Punk Rock: Louder Than Noise

My friend’s band in the early 00s.

A lot of people love punk because of the culture’s DIY ethos. Its ability to forge makers and creators, and to help people find and foster their own voices. I never made anything though; not a band or a song or a zine. I didn’t love it because it let me create. I loved it because it gave me the strength to exist. 

To me, punk was a symphony of misfit anthems. It was a culture of raucous, brilliant outsiders. And more than anything, it was a place where people were driven to look out for one another. Punk was a community, an ethos, and a collection of rasps and chords that screamed that, finally, I had a place where I could be welcomed.

I grew up brown in a very white suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. I was 12 years old when I encountered my first racial slur: the word “chink” written across the knuckles of the kid sitting next to me in homeroom. My middle school experience involved a lot of looking at the ground and avoiding contact with any of the small group of people that semi-regularly threatened me with physical violence. Sometimes there was no avoiding the bigotry, like 7th grade science class when I sat in front of two boys that constantly muttered under their breath about Hitler, the KKK, and White Power.

The school wasn’t racist, per se. Instead, the vast majority of students were content to stare at their desks and ignore all of this, as it wasn’t their problem. The issue, of course, was that in the end it doesn’t help if most of the student body is ambivalent if there are more racists than students of color.

This is when I learned to keep my guard up. I learned to construct facades of alternating humor and complete lack of expression, and to bottle up everything else. I learned that in the face of bullying and persecution, it was important that you never let them see you bleed because showing your hurt would just make it worse.

Needless to say that, even when I was with the few people I grew close to in my middle school years, I felt extremely alone. Totally out of place.

Most of my closest friends I knew through friends of my parents, and who lived in other parts of Cleveland; too far for our carless selves to see each other often. We’d see each other at birthday parties or gatherings of the Filipino community, or when our dads got together to play cards. From childhood we played together. We grew up together. We snuck clandestine peaks at our first Playboy together. As we got older, and suburban everyday world began to choke my spirit, they kept me sane. They gave me a place where I could still be myself. They helped me keep a lot of my best parts from completely shattering.

And they introduced me to punk.

I fell in love with the music almost immediately. I found home in the fuzzy, noisy riffs. I drew strength from the back beats and power chords. The sharp-edged guitars created distorted spaces where I could escape from a more and more constricting life. It was freeing and cathartic, excising isolation and fear and years of pent up frustration. I got lost in the sound of dissatisfaction and, as emo and pop-punk were coming up as well, in actual expression of sadness and grief. I wanted to scream my lungs out as bands like Ann Beretta wailed lines like, “Why do we find ourselves, Too scared to look inside? These days are bringing me nothing, But when we find that place, We'll fit, But we won't belong.”

After years of being pushed down, listening to this felt like flying.

The music lived in my room, with the door shut, through a small stereo my sister had left behind when she went away to college. In my Sony Discman, blasted through headphones. In my throat. In my veins. And as my friends and I started driving, in our cars, crammed in duped cassettes, mixtapes, and filled-to-bursting CD wallets.

Songs like The Descendents’ “Suburban Home” and One Man Army’s “Fate at Fourteen”, with lyrics dripping with irony, lampooned my suburban surroundings that had begun to feel like a trap. In poppy outfits like Goldfinger and The Ataris I found fun that I didn’t think was for me anymore. Punk-adjacent bands like The Getup Kids and Jimmy Eat World chipped holes in my armor, showing me that it was OK to express sadness.

Driving, of course, opened our world even more, and some of my friends started playing in bands, and we started going to shows. By this point I was really only myself with a small group of people because I was wary about who I let my guard down around. But stepping into those clubs felt like coming back home.

The same chords keeping me afloat through my little home boombox were pouring out through person-sized speakers turned up to 33. I could feel the kick drums channeling up through the soles of my feet, rising into my chest. The beat pounded in my blood alongside adrenaline when I jumped into my first pit. 

There’s a closeness that develops from bodies bashing into each other in time with a song; a physical manifestation of sonic release. Strangers didn’t become friends in there, not exactly. But there was a bond of sweat and screaming euphoria that was undeniable. Even as we slammed and crashed, we moved as one. When we fell, we helped each other back up. It was hectic and chaotic and yet fit together flawlessly, just like the music itself.

I didn’t understand why I fell into all of this so seamlessly. I didn’t really care, because I’d finally found a place where I felt unrestrained. It was all so easy and exhilarating. The longer I spent in the scene, though, and the deeper I dove into bands it became more obvious.

From the Dead Kennedy’s “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to the long history of punks violently confronting fascists and white supremacists, it became clearer and clearer that one of the reasons I felt so comfortable in those places was that so many people had spent so many years actively, physically, and sometimes violently holding space for people that looked like me.

These places where a lot of people in my suburban world would have felt uncomfortable, where people were literally forcefully slamming against each other, ended up being some of the places I felt safest in my teenage years. Walking into a show and walking out later with a hat emblazoned with Anti-Racist Action (a loose-knit group whose members across the country now mostly refer to themselves as Antifa - maybe you’ve heard of them) was a revelation. This wasn’t just a space to feel safe anymore, but a place to feel empowered.

A lot of things I went on to do in life, whether creatively, professionally, or personally, stem from punk rock helping me to reclaim control of how I viewed the world. The scene taught me to not let fear immobilize me, and that community is stronger armor than emotional barricades.

The punk scene certainly wasn’t perfect. It had its own hierarchies and blind spots (especially regarding whose voices were usually being shouted from the stage), but for a young, scrawny, Asian kid in the mid- to late-90s it was a beautiful collection of weirdos and oddballs that offered more openness and inclusiveness than most of the world that I lived in. And when that world got overwhelming, that community made me believe, like Rancid sang, “When I’ve got the music, I’ve got a place to go.”