Less than 48 hours after Donald Trump became President-elect of the United States, Kathleen Hanna was dancing. The Julie Ruin singer and feminist punk icon appeared onstage at New York’s Irving Plaza last Thursday in a shiny black-and-silver leotard and told a crowd screaming its guts out, “We need you tonight.” Keyboard player Kenny Mellman greeted us with a Whitney Houston quote: “No matter what they take away from me, they can’t take away my dignity.”
The band opened their set with “I Decide,” an anthem of autonomy that sounded genuinely radical on our second day in Trump’s America. As she delivered the lyrics in the intentionally bratty monotone of a woman too proud to beg for her independence, Hanna executed goofy Jazzercise moves and faux-Riverdance kicks. Between songs, she stretched like a boxer psyching herself up for a fight. Someone behind me whispered, “I fucking needed this.”
It was the first moment of exuberant defiance I’d witnessed since Tuesday, in a city where millions of people were moving through the streets like mourners in a funeral procession. On Wednesday, too consumed by dread to work, I had watched tired parents walk eerily quiet children home from an elementary school in Brooklyn, where Trump had won only 16 percent of votes. Earlier Thursday evening, at a packed bar in his home borough of Manhattan, where he’d failed to crack 10 percent and gotten heckled at his polling place, I’d joined a grim happy hour crew sighing into pints of beer. Reports of racist and xenophobic harassment, even in this supposed oasis of tolerance, were flooding social media. My conversations with friends and family kept ending in mutual confusion over whether we were too worried or not worried enough.
In their refusal to perform defeat, the Julie Ruin cut through that haze of impotent uncertainty. Even after four decades of corporate efforts to reduce it to marketable meaninglessness, punk remains one of the most effective tools for harnessing righteous anger into productive energy. In a live setting especially, it brings artists and fans together as one supportive community that can be outraged, but never somber. Punk fosters the human connections that are necessary for organized resistance. That doesn’t make it unique among musical genres—hip-hop and folk also have long traditions of uniting people for change—but it’s punk that I have always turned to in moments when I’ve felt powerless.
The need to be jolted out of paralysis is what brought me to see Hanna’s band and, the next night, the Thermals. “Here’s Your Future,” a bleak Noah’s ark retelling that opens their 2006 album The Body, The Blood, The Machine, had long been the song that sprung to mind first when I considered the prospect of President Trump.
In the day between those shows, I managed to donate to the relevant organizations and check in with vulnerable friends and start planning to attend protests. Music hadn’t cured my sadness or fear—nor would I have wanted it to—but I no longer felt immobilized by those emotions. It occurred to me that I was turning, without even thinking about it, to the musicians who had spoken for so many of us during George W. Bush’s presidency. I trusted their voices and the communities they’d fostered, even though the crisis we’d survived together suddenly seemed tame compared with what we face in 2017.
Hanna and Mellman, whose work with Justin Vivian Bond as the cabaret duo Kiki and Herb often overlapped with LGBT activism, certainly didn’t seem immune to the anxiety that had seized the city and much of the country. “We made it through the Bush years and thought it couldn’t get worse,” she said. “It did.” But they also offered wisdom amassed over nearly three decades of work at the intersection of art and radical politics—messages of perseverance derived from the experience of caring for themselves and the people they loved while they fought through dark times. Mellman told us about the years he spent “protesting everything,” in San Francisco during the AIDS crisis. “It got terrible in the ’90s. My friends kept dying,” he said. “Your elders are with you, but we are tired. We will be there for you because that’s what we do.”
There were the requisite stories of election-night anguish and exhortations to volunteer our money and skills. The band’s ability to make a thousand sad fans of all races and genders—in a room where women vastly outnumbered men and dozens of queer couples hugged each other tight—dance was a rarer feat. It was a relief, too, to hear Hanna and Mellman vent a jumble of emotions that didn’t all read as “correct” responses to the election. She suggested we run around our homes in red T-shirts and no pants, like Winnie-the-Pooh, and watch bad TV. No one could accuse Hanna, who’d been pushing feminism to tough crowds since she was a teenager and had contributed to Hillary Clinton’s campaign by reuniting Le Tigre for the single “I’m With Her,” of trivializing our predicament. Her words reflected the hard-won knowledge that silly pleasures can fortify you for necessary struggles.
The encore was Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl,” a Kathleen Hanna song that has provided female-identified people with sonic armor against misogynistic bullshit for the past 23 years. Although the Julie Ruin didn’t call “girls to the front,” the way Hanna used to do during the riot grrrl era, Thermals bassist Kathy Foster linked the performances in spirit by opening their Friday night show at Brooklyn Bazaar with that familiar request.
After voicing some reservations about providing catharsis, they played The Body, The Blood, The Machine from beginning to end. Released during Bush’s second term, amid widespread fears that the religious right would gain permanent control over the federal government, it is a concept album about lovers fleeing a fascist, Christian regime. Theocracy may look like just one of many possible dystopic scenarios in 2016, but the threat of persecution feels even more real now than it did then. A few lines from the single “A Pillar of Salt” are painfully prescient: “We don’t want to die/Or apologize/For our dirty god/For our dirty bodies.” In so many ways, this was an election about which bodies deserve to feel safe in America and which bodies do not.
“I didn’t realize we were gonna play the whole album,” Foster said when they’d finished. Hutch Harris, the Thermals’ singer and guitarist, admitted that he hadn’t anticipated it either. They had sped through each song with a ferocity that could only have come from a spontaneous need to press forward until there was nothing left to play. It felt like a miraculous reaction to the shock we were all suffering. I had seen them perform songs from The Body just a few months earlier, in honor of its 10th anniversary. We might have joked bitterly about it that night, but no one in the room then—band included—seemed fully awake to the reality that we were on the precipice of another potential dystopia.
There has been a lot of reflection, in the days since Trump’s election finally became real to us, on what this moment means for pop culture, from trivial questions about whether he will “make ‘The Daily Show’great again” to genuine inquiries into what role art can play at a time when organizing and action seem so much more important. Some writers have felt the need to rehash the old cliché that political turmoil is good for art, shouting over the voices of millions who now feel physically unsafe to remind us that punk arose out of the conservatism and poverty of the 1970s or suggest we can thank Ronald Reagan for hip-hop and hardcore. Others have pointed out that this argument is just as baseless as it is callous.
It is obvious to anyone capable of empathy that good art isn’t worth sacrificing lives or freedom. Masterpieces created out of adversity contain essential lessons for future generations, but that doesn’t begin to justify the horrors that inspired them. Art can only counterbalance suffering by propelling those of us who have the autonomy to act past hopelessness. Albums like The Body are reasons to live, not die.
Wise thinkers have warned us not to “normalize” this moment in history, and there’s a fine line between finding a way to carry on and deluding yourself that everything is OK. Like the Thermals, I’m concerned about using music as catharsis when that anger could fuel so much necessary action. But music doesn’t have to be an escape from reality—it can be an invitation to participate in it. A punk show, or any cultural event that unites us with people who share our values and outrage, can remind us that we love our community enough to fight for its survival. None of this is any substitute for activism, but all of it can prepare us to do that work.