punk - Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth

Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth
David Browne
Da Capo Press
2008
422 pp

Goodbye 20th Centiury is a very detailed band history of Sonic Youth from their 70s No Wave origins through to 2008. Author David Browne has also written books about James Taylor, Grateful Dead, and the Buckley bros. This book is not only highly detailed, but it is evenly detailed, where there author wrote as much about the production of albums like A Thousand Leaves and Rather Ripped as he does about Daydream Nation, the band's most revered album.

This is a book detailing a then still-unfolding story that has since, we all assume, concluded. The end-phase of marital dissolution that ended the band comes after 2008 and is therefore not a part of this story. At the time of publication the band was 30 years old and aside from some drummer changes a long time ago, had the same lineup for that whole time - they seemed permanent.

hip-hop - Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class

Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class

Geoff Harkness

University of Minnesota Press

2014

244 pages

Like many other people, I’ve been interested in the Chicago drill scene since rapper Chief Keef deleted his cruel tweets mocking his murdered rival Lil Jojo. Lil Jojo was, like Chief Keef, a rapper from Chicago’s South Side Englewood neighborhood who was antagonizing the ascending scene star and his associates back in the summer of 2012. Jojo had rapped that he’s ‘BDK’ (meaning 'Black Disciple killer' - Black Disciple was the gang Keef claimed affiliation to) over the beat from Keef’s early hit track, Everyday.

Jojo also drove around Keef’s neighborhood shouting insults at Keef and his friend, rapper Lil Reese.

Within 24 hours of the above video appearing online, Jojo had been gunned down in the street. Chief Keef responded at first with mocking twitter messages, only to delete them a short time later, replacing them with claims that his account was hacked and messages of condolences to Jojo’s family. At this time Keef was a rising national hip-hop star and he must have had people working on managing his image to find that perfect balance of hood authenticity and mainstream acceptability that's so important to obtaining the desired mass audience of white suburban teenagers that make mainstream hip-hop commercially viable. What came across in those tweets, before they were deleted, was the essence of the more-death-than-death-metal, intensely anti-social, nihilism of the Chiraq drill music scene.

I was in the library looking for an entirely different book in the stacks when Chicago Hustle and Flow caught my attention. The title’s mention of Chicago and the book’s 2014 publication date gave me the idea that it might be about the drill scene in Chicago. Drill is characterized by its simplistic and repetitive \ lyrics of street violence, drug use, general anti-social attitudes and self-destruction, spat over beats that are closer to house/techno than hip-hop. The drillers are only mentioned in Chicago Hustle and Flow's Introduction and Conclusion (which were almost certainly the last completed sections of the book), the term ‘drill’ doesn’t appear in the text, and its only the Keef/Jojo rivalry that’s discussed in regards to this component of the Chicago scene. Author Harkness loves hiphop and whatnot but he's discussing pre-drill Chicago hip-hop and he therefore had the bad luck of researching a scene too early in time. 

Chicago and the midwest has contributed a lot to music, especially underground music:

Chicago’s given the world house music while techno came from nearby Detroit,

And industrial rock comes from Chicago

elsewhere in the midwest a lot of the earliest and best punk and new wave bands come from that area as well.

More recently DJ Rashad (RIP) and the Teklife crew have been producing skittering footwork tracks out of Chicago.

But for all of the innovation that's come out of Chicago and its surrounding region, Chicago hasn’t really given hiphop any unique movement to speak of. Obviously Kanye West is from Chicago, but he’s an international superstar that’s successfully blended with the NY crowd, and there are some other rappers who come from Chicago but haven’t created any particular Chicago movement. Chicago, as a city, has in recent years given hip-hop something of its own with the repetitive, joyfully violent, explicitly gang-affiliated, drill music scene led by Chief Keef, Lil Durk, and their producer Young Chop.

Instead of discussing drill, Harkness investigates the tensions between street life and music performance/production among some pre-drill Chicago street rappers, noting their working class or lumpen origins, and the correlations between those origins and their street lifestyles and attitudes towards music. While Harkness is always clear that he’s conducting a sociological study of a ‘microscene’ of Chicago gangsta rappers, his conclusions are already known to anyone who's been paying attention to the things rappers have been saying for the past 30 years. You don’t have to be a sociologist to know that, for example, an unstable concept of authenticity is nearly essential to the success of a street rapper. These rapper's fans contest the authenticity of their favorite hood rappers on a daily basis via youtube comments and you can check any of these videos to confirm that statement. Books like this serve the function of making the things non-academic people already know knowable to sociologists. Thanks to Harkness, future scholars of hip-hop have a text to refer to if they need to explain what a mixtape is.

punk - 2011 - White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race

White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race
eds. Stephen Duncombe & Maxwell Tremblay
2011
Verso
371 pages

Editor Stephen Duncombe is one of those punk academics. In addition to editing White Riot he has written a book about zines and he explains in his intro to White Riot his punk background which included membership in a band called White Noise. Those are his punk credentials, and to prove his current cultural-studies-academic credentials he reflects upon his old band's name to segue into the contents of the book, a vast collection of writings on punk and race.

White Riot is a collection of reflections on race in punk from virtually every available source, from academic authors, including Dick Hebdige, the father of subcultural studies, and their articles, to popular magazine articles, letter exchanges, zine writings, interviews, and song lyrics. The book creates a sense that punk has always had a deeply problematic and fractured relationship to questions of race, from the Sex Pistols wearing swastikas to the presumption among glamour punks that they know what it's like to be of another race because of their weird punk appearance. A reader may recall such singular, uncomfortable, issues as all the supposedly ironic Nazi references in British punk's most famous icons, which are, of course, problematic. The overall view of punk this book creates should compel the reader to recognize a much larger and more profoundly strained scene that appears use its claim to a self-imposed social difference to trivialize the difference of others and reinforce dominant racial values.

Many of the written pieces are actually quite disturbing to read when considering that punk has, to a large extent, constructed itself as the youth culture of radical left politics and social tolerance. Minor Threat vocalist Ian Mackaye, who, even as a 17 year old, was an intellectual leader of the hardcore punk scene, sounds incredibly naive of issues of racism in society in an interview where he is discussing the Minor Threat song 'Guilty of Being White' and lamenting his experience in a Washington DC high-school with an almost entirely black student population. Of course, he was young when he made his statements and perhaps unlikely to repeat them now, but he was also so relevant to the hardcore scene that he was essentially a primary source of punk concepts  One musician-of-colour claims that her white audience gets upset when she shifts from straight punk-rock to picking up an instrument that's traditional to her cultural background, because she's being exclusionary, implying that punks are unwilling to enjoy music that deviates from the conventions they've constructed, and that those conventions transcend any notions of cultural specificity.

Too many punks claim that the experience of being snickered at for their hair-dye gives them the knowledge of the experience of racial prejudice, many subcultures make similar claims, in the documentary film Hells Angels Forever, for example, members of a notoriously racist subculture argue that they, the bikers, "are the real n***ers" because of their outlaw status. Towards the end of White Riot, an argument via a Maximumrockandroll letters section where a black punk, frustrated with the scene and the racism he experienced, is chastised by white punks for giving up on the scene,  meanwhile other black punks relate to the original letter with their own thoughts and experiences, indicating that, within punk, racial divides can emerge as soon as the subject is broached.

PS: Comrade Dr. Alan O'Connor, professor of cultural studies at Trent University, has contributed a piece to this collection about the punk scenes of Toronto and Mexico City.

ultras - 2010 - Football, Fascism, and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football

Football, Fascism, and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football

Alberto Testa and Gary Armstrong

2010

A & C Black

256 pages

In Italy, Football fanatics are called Ultras and engage in many of the same soccer related activities as the Casuals in England. They fight with each other and they sing songs to their team while insulting the fans of their opponents.... and so forth. There are some differences too, though, unlike the English Casuals the UltraS wear their team colours and that’s about it for differences as far as I can tell from reading Football, Fascism, and Fandom. If there are other differences, they’re obscured by this book’s degree of focus on strictly neo-fascist UltraS firms, and their focus on uncharacteristically large firms.

Alberto Testa and Gary Armstrong make all the connections needed to satisfy the reader that the Irriducibili, supporter of SS Lazio, and the Boys, supporter firm of FC Roma, are great admirers of Mussolini, opponents of immigration, lovers of violence, etc. Just like everywhere, in England the English Defense League recruits from hooligans and in Germany, Football hooligans are thought to make up a significant component of the Islamophobic Pageda movement. It is interesting to read about the unique ways that these attitudes are given form among fans in Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, as the teams whose supporters are the object of study for this book both play in a stadium created by the Fascist regime in a city where some monuments to that period still stand.

While Testa’s and Armstrong’s book gets into all of the specific ways Fascism is given a new voice in Italian sports-fandom, particularly in these support clubs, there’s something disappointing about the tight focus this book places on Irriducibili and Boys when the book’s subtitle ‘The UltraS of Italian Football’ led me to believe that I would be reading an overview of the Italian UltraS scene with a focus on political attitudes. The two firms the book discusses, in that they support major clubs in Rome, are undoubtedly at the heart of Italian football, and they may be taken by the reader, at first, as representative of the larger UltraS scene. When reading through the book though, its suspect how typical they are. Irriducibili have built a brand of merchandise using the logos of their firm. How many other firms have a reputation that’s commercially viable? Additionally, they’re both neo-fascist groups, but its not surprising that there are connections between sports fandom and rightwing politics. Major league sports with city teams has, on a surface level, a lot to offer to adherents of the political right. There are moments in reading Testa and Armstrong’s account of these firms where they allude to other Italian teams having left-wing supporters, and I’d like to know more about them and how they come to be.

So essentially my issues with the book dont emerge from any problem with the book content but rather from a gap I perceive between the book and its content.

There was one statement in the book that I found especially troubling, when the authors noted that the method spectator’s used to express racism, that is, grunting like an animal when a black player took possession of the ball - the same method of expressing racism Bill Buford described witnessing on the English terraces in the 1980s in his 1991 hooligan ethnography, Among the Thugs - was practiced by the spectators at large, and not simply by the UltraS, and are therefore ‘beyond ideological explanation’. It is not at all clear to me how such a statement is true.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - 2004 - Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Edward Winterhalder

Blockhead City Press

2005

432 pages

Edward Winterhalder is another biker who has leveraged his outlaw experience into a career as a media personality. Once a national officer of the Bandidos MC and El Presidente of the Oklahoma Bandidos chapter, he is now an author, television producer, and professional interview subject. Out in Bad Standing is Winterhalder’s first book and his coming out as a pundit on biker topics, it gives the details of Winterhalder’s life as a biker, as a family man, as a musician, and as a businessman.

Blockhead City Press is Out in Bad Standing’s publisher, and from what I can tell, it’s Winterhalder’s own publishing company. In essence, Winterhalder published his own autobiography. The length of this book, at 432 pages, communicates a lack of editing, and to compare, Sonny Barger’s own bio, Hell’s Angel, recalling the career of the man who essentially formed the model of the outlaw motorcycle club in the 1950s, is only 288 pages. Winterhalder’s book is long, and somewhat tedious, but its good to have one out there by a Bandido since all the other major clubs are represented in the bio literature. Still, Winterhalder’s book tells the same stories of riding around, rocking out, getting into trouble, having friends die or jail or succumb to drug addiction, as the other books and its hard not to feel like, as a reader, one outlaw biker autobiography is enough to read to have the lifestyle figured out.

What intrigues me about these biker bios are the balance they try to maintain between presenting themselves as model outlaw bikers and as model citizens, and I’m always left wondering if these bios are for other bikers to read or for cultural outsiders? Outlaw bikers have such a tough time convincing everyday citizens that they’re not criminals, or at least, they’re not criminal organizations, that these books often heavily emphasize both the duller aspects of outlaw biker life, or the ways in which the subject is not a biker. Winterhalder is a good father, he owns a successful construction business, and he’s a musician. Presumably his band plays that beer-belly blues rock with harmonicas blaring that you hear whenever a biker appears on television. He was also a chapter president and a national officer with many duties, and he writes at length of the administrative side, with its numerous headaches, of managing a motorcycle club. So by reading his book he convinced me that he’s not a career criminal, but his book goes down these textual roads where, when he’s talking about problems occurring behind the scenes of the Bandidos, it feels as though he’s not trying to convince me that he’s legit, but rather he’s telling his social scene a side to a story that’s best known to other Bandidos.

The book has a strange structure to it, it begins with his trip to Canada to patch over the Rock Machine in the midst of the Montreal biker war, before it goes into his life story. He tells the story that the Bandidos were only willing to patch them over if the war was over, and its tough to be fully convinced that Bandidos are crime free as an organization, when they’re willing to take on men engaged in such a conflict, especially when hostilities continued for a time after the transition, and Bandidos died. A year after the book’s publication, the Shedden Massacre occurred in Southwestern Ontario, where 8 Ontario Bandidos were murdered. The Bandidos may generally be a large group of guys who are ready for a fight but really just want to have fun riding motorcycles and partying, but even if you believe that that’s what they are as a group they’re obviously accommodating to people with very violent inclinations. Winterhalder comes off as smart and tough but also fun and friendly, in his book, but he’s also a part of an outlaw subcultural group that has been involved with events termed ‘riots’, ‘wars’, and ‘massacres’. I may be wrong but even with their fearsome reputation, the Hells Angels don’t have any ‘massacres’ in their history, the Bandidos have two, Milperra and Shedden.

culture jamming - 2009 - The Yes Men Fix The World

The Yes Men Fix the World
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno
Arte France
2009
87 minutes

The Yes Men are a pair of culture jamming pranksters whose interventions into media have revealed injustices in the basic structures of contemporary neoliberalist globalization. Their modus operandi has been to mimic the conventional forms by which information is packaged and delivered to contemporary audiences, deliver a message that is absurd, either in the traditional sense or in a modern sense where an inconvenient truth is acknowledged, and then capture the reactions of the audience. The most profound example of this later sense of the absurd which I mentioned, as expressed in the work of The Yes Men, can be seen in this interview wherein one of the Yes Men claim that Dow Chemical will make reparations for Union Carbide's 1984 Bophal (India) disaster, when the company's Bophal plant leaked toxic gasses which almost immediately caused over 15,000 deaths, now that Dow has purchased the guilty company. The result was Dow's stock dropped instantly, revealing the sense of justice encoded into markets, and The Yes Men were instantly acused of giving the people of Bophal false hope.

The film begins with the song 'Get Happy', which I otherwise know from David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks.

This documentary, The Yes Men Fix The World (an irritating title for a film that doesn't actually show them offering solutions) shows The Yes Men going behind the scenes of their own work and following up on its results. They used media to pretend as though officials were acknowledging the errors made in Bophal India, and also in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and bringing equitable compensation to those affected populations. They visited these locations to speak with people and to ask them if they were filled with false hope, the generic critique of Yes Men interventions by media pundits. Naturally the people of of those locations have very good reason to be angry at the cruelty of governments, corporations, and markets, on a continuing basis and weren't especially put off by the actions of the culture jammers.

The film's revelation that the duo were so often accused of providing false hope is fascinating. Clearly the Yes Men are playing with media to create an image of what justice should look like when filtered through the conventions of contemporary media channels. Of course, when The Yes Men are revealed as tricksters, and media personalities are not including questions about the withholding of justice by the actual offenders in part of their response to the Yes Men's intervention, then they are choosing to protect the image of institutions responsible for disaster.

The Yes Men are media pranksters, and fundamentally this is a documentary about media, chains of communication and representation, the manipulation of symbols, and the public relations industry. TV's are viewed in strange locations, creating juxtapositions of imagery, the sleek PR television image against what is often a post-industrial setting, for our own consumption via our own screen. I'm not pointing that out to note any irony, but I do believe that the production of a documentary like this serves the purpose of giving the Yes Men a forum for responding to their own imagery and the responses it garnered in turn, since they're used to making images with other people's machinery.

punk - communal living - 2005 - Mouth to Mouth

Mouth to Mouth
Alison Murray
2005
M2M Films
101 minutes

Mouth to Mouth is a film about a group of street kids travelling through Europe in a rusty old van, attending festivals, dumpster diving, and smoking and drinking. The group, called Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge, or SPARK, goes from city to city living as crusty punks, forming social bonds and drifting around until they make their way to a vineyard somewhere in southern Europe. At this point the group began living communally and working the land while they also take on the form of the charismatic cult that was hinted at during their earlier travels.

The group has a leader, Harry, who expresses a bland self-help straight-edge philosophy and repeatedly admonishes his followers to "stay strong". At one point, while the group is on the road, their youngest member cuts his throat on a piece of twisted metal and dies after he's flung into a dumpster to look for food. No one really takes responsibility for the death, including the boy's best friend who carelessly tossed him in there, but its Harry's disinterest that is striking as an early clue of his evil. Once they occupy the vineyard, Harry begins exercising authority more cruelly, punishing disobedient followers by putting them in a well. The film ends predictably when one member dies under such punishment and another, Sherry (the film's main character - it doesn't really suit the purpose of my blog to speak about her) rejects Jeff's authority and leaves the group.

The group is a charismatic cult with a complete absence of spirituality, much like the cult in Martha Marcy May Marlene. They are a self-help group with a bad man for a leader. Much like with that other movie, its easier for me to understand how the bizarre and psychotic millenarianism of Charles Manson, for example, could compel followers to invest in him as an authority figure, than it is for me to understand how a bland punk-guru's dull can inspire his friends to obey his every word.

Director Allison Murray also made the documentary Train on the Brain, the greatest of all hobo/train hopping films, so that's good.

The Bug is on the soundtrack, which is also very good.

outlaw motorcycle clubs, Mongols Motorcycle Club - book - 2011 - Out Bad

Out Bad
Donald Charles Davis
2011
247 pages

Out Bad is the other self-published (via CreateSpace) book by The Aging Rebel blogger and journalist Donald Charles Davis. The book The Aging Rebel was a collection of Davis’ better blogposts, each one a brief critique of something gnawing at the biker world. Out Bad is an in depth critique of the media discourse surrounding Operation Black Rain, a major ATF undercover operation that ultimately dismantled what was then theleadership of the Mongols Motorcycle Club.

Davis' blog is great for its sharply intelligent analysis of the issues that press against a subculture widely viewed as dumb, but Out Bad is his great contribution thus far, a book which I consider to be a major addition to the literature on outlaw bikers. It responds to media accounts of outlaw biker affairs, often taking journalists to task for simply repeating law enforcement statements on MC-related crime scenes.  Also Davis’ critique expands the picture of those scenes, giving the fuller perspective on biker issues that he suggests are absent from media representations of the subculture. Furthermore, Davis is an interesting commentary on these issues because he A) writes from an insider’s perspective, the cover of this book features a photo of him riding with the Mongols and B) he writes at an intellectual level that equals that of the academics of biker culture, Daniel R. Wolf and Arthur Veno. Davis’ prose shows his talents as a seasoned journalist who can make information engaging, but his writing is also laced with literary and philosophical references as well. Out Bad is certainly a retort to every true crime text that paints the biker scene as an engine for lurid crime-scene imagery and brute stupidity.

Out Bad is not simply a reply to journalist accounts of bike-gang warfare and meth cookery, and the base repetition of police press releases.  It also criticizes many of the books published by biker-world figures over the last ten years such as Under and Alone by Mongols ATF infiltrator William Queen, No Angel by Hells Angels ATF infiltrator Jay Dobyns, and especially, Honor Few Fear None, the memoir by short-term Mongols national president, Ruben Cavazos. In his criticism of Cavazos book, Davis presents a much different view of the club, which is more racially mixed (while Cavazos constructed it as a means for retired LA street gang members) with many members disappointed with Cavazos leadership and the changes he instituted. As a sustained work of argument against another book, Davis produced for the biker world the kind of book-length works of criticism that readers find in the more traditionally intellectual fields of political theory, philosophy, and literature.

Out Bad's relevance is three-fold: it is an intelligent piece of media criticism aimed against those lazy journalists for whom newswriting is transcribing a brief and trite witness statement into a cut and pasted law enforcement press-release, it is a work of criticism against Ruben "Doc" Cavazos book and other appearance in mass media as well as his leadership of the Mongols Motorcycle Club, and it is in itself a work of journalism that investigates and examines the events of the ATF's Operation Black Rain from the perspectives of participants in the subculture.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2011 - The Aging Rebel: Dispatches from the Motorcycle Outlaw Frontier

The Aging Rebel: Dispatches From the Motorcycle Outlaw Frontier

Donald Charles Davis

2011

270 pages

Donald Charles Davis is a freelance journalist who currently writes and maintains The Aging Rebel, a blog about outlaw biker issues. This book is an anthology of posts from that blog although much of the blog material focusing on The Mongols Motorcycle Club is absent (and presumably rewritten into another of Davis’ self-published books, Out Bad) and rather focuses, for the most part, on peripheral subject matter to the outlaw biker lifestyle and image.

The items that appear in The Aging Rebel carry a few key themes. Many of the posts relate to motorcycling such as helmet laws, or for greater safety awareness among car-drivers. Many other items are obituaries for bikers who died on the road. Other items are relevant to the world of outlaw bikers, including pieces on a Hells Angels trademark lawsuit and criticism of other reporter’s handling of biker news.

Davis’ book is interesting because its good writing about bikers from someone who knows about the subculture. It’s also old fashioned reporting like what you imagine reporters on tv shows and movies about newswriting churn out. So much of what appears in the news, on all topics and in all sources, are institutional press releases with a reporter’s name added because they tacked on an introduction. Davis investigates his stories, and adds insight drawn from his immense knowledge of his subject matter. His work is exemplary of what journalism can be in an age of ubiquitous self-publishing possibilities, where mainstream journalism arises out of an industrial process and older professional values are taken up by individuals who have a vested interest in exploring a particular subject.

outlaw bikers - book - 2006 - Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers Global Crime Empire

Angels of Death: Inside the Biker’s Global Crime Empire

Julian Sher and William Marsden

Alfred A. Knopf

2006

464 pages

Angels of Death is a survey of recent, to the time of publication, violent crimes committed by various bikers around the world. The title is a dramatic misnomer, as the inclusion of the word ‘angels’ strongly suggests that the book is exclusively about the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, which it isn’t.  Furthermore, the authors, two Montreal journalists turned true-crime writers, claim that there’s a worldwide biker syndicate but they never ground that assertion in facts. What they do, instead, is show that the outlaw biker subculture is global and that everywhere bikers live bad things, sometimes truly atrocious things, happen. Angels of Death is primarily a series of lurid true-crime murder stories connected by the mode of transportation the killers chose.

anonymous - book - 2011 - Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan's Army Conquered the Web

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan’s Army Conquered the Web

Cole Stryker

Overlook Duckworth

2011

304 pages

By now the phenomenon of Anonymous, an unspecified and unorganized mass of computer pranksters and social activists (popularly known as... ugh... ‘hacktivists’) is a part of the common imagination.  Everyone has at least seen images of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks (referencing not just the 17th century English anti-parliament terrorist but also the technique of mass identification with a social movement or anti-establishment attitude via obscuring one's individual identity as shown in the 2006 film V For Vendetta) or heard stories about members of anonymous hacking such and such institution or organization or declaring war via internet against a repressive regime. Less known (but still pretty well known) is that Anonymous, as a social movement, emerged from a specific online location, 4chan.org.

4chan.org was started in 2002 by a kid who calls himself m00t, real name Christopher Poole, who wanted to emulate Japanese anime discussion boards (specifically one called matsubara or 2chan). The site is interesting, in part, because it does not save any of the content that users contribute to it (some of the effects of which have been observed by an MIT research team) and therefore everything has to be constantly renewed. The repetition and variation on the forms that appear on 4chan have led to site users (who post under the name ‘anonymous’ and are not required to enter a username to contribute) to develop a large number of different graphic memes that have transcended the site, some of the more popular forms, like the LOLcats, have become mainstream pop culture phenomena. 4chan.org is the opposite of Facebook and as a contemporary internet phenomena, is far more interesting (Facebook itself is not interesting at all but the discourse surrounding the service is.) While Facebook is a global data-mining operation posing as a good-vibes world funfest where people can post their opinions and expect only agreement in return, 4chan is a carnival of all of the most transgressive subjects and images including discussions about gore, pornography, drugs, etc.

Cole Stryker is a freelance journalist who appears to focus on trends in network communication technology and its cultural uses. In Epic Win for Anonymous he gives a fairly detailed history of 4chan and a survey of its uses. Stryker’s text is not heavy on analysis, cultural or otherwise, but it still helps a lot in forming an understanding of the phenomena of Anonymous, their origins in hacking and online trolling/flame wars, as well as predecessors to 4chan site that fostered the kind of transgressive (verging on nihilistic attitude) that appears to dominate. Epic Win for Anonymous is a descriptive history of 4chan, its origins, and the actual social movements that have emerged out of it.

What interests me about Anonymous is that it’s never really clear what it is, because it isn’t something in particular. At its surface level it appears as a protest tactic, similar to the Black Bloc in its core emphasis on the intersection of mass protest and the protection of personal identity. On another level though, it is a form of mediated mass protest that appears to permit its participants to engage with their social causes to the extent that their individual technical abilities allow. If a target for direct action is selected (by whom, I’m not sure) then some Anons might proceed by breaking the target’s network security and obtaining documents, others make up mocking graphics with their photoshop skills, others might pile onto a denial of service attack, and some will don their Fawkes mask and attend the street protest.

Anonymous was, for example, instrumental in ensuring justice during the recent Steubenville rape trial, with Anons obtaining and disseminating the videos and images that served as evidence at trial, and also picketing the town through online action and street demos. Interestingly, this murky group that has grown out of an underground website largely devoted to exploring transgression had established a stable moral position with regards to that crime while much of mainstream America were perfectly willing to blame the victim for what happened to her, and to falter over what constitutes rape in their country.

The other level at which Anonymous is interesting, which Stryker discusses in his book, was the collective problem solving potential of the group. Anonymous is geographically dispersed yet they are localized (ugh...) virtually to 4chan. Occasionally a problem is brought to the group, sometimes in the nature of an image of an animal or child abuser, for example. The users of 4chan will use their collective knowledge to try to identify features of that image which can be used in identifying the abuser to authorities. This aspect of Anonymous reveals how much greater potential 4chan has at motivating people to action than the major social network websites. Facebook may be orders of magnitude more popular than 4chan, but 4chan’s impact on the culture has been immensely more meaningful than Facebook’s.

computer underground, Anonymous - 2010 - /b/: The Random Anonymity Culture and a New Direction for Anonymous

/b/: The Random Anonymity Culture and a New Direction for Anonymous
Mint Lily Cherbet-Bouchard
2010

Last year I had written a research paper about the use of images on the imageboard website 4chan.org, a home to transgressive and offensive communication and the emerging point for the activist/hacker “group” called Anonymous. When I was searching for books about 4chan and Anonymous I came across this Createspace published text that had pretty poor reviews on Amazon.  Well, I ordered the book regardless of everyone’s warnings and, as it turns out, it is just as irrelevant as the reviews suggested. Its major problem is that the book does not distinguish between 4chan.org users and Anonymous.

I don’t know anything about the author aside from the fact that there’s a facebook page stating that she is a student at UC Berkeley. She also apparently uses 4chan.org and I guess an enthusiastic professor or course instructor encouraged her to publish something based on this phenomenon that has, so far, little literature devoted to it. The book itself is all text (despite being about an image-oriented website), and is largely composed of semi-coherent discussions of aspects of the Anonymous/4chan subculture (including ruminations on anonymity and mainstream media portrayals of the group, and thoughts on things like the use of offensive language). 

 The other major component of the text is excerpts of posts to 4chan’s /b/ (random) board, where people have outrageous discussions about weird things and make jokes about suicide and post bizarre images with their writings. Cherbet-Bouchard discusses a mostly incomprehensible vision for what Anonymous can be.

outlaw motorcycle clubs, bandidos mc - book - 2009 - The Fat Mexican: The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club

The Fat Mexican: The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club
Alex Caine
Vintage
2009
222 pages

This is the second book by retired Canadian contract informant Alex Caine, so I guess he has a multi-book publishing deal going. In his previous book Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his undercover life with a chapter of the Bandidos, one of the “big four” outlaw motorcycle clubs.  Presumably those experiences has given Caine the sufficient expertise to write this book about the history of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club in Canada, with a particular focus on the “Shedden Massacre”, the 2006 murder of 8 Toronto Bandidos on a farm in Southern Ontario.  

The Fat Mexican is another contribution to the enormous body of true crime literature on the Outlaw Biker subculture. The book is not particularly good although it is one of the few biker books that is not entirely focused on the Hells Angels or one of its members.  Instead its focus is one of the HA rivals, the Bandidos, who use a beer bellied Mexican bandit as their patch symbol and once challenged OMC traditions by explicitly claiming ‘gang’ rather than ‘club’ status. The Bandidos are Texas centered but have chapters through the United States and, in the 1990s to the present, in Canada as well. Caine discusses the history of the Bandidos push into Canada; first in Quebec as part of a strategy by the Rock Machine (perhaps the only international MC to originate in Canada) to reinvigorate their fight against the Hells Angels during the Quebec Biker Wars by patching over to a larger club. The Quebec Bandidos failed and reclaimed their Rock Machine patch, but the Bandidos moved west across Canada to compete with the Angels patching over of small Canadian clubs.

Caine describes the push from the Bandidos into Canada as somewhat incompetent, with little support and no oversight provided by the American Bandidos network. The Quebec Bandidos reformed the Rock Machine after a couple of years, and then in 2006, the Shedden Massacre occurred.  According to Caine, the massacre happened due to a biker-world scandal over a Toronto Bandido member who just chanced upon a Cocaine shipment in Toronto’s Rexdale neighborhood that coincidentally belonged to the Angels (rather than one of a zillion other Toronto based gangs). Through a chain of connections, the Winnipeg Bandidos traveled to Southern Ontario farm of Wayne Kellestine, one of those Nazi fanatics (see also Lemmy Kilmeister), where they lured the Toronto Bandidos for their execution.  That, in effect, was the Shedden Massacre, a gruesome event that saw Bandidos killing bikers from their own club.

There’s not much else to say about this book, like all true crime texts, The Fat Mexican dwells on any details that might heighten the reader’s sense of pleasure at the cruelty of others while maintaining a strong sense of moral indignation. Little details like the banter between killings are emphasized (and almost certainly invented) by Caine. Caine repeatedly calls Kellestein a Neo-Nazi on the grounds that he owned a large collection of Nazi paraphernalia. Like many people, I consider the accumulation of Nazi junk to be distasteful but as someone who studies the nuances of subcultures, I know that it is possible to be 1) a collector of Nazi garbage 2) bigoted 3) not a Neo-Nazi - a designation which involves a particular kind of political commitment. Many countercultural groups adopt the use of Nazi symbols because it establishes them as ‘the adversary’ using symbolic forms of recent history. Furthermore, Nazi symbolism can also be fetishized to suggest a fascination (a fetishistic fascination) with violence and cruelty.  

All of that is only to offer a critical counterpoint to Caine’s accusations of Kellestine as a Neo-Nazi-Biker.  Kellestine was obviously an awful person and, Neo-Nazi or not he is still guilty of 8 murders and of rupturing the notion of MC club membership as being intrinsically tied to concepts of brotherhood.

Furthermore it wasn’t difficult to find evidence of Kellestine bigotry as a simple google image search brought up photos of him taunting gay pride marchers with a confederate flag in London Ontario.