Third Text, 2020
Vol. 34, No. 1, 49–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1663686
Roscoe Weiner, Punk Map of
New York City, May/June
1978, cartoon, Downtown
Collection at the Fales Library,
New York University, photo by
author
1 Punk, no 14, May/June 1978
2 Mark Anthony Neal
describes how early hip hop
emerged from a de facto state
of racial segregation in a
post-industrial urban
landscape, and that this
segregation was, arguably,
more insidious than the legal
segregation of the pre-Civil
Rights era, see ‘Postindustrial
Soul: Black Popular Music at
the Crossroads’, in Murray
Forman and Mark Anthony
Neal, eds, That’s the Joint!:
The Hip-Hop Studies
Reader, Routledge,
New York, 2004, pp 366–
367
3 Alan Light, ed, The Vibe
History of Hip Hop, Three
Rivers Press, New York,
1999, pp 26–27
Racialising Amateurism
Punk and Rap
Benjamin Court
‘The Punk Map of NYC’, featured in the May/June 1978 issue of Punk
magazine, offers a cartoonish view of New York City. Along with
famous tourist destinations and iconic punk destinations like CBGB’s
and Bleecker Bob’s record store, the ‘cartographer’ Roscoe Weiner
depicts the dangers of the city, including a murder in Central Park and a
‘floating suicide’ in the Hudson River. The map represents New York
City from the skewed perspective of downtown Manhattan, with
Harlem and the South Bronx lumped together on its northern edge.1
The South Bronx, backed by flames, is depicted as a dangerous, distant
location inhabited only by cockroaches and the most egregious black
stereotypes – a hustler running a game of three-card monte, a pimp with
a cigar in his mouth, and a group of cannibals holding spears, cooking
a white man in a pot. Immediately to the east, the prison on Riker’s
Island is occupied by a sea of anonymous black faces. Punk magazine
rarely covered music made by African American musicians, but black car-
icatures regularly appeared in its comic strips.
Histories of New York City note the 1970s as a high point of musical
creativity. Punk in downtown Manhattan arose at the same time musi-
cians in the Bronx began rapping and developing new turntable tech-
niques, but interaction between the two music scenes was rare in the
1970s. Black musicians in New York City had become ghettoised
through decades of racial segregation and redlining. Federal housing pro-
jects, ostensibly built for the working poor, ensured that the poorest black
residents remained socially and economically isolated.2 Throughout the
1960s and early 1970s, approximately 60,000 Bronx homes, whose resi-
dents were disproportionately black and Puerto Rican, were razed to the
ground. Around the time rap became a recorded artform, pop radio
was likewise entering its most segregated period since the 1940s.3
© 2019 Third Text
51
4 Richard Goldstein, ‘Got to
Slo Disco’, Village Voice,
12 November 1979. As late
as 1987, the New York
City chief of city artists’
accreditations would not
accredit any rap musicians
‘because she did not
consider their work to be
music or art’, quoted in
Richard Kostelanetz,
Artists’ SoHo: 49 Episodes
of Intimate History,
Fordham University Press,
New York, 2014, p 186.
5 For general histories of
music in New York City in
the 1970s, see Will Hermes,
Love Goes to Buildings on
Fire: Five Years in
New York That Changed
Music Forever, Faber and
Faber, London, 2011;
Benjamin Whalley,
director, Once Upon a
Time in New York: the
Birth of Hip Hop, Disco
and Punk, colour film, 60
minutes, British
Broadcasting Corporation,
London, 2007. These
histories present punk and
rap (along with other
genres) as historical
coincidences but draw
minimal cultural or musical
connections between the
two. See also the dust
jacket for Hermes, which
reproduces, and sanitises,
‘The Punk Map of NYC’.
6 Musicians of colour have
been central to punk since
its birth in the 1970s (in
cities including Los
Angeles, Detroit, and
Washington DC) and
continue to form a
significant core of the
genre’s regional scenes to
the present. For a wider-
ranging approach to punk’s
racial history, see Stephen
Duncombe and Maxwell
Tremblay, eds, White Riot:
Punk Rock and the Politics
of Race, Verso, London,
2011. The scope of this
article focuses on the
genre’s origins in the early
1970s through the earliest
recognition of rap by white
music media in about 1981.
7 See also Evan Rapport,
‘Hearing Punk as Blues’,
Popular Music, vol 33,
issue 1, 2014, pp 39–67
Disco nightclubs in Manhattan regularly featured black musicians, includ-
ing early rap acts, but these venues were nonetheless segregated;
New York’s City Planning Commission and the Board of Standards and
Appeals aggressively zoned residential areas to keep discos, and their
black and queer club-goers, from encroaching beyond Harlem. As
Richard Goldstein reported, these zoning tactics were a blatant attempt
to ‘confin[e] minorities so the gentry can breathe free’.4
As a result, punks had little knowledge of hip hop’s musical or cultural
vibrancy in the 1970s. Though their cultural births coincided, and critics
would later draw social and stylistic comparisons between the two, punk
and hip hop received starkly divergent cultural judgements in their early
years.5 In particular, musicians, rock critics and punk fans frequently
evoked ‘primitivism’ when discussing the amateurish qualities of both
white downtown musicians and black musicians from Harlem and the
Bronx; I emphasise this aspect of the discourse to question how a term
intended to identify a positive energy in punk became derogatory when
used to describe rap.6 It is through this dual standard I question a bias
in the affirmation of artistic ‘amateurism’, which I define as a characteristic
set of beliefs, a body of knowledge, and a way of knowing, all organised
around the principle that it is possible, and perhaps preferable, to make
music without established musical knowledge. Artistic ‘amateurism’ func-
tions as a celebratory term only when we give such art the benefit of the
doubt – that it is not mere ineptness, that it is fruitful, that it is intentional,
or that it is subversive. This benefit is also a privilege; in this case, it is a
white privilege.
This punk mode of whiteness is defined not only by the self-conscious
performance of untrained, anti-normative, or anarchic amateurism, but
also the benefits that result from the critical celebration of such transgres-
sions. In this article, I describe New York punk in the 1970s as a white
racial project.7 Michael Omi and Howard Winant define ‘racial projects’
as the linkage between racial representation and the structural effects of
race: ‘Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive
practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experi-
ences are racially organized, based upon that meaning.’8 Racial projects
are themselves the building blocks of a broader ‘racial formation’, that
is, ‘a process of historically situated projects’ by which ‘racial categories
are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed’.9 Omi and Winant
explain how racial projects operate through a social hegemony that is
simultaneously structuring and signifying; on the micro-social level, a
racial project often appears as ‘common sense’, ie through the assumption
and expectation that people will act out their apparent racial identities,
and ‘indeed we become disoriented when they do not’.10 Historically,
Winant argues, white racial projects were significantly reshaped in the
1970s:
The anxieties caused by the upsurge and containment of the struggle
against racism, in short, precipitated widespread political crises and
realignments across much of the political spectrum, for people of
every ideological and racial ‘hue’, so to speak… It is no surprise,
then, that a reevaluation of the meaning of whiteness emerged as
part of a fierce effort to come up with a post-civil rights era
concept of race.11

8 Michael Omi and Howard
Winant, Racial Formation
in the United States, third
edition, Routledge,
New York, 2014, p 56,
emphasis in the original.
9 Ibid, p 55, p 68. For the
early history of New York
City’s racial formation, see
Thelma Wills Foote, Black
and White Manhattan: The
History of Racial
Formation in Colonial
New York City, Oxford
University Press, Oxford,
2004. For other
approaches to racial
formation in musicology,
see Derek W Vaillant,
‘Sounds of Whiteness:
Local Radio, Racial
Formation, and Public
Culture in Chicago, 1921–
1935’, American
Quarterly, vol 54, no 1,
March 2002, pp 25–66.
10 Omi and Winant, Racial
Formation in the United
States, op cit, p 68, p 59
11 Howard Winant, ‘White
Racial Projects’, in Birgit
Brander Rasmussen, Eric
Klinenberg, Irene J Nexica,
and Matt Wray, eds, The
Making and Unmaking of
Whiteness, Duke University
Press, Durham, 2001, p
102. Roderick A Ferguson
challenges this narrative
from an intersectional
perspective: ‘But a
periodization of the
seventies and eighties as the
moment of women-of-color
and queer-of-color
emergences tells a different
story about identity. This
periodization promotes the
historical and contingent
importance of identity in
anti-racist struggles as well
as identity’s limitations
with regard to those
struggles,’ see ‘On the
Specificities of Racial
Formation: Gender and
Sexuality in
Historiographies of Race’
in Daniel Martinez
HoSang, Oneka LaBennett
and Laura Pulido, eds,
Racial Formation in the
Twenty-First Century,
University of California
Press, Berkeley, 2012, p 53,
emphasis in the original.
52
In this case, I compare the acceptance and celebration of punk as ‘primi-
tive’ with inverted judgements of shared qualities in rap music. Namely,
I question the critical origins of the myth that rap is somehow less
musical or not considered to be music at all. Persistent stereotypes in
white music media, particularly rock criticism, constructed the discursive
meanings of punk and rap, while institutional and political segregation
structured this distinction.12
Racial biases evident throughout white punk receptions of rap reflect
the segregation that kept these musical scenes distinctly separate through-
out the 1970s; musicians were writing and performing rap and punk in
New York City for at least seven years before they endeavoured any sub-
stantial creative interactions.13 Richard Grabel notes, ‘It’s a symptom of
the cultural gulf that separates black and white in America… that
rappers music could have been fermenting in the clubs of Harlem since
1972 without anyone south of 96th Street being aware of it till barely a
year ago.’14 When rappers began to release commercial recordings in
1979, it took two years for the Village Voice, one of the most widely
read downtown newspapers, to start reviewing them. The music editor
of the Village Voice, Robert Christgau, had a policy of not reviewing
twelve-inch singles – a format largely reserved for DJs and dance records.
Yet self-conscious primitivism was central to punks, who prized their
inability to play and purported lack of musical knowledge. Punks and
associated critics defined the genre, in part, by its primitivism. Drawing
on Norman Mailer’s definition of the hipster as ‘the wise primitive in a
giant jungle’, Mark Jacobson described the punks he saw on the Bowery
as ‘a collection of wise primitives making incisive comments about a
culture nobody even wanted to admit existed’.15 Similarly, Bernard
Gendron argues that Lester Bangs and his colleagues at Creem defined
punk in part by pointing out its particular ‘ineptness and amateurism’.16
Bangs wrote that The Stooges, for example, embodied the punk aesthetic
through ‘the magic promise eternally made and occasionally fulfilled by
rock: that a band can start out bone-primitive, untutored and uncertain,
and evolve into a powerful and eloquent ensemble’.17 In one particular
editorial in Punk, an unnamed author defines the word punk as ‘a begin-
ner, an inexperienced hand’, clarifying the conventional punk attitude that
‘any kid can pick up a guitar and become a rock ’n’ roll star, despite or
because of his lack of ability, talent, intelligence, limitations and/or poten-
tial’. More specifically, the author explains that punk rock is rooted in
rock ’n’ roll as a ‘very primitive form of expression – like cave paintings
or jungle sculpture’.18
By the early 1980s, musicians and rock journalists were drawing com-
parisons between rap and punk rock.19 Summaries of the two musical
genres noted their historical and geographic proximity; one typical com-
parison described both as ‘essentially grass-roots phenomena with dedi-
cated followings of younger fans who view the music as something
distinct from the slicker, more conservative sound of old-line bands’.20
Bangs described rap as an essentially noisy genre, like punk, and explained
one reason for ‘the popularity of rap music, like disco and punk before it,
is that it’s so utterly annoying to those of us whose cup of blare it isn’t’.21
Chris Stein from Blondie also referred to rap as ‘the closest thing to punk
rock’, comparing the do-it-yourself roots of punk to the technological
innovations of turntablists and rappers. But Stein also pointed out
53
12 Although racial formation
theory emphasises both
structures of oppression
and the effects of racial
representation, I
acknowledge criticisms of
the theory that claims it
misses the outsized power
of white supremacy in the
United States. Joe Feagin
and Sean Elias argue that
Omi and Winant ‘do not
provide a significant and
explicit discussion of
whites’ central and
powerful role in shaping the
racial hierarchy and the
dominant beliefs, practices,
social institutions and
larger US social structures’,
in ‘Rethinking Racial
Formation Theory: A
Systemic Racism Critique’,
Ethnic and Racial Studies,
vol 36, no 6, 2013, p 940.
13 I refer specifically to rap
music throughout this
article to distinguish it from
the broader cultural
umbrella of ‘hip hop’,
which also includes graffiti
art and various forms of
dance. Downtown art
galleries started exhibiting
graffiti around 1973, when
the United Graffiti Artists
were featured at the Razor
Gallery. The first lasting
connections between
downtown artists and
Bronx artists came about
when the SoHo artist Stefan
Eins opened the gallery
Fashion Moda in the South
Bronx in 1978. Starting in
1979, before rappers ever
performed in Downtown
Manhattan, Fashion Moda
hosted concerts that
featured both downtown
rock bands and local Bronx
rappers, such as the Wicked
Wizards. See Calvin
Tomkins, ‘The Art World,
Alternatives’, New Yorker,
26 December 1983.
Jonathan Toubin details the
key artists and events that
eventually brought together
these segregated artistic
scenes, describing them as
actively working to forge
connections in spite of so
many geographic and
cultural barriers, see
‘Uptown-Downtown: Hip
Hop Music in Downtown
Manhattan in the Early
1980s’, in Ellie M Hisama
significant class differences between the two groups: ‘Where the C.B.G.B.
crowd, lower-middle and middle-class kids, had access to guitars and
stuff, these guys don’t have access to anything – all they have is micro-
phones and voices.’22
In spite of these similarities, critics in the mainstream – shaped by
implicit and explicit racial bias – characterised rap as a ‘simplistic’
and ‘naive’ type of music. As David Samuels argues, white critics
regarded early rap musicians as an ‘evocation of an age-old image of
blackness: a foreign, sexually charged, and criminal underworld
against which the norms of white society are defined’.23 Rock critics
in the 1970s were almost entirely white men concerned with legitimising
white rock musicians; in the rare instances when a critic from Creem or
Rolling Stone covered black musicians, they usually placed their music
into a separate, smaller category: ‘One listened to white rock for signifi-
cance and one danced to black music for fun.’24 Grabel, in one of the
earliest mentions of rap in New Musical Express, described the ‘grass
roots’ origins of a genre he thought was created by ‘fresh-faced and
naïve’ youth ‘who know more about street hustling than media hus-
tling’.25 In The New York Times’ Stephen Holden remarked, ‘Not
since the halcyon days of doo wop, has a style of street music
emerged that combines this much innocence with a real communal
exuberance.’26 Patrick Goldstein states that ‘unlike most dance
records, the production is simple’, ‘it’s essentially the work of amateurs’,
and declared that ‘Most of rap’s appeal is in its joyous simplicity.’27
Critics who noted amateurism as a sign of creativity in rock music
described rap, however, as youthful and inept.
As rap entered into broader public awareness, these primitivist associ-
ations became linked directly to stories about the dangers and deterio-
ration of the Bronx. Jacobson explained that punks like Legs McNeil (a
co-founder of Punk) had extremely limited awareness of black experiences
and that ‘blacks were mostly on the radio, making the rotten disco music
he hated, or in the first three pages of the Daily News hurting people’.28
Rock journalists contributed to this narrative by depicting rap as an as
‘aural dark alley, a seemingly anarchic collage of ghetto patois and
jagged rhythms’ that would ‘disorient’ listeners used to ‘the sunny,
squeaky-clean rock popular today’.29 The photographer who contributed
to Grabel’s feature in New Musical Express suggested taking a photo of
Grandmaster Flash in front of ‘a particularly wasted-looking shell of a
building’ in his neighbourhood, to which the musician responded by
‘screwing up his face in distaste at the idea’. Nonetheless, Grabel
opened his feature on Grandmaster Flash with a gritty depiction of the
Bronx as a ‘wasteland’:
the evidence of advanced decay is everywhere. The buildings at the end
of the block are abandoned, their windows smashed or boarded up.
Garbage and rubble is piled on the sidewalk. The vacant lots that dot
the landscape are also strewn with rubble. Grandmaster Flash lives on
this block.30
Meanwhile, city housing policies largely benefited artistic pursuits
in Downtown Manhattan. As a matter of course, histories of the

and Evan Rapport, eds,
Critical Minded: New
Approaches to Hip Hop
Studies, University of
Michigan Press, Ann Arbor,
2005, p 42.
14 Richard Grabel, ‘Kurtis
Blow: Blow by Blow’, New
Musical Express, 11
October 1980
15 Mark Jacobson, ‘Cool in an
Uncool Time: Teenage
Hipster in the Modern
World’, Village Voice, 7
August 1978
16 Bernard Gendron, Between
Montmartre and the Mudd
Club: Popular Music and
the Avant-Garde,
University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 2002, pp 234–235
17 Lester Bangs, ‘Of Pop and
Pies and Fun: A Program
for Mass Liberation in the
Form of a Stooges Review,
or, Who’s the Fool?’,
Creem, November/
December 1970
18 This definition was
included in an editorial
reply to a letter written by
Peter Crowley, the music
director of Max’s Kansas
City. ‘Editorial’, Punk, vol
1, no 3, April 1976
19 In June 1980, Fashion
Moda co-curated, with the
art collective Collaborative
Projects, the ‘Times Square
Show’, a massive exhibit in
an abandoned massage
parlour in Times Square
that presented work from
over 100 artists and
included a mix of both
downtown and uptown
artists. Richard Goldstein
compared the conceptual
approach of the artists
involved in the ‘Times
Square Show’ to punk’s
stripped-down aesthetic
referring to the exhibit as
‘three chord art anyone can
play’, in Richard Goldstein,
‘The First Radical Art Show
of the ‘80s’, Village Voice,
16 June 1980. Lucy R
Lippard’s review described
the art’s ‘ineptness, and the
ramifications of that
ineptness’ as the most
significant outcome of the
exhibit, in ‘Sex and Death
and Shock and Schlock: A
54
downtown art scene explain how artists thrived in the cheap, dilapi-
dated lofts of SoHo that allowed them to congregate in large, affordable
spaces. As Ann Fensterstock points out, however, a wider set of politi-
cal, economic and cultural variables ultimately led downtown Manhat-
tan to become an attractive site for these artists.31 In the early 1960s,
land developers targeted the empty lofts these artists would later
occupy. The New York City Planning Commission report, written by
Chester Rapkin, an economics professor at Columbia University,
demonstrated that forty per cent of the workforce in the 650 businesses
belonging to the garment, rag and hat industry in SoHo was Puerto
Rican, twenty per cent black, and the remainder were largely Jews
and European immigrants. Political pressure from organised labour
used this report to keep SoHo loft spaces from being demolished, but
light manufacturing had largely abandoned Lower Manhattan by
1970. By this point, landlords were illegally renting these lofts to
about 2,000 artists.32
As downtown Manhattan became a refuge for white artists, overt
racism became a stylish expression of the systemic white supremacy that
had come to define the downtown music scene by 1979. In his 1979
article ‘The White Noise Supremacists’, Lester Bangs explained how
punk’s position of self-marginalisation made racial epithets and racist atti-
tudes seem hip and cool. Bangs blamed himself in part for contributing to
a punk culture in the pages of Creem, that ‘represented a reaction against
the hippie counterculture and what a lot of us regarded as its pious pussy-
footing around questions of racial and sexual identity’.33 One of Bangs’s
black friends, quoted in his essay, describes CBGB’s scenesters as ‘striving
to be offensive however they can, so it’s more vocal and they’re freer. It’s
semi-mob thinking’.34 As Bangs explained, punks prided themselves on
being uniquely abject: ‘One of the things that makes the punk stance
unique is how it seems to assume substance or at least style by the abdica-
tion of power: Look at me! I’m a cretinous little wretch! And proud of
it!’35 Over time, punk’s attempt to create a new backlash against
decency developed into a culture of everyday racism and ‘After a while
this casual, even ironic embrace of the totems of bigotry crosses over
into the real poison’. The swastika, for example, stands as a metaphor
for how punk’s compulsive need to shock generated the cynical, misan-
thropic attitude that led to everyday racism: ‘This scene and the punk
stance in general are riddled with self-hate, which is always reflexive,
and anytime you conclude that life stinks and the human race mostly
amounts to a pile of shit, you’ve got the perfect breeding ground for
fascism.’36 Putting it bluntly, the ‘resident punk’ and co-founder of
Punk magazine Legs McNeil declared, ‘blacks have their culture and we
have ours’.37
Critics heard an explicit emphasis on musical whiteness in punk’s
careful revision of the blues tropes that had informed rock ’n’ roll.
Bangs described ‘an evolution of sound, rhythm, and, stance running
from the Velvets through The Stooges to the Ramones and their children
that takes us farther and farther from the black-stud posture of Mick
Jagger that Lou Reed and Iggy partake in but that Joey Ramone certainly
doesn’t’.38 Christgau argued that punk was a style formed by a new gen-
eration of rock musicians who ignored, or openly rejected, the most overt
blues-based features of rock ’n’ roll. He described this style as ‘rock and
55
Long Review of The Times
Square Show’, Artforum,
vol 19, no 2, October 1980,
p 54
20 Don Snowden, ‘Rap, Rap,
Rapping at Top 10’s Door:
Kurtis Blow and Company’,
interview, Los Angeles
Times, 21 June 1981
21 Lester Bangs, ‘A
Reasonable Guide to
Horrible Noise’, Village
Voice, 30 September 1981
22 ‘As far as a generation of
kids who are literally
finding their own voice,
which is what the rapping
literally is… the technology
of the thing is fascinating,
the turntables and that
stuff,’ Chris Stein, quoted in
Andy Schwartz, ‘The Chick
Side of Blondie’, New York
Rocker, vol 1, no 34, June
1981, p 20
23 David Samuels, ‘The Rap
on Rap: The “Black Music”
that Isn’t Either’, in Forman
and Neal, eds, That’s the
Joint!, op cit, pp 147–148
24 Gendron, Between
Montmartre and the Mudd
Club, op cit, p 284,
emphasis in the original.
25 Richard Grabel, ‘The
Funky Four + One: Rap,
Rap, Rap’, New Musical
Express, 30 May 1981
26 Stephen Holden, ‘Pop:
Flash and Furious 5’,
New York Times, 4 August
1981
27 Patrick Goldstein, ‘Rappin’:
The New Sound of Soul’,
Los Angeles Times, 11
October 1981
28 Jacobson, ‘Cool in an
Uncool Time’, op cit
29 Goldstein, ‘Rappin’, op cit
30 Richard Grabel,
‘Grandmaster Flash: Flash
is Fast, Flash is Cool’, New
Musical Express, 26
September 1981
31 Ann Fensterstock, Art on
the Block: Tracking the
New York Art World from
SoHo to the Bowery,
Bushwick and Beyond,
St. Martin’s Press,
New York, 2013, pp 30–31
roll that differentiates itself from its (fundamentally black and rural)
sources by taking on the crude, ugly, perhaps brutal facts of the (white
and urban) prevailing culture, rather than hiding behind its bland
façade’.39 Of course, like every other form of popular music originating
in the United States, punk musicians undoubtedly drew heavily from
African American sources. Unlike previous rock musicians, however,
punks obscured the directness of these influences. Mark Jacobson
theorised that punks had broken significantly with Mailer’s notion of
American ‘hipster’ subculture by rejecting the ‘white negro’. As Jacobson
explained, black culture began to be redefined as middle-class, and thus
‘square’, in the 1970s, causing a serious dilemma for the white negro
model of hipsters:
If Legs were a hipster, and CBGB a hipster scene, where were the blacks? I
can’t remember seeing more than three or four blacks in any CBGB crowd.
Not one punk-rock band has been dominated by black musicians. No
CBGB band even seems to borrow firsthand from traditional R&B or
blues sources.40
Instead, young punks like McNeil began to look to white ethnic cul-
tures – especially those of Italians and Irish Americans – to find new
paradigms of countercultural toughness. This toughness was marked
by aggressive racism because, according to ‘black-fearing Squares (as
well as black-fearing hipsters)’, these ethnic groups were supposedly
‘the only group of whites capable of fending off the onrush of
“them”’.41
Punk and rock fans often directed these racial fears towards disco,
which the younger generation of punks associated explicitly with ‘black
music’. In an interview with radio station WPLJ’s DJ Tony Pigg, Pamela
Brown revealed Punk magazine’s tendency to synonymise disco and
blackness:
Pamela Brown What do you like?
Tony Pigg I like black music.
Brown (horrified) Disco?!
Pigg No! How old are you?
Brown Twenty-two.
Pigg Black music is like… young people tend to think black
music is disco music… that it means the same thing. It
doesn’t.42
For Brown and punks of her generation, the term black music immedi-
ately referenced disco. McNeil was known to use racial epithets liberally
when referring to disco, which he considered to be the result of an
‘unholy alliance between blacks and gays’.43 Bangs also noticed this
attitude amongst New York punks as a DJ when playing records by
black artists: ‘I began to hear this: “What’re you playing all that
nigger disco shit for, Lester?”’44 One of the only punk-associated acts
in downtown New York during the 1970s to borrow from disco expli-
citly, the no wave band James White and the Blacks, did so condescend-
ingly; as the bandleader James Chance explained, ‘disco is disgusting…
There’s something in it that’s always interested me – monotony. It’s sort

32 Ibid, pp 29–30
33 Lester Bangs, ‘The White
Noise Supremacists’,
Village Voice, 30 April
1979
34 Ibid, emphasis in the
original
35 Ibid, emphasis in the
original
36 Ibid
37 Quoted in Jacobson, ‘Cool
in an Uncool Time’, op cit
38 Bangs, ‘The White Noise
Supremacists’, op cit
39 Robert Christgau, ‘Avant-
Punk: A Cult Explodes…
and a Movement is Born’,
Village Voice, 24 October
1977. Gendron later noted
that punk discourses in the
1970s were largely shaped
by a generation shift among
white male teenagers.
‘Punk/new wave may well
be the first significant rock
music movement not to
display an explicitly blues
or soul foundation,’ he
wrote, in Gendron,
Between Montmartre and
the Mudd Club, op cit
40 Jacobson, ‘Cool in an
Uncool Time’, op cit
41 Ibid
42 Pamela Brown, ‘Interview
with Tony Pigg’, Punk, vol
1, no 3, April 1976
43 Jacobson, ‘Cool in an
Uncool Time’, op cit
44 Bangs, ‘The White Noise
Supremacists’, op cit
45 Alan Platt, ‘No Chance’,
SoHo Weekly News, 4
January 1979, emphasis in
the original
46 John Holmstrom, ‘Death to
Disco Shit! Long Live the
Rock!’, Punk, vol 1, no 1,
January 1976. Later that
year, and despite the fact
that Holmstrom thought
Donna Summer was
‘DISCO SHIT and [he]
REALLY HATE[S] DISCO
SHIT,’ he wrote a review of
one of her singles after
Casablanca Records sent a
press kit to Punk.
Holmstrom’s entire review
focuses on Summer’s
56
of jungle music… Really primitive’.45 On the first page of the first
issue of Punk, the flagship magazine of the New York punk scene,
founding editor John Holmstrom declared the magazine’s position
on disco:
Kill yourself. Jump off a fuckin’ cliff. Drive nails into your head. Become a
robot and join the staff at Disneyland. OD. Anything. Just don’t listen to
disco shit. I’ve seen that canned crap take real live people and turn them
into dogs! And vice versa. The epitome of all that’s wrong with western
civilization is disco.46
Disco also regularly ranked towards the top of Punk’s ‘Bottom 99’ list – a
feature that listed all things hated by punks, based partly on suggestions
sent in by readers. Though the authors of this list regularly included
ironic and self-effacing entries – including ‘John Holmstrom’ and ‘Punk
magazine’ – they placed disco alongside other things genuinely despised
by the magazine staff, including ‘faggots’, ‘feminists’, and ‘affirmative
action’.47
Rap music in the 1970s was inextricable from disco. Most of the
early rap records sampled from disco hits – such as the Sugarhill
Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ (1979), which borrows its instrumental track
from Chic’s ‘Good Times’ (1979) – and rappers often performed in
disco nightclubs. Journalists frequently portrayed rap as a tougher,
more grassroots version of disco. For example, Rolling Stone’s John
Morthland addressed the style’s roots: ‘Rapping may be the current
form of black, teenage street music, but it has ample antecedents. The
call-and-response is analogous to field hollers and gospel music; the
sexual bravado comes from blues and soul; the beat is an extension of
disco.’ Turning his attention to black audiences, he noted the difference
between the ‘older and more affluent blacks’ in midtown nightclubs who
‘preferred disco music with vocals and rappers who used crowd
response’ and the ‘ghetto’ version of rap: ‘Up in Harlem and the South
Bronx, ghetto kids… liked DJs who rapped all the way through breaks
without crowd response.’48 When rock critics first wrote about rap
records, they usually noted its rhythmic complexity but also frequently
gave simplistic misreadings of the music’s melodic or harmonic
content. Stan West and Don Snowdon (music critics for the Los
Angeles Times) explained that rap, as a genre, had ‘some problems’
because ‘most rap records are just displays of macho-man boasting’
and that the ‘unanswered question is whether the rappers can create
enough different rhythmic grooves to sustain interest over the long
run’.49 John Rockwell wrote in the The New York Times, ‘Rap has its
limits, in that it eschews the melodic element that has been essential to
most popular music’ in favour of this increased attention to rhythm.50
These reviews not only overlook the abundant melodic features of rap,
they underestimate the fundamental significance of rhythmic and other
non-melodic elements in popular music. The Western preference for
harmony over rhythm has historically been employed to denigrate
black musicians, as Richard Dyer observed about disco in 1979: ‘It is
to other cultures that we have had to turn – and above all to Afro-Amer-
ican culture – to learn about rhythm… Typically, black music was
57

Sha-Rock and Keith Keith of the Funky Four Plus One at the Kitchen, 22 November 1980, video still, The Kitchen, https://
vimeo.com/115293799

appearance, without even
mentioning the name of the
record. Holmstrom,
‘Review’, Punk, vol 1, no 4,
July 1976
47 Punk, vol 1, no 16, March/
April 1979; Punk, vol 1, no
17, May/June 1979. In this
regard, the editors of Punk
are, stunningly, most
aligned with the
‘neoconservative’ white
racial project that
‘attempted to frame the
new, post-civil rights
meaning of race as a type of
ethnicity, a largely cultural
difference’, consolidating a
strategy of critiques against
‘reverse racism’, ‘race-
thinking’, and ‘racial
preferences of any kind’,
Winant, ‘White Racial
Projects’, op cit, pp 102–
103
thought of by the white culture as being both more primitive and more
“authentically’ erotic”.’51 In one review, Patrick Goldstein quoted
from record store patrons who referred to Grandmaster Flash’s
music as ‘awful’ and ‘garbage’, and a record store clerk who declared
his preference for ‘melody’ over ‘jive-talking’.52 Robert Palmer
bluntly described the Funky Four Plus One as ‘a kind of rhythmic
noise’, and explained that ‘melody and harmony have no place in
their music’.53
In 1981, punk and rap musicians began to collaborate publicly, and
white audiences did not readily accept rap. Rock fans accepted transgres-
sions from white punk bands, but the potential dangers rap musicians pre-
sented, and the new sounds from black teenagers, were confusing and
potentially threatening. When Chris Stein and Debby Harry of Blondie
invited the Funky Four Plus One to perform on Saturday Night Live on
14 February 1981, after seeing them perform at The Kitchen, they
‘freaked everybody out’ on the set. Stein attributed this reaction to
racial fear:
But if we’d brought, I dunno, the fuckin’ Dickies or the Damned on, it
would’ve just been ‘well, here they are, nice boys, super-loud though,

48 John Morthland, ‘Kurtis
Blow Raps His Way to the
Top,’ Rolling Stone, 4
March 1981
49 West and Snowden, ‘Rap,
Rap, Rapping at Top 10’s
Door’, op cit
50 John Rockwell, ‘Rap: The
Furious Five’, New York
Times, 12 September 1982
51 Richard Dyer, ‘In Defence
of Disco’, Gay Left 8,
Summer 1979, p 21. Walter
Hughes explains how this
anti-rhythmic prejudice is
also fundamentally
masculine and
heteronormative: ‘Allowing
the beat to become a part of
us disturbs the very
foundations of
conventional constructions
of masculine selfhood;
allowing ourselves to be
penetrated and controlled
by musical rhythm, by
desire, or by another person
is to relinquish the
traditional conditions of
full humanity and
citizenship, and to embrace
instead the traditional role
of the slave’; see ‘In the
Empire of the Beat:
Discipline in Disco’, in
Andrew Ross and Tricia
Rose, eds, Microphone
Fiends: Youth Music and
Youth Culture, Routledge,
London, 1994, p 151.
52 Goldstein, ‘Rappin’, op cit
53 Robert Palmer, ‘Pop: The
Sugar Hill Gang’,
New York Times, 13
March 1981
54 Quoted in Schwartz, ‘The
Chick Side of Blondie’, op
cit, p 20
55 The Saturday Night Live
producers were especially
sceptical of allowing a live
turntablist. Stein recalled, ‘I
remember trying to explain
to [the producers] how
scratching worked. Trying
to verbalise what that is for
someone who has no idea,
it’s really difficult’, and
ultimately the Funky Four
Plus One were forced to use
a pre-recorded backing
tape. Quoted in Andrew
Mason, ‘Sound Image’,
Wax Poetics 60, December
2014, p 44
58
turn it down, would you, boys?’ and that would’ve been it. When
you bring in four black kids with microphones and a deejay, it’s ‘uh-oh,
what is this?’54
Despite the similarities that critics noticed between white punk rock
bands and black rap groups, when the Funky Four Plus One performed
rap music on national television for the first time they did so as com-
plete outsiders.55 When Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
opened for The Clash on 20 June 1981, at Bonds International
Casino near Times Square, fans booed and pelted them with trash.56
Mick Farren lamented the audience’s ‘thick-ear conservatism’, and a
‘racism that lurks just below the surface of the Clash audience’. Grand-
master Flash and the Furious Five were ‘clearly too much for three
quarters of the crowd, white, Wonderbread-fed, post-Travolta kids
from the suburbs. To them, rap is the anthem of the ghettos’. One
member of the Furious Five noted that this was an unusual experience,
and that The Clash’s audience was unusually aggressive, remarking,
‘We’ve played a lot of places to a lot of faces, but we’ve never seen
shit like this.’57
The reception of rap was somewhat different in the SoHo avant-
garde scene than among punk and rock listeners. When the Funky
Four Plus One gave the first ever rap performance in downtown
New York at The Kitchen on 22 November 1980, for example, as
part of a three-night festival, ‘Dubbed in Glamour’ (21–23 November),
they were well received by their mostly white audience. Organised by
the art critic Edit deAk, ‘Dubbed in Glamour’ featured performances,
slideshows, videotapes, films and live music by women artists. The
Funky Four Plus One were invited to perform because they featured
‘The First Female MC’, Sha-Rock. In a review of the performances,
John Howell wrote that Manhattan was ‘another world to these
Bronx groovers’ who ‘took turns at individual capsule bios spoken/
sung in alliterative slang’.58 The context of this feminist art festival
may partly account for the positive reaction the Funky Four Plus One
received, compared to the negative reaction to their Saturday Night
Live performance only a few months later. Frank Rose argued that
the racism in the punk scene derived from its machismo; tough guys
treated racism as ‘the final badge of manliness’ that fed into a ‘white
man’s fantasy’ that middle-class teenagers could gain some working-
class authenticity, creating a link between ‘the suburban kid and the
macho preserve of the all-American shitshoveler’.59 Moreover, audi-
ences at The Kitchen during this time were steeped in minimalist
music and were familiar with composers who sought to critique the
Western art music hierarchy. As one reviewer for the East Village
Eye wrote, rap made sense to the art music scene because it was ‘some-
thing different and exciting to listen to… After all, isn’t this what “New
Music” is all about?’60 Others were sceptical. Referring to this perform-
ance, Grabel wrote, ‘There is a tendency among the white, downtown
art elite in New York to treat rap as exotica to be put on display.’
Grabel warned other critics against the tendency ‘to play instant
sociologist’ with a new, unfamiliar style of music like rap, which he
described as ‘so dripping with authenticity it’s in danger of being put
59
56 Rappers had been
performing in nightclubs
and discos for several years
by 20 June 1981, but it had
only been a few months
since the first ever rap
concert at a live music
venue, when Sugar Hill
Records hosted the ‘Ritz
Rap Party’ at the Ritz in
March of that year. Toubin,
‘Uptown-Downtown’, op
cit 50
57 Other opening acts for The
Clash, including musicians
of colour – Mikey Dread
and ESG – experienced
similarly abusive responses.
Mick Farren, ‘How The
Clash Fed the Wonderbread
Generation, Made the
Mountain Come to
Mohammed – And Other
Miracles’, New Musical
Express, 20 June 1981
58 John Howell, ‘They Live by
Night: Glamour Groupies
at The Kitchen’, Live
Performance Art 5, 1981, p
12
59 Frank Rose, ‘The Butch
Fantasy: America Goes
Punk’, Village Voice, 9
August 1976
60 ‘Grandmaster Flash and
Melle Mel, “White Lines
(Don’t Do It)”’, East
Village Eye, November
1983
61 Grabel, ‘The Funky Four +
One’, op cit
62 Priya Kandaswamy warns
against simplistic models of
inclusion in feminist theory:
‘Rather than take seriously
the theories of race and
gender and the feminist
politics that emerge when
the experiences of women
of color are centered,
inclusion simply invites
women of color into a
project that has already
been defined in relation to
the experiences of white
women. Instead of taking
intersectionality as a call to
fundamentally transform
(or abandon) frameworks
that cannot grapple with
racial difference, inclusion
frequently preserves those
frameworks as they are by
simply adding to them,’ see
‘Gendering Racial
on a pedestal’.61 Moreover, the invitation of the group to a white fem-
inist space feigns intersectionality but did little to include non-white per-
spectives in the festival.62
Black musicians were frequently excluded from programmes at
white institutions of new music, including The Kitchen, throughout
the 1970s.63 In 1979, The Kitchen came under criticism for almost
entirely excluding black composers and performers from their ‘New
Music, New York’ festival (8–16 January).64 When some participants
questioned why the festival was so heavily weighted toward white
musicians, Village Voice critic Tom Johnson dismissed any potential
racism behind The Kitchen’s programming. He claimed the organisers
went beyond ‘black Americans vs. white Americans’ by excluding
music by artists from pretty much every racial and ethnic group in
the city, and that the decision had ‘more to do with recent history
than with overt racism’. According to Johnson, ‘Loft jazz has been
quite visible and successful in its own way, and for an institution
like The Kitchen an attempt to take this genre under its own wing
would be far more patronizing than constructive.’65 The loft jazz
that Johnson refers to was, at the time, one of the central, thriving
jazz scenes in the United States and was known for holding concerts
in lofts that literally surrounded The Kitchen.66 Yet Johnson’s state-
ment evades the problem of how racial biases may have affected pro-
gramming choices. The Kitchen had not programmed any jazz
performances until 1976, and when they finally chose to open their
doors to improvised musicians there was ‘considerable outrage
among members of the art music community’.67 Rhys Chatham
wrote that ‘“improvisation” was a dirty word in the hallowed halls
of the music establishment’ at The Kitchen, and that in the mid-
1970s there was a commonly asserted ‘hierarchical pyramid with clas-
sical music on the top, “jazz” somewhere lower down in the middle;
and of course, rock was barely considered music’.68 In his lecture at
‘New Music, New York’, Johnson lamented ‘the Kitchen syndrome’
that ‘represents the last of the ethnocentric movements in new
music’.69
In 1984, the New York art scene confronted primitivism head-on
when the Museum of Modern Art opened a vast exhibition, ‘“Primi-
tivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’
(27 September 1984–15 January 1985). This exhibition spawned
numerous essays and exchanges regarding the meaning and legacy
of the term primitivism. As Hal Foster pointed out, ‘Historically,
the primitive is articulated by the West in derivative or supplemental
terms: as a spectacle of savagery or as a state of grace, as a socius
without writing or the Word, without history or cultural complexity;
or as a site of originary unity, symbolic plenitude, natural vitality.’70
James Clifford wrote that one of the unintended effects of the exhi-
bition was ‘to show, once and for all, the incoherence of the modern
Rorschach of “the primitive”’, and that the curators failed to
demonstrate any ‘essential affinity’ between the tribal and the
modern, ‘but rather the restless desire and power of the modern
West to collect the world’.71 The exhibition seemed to reinscribe
the colonial ‘souvenirism’ of the modern artists it featured, unveiling
‘the way our cultural institutions relate to foreign cultures, revealing

Formation’, in HoSang,
LaBennett, and Pulido,
Racial Formation in the
Twenty-First Century, op
cit, p 28
63 Regarding the art scene that
operated parallel to punk in
downtown Manhattan,
Bangs bluntly pointed out
that, ‘Most of the SoHo
bands are as white as John
Cage,’ in ‘The White Noise
Supremacists’, op cit
64 Tim Lawrence, Life and
Death on the New York
Dance Floor, 1980–1983,
Duke University Press,
Durham, 2016, p 85–86
65 Tom Johnson, ‘New Music,
New York, New
Institution’, Village Voice, 2
July 1979
66 Two maps demonstrate the
geographic proximity of the
loft jazz scene to The
Kitchen in Michael C
Heller, Loft Jazz:
Improvising New York in
the 1970s, University of
California Press, Berkeley,
2016, pp 116–117. See also
Bernard Gendron, ‘The
Downtown Music Scene’,
in Marvin J Taylor, ed, The
Downtown Book: The
New York Art Scene, 1974–
1984, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 2006
67 Rhys Chatham, ‘5
Generations of Composers
at The Kitchen’, in Lee
Morrissey, ed, The Kitchen
Turns Twenty: A
Retrospective Anthology,
University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1992, p 19
68 Ibid, pp15–16
69 Tom Johnson, ‘The Decline
of Western Music’, Village
Voice, 23 July 1979
70 Hal Foster, ‘The
“Primitive” Unconscious of
Modern Art’, October 34,
autumn 1985, p 58
71 James Clifford, ‘Histories of
the Tribal and the Modern’,
Art in America, April 1985,
p 169
72 Thomas McEvilley,
‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian
Chief: “‘Primitivism’ in 20th
Century Art” at The
Museum of Modern Art in
60
it as an ethnocentric subjectivity inflated to co-opt such cultures and
their objects’.72
The earliest encounters between white downtown and black rap
musicians only a few years before this exhibition prefigured the
overt discussion of this neo-colonial relation. Significant artists and
critics centralised white Western musical practices by casting primiti-
vism as a positive creative concept for white downtown musicians
and as a sign of danger and ineptness in black rap musicians. As Clif-
ford explained, the primitivism debates ‘unravel[ed] for good the cat-
egory of the primitive, exposing it as an incoherent cluster of
qualities that, at different times, have been used to construct a
source, origin or alter-ego confirming some new “discovery” within
the territory of the Western self’.73 In this case, white downtown musi-
cians used this term to structure and signify racial differences between
their own amateurism and the amateurism of rap musicians from
whom they were culturally and geographically segregated. Amateurism
may, then, be a way of framing art in a more participatory way, but it
does not imply the elimination of biases, the breakdown of hierarchies,
or a more equitable consideration of artistic techniques. I acknowledge
amateurism’s political appeal: if professionalism is necessarily profit-
driven, amateurism is not. Yet, an alternatively ‘love-driven’ model
of artistic practice leans on antiquated notions of authenticity; who
is in the position to determine which artists’ creations are a genuine
act of love?
As Omi and Winant argue, ‘By knowing something of how [racial for-
mation] evolved, we can perhaps better discern where it is headed.’74 Rap
music’s cultural status in the United States has changed enormously
in the decades since these initial comparisons. At present, pop fans
and critics frequently describe rap in terms of virtuosity and excel-
lence. Kendrick Lamar’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Music confirms the
form’s acceptance by at least some of the ‘high culture’ institutions
that had previously ignored or derided it. Even then, a small
segment of ‘new music’ devotees vocally opposed this prize; self-
appointed gatekeepers of high culture echoed canards about rap as
‘noise’ or ‘not music’.75 Zachary Woolfe did not have a problem
with rap’s musicality, but rather lamented Lamar’s popularity in
The New York Times (a charge not likely lodged against past
winners like Aaron Copland).76 Lamar’s win surprised largely
because the Pulitzer jurors have been predictably ‘safe’ with their
choices since the award’s inception in 1943. This deviation suggests
either that the Pulitzer committee made a ‘risky’ choice in 2018, or
that rap is finally considered ‘safe’ enough for mainstream ‘high
culture’ in the United States. As Doreen St Félix suggests, Lamar suc-
ceeds by negating this dialectic: ‘In its long and perplexing lurch
toward acclaim, did hip-hop sacrifice its edge? Lamar is a fascinating
and brilliant non-answer.’77 Meanwhile, conservative activists have
continued the white racial project of actively denying rap its musical-
ity. Recognised columnists and influential pundits continue to spread
malignant accusations that ‘rap isn’t music’ or that ‘rap is crap’,
usually accompanied by persistent stereotypes about the music’s pri-
mitivism.78 Though rock and rap musicians have now collaborated
and supported one another for decades, the roots of these pernicious
61

1984’, Artforum 23,
November 1984, p 60
73 Clifford, ‘Histories of the
Tribal and the Modern’, op
cit, p 176
comments lie in rock criticism. The continued proliferation of such
explicitly anti-rap comments sheds light on the power of whiteness
as an obstinate and exclusive force for both authenticating and inva-
lidating music.

74 Omi and Winant, Racial

Formation in the United Many thanks to Nina Eidsheim, Robert Fink, Tamara Levitz, Miriam Piilonen, Ken
States, op cit, p 61 Reinhard, and Benjamin Piekut and Julia Bryan-Wilson for their help at various
75 See, for example, the twitter points in my research project. A special thanks also to the UCLA Musicology Class
thread in New Music of 2019 for their insightful critiques of my theses.
Drama, 16 April 2018,
12:13 pm, https://twitter.
com/NewMusicDrama/
status/
986002637962301441

76 Woolfe wrote, ‘[Lamar’s]

victory feels like another
sign of the world, and
therefore the musical
culture, we live in –
embodied by the streaming
services, through which the
biggest artists and albums
get more and more, and
everyone else gets a smaller
piece of the pie,’ in Jon
Pareles and Zachary
Woolfe, ‘Kendrick Lamar
Shakes Up the Pulitzer
Game: Let’s Discuss’, The
New York Times, 17 April
2018, https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/04/17/arts/
music/kendrick-lamar-
music-pulitzer-prize-damn.
html
77 Doreen St. Félix, ‘What
Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer
Means For Hip-hop’, The
New Yorker, 17 April
2018, https://www.
newyorker.com/culture/
cultural-comment/what-
kendrick-lamars-pulitzer-
means-for-hip-hop

78 Ben Shapiro, ‘Fact: Rap

isn’t Music and if You
Think it is You’re Stupid,
Twitter post, 8 January
2012, 9:32 pm, https://
twitter.com/benshapiro/
status/
156246995978293248;
Ben Shapiro, ‘Rap is Crap’,
Breitbart, 29 March 2009,
https://www.breitbart.com/
entertainment/2009/03/29/
rap-is-crap/
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