The Damned South Side
Chicago's south neighborhoods, which are often debated if they are even apart of the city, is the scene for a couple of punks in the early '90s.
Shifting through the music section bin of bargain books at the now out-of-business bookstore, I come across a YA novel. With a slime green backdrop and a focus on someone with bright, dark pink hair wearing over the ear headphones on the cover. Yes, I’m a person who judges the literal book by its’ cover. Not when it comes to people, you know what the phrase actually means, but if I see a cover that is too plain, generic, bad photoshop work or whatever, I don’t pick it up.
It’s dumb, I know. I’m trying to actively work past my problem like everyone else.
Anyway, the book is called Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno.
The novel came out in the early 2000s, i.e. the time I always say I would’ve thrived in if I was not a whole ass elementary schooler during it, but is set in 1991 in the south side neighborhoods and suburbs of Chicago. Traditionally, these south neighborhoods of the city are so far away from the downtown area that you’ll often encounter its’ inhabitants stating they live in the city, proper. Even if they’re borderline in another adjacent south suburb, like Summit. These neighborhoods with quaint bungalows, street parking and many parochial schools also nurture a fair amount of cops who live there.
According to Wikipedia, Mount Greenwood, a close town to the setting of this novel, “is known as the home of many Chicago firefighters...police officers and union workers.” While we all know we shouldn’t be using Wiki as a supportive source sans every teacher and professor I’ve ever had, citing friends and my personal experiences in this area (not that town specifically, but near Garfield Ridge) only shows one piece of this theme Meno displays well in the book.
The characters are young Brian and rebellious Gretchen trekking through their monotonous, dysfunctional teenage existence in a 1994 white Ford Escort (I also know this car very well) with The Clash forever being the background music (because that cassette is stuck in the stereo). In a first-person POV prose, we follow Brian as he combats an infatuation with the rowdy, angry Gretchen: “The other problem I had was that I was falling in love with my best friend, Gretchen, who I thought the rest of the world considered fat.”
Let’s remember: this book has a lot of outdated slang and social perceptions that wouldn’t be correct to say today. There are r-word bombs, for example. Does it make it ok? No, it is a glimpse into a time where some of us weren’t old enough, or hell, even born yet, though that bears this societal norm. There is also a character, Tony Degan, who is a white supremacist and way too old to be hanging around Haunted Trails and high schoolers. Well, Gretchen becomes infatuated with him based on the premise of “doing it” with him to “get it done and over with.” For a chick running around telling people what’s punk and not though, this is pretty un-fucking-punk to the extreme.
What Meno says about this in a 2005 WBEZ interview though, is that it showcases the politics in that area of the city during that time. He refers to an event in the novel, where there’s a segregated prom because music couldn’t be agreed upon. What’s even crazier is that this event occurred in 1991 at Brother Rice High School, an all-boys Catholic school in the south side.
“The college preparatory school is in a virtually all-white, middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's Southwest Side and has 1,330 students, 12 percent of them black, and no black teachers. And while blacks and whites participate in classes and clubs and sports together and many consider each other great friends, they sit at separate tables at lunchtime and go their separate ways after school is over.” -Isabel Wilkerson, The New York Times
The main and only article I found was from The New York Times from May 5, 1991. Thanks to my mom, who went to the all-girls version of that school in the late 1980’s/90’s, Mount Assisi Academy, she had heard some talk about the prom and was able to help me search different schools in that area to unearth the article.
She also tried to send me there for high school-thank God it ended up being too expensive and I just went to public school in the western ‘burbs. But I digress. Despite the head of the school threatening the black students with suspension, expulsion, 200 white couples and 30 couples had their prom at a Gold Coast hotel and the black students arrived at the McCormick Hotel.
The reason? A disagreement about the type of music that would be played.
Stated in the article, black students didn’t believe their culture was being represented at the majority-white high school. The “virtually all-white prom committee” hired a band and DJ to play rock music. Hosea Hill, a black senior at the time said, “If you're paying tuition to the school, you should have some input. But with us being in the minority, we're always outvoted. It's as if we don't count.”
Not only is this a testament to the social, classist and racist problems our society has consistently coddled for their selfish sense of normality but does it so blatantly that we cannot continue to forget about the reality in these areas.
Discussing music, that thing a lot of us truly love similarly as a family member, friend, arch-nemesis that you have a Lil’ soft spot for, has garnered a lot of lovely hostility. It’s very obviously a passionate, personal avenue of connection for many. When Meno shopped Hairstyles of the Damned to different publishers, he said a Viacom publishing subsidiary wanted to print the book on some conditions; of course, there’s always SOMETHING.
Meno, in the WBEZ interview, said they wanted to rotate out the bands he mentioned in the novel with MTV bands. So instead of Misfits, The Clash, The Ramones and so on, classic punk staples, it would’ve been (probably, I had to google what were top rock songs during 2003-2004) Linkin Park, The Offspring, Green Day or maybe Evanescence. He turned it down, though, “there were no bands at that time, and to this day that is in any way talking about these social issues that have a profound effect [on Brian].”
When saying “to this day” Meno means in 2005; comparing it to switching out prevalent bands in the early ‘90s. It’s 15 years from that original interview and do we still see this as true? Thanks to social media, the OG MySpace evolution and progression of the local music scene, more politically, angry filled noise have made their ways into people’s Bluetooth headphones.
Oh, and Meno went with the indie-DIY publisher, Punk Planet/Akashic Books.
I believe that music within this genre, to specifically analyze the rock genre and it’s many subgenres, has a social responsibility to perform to tell a story of those they derive their sound from.
Rock music started with Sister Rosetta Thorpe. Tracing back even further, many noises, and even slave songs were used in popular rock songs. Why work towards isolating those? It’s othering; showcasing the inherent power, dominance and suppressive forces that it has maintained. There are political bands that speak up about these problems, use their platform for positive changes, but equally so, many do not or do the bare minimum. We’ve seen this recently noted as performative activism in some cases, with Black Lives Matter protests. How can this progress further? To also give those BIPOC individuals their platforms in this music category and others?
There isn’t a quick, easy answer to that. Collecting ideas, initiating them, supporting those under-represented is a good start. Opening a safe, receptive arena where all can play without pejorative rhetoric spewed from deep caverns of hatred is also, another answer.
“If we only make art to make money, I think big social issues like racism, love...are going to get less important and have more and more pop music that doesn’t ask us any questions.” Pop music is also very different than before. There are more messages of loneliness, depression, broken emotions filtered through. Just take a look at Billie Ellish as the primary example. As a music scene as well, we have converged to dissolve the artificial lines propped up by marketing execs to sell more records. Paramore’s “After Laughter” is another example to demonstrate the new-age of music.
While there is still elitism in music, or constant “die on this hill” mentality, but on a serious level which tends to turn into bullying and dismissive attitudes towards others, the great amount of those who shun this stance can champion constructive criticism, rather than resentful reviews.
Back to the book.
A looking glass into the past, but still, it summons topics which were underlined, and still are, to an extent. It also discusses feeling out of place and finding outlets to cope with loss. Brian and Gretchen are two wandering souls hovering around their city-suburban cemetery, searching for their portal to enter a different world. For now, though, there’s consolation in wailing on popular girls who make fun of Gretchen’s style and weight, while Brian is trying to discover a stable state to call home.
We’ve all experienced some sort of similar feelings. For myself, I grew up as the “fat crybaby” with a supreme lack of conversational skills that I didn’t piece together to be severe social anxiety until I took a psych 101 class at community college in my sophomore year. Partnered with consistent run-ins with Father Death from a young age to insults hurled from family and peers about my picky eating, introverted, awkward personality, there has never been a “belonged” place that was safe.
Shuffling through emotionally charged music assists in that. It’s why there’s a therapy that incorporates it because it helps calm anxiety, work through trauma, and more. Brian and Gretchen utilize these old songs to do the same. I like to compare this book to The Perks of Being a Wallflower when explaining it to others for the first time. Sometimes I’ll throw in Catcher in the Rye, too.
Coming-of-age novels and films are something I’m a sucker for. Both embed music, some sort of turmoil that most can relate to, a climax, embarrassment, and a loving revolution. The first person POV while heavily subjective allows you as a reader, viewer, listener to decipher what’s going on. Is this the truth? Or is it their skewed reality? Was I ever like this? Who would want to deal with all of this? Why is it so difficult to welcome others in the same manner as we do so for each other? How are these people such jagoffs?
Meno has written other academic articles and novels about prominent and under-reported news topics, as well. What’s inherently been punk is searching to tell those stories and amplify those voices. Conjunctively, it’s punk to be ourselves while searching for what promises lie ahead of us. Altogether, it’s imperative to keep running, to generate good trouble.
“The world is one mad graveyard, in all kinds of fucked-up ways. But you are still alive.” -Hairstyles of the Damned
You can check out this playlist with some of the songs mentioned in the book, some that were played at the segregated prom and other current music which challenges the status quo.