Name In Mind

The names we are given often tell rich stories about where we come from. The punk practice of changing your name is about taking control of who you are now.

My mother and her three sons. I’m the youngest, obviously. Woodside, NY. 1977.

I.

As children acquiring language, names are the first words we truly learn. We respond to our own names before we understand why we respond to them; we “know” these sounds make meaning before we actually know that sound makes any meaning at all. What we don’t seem to grasp right away, if ever, is that something profound occurs with every time we establish this connection between name and self. We become our names by answering to them when we are called, and in doing so, we allow ourselves to be named. And each time we identify with the names we are given, we undergo a process of deep internalization that bonds us with the historical, social, political, and personal dimensions of that name. At that moment, the person who calls for us creates us.

The family folklore surrounding my first name is confusing. At least as far as the story goes, my parents somehow landed on “Norman” in a somewhat panicked and last-minute decision. For one brief moment, my name was Julian. But not long after my mother held me for the first time, my parents agreed that “Julian” was not the little person who had just made his arrival into the world. That’s when I became Norman. Later, I would discover that this neat little story has a wrinkle. The name “Norman,” which has no significance to our family or to our family heritage, was chosen specifically for its Anglo origin. It is random, disconnected, and essentially ahistorical to my heritage. But my parents were immigrants to America and I was their first-generation son. They wanted me to be an American before anything else.

I was also given a surname. If you’ve only just discovered Anti-Matter—and me—in the past year, then you may be unaware that for the first thirty years of my life, my name was Norman Arenas. I legally changed my last name in 2004 for personal reasons, and while I’d rather never have to hear my birth name again, I’m also realistic about the fact that my past is not exactly a secret. There are literally hundreds of thousands of individual records and zines in the world that attach my work to that name. I can live with that. There was one underlying motive for changing my name, however, that I have rarely ever talked about: I still carry the baggage of knowing that for the entirety of my public life, almost everyone mispronounced it. And for reasons both social and cultural, I never bothered to correct anyone until it was much too late. Which is to say that, at some point, I accepted a name that I’d never been given, and I spent a young lifetime quietly resenting that.

Neeraj Kane, live with The Hope Conspiracy. The Chain Reaction. Anaheim, CA. December 3, 2010. Photo by Mitchell Wojcik.

II.

It would be easier if you heard me say it out loud, but for the record, my birth name was meant to be pronounced ah-reh-nahs, with or without a hard R, depending on how strong your Spanish phonics are. It was never ah-ree-nahz—like an “arena,” but plural—and it was most certainly never ar-nehz, like the way most people say Desi Arnaz. Recently, while on tour in Chile, our promoter asked me about my birth name, saying it correctly. It had been so long since I’d heard anyone say it right that I almost asked him to say it again, like a lab rat asking for a dopamine hit. I know this sounds like a metaphor, but that’s literally how I felt.

At the same time, I take accountability for my own resentment. I could have made it more of an issue of it early on, but this is where matters of identity and an imbalance of power come into play: Children of immigrants are born into this country already feeling less than American. We struggle to exist without making too many waves because we don’t feel like we have the right to demand anything of anyone. Even as children, we often just want to get through the day without feeling othered; enforcing an “exotic” pronunciation of our names, in our minds, would do just that. It’s no wonder, then, that many of us gravitate towards hardcore when we discover it. The lyrics of persistent alienation run deep inside of our experience.

Such was the case for Neeraj Kane, a guitarist best known for his work in The Hope Conspiracy, Hesitation Wounds, and The Suicide File. With almost 25 years of music behind him—and a new Hope Conspiracy album arriving at the end of the month—it felt like a good time to talk about his name. Because chances are, you haven’t been saying it right either.

“Being a Gen X’er and growing up in the ‘80s, in a suburb that was predominantly white, I just never corrected anybody,” Neeraj recalls, for a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “My father also never corrected anybody. So, everyone says my last name as ‘cane,’ but it’s actually kah-nay. I was aware of this early on, as soon as they started taking attendance in kindergarten. And my first name is actually nee-ridge, but everyone says ne-rahj. That’s just how they started pronouncing it, and I kind of just went with it because I didn’t want to make a fuss. It kind of became part of another separate identity, if that makes sense. Because I’ve lived in two worlds for most of my life: my first-generation Indian American culture, and then my being an American and going into that Western culture. So it kind of helped me partition the two things. I was ‘Nee-ridge Kah-nay’ in this one world and I was ‘Ne-rahj Cane’ in this other world.”

I once operated in this way, too. But my experience with the closet as a gay man ultimately informed a developing view of compartmentalization that wouldn’t allow for it. Because when you don’t feel like you’re fully allowed to claim your space, you often cut yourself in pieces to be smaller. You might even start to believe that you can never be whole again.

The artist formerly known as Paul Hudson. H.R., live with Bad Brains. Valley Green Housing Complex. September 9, 1979. Photo by Lucian Perkins.

III.

For the last 20 years, none of this has been a problem for me anymore. Having been disowned by my family after finally coming out to them, any connection I may have had with my family name—however you pronounce it—had been completely severed. It had become more than just a source of annoyance now; it was a source of anguish. This is when I contacted an attorney and began the process of renaming myself.

Changing your name, publicly or legally, is punk tradition—and this was not lost on me. But we do it for wildly different reasons: Jeffrey Hyman became Joey Ramone to establish a familial connection within his band. Although initially a shortened nickname for “hunting rod,” Paul Hudson eventually adopted the name H.R. to tell you something about what he stands for—in this case, “human rights.” Henry Garfield changed his name to Henry Rollins because the members of Black Flag were worried that having the last name of a former president would attract the interest of law enforcement. Jan Paul Beahm literally invented Darby Crash in the lyrics to “Circle One” and just went with it. I see all of these as assertions of power and self-determination.

“One thing I wanted to bring back to rock ’n’ roll was the knowledge that you invent yourself,” says Richard Meyers, better known as punk pioneer Richard Hell. “That’s why I changed my name. [Because] naturally, if you invent yourself, you love yourself.”

For me, having a name that was widely and fundamentally mispronounced reminded me of the ways I hated myself as a child. I hated feeling like a cultural outsider, sure, but I also hated myself for acquiescing to a name I wasn’t given. Every time someone said it, I felt further disconnected from my personal history—which meant that giving myself a new name, even a random one, couldn’t possibly make me feel any more disconnected. By taking the power to name myself, I believed that I could rewrite those pathways of connection by force.

IV.

Before I chose it, the name “Brannon” did not have any specific meaning to me—and that was the point. I placed only four requirements for the name: that it be easy to spell, that it be easy to pronounce, that I not personally know anyone who shares the name, and that it “sounds right” with my first name, which I decided to keep. I also took the question of ethnicity into account, and originally looked into other Spanish and Latin American names, but in the end, something felt off about adopting a family name that I could actually have been born into. I don’t know how to explain it, but it felt like I’d be adopting someone else’s story in a way that other names didn’t.

“Brannon,” then, was random. In my mind, that fact alone imparts continuity with the story of my first name. At the same time, there was a rationale behind this choice that was clearly intentional. For one thing, no one would ever look at me and believe that I was Irish. That kind of ambiguity is appealing to me. And to believe that this name tells you nothing about the historical, social, political, and personal dimensions of my existence would be a mistake. “Brannon” is a direct reference to my family’s history of assimilation at all costs, already made explicit by first name. It speaks to the rejection of a mistakenly pronounced surname that I had never been given, and to the lack of social capital I felt I needed to correct that wrong. It bears witness to the political reality of queer people like myself, who are disowned by our birth families and compelled to create other kinds of family—as well as other family names. And it tells you something about me as a person, and how I needed to reclaim a sense of agency in light of all of these facts about my life.

That said, for as much as I love the sentiment, I’m not sure that I fully relate with Richard Hell’s contention that “if you invent yourself, you love yourself.” The way I see it, I invented myself because I loved myself. I simply put a new name on something that was already there, and ever since then, I’ve worked hard to make it mean something. As for that other name, I don’t care how you pronounce it anymore. It never really felt like mine to begin with.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Neeraj Kane of The Hope Conspiracy, The Suicide File, and Hesitation Wounds.

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