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| (photo: Selina Stoane) | |
G'Ra Asim is an assistant professor of nonfiction writing at Ithaca College and a member of the pop punk band babygotbacktalk. Asim's debut book, Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother, combines personal essay, memoir and pop culture critique in an entertainingly discursive ode to punk music and culture. The book is addressed to his younger brother, Gyasi, and serves as something between a road map and an ongoing conversation. Boyz n the Void will be published by Beacon Press on May 11, 2021.
What was your process for selecting each song in your mixtape?
Part of the concept for this book emerged from hitting a certain point in my late 20s and thinking, "weird--the cliches suggest I should have aged out of this and moved on but I'm still a punk rocker; I wonder why that is." I wrote towards examining whether the tenets of the subculture meant as much as my younger self imagined, or if going to shows, playing in bands and making zines was just a force of habit. I began to select and form chapters around songs that represented some of my philosophical linchpins, or songs that I associated with formative moments where my place in the world came into clearer view. Around the same time, Gyasi sent me the fateful e-mail that I include as the point of departure in the first chapter. From there I realized that if I was to narrate what punk and straight edge had meant and continued to mean to me up to that point, my youngest brother was an ideal audience. And that my doing so might help to illuminate some of the same riddles he was beginning to untangle for himself.
You write about the difficulties of "aestheticizing your personality" in nonfiction. How do you think you aestheticize your personality in Boyz n the Void? Are there elements of your personality that are important for you to communicate in your prose?
Part of the reason I was attracted to punk rock, this haven for weirdos and misfits, is that so much of my life involved people responding to me to the effect of, "Black people are like X, but you are Y. Men are like X, so how can you be Y? People from your seeming class background are X, but you are Y" and so on. In the chapter where I talk about the challenges of aestheticizing my personality, I was anticipating some readers' own possible difficulty imagining a character with my interests and experiences. It's important to me to write that character in a way that is hopefully true to myself: a person who is genuinely passionate about ideas and words but also always a bit impish and playful, and who doesn't think he's hot sh*t.
Punk struck a particular chord and served a particular purpose for you; would you be surprised if Gyasi found similar inspiration elsewhere?
I wouldn't be surprised at all. I'm sure he already does find similar inspiration elsewhere, and I hope he'll share his own insights about the pieces of culture that become dear to him in turn. Punk does have some unique affordances as a genre and cultural tradition, but it is to some extent a McGuffin in this book. It was a bit by the comedian Bill Burr that led me to the strategy of using a "mixtape" as a conceit. Burr says the key to raising a child is to go into the backyard to play catch and talk about life. Instead of sitting down across from your kid and asking them about their day, you use a device--in his case, a game of catch--so that your interaction with your kid doesn't feel as overtly didactic. "You distract them by throwing the ball," Burr says. "They don't even notice you're filling their heads up with your theories."
I figured Burr's rhetorical strategy could be applied to writing a book, and to engaging my teenage brother through that book. The mixtape is intended to keep things casual enough that things I'm telling Gyasi don't end up coming off like a lecture.
Do you think performing punk music has changed how you relate to punk?
For sure. I love that punk is radically participatory. I think about Frank Turner's "Try This at Home" or New Found Glory's "Ready and Willing," which are both songs that make explicit appeals to the listener to pick up the baton and carry the tradition forward by either getting involved with music yourself or approaching your life with punk rock intensity. One of my best friends to this day is a guy who picked up a homemade demo I threw out into the crowd at the end of a show at a community art space 10 years ago. He listened to it, was into it, tracked me down even though I didn't have a cell phone at the time, and told me exactly what he liked about the songwriting and what bands he assumed I listened to based on how my band sounded. Coincidentally, I was familiar with and a fan of his band, too. We hit it off immediately and have been homies ever since. Making punk music is like writing down a message in a bottle and casting it off into the ocean, except a high percentage of the time some pretty cool people receive it and write you back.
Do you ever worry that the response to the book from some quarters will focus on the supposed incongruity of you, as a black person, celebrating punk?
You make a good point--it's certainly possible that people will read the book as a kind of novelty. My attitude about this loosely parallels the tension between "colorblindness" and anti-racism. It's true that I'm a lifetime punk rocker, just like any other, and that being black shouldn't relegate me to some special category. But it's also true that being black has shaped my relationship to punk rock and framed my experiences in the alternative/DIY world. We know by now that overlooking race doesn't undo its profound social consequences.
In 2019, my band, babygotbacktalk, was invited to play the AfroPunk Festival in Brooklyn. A few days before the gig, we were at a networking event about the festival and I was lucky enough to meet Creature, lead singer of the all-black hardcore band Rebelmatic, who are veterans of AfroPunk Festival. We chopped it up for hours about what it was like for each of us being teenage African American punks when almost no one else--neither white people nor other people of color--really understood it. We talked about what it felt like when AfroPunk Festival became trendy years later and a lot of those same people who'd laughed at us when we were kids were members of the audiences we were playing to now. The specific convergence of otherness that is chosen and otherness that is socially imposed is a story that deserves to be told. I call it putting the alt in alternity.
You note that while punk likes to position itself as the ultimate outsider music, it often merely echoes the white cis male status quo. What do you think punk fans and musicians need to do to break that cycle?
Fortunately, this is already changing. I started going to shows in the early 2000s, and the scene in my town was pretty much completely homogeneous. Contemporary punks are for the most part much more conscious of diversifying bills and even about deliberately seeking out bandmates from marginalized groups. (Admittedly, there is a cynically ambitious component to the heightened sensitivity and political correctness among punks today--people want to be viewed as progressive individuals at least as much as they want to achieve progressive outcomes. Still, I'll take it.) The questions I always ask myself when curating a show or some kind of content are, who do I want to participate, what barriers might impede their participation, and how do I eliminate those? It's a process, but that's a solid place to start.
What are you listening to these days?
Lately I have been interested in Townes Van Zandt and Mississippi John Hurt. Something about the cataclysmic backdrop (preventable and ongoing mass death, surges of right-wing violence, exonerations of murderous cops, etc.) makes plaintive acoustic guitar jams especially comforting. In terms of punk stuff, I'm always spinning Rebelmatic, Gibbons, MAAFA, the 1865 and Meet Me @ the Altar. --Hank Stephenson