, and analyses of punk history on issues of racial identity.

The fractured nature of the zine dictates it be ingested in small doses. Due to most zine’s thematic schizophrenia, this is the case the majority of the time. However, when collected, some zines are able to communicate an overarching theme.

Punk, hardcore and alternative rock music scenes have been for years the almost exclusive realm of teenagers and youth in their 20s. Not only have they been areas of creative expression, but such subcultures have given young people a place to challenge beauty standards, political boundaries and cultural norms.

The contemporary vision of straight edge is a highly westernized one, focusing on plodding metal music and alpha male attitudes, with politics largely subtracted from the equation.

Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton perhaps explained Black revolutionary nationalism best when he drew lines against what he called reactionary nationalism. Revolutionary nationalism is a force that sees capital and the ruling order in a fundamentally different way;

Letter to the President: The Streets Get Political, produced by Russell Simmons, directed by Thomas Gibson, composed by Quincy Jones, and narrated by Snoop Dogg, is a wake-up call to the world that hip-hop and rap does not mean money, ignorance, and violence, but a voice from a imprisoned, oppressed, and repressed community. This is an excellent film on the history of hip-hop and rap in the U.S. in relation to race, class, and sexism.