In Conversation: James Spooner
As the filmmaker behind the Afro-Punk movie and cofounder of the Afropunk Festival, James Spooner gave a voice to Black punks everywhere. Now he's focused on telling his own story—in his own words.
When I first met James Spooner in the early ‘90s New York hardcore scene, everyone called him “Razzle.” The name didn’t have any sort of significant or special meaning, but it did describe something about his presence in a room that checked out: Razzle didn’t fade into the background of a show. Razzle made himself known.
In a similar way, when the Afro-Punk documentary dropped in 2003, we all felt it: James Spooner had now arrived, too. In the 20 years since, James has been a tireless advocate for Black punks everywhere—through the time he spent as cofounder of the Afropunk Festival, as director of the feature-length film White Lies, Black Sheep, as author and illustrator of the autobiographical graphic novel The High Desert: Black. Punk. Nowhere, and mos…