#kenocore

On the stage stood a solo kid from Chicago, with the ubiquitous midwest punk look: silly hairdo (half-shaved, floppy, mint green) half-hidden under a black Carhartt stocking cap, plaid flannel shirt, dirty black jeans, scuffed black steel-toe boots. They were super cute, and though I only caught the last few songs of their set, I loved the music: stripped-down, plugged-in yet kinda folky-punk, Billy Bragg-style; raw and open-hearted. I’ve become disillusioned with folkpunk as A Thing, but when I first heard folkpunk I said it was more punk than straight-up punk and I still have a deep love for us solo punx (cos I’m one of ‘em): when we get up there on stage, whether we play electric or acoustic, whether we play guitar or accordion or a fucking pickle-tub drum, it’s just us and our instruments and our voices and our hearts that we’ve made into jackets and if we fuck up everyone hears it cos we don’t have a band to back us up or distract from us and we are so vulnerable and so brave and we do it because we have to, we so need to play music that we’ll do it even without a band.

Between bands, another drink, I started feeling the whiskey and it was good, good to be whiskey-drunk, fuel and grease loosening my limbs. Going outside to smoke, collars up against the wind and hands cupped around flickering flames. Inside, talking to old familiars and new faces. I talked with the solo mint-haired punk, told them I liked their music; we talked about Chicago, turned out they live in one of the neighborhoods I used to live in. Then there was the third dude who came close to having my fist in his face - another guy I’ve known forever. He’s a decent dude when he’s sober, but when he’s fucked up he gets stupid, and that night he was drunk and on some kind of pill-high; he tried to hit on both me and Beagan and didn’t back off even when we told him we weren’t interested, and I was getting annoyed. He was saved from my wrath cos he got distracted by another old friend of ours, and he stumbled away.

The second band, I couldn’t get into. The frontman was trying so hard to be a funny, cool rockstar, and the music wasn’t my bag, so I concentrated on drinking. More rounds of drinks, rounds and round and round, more cigarettes. Then Republicans on Welfare. They were great, reminiscent of all my old favorite Kenocore bands but not totally derivative. Good, raging hardcore with a side of garage-y punk. I danced up front for most of their set, and the pit (such as it was, there were too few people for it to truly be a pit) was mostly made up of girls. A couple dudes bounced in and out, but most of the time it was us girls slamming, skanking, pogoing.  I’d run to where Beagan sat, have a sip of my drink, run back up, dance, fist in the air. I picked up the words to choruses on the fly and shouted along. Toward the end of their set, they did a blistering cover of “Blank Generation” and then I really shouted along. I love anytime a band covers that song; it was written, what, like 40 years ago and is forever the perfect anthem for anyone disaffected. I was sayin’ “let me outta here” before I was even born… It’s such a gamble when you get a face. Everything was great, the gals in the pit were so welcoming, though none of them knew me. “I love your jacket,” they said, or, “your hair kicks ass,” and we threw our arms around each other and did high-kicks like some kind of punk rock chorus line. But then, this one girl who’d been standing in the back came up near the stage to take some pictures, and she started giving me death glares. She looked at me like she thought I was trying to get with one of the band members, like she thought I had my eye on the same fella she did. I wanted to reassure her that wasn’t the case, that I was there to sing, to slam, to sweat the winter blues away. I wanted to say: “Honey, we can both do so much better than any of these boys. Let’s forget them, join forces, and smash the patriarchy.” I couldn’t shout all that over the noise from the PA, so I smiled at her, hoping that would convey my message, but that made her glare harder. It bummed me out, so, for the last couple songs of the Repubs’ set, I returned to Beagan and my booze.

When the music ended, we stayed on a while longer, drank more, stood outside smoking more cigarettes. I was drunk enough by that point that the biting wind didn’t faze me at all. I talked with this cute punk kid (mussed-up hair, striped shirt, Army-issue jacket covered in patches). He flirted with me, all: “I haven’t seen you around here before.” “Well,” I said, “I’ve never been to this bar before, but I’ve been coming to punk shows in Kenosha since 1998.” He said: “Uh, I wasn’t going to punk shows back then. I was eight.” We talked about music; I scoped the patches on his jacket and nodded at the bands I know and like. I was curious about his backpatch: “Who’s that one for?” -“Mouth Sewn Shut.” I didn’t know who that was, he told me it was the singer from Toxic Narcotic, I got stoked cos I used to love Toxic Narcotic and I didn’t even know he had a more recent band. We talked about where we were from, where we’d lived. I said I was born in Lansing, Michigan, and he said: “Oh, the Crucifucks are from Lansing. Did you ever see them back then?” -“Dude, how old do you think I am? I know I’m older than you are, but fuck. The Crucifucks broke up when I was, like, six!” He blushed and said: “I didn’t mean you were old, I’m sorry, I just, I didn’t know when they broke up, I wasn’t thinking about that!” I told him it was cool, I knew he didn’t mean anything by it.

Beagan and I went back to her apartment, stayed up until four a.m. drinking and talking. Five hours of fitful sleep later, I found my way back north. A week or so before, I’d been feeling bleak about where I was living, that old feeling that comes on when I’m unhappy with my life, like Maybe life would be better elsewhere. Maybe I should move back to a bigger city, or leave the midwest for good. What’s that one pop punk song about hating your hometown but knowing you’ll never escape it? That’s how I’d felt a week before. But that Saturday morning, driving up Highway 32, on the icy roads, along the frozen lake, I felt a deep and abiding love for southeastern Wisconsin. I thought about Highway 32, that road I’ve spent more of my time on than any other road in the world, and how I want a stick&poke tattoo of the highway sign, and how I’d like to write a whole mini-zine about that road. I thought about Kenocore, and how I’ve been thinking of writing a zine-book about the history of Kenocore for over a decade now. I thought about a conversation Beagan and I’d had the night before. We were talking about someone we knew from Kenosha who moved to Chicago several years ago and now says he’s from Chicago, as though all his years in southeastern Wisconsin never happened. “Why be ashamed of where you come from?” she asked. “I agree,” I said. “Besides, it’s more impressive when someone from a little town or mid-sized city like Racine or Kenosha does something cool. Why pretend you’re from Chicago? There are a million cool people in Chicago, but not so many in Kenosha.” I thought about the previous night’s show, and how, to paraphrase World/Inferno, the kids do still sing and dance, drink and fuck, smash it up. It’s my homeland.