“Gimme Gimme This . . .

Gimme Gimme That”

Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons

José Esteban Muñoz

Jack Spicer’s poem “Improvisations on a Sentence by Poe” can be read as

something of a manifesto.1

“Indefiniteness is an element of the true music.”

The grand concord of what /
Does not stoop to definition. The seagull
Alone on the pier cawing its head off
Over no fish, no other seagull,
No ocean. As absolutely devoid of meaning
As a French horn. It is not even an orchestra. Concord
Alone on a pier. The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. No fish
No other seagull, no ocean — t he true
Music.

Most readers of the linguist-­t urned-­poet will recognize the description of

a “grand concord of what does not stoop to definition” as descriptive of
his own poetic practice, one that always strived to be as devoid of mean-
ing as a French horn. The image of being alone on a pier and locating that
as the site of this grand concord can also speak to what some might dub
the “antisocial” impulses in the poet’s life. Spicer, along with the poets
Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, was a key member of the Berkeley
Renaissance. Spicer was a notoriously difficult person, and his biography
describes various moments when he eschewed conviviality, acted out in
public, and was generally difficult. He ultimately dismissed much of his

Social Text 116 • Vol. 31, No. 3 • Fall 2013

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2152855  © 2013 Duke University Press 95
 own work, including the poem I have just cited. The poet drank himself
to death in 1965 at the age of forty. The term antisocial is a common mis-
nomer insofar as one can often find the impulse for sociality in this being
and acting differently of difficult characters like Spicer. The antisocial-
ity of a hard-­d rinking gay poet or punk icon with an active death-­w ish
habit is certainly nothing like the fantasy of antirelationality that is put
forth in a few contemporary schools of academic inquiry, including, but
not limited to, certain strands of psychoanalytically oriented gay stud-
ies that wish to convince us that any socially oriented cultural analysis
is nothing more than delusional disavowal. More interestingly, object-­
oriented ontology, a movement in contemporary theory that attempts to
contemplate the object before relationality, offers readers a chance for
greater attunement to objects but in doing so often eschews relationality
altogether. Spicer theorized relationality across generational lines when he
described what he called a “queer genealogy” of poetry where he located
himself in relation to Federico García Lorca, Arthur Rimbaud, and a
generation of younger poets with whom he was in contact. In the open-
ing poem, we see him focus on a line from Edgar Allan Poe, whose dark
and mysterious nature may partially align him with this queer genealogy.
There are of course many queer genealogies, and they lead to sites and
movements that are not always self-­declared as queer or even LGBT. To
think along these grooves we should resist the impulse to simply “queer”
an object, phenomenon, or historical moment and instead attend to it with
an understanding of lines of queer genealogical connectivity as something
other than tautological. The challenge here is to look to queerness as a
mode of “being-­w ith” that defies social conventions and conformism and
is innately heretical yet still desirous for the world, actively attempting to
enact a commons that is not a pulverizing, hierarchical one bequeathed
through logics and practices of exploitation.
As a thought experiment, I am interested in extending this dark
queer genealogy that does not lead to a site of avowed or even coherent
queer self-­actualization. I open with a poem by a weird precursor to queer
punk aesthetics. Spicer’s life, and to some extent his work, was dark. He
spoke to and from a negativity that I think of as the animating force of
queer punk. But Spicer is not the fish or seagull considered in this essay.
This malcontent gay poet and liberationist merely sets the stage for our
inquiry. Instead, this essay looks to circuits of being-­w ith, in difference
and discord, that are laden with potentiality and that manifest the desire
to want something else. In this sense I want to consider the queerness and
the racially marked resonances of a historically specific punk scene. This
essay belongs to a sequence of writings that describes the early Los Angeles
punk scene as a punk rock commons that was marked by surging queer
and racialized singularities and energies. This iteration of the early punk

96 Muñoz ∙ Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons

scene is alternatively called the Hollywood punk scene, since so many of
the clubs and venues these bands played their earliest gigs in were small
venues located in the heart of central Hollywood, such as Brendan Mullen’s
Masque club. The Hollywood of this scene was not the glittering hub of
cultural production, but instead a working-­class area populated by many
people of color and by new immigrants. Punk legend Alice Bag’s memoir
Violence Girl recounts the various paths that working-­class young people of
color and queer kids from other neighborhoods around sprawling LA, who
dressed in their best punk regalia, borrowed cars, and secured rides from
friends and parents, took to arrive at the Hollywood scene. 2 Some of the
punks moved in to run-­down apartment complexes such as the legendary
Canter­bury hotel, where hard-­partying punks lived beside working families
of color. But that split is not totalizing since some punks, like Bag, were
also from working-­class communities. The salient point is that this punk
rock commons was grounded not only in a time but also a place, a location
that was as turbulent as the historical moment that punk emerged from.
In the scene, people encountered one another in ways that felt new and
unpredictable. They arrived at venues and stages where they could realize
their plurality. And through punk as genre (or, more nearly, antigenre) they
found a way to, in a sense, “pause” a temporal moment, allowing people
hailed by a mode of negation associated with the outsider’s trajectory, the
space to find an otherwise elusive mode of being-with.
Punk rock is so often viewed as an aesthetic of nihilism: it is com-
monly spoken of in terms of dystopia; its energy is described as chaotic, as
creating a life without rhyme or reason, as quintessentially self-­destructive;
it represents the path of the outcast, of someone who often rejects sociality
altogether. Indeed, punk aesthetics tell us the story of the negative. It is the
kind of negativity that displaces simple oppositions between the positive
and the negative and instead shows us something else. I am interested in
considering a punk rock commons that is founded on a certain aleatory
materialism. Louis Althusser’s posthumously published writing on the
“philosophy of the encounter” extrapolates on the clinamen, a term coined
by Lucretius to describe the unanticipatable swerve of atoms that is at the
foundation of matter itself. 3 I contend that the clinamen, or the swerve at
the heart of the encounter, describes the social choreography of a poten-
tially insurrectionist mode of being in the world. Thus, the swerve can
describe the encounter as both queer sex and punk style (or, alternatively,
punk sex and queer style). Tavia Nyong’o has expertly delineated the
partial origin of the term punk in the history of sexual violence in highly
racialized scenes of incarceration and, in doing so, has evidenced the
powerful imbrication of sex and race that is central to punk.4 Punk rock
engenders a certain kind of encounter, a weird clinamen, where matter,
sound, and people collide. Punk social relations can be thought of as alea-

Social Text 116 • Fall 2013 97

 tory and belonging to the realm of the clinamen. The central swerve of the
encounter is a collision that can be turbulent or harmonious, an essentially
incalculable concord of that which does, in Spicer’s phrasing, not stoop to
definition. The crash of atoms becomes the crash of bodies in dark spaces,
the willful unharmonious crash of chords and notes, and in the early days
of one particular punk rock scene, the clash of young people from different
social geographies converging in dank little clubs in Hollywood.
Central to this notion of a punk rock commons is the lived politics of
the negative, a politics that is brazenly and usefully illustrated in the his-
tory of the early Los Angeles punk rock scene. Theories of the commons
emphasize idealist notions of collectivity that often feel utopian. Thus the
idea of a punk rock commons that is simultaneously utopian and marked
by negation seems contradictory at first glance. I propose that we can see
the negation that is negativity as something that can be strangely utopian
while simultaneously dystopian. It can conterminously represent innova-
tion and annihilation. At the heart of the punk rock commons one locates
the desire, indeed the demand, for “something else” that is not the holding
pattern of a devastated present, with its limits and impasses. This demand
is for a dystopia that functions like the utopian. To that end, this essay’s
central presence is the tragically doomed punk icon Darby Crash and
his legendary band the Germs. Crash is one in a series of queer oddballs
whom I have been thinking and writing around. His often quoted demand
for more, “Gimme gimme this, gimme gimme that,” is the semiarticulate
demand for a world that is not the world of California in the late 1970s or
the burgeoning reality of Ronald Reagan’s America.
•••
Before I tell the story of the Germs and the place they occupy in the
history of American punk rock, I want to explicate my approach in rela-
tion to the band and its leader. I am writing from the position of both a
queer theorist and a fan. Fan is often a degraded term. Its conations can
include the unprofessional, the nonobjective, and the affectively overly
imbricated. I risk, and to some degree own, all these connotations for a
particular reason. Fan is also meant to mark that I was not “there” in the
time and place of the Masque club where the Germs performed or in Los
Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Instead, I followed the band as
a kid in the suburbs of Miami. I was thousands of miles away from the
music, musicians, spaces, and performances (both everyday and spec-
tacular) that we discuss under the sign of the LA punk scene. But I was
there through the affective mode of being and feeling that we call fandom.
This is to say that listening to the Germs and some of the other bands in
and around that scene, especially X and the Gun Club, represented an
event in my life — a kind of falling in love that offered me a vital screen on

98 Muñoz ∙ Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons

which to project my own ongoing desire to actualize a singularity that was
desirous of thinking of itself in relation to a larger collective. This writing
for me is a kind of fidelity to the figure of Darby Crash and the Germs.
By fidelity, I mean fidelity to the life that happens after the event of the
Germs — both the event of the band actually existing and the event of me
first putting a needle down on vinyl on my record player in my parents’
home in South Florida. For Alain Badiou, the event can be everything
from the French Revolution to falling in love. We understand and know
the event not so much through the moment itself, but instead through the
fidelity we have to a transformative spike in our public or personal histo-
ries.5 Therefore, I am not doing the music historian’s important work of
reconstructing what happened. My approach is that of the performance
theorist who thinks about the performativity of Darby Crash and the
Germs as icons and describes them as figures that represent a certain way
of feeling and being in the world. This is the “doing” that is done by the
Germs three decades after the band’s dissolution and the singer’s suicide.
I want to be clear that my fidelity to the event of the Germs in the
figure of Darby Crash is not to be taken as a celebration of the actual
historical personage of Darby Crash. Darby Crash was a confused young
man. His rhetoric would sometimes vector into the realm of incoherent
anti-­Semitism. I am not interested in making apologies for Crash’s dis-
course. But I will say that his invocations of the Third Reich were juvenile
nonsense statements mostly meant to soak up any attention he could get.
At times Crash would also spout out pseudocommunist dogma and get it
wrong. This is not a biographical endeavor that is dedicated to straighten-
ing out Crash. I am not interested in recuperating the historical figure of
Crash or lionizing him as some heroic icon. The negative isn’t always or
consistently the path of radical subversion — it can also be just the opposite
and it is rarely consistently either. For the most part, my inquiry is not about
the actual Darby Crash but, instead, the figure of Darby Crash and the
Germs and the figural work they do in their future and our present. More
precisely, I am interested in the ways in which the Germs, their iconog-
raphy and music, allowed a kind of punk rock commons, a being-­w ith, in
which various disaffected, antisocial actants found networks of affiliation
and belonging that allowed them to think and act otherwise, together, in
a social field that was most interested in dismantling their desire for dif-
ferent relations within the social. Of course this essay’s interest in Crash’s
afterlife, the way in which young people with diminished life chances, like
many queer kids of color, found a resource in Crash is convenient insofar
as it can allow one to distance oneself from the biographical and engage
the figural. But expressing an interest in the figural does not inoculate one
from the messiness of history. While this line of analysis is dedicated to
the afterlife of Darby Crash and its performative reverberations, that does

Social Text 116 • Fall 2013 99

 not mean one avoids or sidesteps the real, messy, and unruly Darby Crash.
Crash had a fantasy about a Germs burn, which was a unique ritual
that imagined a certain futurity through the act of burning a circle onto the
flesh of a Germs devotee with a cigarette. The afterlife of Crash’s ritualistic
scarring is the stuff of punk rock legend. Most famously, the band Matmos
paid tribute to the burn in their song “Germs Burn for Darby Crash”
(2006), a digital musique concrète composition that features the sound of
band member Drew Daniel’s flesh being burned. Matmos’s weirdly ambi-
ent tribute sonically transmits the pain and pleasure of the passage and
partage that the burn initiated. There are less edgy reverberations of the
burn than the Matmos song. Rodger Grossman’s 2008 film What We Do
Is Secret narrates the almost mythological punk rock initiation ceremony.
The film depicts Crash’s penchant for marking his fans and followers with
this indelible mark in fictionalized narrative form. The film is a somewhat
mainstream homage to the band. Those who enjoy their punk memoirs
dirty and unwashed, as anticommercial as possible, may not enjoy that
film’s somewhat sanitized aesthetic. Yet it cannot totally be ignored by
the fan who collects and holds even those things that pretend to belong
to the event of the Germs. Therefore it seems like a pointless exercise to
denounce the biopicture like some punk purist. Instead, I want to sug-
gest that it is useful to understand it and acknowledge its representational
force and its rendering of an event, in this case of a circle, a burn, and a
force field of belonging through feelings, attachments, and fidelities. Bijou
Phillips plays the legendary Lorna Doom and Shane West took the role
of Darby Crash. In a pivotal scene Lorna Doom leans in for a kiss from
the film’s antihero after Darby offers an especially tragic soliloquy about
belonging and not-­belonging, but instead of the kiss, he gives her the burn.
This dramatic reenactment of the nasty little ritual of the Germs initia-
tion burn is accompanied by a fantasy about a sort of future in which we
will be alienated, in which we will no longer be punks on the street act-
ing out in parking lots and alleys, but consumers buying groceries, blank
and hollowed out by life. We will casually look down and catch sight of a
Germs burn and suddenly have a fellow traveler in our sights, someone
who holds that germ that marks one as belonging through the annihilative
act of burning flesh. The Germs burn is the mark of innovation, of queer
belonging-­in-­d ifference, or, equally, in secret. The band’s name itself is
important. The germ is not only a grubby pathogen, a harbinger of disease,
but also the germ of a time and place where we rise up from the stultifying
moments of alienation that are the presentness of our life — moments like
that at the checkout counter — t here, in that line, the fictionalized Crash
argued, we would see a burn, which is a germ, marking the who that is
you, and it would signal the potential of our life to take the shape of some-
thing beyond the here and now. Suddenly, the checkout line becomes the

10 0 Muñoz ∙ Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons

potential checking-­i n line, wherein which we see ourselves as belonging to
some kind of collectivity. It is a rich fantasy that was shared by many and
reproduced widely, a mundane example of the convergence of dystopia and
utopia, pain as potential, annihilative act as figuration of queer futurity.
We do not need the film to see the ways in which life in the Germs’
circle worked, the particularity of recognizing ourselves not simply being
singular but always being marked by a kind of plurality. The mysterious
blue circle that was the Germs’ symbol is a sign of simultaneous singularity
and plurality — it is descriptive of Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea about the way in
which interlocking singular senses of life and experience pluralize to form
our notion of the world.6 We can, for instance, listen to some of Crash’s
lyrics and think about the story they tell us about the seeing and knowing
of ourselves not as singular marks but as parts of a larger choreography of
being and belonging, of life within a circle that expands and grows, and
of an annihilating force that clears the way for a kind of innovation — t he
making of worlds and possibilities. The lyrics to one of Crash’s signature
songs, “The Other Newest One,” are typically enigmatic and therefore
representative of the band’s oeuvre and Crash’s songwriting.

The Other Newest One

I feel your body’s close to mine
I feel your breath and mine in time
I know I’m nothing but it’s you that I need
I touch your skin and it starts to feed

You’re not the first you’re not the last

Another day another crash

My eyes meet yours in secret glance

Our bodies look in ancient stance
You whisper something and I
Know it’s good
You’re acting crazy just like I
Knew you would

You’re not the first you’re not the last

Another day another crash

Embracing my life between your thighs

We will perform in the deadly skies
Reducing my mind to endless nights
You send my dreams to their demise

Realized by your last breath

I take your hair into my hands

I pull it tight to fit your demands
Feel my body into yours

Social Text 116 • Fall 2013 101

 Know that it’s right cause that’s
My soul you stir

You’re not the first you’re not the last

Another day another crash7

This imagined encounter is a bit more involved than the story of the
checkout line that becomes the check-­i n line. But it is similar. The song’s
lyrics tell us about a moment of secret recognition. Eyes meet in “secret
glance” and bodies respond by taking on an “ancient stance.” While
Crash did not write “gay songs,” he composed music in his own closet
with an always-­shattering glass door. The queer scenarios and energies
that run throughout his work are instantly glimpse-­able if one has any
access to a queer sensibility — be it owned, begged, borrowed, or stolen.
The story of “The Other Newest One” conjures the electrifying and
animating world of touching and breathing along with other boys in the
mosh pit. The flaying, annihilative spectacle of a mosh pit was the gateway
for many boys to touch other boys without having to wear a helmet and
catch or throw balls in the air. It is through such moments of touching and
being touched, heavy breathing with and alongside the other newest ones,
as sweat mingles and hands linger, that we hear that whisper and know it is
good, that a certain acting crazy together is possible. Darby’s lyrics render
a picture of the encounter where corporeal selves crash and careen into
each other and some kind of recognition becomes available. The song is an
ode to the lusty and sweaty scene of an aleatory encounter for queer boys;
it’s the mosh pit as the scene of swerving and colliding kids as clinamen.
It is a rendering of a being-­w ith that forms a provisional and temporary
commons through the encounter, and it happens under the sign of punk.
It is replete with queer animism but does not indulge in the holding pat-
tern of naming this desire as anything but the style we call punk, which
we know to have partially emerged from violent scenes of incarceration,
yet goes on to stand in for a more general collision of people and objects
that can be simultaneously destructive and generative, annihilative and
innovative, insofar as it is the ground for enacting new modes of being in
the world and enacting a punk’s uncommon commons.
One could look beyond the words and see this song performed to gain
an even fuller picture. Crude documentary footage of the Germs playing
the Whisky in 1979 lines up with most written accounts of the Germs’
shows. 8 Crash sings out of time with the band’s spare chords and beats.
So much of the performance is Crash’s scowling, swagger, and stumbling.
The speed and athleticism we associate with some punk is missing here.
Instead, a wasted and discombobulated Crash seems to stumble into the
audience where he is engulfed by a sea of boys. He is hoisted back onstage
where someone takes the microphone to say that “Darby Crash is not God,”

10 2 Muñoz ∙ Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons

which makes one think that the threat of Darby Crash being God was
somehow lingering in the air. Back onstage he attempts to pull himself up,
but his body seems to decide that the ground level of the stage may in fact
be the best place to bring his lyrics home. At the end, we see the famous
image that adorns the poster for The Decline of Western Civilization (1981)
of Crash on his back, his sputtering body, lying onstage, seemingly col-
lapsed by the weight of his righteous punk rage. This image of the wasted
teen icon writhing on the floor, looking conterminously pained and blissed
out, indexes the ways in which punk functioned as a visceral desire to want
something else within a field of ossified social relations.
•••
While I have gone to some lengths to make a distinction between Darby
Crash the historical personage and the figure of Crash, making the point
that it is the figure of crash that conjures a sense of a commons, it seems
necessary to offer a brief outline of Crash’s biography, which, after all,
functions as source material for the figure of Crash. Darby Crash was
born Jan Paul Beahm. Legend has it that he had a troubled family life.
The man he grew up believing was his biological father left his fam-
ily. His older brother died of an overdose. During a teenage argument,
his sister revealed to him that his biological father was really a Swedish
sailor named William Björklund. He attended IPS (Innovative Program
School), a school within University High School in Los Angeles. Before
the Germs were the Germs, Beahm and Pat Smear (then Georg Ruthen-
berg, one of the only African Americans at the high school) called them-
selves Sophistifuck and the Revlon Spam Queens, but had to shorten this
name to the Germs. After first adopting the name Bobby Pyn, Beahm
changed his name to the less cutesy sounding Darby Crash. The final
lineup of the Germs included Crash, Smear, Doom, and drummer Don
Bolles. They struck their poses beautifully. The Germs’ classic lineup
included a charismatic, self-­destructive, and, more often than not, wasted
lead singer-­songwriter, a black guitarist who would go on to play with
Nirvana and be the epicenter of another cultural moment, an extremely
cool-­looking female bassist with perfect bleached white hair, and a seem-
ingly guileless drummer from Arizona who served as a foil for the band
and who was often referred to as a “Cactus Head.” Such a crew, includ-
ing a queer, a woman, and a person of color, may have enacted a visual
iconography that appealed to many of the kids in the audience, but it is
nonetheless important to note that the most relevant identity locus at the
moment was punk itself, not race, gender, or sexuality. But this is also to
say that Hollywood punk was not then the predominantly white phenom-
enon that it would become when the Orange County hardcore punk scene
arose. The Germs played their first gig at the Orpheum Theatre in 1977

Social Text 116 • Fall 2013 10 3

 and eventually broke up in 1980. Crash took his own life on December 7,
1980, at the age of twenty-­two through a planned heroin overdose. It is
inaccurate to suggest, in the parlance of addiction, that the young punk
struggled with addiction since he had planned his demise through this
method for some time before his death.
Some of the data that informs our understanding of this biography
is gleaned from two defining texts on the LA scene: We Got the Neutron
Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen
and Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the
Germs by Mullen with Adam Parfrey and Germs drummer Bolles.9 Both
books present alternating stories of Darby as a visionary genius and a whiny
brat. As with the concert video I described and the Hollywood biopic I
discussed, these oral history books on the Germs and the LA punk scene
are not just sources or data; they are objects that are not of the Germs, like
the music itself or the lyrics, but belong to the idea of the Germs, the punk
fan’s scene of fabulation and figuration, which stand in, for, and beside the
event of the Germs. My favorite story in one of these books was one I cited
in my book Cruising Utopia.10 I cannot resist retelling the story of Tomata
du Plenty’s take on Darby:

Darby was fascinating in a parking lot. I think that’s where he was really a
star. Watching his behavior in a parking lot, that’s what made Darby Crash,
that’s what made him a legend, certainly not his onstage performances! Oh,
they were so boring! I couldn’t sit through a Germs set, please. Torture! But
I could certainly sit on the curb with a 40-­ounce and listen to him for hours.
He was an interesting, interesting boy.11

A lot of people had a lot of things to say about Crash; he was that kind
of figure. Tomata’s line should be read within the context of a state-
ment from another genius gay front man on the scene. Its bitchiness still
reserves the title of genius and outright fabulousness for Crash but not
within the parameters we usually view performers. Tomata suggests that
Darby’s genius happened on the level of everyday life and never lived
up to the spectacle of performing. Other voices in the two scene biogra-
phies I have mentioned make the opposite case, that Darby was a genius
and visionary performer. The accuracy of either interpretation is beside
the point. Instead we can see how these competing voices of affiliates,
aficionados, and the afflicted — a ll labels that circulate around the sign
fan — converge in the service of assembling the myth of Darby Crash.
But myth can be treacherous, as Jean-­Luc Nancy contends in the
Inoperative Community, for myth, and the holistic idea of community it
props up, leads to fascism. He argues that the mythical needs to be inter-
rupted for another sense of being-­i n-­common to reveal itself.12 In the case

10 4 Muñoz ∙ Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons

of Nancy, this other sense of being-­w ith is a literary communism.13 Litera-
ture for Nancy disrupts the totalizing originary force of myth that leads
to the disintegration of community. The literariness of literature, which
Nancy understands as its arbitrary, aleatory, and fragmentary nature,
interrupts the dangerously enclosed conception of the communitarian.
The fan’s fabulatory flight plan leads to a destination or landing, in this
case punk, by working with found objects, real or fake, that “belong” to
the event, as provisional vehicles, which allow for a certain arrival at the
idea of punk. And punk itself is often fragmentary, refusing the origin
myths that have been ascribed to it, insisting on a fragmentariness that
feels no responsibility to adhere to any idea of an a priori whole. Punk is
about inelegantly cutting and stitching a sense of the world together; it is
about imagining a commons that is held together by nothing more than a
safety pin. The figurations of the Germs and Crash function as interrupted
myths, an always incomplete and astir fabulation, and finally an entry into
an idea of a punk rock commons or a punk communism.
It seems like a hindrance to attempt to theorize the ontological com-
munism that punk reveals through an inquiry into a figuration that is still
based on one performer, Darby Crash; in such an analysis, the figure of
Crash can therefore be mistaken for a hermetic individual. Crash is not
an individual but, instead, a singularity that sets the scene for other sin-
gularities to encounter each other. It is worthwhile to consider the ways
in which the singularity of one figure opens up the possibility of seeing a
turbulent, aleatory, and potentially generative being-­i n-­common. Having
a death wish in the case of Crash was not simply a nihilistic no-­future
fantasy. Crash wanted to belong to something larger through his messy
martyrdom; by all indications, his desire to die young was a wish to belong
beyond finitude to a vaster plurality — a conflicted, fragmentary, and thorny
punk rock commons. One of Crash’s central texts, the lyrics to “Lexicon
Devil,” illuminates an understanding of the being-­i n-­common of the punk
rock commons:

Lexicon Devil
I’m a lexicon devil with a battered brain
Searching for a future the world’s my aim
So gimme gimme your hands gimme gimme your minds
Gimme gimme your hands gimme gimme your minds
Gimme gimme this gimme gimme that

I want toy tin soldiers that can push and shove

I want gunboy rovers that will wreck this club
I’ll build you up and level your heads
We’ll run it my way cold men and politics dead

(Chorus)

Social Text 116 • Fall 2013 10 5

 I’ll get silver guns to drip old blood
Let’s give this established joke a shove
We’re gonna wreak havoc on this rancid mill
I’m searchin’ for somethin’ even if I’m killed

(Chorus)

Empty out your pockets — you don’t need their change

I’m giving you the power to rearrange
Together we’ll run to the highest prop
Tear it down and let it drop . . . away . . .

(Chorus)14

Crash is, of course, the lexicon devil with the battered brain who many
know and love. He is looking for a future, and he is desirous of futurity.
He is asking for our hands and, more importantly, our minds, in some
kind of union. We need to level the “rancid mill,” which is the scene of
our everyday lives as exploitable subjects. We are being asked to pledge
allegiance to the not-­so-­secret flag, which is a fag, a blue circle, and a burn
on your arm. The fragmentary call of the song’s lyrics asks for something
that is beyond mere recognition. It is a plea for a kind of compresence,
a seduction toward shared heresy, to join together in his quest, which is
for both a future and a world. The world is made up of various senses of
the world and their attunement toward seeing and feeling in common,
to touching the limits of one another’s being, much like the punk who
staggers forth in a mosh pit, hurling herself against another body, not to
do harm, but instead to touch in a way not predicated on mastery and
control, signaling a salient desire for an encounter, an engaged participa-
tion, an invigorating melee. This punk rock commons is predicated on
the acknowledgment that brains have been battered and that the order we
live and struggle within is indeed a “rancid mill.” Capitalism is itself the
rancid mill, insofar as it organizes life around production in such a way
that abstract labor impedes the potentiality for being-­w ith.
Crash’s official call to charismatic adoration was of course matched
by something like his everyday call for people to give him stuff. In the first
of the two coauthored oral histories that I mentioned, Brendan Mullen filed
the following report on the scene:

Around the time (GI) came out, Danny’s Oki Dog on Santa Monica Boule-
vard became the hot post gig gathering place for the new suburban hardcore
kids who were coming up in droves to Hollywood all the time for shows
at the Starwood and the Whisky. Oki Dog became the big Tuesday night
hotspot, the consolidated gathering of the intercounty, SoCal teen punk
tribes during the summer and fall of ’80. Many of these new kids would hang
around Oki Dog and try to emulate Darby with his pre-­Mohawk look . . .

10 6 Muñoz ∙ Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons

 a single footlong braided ponytail hanging from the back of the neck with
chains and bandanas wrapped around the ankles of U.S. Army combat
boots. Oki Dog was the newest, coolest place yet to get your Germs burn
and to watch Darby hold court with his minions squatting openmouthed
on the ground while he practiced his “Gimme, gimme this . . . Gimme,
gimme that” mantra. I’d hear him say, “Hi, I’m Darby Crash and that shirt
would look real cool on me. Give it to me, please.” It was a litany of gimmes.
Gimme your shirt. Gimme that button. Gimme that bracelet, Gimme a
beer. Gimme two dollars. Gimme a ride to the Whisky. Gimme a ride to the
party. Gimme a ride home. Jesus wept!15

So Darby’s call to “empty your pockets” was part of a continual perfor-

mance. It happened onstage and it happened at Oki Dog. This is a story
about a bratty kid panhandling throughout his life. But let’s go beyond
the literal and think about this “Gimme, gimme” as an open call for hav-
ing and needing more. It is the relevant complaint that this “here and now
is not enough,” that we must demand more and more from the world and
we should not be content to settle. To want more is to desire an enhance-
ment of our multiple senses of the world. Crash is the scamming, grifter
punk who just wants stuff, but he elevates this wanting of stuff to another
level that is not just the desire to consume commodities. Crash’s “Gimme,
gimme” is the performance of a voracious desire to have more than this.
It can be understood on the level of an individual, and as a response to
Ronald Reagan’s America and to California; however, as Fiona I. B. Ngo
has suggested, the LA punk scene in general can be understood as a semi-
articulate response to the “the impact of the wars in Southeast Asia, as
well as the continuing histories of imperialist aggression elsewhere,” and
Crash’s words can be understood in this way as well.16 Put in the context
of the particularly appalling shell game of abundance and scarcity that
marks that period, we can perhaps enter Crash’s blue circle, his secret
and extremely queer sociality of wanting more. Working through this
enhanced scale, we suddenly have a story about wanting as an emerging
collectivity. Again, let’s consider this one of this essay’s organizing dialec-
tics, that of annihilation and innovation. Crash’s desire is a wave of want-
ing that will demand the shirt off our backs and the cleaning out of our
pockets. But after that particular burn of “not having things,” of loss writ
large, the conditions of possibility of really wanting something open up in
visceral and tangible ways. Perhaps what is needed is that those hailed by
the blue and burning circle of the Germs walk out onstage, or even act out
in the checkout line, and declare that the capitalist transactions that stand
in for our actual lived experience of each other might not be enough, that
we need something else, something more, something common.
Many young people who are not traditionally associated with punk’s
whitewashed history found a portal to think of their being-­in-­common

Social Text 116 • Fall 2013 107

 through the figure of Crash. A few years ago journalist and music theo-
rist Josh Kun wrote an article on the East LA punk scene for Los Angeles
Magazine. He began with a story that features two members of the Chicano
punk band Los Illegals sitting at a café:

It was the night the Chicanos got blessed by the Pope of L.A. Punk. In
1980, the Atomic Cafe sat on a lonely stretch of Alameda, just south of Oli-
vera Street and Union Station. Run by an army of Japanese American wait-
resses in short skirts, dagger earrings, and sky-­h igh jet-­black hair streaked
with electric blue, it was an after-­hours outpost on the edge of pre-­Home
Depot downtown with picture windows and squinty office lighting. After
last call, it’s where the L.A. punk scene went to get fed.

The Chicanos, Willie Herron and Jesus Velo, remember the night like this.
They were eating wieners and beans after a midnight club crawl and in
walked the punk pope himself, Darby Crash — the chronically cut-­a nd-­
stitched lead screamer for the Germs, the most infamous local crew of musi-
cal screwups. Pale, white, and out of control, Crash was the punk scene’s
misfit poster boy, as well known for smearing his body with mayonnaise
and burning circles onto his skin as for his noise assaults. He had just come
back from a stay in London with a new Mohawk and a new death wish the
night he walked into the Atomic Cafe, cruised all the tables full of bands and
groupies, and then stopped to fix his blurry stare on the Chicanos.

“He just nodded at us, letting us know he saw us,” Velo recalls. “I was like,
‘Este pinche vato.’ We got the Darby blessing!”17

Crash’s blessing means a lot to the Chicano punks. Crash, as I mentioned

above, went on record saying some stupid things about fascism that I
do not want to simply dismiss as merely punk posturing. It is therefore
interesting that despite his ignorant provocations, he represented a version
of punk rock that so many kids with less stuff, and by this I mean fewer
life chances, could really relate to. But again, this essay has not been so
much about the biographical Darby Crash as it has been about the figure
of Darby Crash, in all its contradictoriness and incommensurability. The
incident that Kun narrates suggests that there may have been an erotic,
more-­than-­neutral gesture of approval. It may have been part of the
story of a “secret glance” and an “ancient stance.” On an explicitly queer
note, Darby makes an appearance in The Barber of East L.A., a play per-
formed by the Butchlalis de Panochtitlan and written by Raquel Gutier-
rez. In the play, the character Julian talks about how he loves dirty, gross
punk cock and dreams of his date with Darby Crash. Brown/Chicano
and queer imaginings crash at the figure of Darby. Karen Tongson has
made the case that The Barber of East L.A. “explores how queer of color
histories intersect with both mainstream and underground events and
movements,” and certainly the play performatively grafts onto the ways

10 8 Muñoz ∙ Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons

in which brown queers of color locate their own histories of desire and
desiring-­w ith through Crash’s underground iconicity.18 He is a figure that
invites a certain allegiance, a fandom, a sense of plurality — t hat being-­i n-­
common that so many who are without crave.
Elsewhere I have made the case for a kind of anti-­a ntiutopianism in
the face of the foreclosure of politics that various forms of antirelationality
call for.19 But I take this opportunity to add that while a certain version
of the negative is problematic for various modes of thinking otherwise,
another version of the negative, the one I have been signaling through this
paper’s plotting of a dialectic of annihilation and innovation, might be a
good and even necessary negation that enables the enactment of a punk
rock commons. Paolo Virno discusses the innovative action at the center of
the joke’s negation of the “real world.” He suggests that through the fallacy
intrinsic to the joke, we arrive at a juncture where we can imagine “new
diagrams for living.”20 Jokes thus function to question and even partially
annihilate a certain sense of the real. A lot of people thought Darby and the
Germs were a joke band, and, in this way, they were just that — t hey repre-
sented a negation akin to Virno’s fallacy that renders life in the checkout
line as a bad joke. This is the negation of punk rock. It is the belligerent
insistence on something else. “Gimme, gimme” is simultaneously a rallying
cry and a mantra. Returning to Spicer, it is “The grand concord of what /
Does not stoop to definition.” The brown punks and queers discussed
here locate a certain dissident mode of desiring in the dead icon’s afterlife
and afterburn. They perform an insistence on wanting more in the face of
scarcity, which does more than simply reject negation, but instead, works
through it to imagine a being-­in-­common within the negative.

Notes
I would like to thank Joshua Lubin-­L evy for his invaluable help in the preparation
of this essay.
1. Jack Spicer, “Improvisation on a Sentence by Poe,” in My Vocabulary Did
This to Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 28), 171.
2. Alice Bag, Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage (A Chicana Punk
Story) (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2011).
3. Louis Althusser, The Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978 – 1987,
ed. Francois Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso,
1997).
4. Tavia Nyong’o, “Punk’d Theory,” Social Text 23 (2005): 19 – 34.
5. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feldham (London: Continuum
Books, 2005).
6. See Jean-­Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and
Anne E. O’Bryne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
7. The Germs, “The Other Newest One,” (GI), Slash Records, 1979, LP. Song

Social Text 116 • Fall 2013 10 9

 lyrics transcribed from (MIA): The Complete Anthology, Slash Records, 1993, CD.
Song lyrics reprinted in Brendan Mullen, Don Bolles, and Adam Parfrey, Lexicon
Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs (Port Townsend,
WA: Feral House, 2002), 281.
8. The Germs, Media Blitz: The Germs Story, Cleopatra Records, 2004, DVD.
9. Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen, We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold
Story of L.A. Punk (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001); Mullen, Bolles, and Par-
frey, Lexicon Devil.
10. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
(New York: New York University Press, 2009), 112.
11. Mullen, Bolles, and Parfrey, Lexicon Devil, 47.
12. Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans.
Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 43 – 70.
13. Ibid., 70 – 82.
14. The Germs, “Lexicon Devil,” (GI). Song lyrics transcribed from (MIA):
The Complete Anthology. Song lyrics reprinted in Mullen, Bolles, and Parfrey, Lexicon
Devil, 279.
15. Spitz and Mullen, We Got the Neutron Bomb, 209 – 10.
16. See Fiona I. B. Ngo’s important work on the LA punk scene’s formation
as affected by shadow of war and imperialist logics. Fiona I. B. Ngo, “Punk in the
Shadow of War,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22 (2012):
205.
17. Josh Kun, “Vex Populi,” Los Angeles Magazine, March 2003, 62.
18. Karen Tongson, Relocations: Suburban Queer Imaginaries (New York: New
York University Press, 2011), 191.
19. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 12.
20. Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, trans. Isabella
Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008),
74.

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