unleash your inner rebel with brazil’s black pantera
Since their first singles, Brazilian metal trio Black Pantera has cemented themselves as one of the most vital heavy groups out there. With outspoken social criticism and fiery sound that bridges the gap between punk and metal, the short of it is: if you’re not listening to Black Pantera, why even bother having ears?
Their latest single is a blistering anthem of defiance destined to become an AFROPUNK staple. “Punk Rock Nigga Roll” was timed to release with their appearance at this weekend’s AFROPUNK fest in Brooklyn, and it’s the perfect encapsulation of what they do. It’s explosive, inventive, and it’s as much as a celebration as it is a call to rebel.
video premiere: “culture vultures” are hit hard in blues rockers black joe lewis & the honeybears’ latest
Raw and direct, the new track from Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears takes aim at culture vultures. “Culture Vulture” adds some stripped down cowpunk to the band’s palette of throwback blues and R&B, while Lewis delivers some of his most pointed lyrics to date. “Culture Vulture” is sharp as knives.
“Culture Vulture is a song about those who consume everything from the masses to create their identity while thinking it’s their own culture and influence that is under attack from others they perceive as different,” Joe Lewis tells AFROPUNK. “They think some kind of urban revolution is needed to preserve what’s theirs. Which allows the Powers that be to play off their fear mongering and watch the world burn. ‘That’s porno for the agency.’”
Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears’ latest record, The Difference Between Me & You drops September 7th. Pre-order it here.
premiere: light, darkness, sex & death permeate punk rockers pleasure venom’s visceral video for “these days”
Pleasure Venom frontwoman Audrey Campbell is known as much for her singing as for her music videos, so it’s no surprise that the latest single from the band is ambitious as all getout. It’s a dual format video for “These Days,” first as a traditional video and second in 360 degree stereoscopic VR. The traditional format finds the band performing in an empty field with gas cans burning, interspersed with riot footage and vintage Soul Train dance clips. It’s a jarring series of contrasts, that heightens the tension at the heart of Pleasure Venom’s music. Flash cuts highlight the tension between celebration and rage.
The VR version is a profound technical achievement, though it scales back the ambitious imagery and editing by nature of the format. With a camera placed in the middle of the field, band members swirl around you. You control the camera as Campbell moves throughout the rest of the band. It’s visceral in a different way than the heightened editing of the traditional version; instead of being presented with a series of radical contrasts, you’re in charge of your experience. Though I wasn’t able to view it on a VR device (the only phones I will use are made by Nokia, are indestructible, and come with snake. End of story.), even on a laptop screen there’s something unexpectedly exciting about playing the role of camera person in a video. It’s immersive in a way that’s entirely unique.
For Audrey Campbell, those contrasts are the heart of the song: “When I wrote the song, I was feeling very great and very shit at the same time. I wanted to play with that paranoiac state visually and see what happened. At the time I was falling for someone, which always feels amazing, yet I was also coming out of a pretty dark time and situation. I consider it a study on light and dark, sex and death. Fire and more fire. Beautiful and ugly shit. The contrast of isolating ourselves and putting on your finest coat to dance on a car and just let loose and push through the bullshit, but the feeling of sugarcoating things should be evident. It’s a lot more colorful and fun to look at than anything I’ve done so far, yet my politics always tend to seep through. I’m hoping the tiki torch in the beginning will not go over everyone’s heads. That “Alt-Right” march was so ridiculous. Can’t believe this is what we have come to.”
Check out the traditional cut above and the VR version below.
Photo by Victoria Renard
this punk rock opera/visual album is a gripping horror short about white supremacy in the scene
It’s a scenario that anyone who isn’t a straight white dude has experienced on tour: when you walk into a venue, size up the room and realize “shit, I might not be safe here.” (The Johnson City man’s voice asking me “so is y’all some kinda f*****?” before the show will be forever etched in my eardrums.) So what do you do? Home’s 600 miles away and your ability to get there is dependent on the 50 bucks the bar’s promised to shell out at the end of the night. So you unload and play the set and try to squash down that 6th sense. Danny Denial takes that moment of dread and ratchets it up to the millionth degree on the visuals for his new album Dead Like Me.
The band pulls up to a small town bar and starts to unload at the beginning of DETHHEADS U.S.A. Things go from “shitty bar show” to “set-up for a great episode of the X-Files” quickly as the all-white bar patrons quickly reveal themselves to be members of some kind of white supremacist patriarchal death cult. To say much more would be to spoil what may be the single most harrowing video since Nine Inch Nails’ Broken movie. The video paints in broad strokes, leaving most of the horror to the imagination, while Danny Denial’s angular punk rock keeps the tension high. Songs like “Suck My Jesus” and “Dead Like Me” are the highlights of both album and film, perfectly capturing the disaffected rage and confusion.
DETHHEADS U.S.A. marks the arrival of Danny Denial as the kind of artist who makes waves. It’s a bold, honest, and chilling film that’s not just a damn good showcase for his music, but a gripping horror short on its own. Definitely check out DETHHEADS U.S.A. and the full album Dead Like Me. Both are out now.
Photos by Leo Ramos and Brendan Cescon
shatter those eardrums, courtesy of punk/hip-hop pioneers game rebellion’s ferocious ‘a decade of disaster (2002 – 2012)’
When Game Rebellion burst onto the scene in 2002, they were a necessary antidote to the tedium of nu metal. By the time they parted ways in 2012, they were still frustratingly ahead of their time. Over the past 6 years since their split though, something happened: music caught up.
Released last week, A Decade of Disaster is less a greatest hits album than it is an introductory course. The band opens with “Trapped,” about as clear a distillation of their sound as possible. It’s fiery, ferocious, and tight as fuck. They launch immediately into the Beethoven-riffing “Lights Out.” It grows from haunting to a little goofy to eardrum-shattering in seconds. This was a band that took genre-smashing to its most logical extremes years before the trend took over.
Game Rebellion goes for maximum variety on A Decade of Disaster, mixing in R&B “Laydown,” dub nods “Maria,” and even a little dubstep bass wobble on “GTFO.” Their best cuts close out the album. “Save Me” and “Sun” finds the band firing on all cylinders. “Save Me”‘s mix of classic punk and heavy social criticism could have been released last week (I guess technically it was).
It’s a sad aftershock of how quickly things can change in the age of the internet, that few of the albums Game Rebellion pulls from on A Decade of Disaster are easily available. Luckily the band is clear to mark it as “Part I.” Stay tuned for Part II. And in the meantime, check out this classic blistering video of them performing “Sun” back at the 2008 AFROPUNK Fest.
fuck la migra! the latest afropunk mixtape is a declaration of immigrant rights
The truth is that immigration law has always been about white supremacy. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 on down to the founding of ICE in 2003, these are explicitly racist laws designed to preserve a racist power structure, and they were always headed here: internment camps to imprison immigrant children and punish families for seeking a better life. We stand with refugees and immigrants the world over to demand an end to racist immigration laws. Close the camps. Reunite the families. Fuck la migra.
01. Intro: Abolish ICE (June 2018)
02. Samurai Shotgun – The Blast
03. Ebony Bones – No Black In The Union Jack
04. Fantastic Negrito – Plastic Hamburgers
05. Denzel Himself – Thrasher
06. Interlude: Rep. Maxine Waters (June 2018)
07. Mereba – Black Truck
08. G Matthews – Choices!
09. Emicida & Ibeyi – Hacia El Amor
10. Harville – Spill
11. Curtis Harding – It’s Not Over
12. Rest Ashore – Concussion
13. Interlude: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (June 2018)
14. Deathgrips – Black Paint
15. Joji Abot – Gods Among Men
16. Interude: Leah, 12 Year-Old Speech (June 2018)
17. Marci Phonix – Liberties
indulge your punk sensibility with south london mc/producer mc denzel himself’s game-changing catalogue
“I think about death every day.”
Over the past year, South London MC and producer Denzel Himself has released a string of singles and EPs that demand attention. The avowed punk cut his teeth on ‘Trash Talk’ and punctuates spaced-out beats with hardcore screams, filling in the margins with distorted guitars and bass. Songs like “Thrasher” and “State Ya Claim” showcase an inventive drive; Denzel Himself produces everything, well, himself. The results are tracks that are totally unique.
His latest EP, Baphomet James, is a more introspective affair. The beats are sparser, the verses stretch out. The standout cuts like “Navy” find the MC musing on mortality and the pressure of trying to make it in a world that stacks the decks against you. “Melty” pairs Denzel Himself up with KEYAH/BLU for a hazed out hookup ballad. Conflicted, unresolved, and totally unique. Like the best of Denzel Himself’s cuts, just when you think you’ve pinned him down, he changes the game.
4th movement celebrated gospel-punk life (after death)
The story of Death is now accepted historical lore: They were mid-1970s Detroit punk pioneers, ignored at the time but whose reissued recordings (2009) led to a critically beloved documentary and a reunion (that saw them play AFROPUNK in 2013). But the music that brothers David, Bobby and Dannis Hackney made after leaving the Motor City for the Vermont woods, is only now coming into a wider perspective.
The 4th Movement by The 4th Movement
As “Revelation’s Eve,” the opening track of their debut album as The 4th Movement, shows, the Hackneys may have continued to rock as hard as ever, but now their musical devotion took on a different focus. The 4th Movement played power chords for the Lord, with all of their songs taking on a spiritual concern. So, if Death was the unofficial birth of punk rock (predating Bad Brains, The Ramones, etc.), The 4th Movement was the first hymnal sound of gospel-punk. (Check out, “Death Into Life,” the short doc that Matt Yoka made about the group’s evolution, below.)
The Hackney brothers recorded two 4th Movement albums in Burlington, which, just like the early Death singles, they self-released on their own Tryangle label — these became super-expensive collectors items in the nerd-vinyl world. Now, the good people at Drag City Records are bringing that music back into general circulation, starting with the reissue of the 4th Movement’s self-titled LP from 1980. If you care about the roots of this AFROPUNK thing, and are looking for real-life inspiration, this music is worth your time.
The 4th Movement’s self titled album is being reissued in late June.
get the power to face the everyday bullsh*t with pop punk diva g matthews’ ‘superhero’
The superheroes on G Matthews’ new album might not spawn billion dollar franchises (or leave billions of dollars in damage in their heroic wake), but that doesn’t make them any less epic. Superhero is a celebration of the ordinary people who face all the bullshit the world has to throw at them and live to fight another day.
With massive anthems like “Keep On Going,” “Leap Of Faith,” and “Not Tonight,” it’s an album that flips the script of alt rock into messages of empowerment without losing an ounce of power. The best songs on the record tend to be the ones that look the darkness straight in the face without blinking. From the dissonant hardcore guitars of “Leap of Faith” to the miles deep groove of “Things You’ll Never Know,” there are nods to classic post-hardcore and emo buried beneath G Matthews’ massive pop melodies. The album’s highlight though is “Choices,” which adds some 8-bit flourishes to a propulsive punk rock song about overcoming anxiety, and I’m just very much here for it.
The Dark Knight memorably called Batman the hero Gotham deserves, not the one it needs. G Matthews’ Superhero is both. We all need some anthems to remind us that the daily fight is worth fighting, and we all sure as hell deserve it.
decolonize & reclaim! the latest afropunk mixtape is streaming now
Decolonize land. Decolonize thought. Decolonize bodies. Reclaim the narrative. What does it mean to decolonize? What does it take to reclaim? Those are the questions asked by our latest Mixtape: Decolonize & Reclaim. Songs from artists like Angelo Moore, Childish Gambino, Le Vice, DOOKOOM, Baloji & Shingai, and many more wrestle with these complex questions, and envision worlds free of internal and external colonial bullshit. Turn it up and take it back.
01. Le Vice – Boys & Girls
02. Interlude: Quetzala Carson (August 2017)
03. The Internet – Roll (Burbank Funk)
04. Aphrotek – River Styx Ride (ft. Mike Ladd)
05. Interlude: Decolonize This Place (April 2018)
06. Monoculture – Movement
07. All Cows Eat Grass – Air Castle
08. Ajo – Gotta Love It
09. MTA Interlude
10. Yuno – No Going Back
11. Pete Wilde – Lucy
12. Unlikely Heroes – Tazzy
13. Vodun – Spirits Past
14. DOOKOOM – Gangstaz
15. SCARLXRD – Burns
16. DUCKWRTH – Boy
17. Interlude: Now This / Decolonize the Brooklyn Museum
18. Angelo Moore & The Brand New Step – Inner City Blues (ft. Butterscotch)
19. Baloji – Soleil de Volt (Shingai Remix)
20. Childish Gambino – This Is America
Album artwork photography by Sammy Sampson / @Sammysampsonphotography