Return to Strength

Historically, punks hated "jocks" in part because they represented the norm, and in part for their role in our own teenage nightmares. But what, if anything, did we throw out with the jock bathwater?

Henry Rollins, live with Black Flag. 1983. Courtesy of UCLA Library Special Collections.

I.

Like many people in our community, I discovered punk and hardcore at an extremely early age. I was a preteen, even. And while I’d like to think that I was far more worldly and sophisticated than your average twelve-year-old, when I look back on my life almost 38 years later, I understand now that I was still just a child. Which means that for as much as I knew about global politics, socioeconomics, or racial discrimination—and honestly, I was as well-read as a child could be—I was still very much operating with a developing mind. I was simplistic and reductive and quite often wrong.

To be that young and punk in the 1980s meant that many of us came to the scene with an adolescent list of our real and imagined adversaries. Whether it was generational or we were simply a product of the time, our targets were largely the same: We hated hippies, which often included our parents (see the Teen Idles’ “Deadhead”). We hated the government (take your pick of literally any Reagan Youth song). And more than anything else, it seemed, we hated jocks. Or rather, we hated whatever the teenage image of a “jock” was at the time. It wasn’t just the “beef patrol” that Jello Biafra sang about in “Jock-O-Rama.” It was the entire culture of competition and cut-throat bullying that defined rival sporting events (see 7 Seconds’ “I Hate Sports”), and it was the way that jock mentality continued to infect our real world experiences long after graduation (see SS Decontrol’s “Jock Itch”). Ask any young punk today about their childhood and they’ll be absolutely thrilled to tell you how they “weren’t like the jocks in my high school.” It’s one of hardcore’s most common tropes. It’s also one of my greatest peeves in punk: We’ve always been much quicker to define ourselves by who we are not than by who we are.

There have always been outliers, of course. Slapshot’s entire schtick was based on the raw aggression of hockey—and at least Choke had, like many who came before and after him, an unapologetically muscular build. Supertouch famously thanked the New York Knicks in the liner notes for the New York City Hardcore: The Way It Is compilation, and continue to approve basketball-related imagery for new merchandise to this day. Youth Of Today established a “jock” aesthetic that became an enduring visual signifier for late eighties straight-edge and beyond. Bands like Ten Yard Fight and Sportswear took that aesthetic and made it more literal, even if somewhat tongue-in-cheek. More recently, Matt Karll from Gridiron answered a question about his nonmusical influences by saying, “I take a lot of my thoughts about the [Philadelphia] Eagles and try to put them into words sometimes, which helps a lot with lyrics.”

All of this makes me feel like maybe we missed something. It makes me feel like most of our initial reaction to sports was just a knee-jerk response arising from the detritus of our collective high school traumas. It makes me wonder what, if anything, we threw out with the jock bathwater.

We had a hardcore show here in 1997 and people sat down to watch it. Huntington Beach, California.

II.

Back in 1994, Henry Rollins wrote a now semi-famous essay for Details magazine called “Iron and the Soul.” In it, he makes the argument for how exercise—and in his case specifically, working out—can be used as a strategy for self-realization. I scoffed at it when the essay was first published; like other scrawny hardcore kids of the time, I’d already learned to value my brain more than my body. In the nineties, we codified that value by literally putting on shows that also featured workshops and debates. Dozens of zines came out that eschewed “punk journalism” for think-pieces and passionate polemics. Some of us vocally challenged the hierarchies of physicality by discouraging moshing and stage-diving. In 1997, when Texas is the Reason played a stage-free library in Huntington Beach, California, we went so far as to ask the audience to just sit on the floor so that everyone could have fair and equal access to a view of the band. Everyone happily sat down and applauded the initiative. We just didn’t believe that anyone’s height or strength should be determining factors in how you experience a show, and apparently, the audience agreed.

I’m still happy about the fact that all of those things happened. I believe we were creating a more inclusive vision for hardcore that went beyond the brute force of the eighties and embraced a variety of valid alternative expressions at shows. But at some point I also began to realize that my own personal trauma with “jocks” was at least partly responsible for creating a false dichotomy that I was clinging on to as a matter of identity: I acted on the conviction that my body and brain were two separate entities. Unlike a devoted athlete, I believed that my body was simply a carcass-in-waiting, and that my brain was everything. It wasn’t until I suffered a major accident—including a traumatic brain injury—that a therapist I was working with for depression recommended working out as a tool for improving my mental health, forcing me to reassess this long-held opinion. I resisted her recommendation for months until, one day in 2004, I gave in and hired a personal trainer.

Here’s what I quickly realized: Being in touch with your body is being in touch with yourself. And your brain is, in fact, only a part of your body. If anything, the body and the brain are interdependent to the extent of which I can’t even find a suitable comparison. For so many years, I used punk and hardcore as a shield from being overtly physical because I had ceded that platform to the “jocks” I thought we all hated. But on some level, I believe now, I actually relinquished my own wholeness to a punk dogma that I had never once thought to challenge.

“The Iron is the best antidepressant I have ever found,” Rollins contends. “There is no better way to fight weakness than with strength. Once the mind and body have been awakened to their true potential, it’s impossible to turn back.”

I was finally beginning to get this.

III.

There’s an incredible song on Deep Sage, the first new Gouge Away album in five years, called “Stuck In A Dream.” The lyrics quite vividly describe the ways in which being on tour—an experience that for many of us had been, at one point, akin to “living the dream”—can become a harsh and unforgiving mental health battle. Indeed, it often feels bleak, and the way it’s portrayed in the song is as true as anything I’ve ever heard: “Redundancy / A boring thing / No in-betweens / Of the extremes.”

When Gouge Away vocalist Christina Michelle and I sat down for an interview that will be published in full on Thursday, I brought this lyric into the conversation specifically because I had only recently experimented with working out while on tour for the first time ever last spring, and I discovered that, somehow, morning exercise took the edge off of so many of the mental and physical extremities of touring in a way that I’m not even sure I have an explanation for. When I asked Christina how she beats the feeling described in the song, she was quick to connect her own mind-body relationship with the answer.

“Oh my God. How do I beat the feeling?” she laughs. “I think it’s something that I’m having to figure out all over again. I feel like this tour back was a big learning experience and now I know more going into the next one. I need to make room for things like physical fitness; I need to commit. That is a huge mood changer for me. It’s just more rewarding for yourself and it makes your body feel better—and those are good things. I want to eat healthier going forward. I kind of slacked on that big time on this one. But also I need to listen to myself a lot more, and when I do need personal space, I need to put the headphones in and create my own little bubble in the van. I was touring [as a bass player] with Nothing, and whenever I needed my own space from them, I would journal. I would just write what I was feeling, and it really helps to get it out there. Just listening to yourself is important.”

Christina is only reinforcing the reality that there is no such thing as mental health without physical action. Listening to yourself, she maintains, means listening to all of yourself.

IV.

I was bullied as a kid in high school, even when I was a skinhead in the late eighties. I learned how to fight as a necessity—and against my better nature—but for a long time I felt weak and disempowered. Being gay compounded that negative self-image even further, and it wasn’t until I became a creative contributor to the hardcore scene that I was finally able to claim any real sense of self-worth as a young man. It was for that reason that I went so long living solely inside of my own head: My body had only ever caused me pain, I thought. My mind was the only thing anyone ever seemed to respect. So I obsessively worked out that muscle.

Over the years, however, I’ve begun to realize that—far from being the domain of absent-minded “jocks”—the gym did become a place where I could reclaim my power, even if only silently. Barring the occasional Instagram story, I don’t advertise my wins or my losses. But as it turns out, like Rollins, I actually have had moments of self-realization at the gym. I’ve put myself through challenges that I never thought I’d get through and I’ve walked out of that building understanding that I am not my self-limiting beliefs. I’ve also learned that, unlike those images of the “jock” archetypes I railed against in my teenage punk years, I often feel less judgment from people at the gym than I do almost anywhere else. It reminds me of how I felt when I first started going to New York City hardcore shows in an uncannily similar way: Back then, I felt respected at a show for just being there, because we all knew how many fears and obstacles we had to get past in order to just walk through that door. Back then, we all gave each other “the nod” because we knew we were there to sing along with songs about getting stronger, improving on yourself, and fighting through the pain—and we wanted each other to win.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Christina Michelle of Gouge Away.

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