Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California by Dewar MacLeod (review)

Dewar MacLeod’s Kids of the Black Hole is an authoritative, superbly researched account—right down to the illustrations—of the original punk scene in Los Angeles circa 1977 and its evolution into often brutal hardcore punk in the early 1980s. One of the few flaws in this otherwise admirable work involves this very chronology: MacLeod ends his work rather abruptly in 1981, in the middle of the dark, violent period when Black Flag, with new singer Henry Rollins, was preeminent. A very brief epilogue sums up the music of the subsequent decade leading up to Nirvana’s explosion in 1991, “the year that punk broke” (as a documentary about Sonic Youth once put it). MacLeod’s conclusion in medias res left me dispirited, an unfortunate effect after such palpable evidence of his enthusiasm for the subject.

Kids of the Black Hole no doubt sounds like a take-it-or-leave-it proposition depending on whether one has the slightest interest in hardcore punk (which one should since it is the most exciting radical cultural movement in the United States), but in fact—in a largely implicit way—the book should prove interesting to anyone concerned with either the relationship between academia and popular culture, or the broader history of American youth subcultures.

Kids of the Black Hole will enthrall anyone interested in the Los Angeles punk scene, but the text does have—for better and worse—its more academic moments. It includes a valuable summation of the literature on youth and mass culture, but also relies on some familiar clichés regarding postmodernism. Although published by a university press, the book is beautifully produced and clearly aimed at a crossover market.

Kids of the Black Hole should also prove of general interest to readers of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth in its account of the relation between youth, popular music, and mass culture in the twentieth century. MacLeod brings out very well the irony that postwar adolescents, in carrying their training in “consumerist mass culture”—particularly rock and roll—into adulthood, effectively obviated “Erik Erikson’s influential theories of adolescence” almost as soon as they appeared. Psychological research based on Erikson’s scholarship came to the conclusion that the “fixation of identity that was supposed to occur in the teen years occurred not at all in a world driven by mass culture.” This does not mean, MacLeod is careful to note, that adolescents “never grew up, but that what defined them as youth . . . was no longer attributable only to a certain age group” (p. 52).

Later, however, when MacLeod describes “postsuburbia” in Southern California—in an otherwise fine history of politics in the area—he is less cautious about conveying his academic material, falling into an overused rhetoric about postmodern “fragmentation.” Although he observes that Michel de Certeau can be “a bit reductive” and that his opposition between the “tactics” of subordinate groups and “strategies” of the powerful “is too simplistic,” MacLeod nonetheless employs this theory at length (p. 114). It makes little sense to invoke Certeau in a book about popular music, given his view that the “voice of the people” is fragmented into “aphasic enunciation [of] bits of language.” MacLeod’s perspective on agency is actually much more humane, and I wish he had stuck to it. “Record labels, zines, clubs, and communal youth organizations can be read,” he writes, “as an attempt to create some sense of reality, maybe even authenticity, [and] certainly control over daily life and the future” (p. 100).

When MacLeod deals directly with performers and audiences, rather than focusing his thoughts through an academic prism, Kids of the Black Hole shines, as the author relates a number of fine, deeply engaged passages. I was particularly impressed by his description of the performance of “Institutionalized” by the Suicidal Tendencies and learned a great deal from MacLeod’s account of the schism between punk and “New...