Kevin and Yusong are in the midst of a road trip to the Yankees game, and the guys talk about the craziness that is the Astros-Tiger game and the Mets-Astros game. Also, a woman wants a ball signed.
Transcript
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00:00:20.000Live from New York, it's Get Off My Lawn with Kevin McGuinness.
00:00:29.000We're here in the hotel room, binge-watching Tyler Henry's Hollywood Medium.
00:00:34.000It's a show where he goes to celebrities' homes and makes them cry after Wikipediaing them and maybe Googling the fact that their grandmother died of a botched biopsy.
00:00:48.000And then they go, woohoo, and they start crying.
00:00:53.000I think he's a sociopath that was probably happy when Alan Thick died because he had said to Alan Thick, I think you might have a heart problem.
00:01:00.000He said to an old man, you may have a heart problem.
00:01:05.000I've already talked about this, but the other day we had that woman, those New Yorkers, those angry New Yorkers, bitching about them not having balls signed.
00:01:14.000Now, I don't know why a 65-year-old wants a ball signed, but this is where we're at now.
00:01:29.000Now, this is a ball from DeGrom that at practice session in the morning, he just tossed to my son, which is way better than getting a ball in a game.
00:01:39.000So this is just his buddy DeGrom throwing him a ball.
00:02:20.000Then he caught a foul ball during the game from the Tigers.
00:02:25.000While he was in there in the pit, he found another game ball from the Astros.
00:02:32.000Then in two separate occasions, a woman and a man who work at the concession stand, they get balls that bounce right into their area and they keep them.
00:02:40.000And so they got a little bucket of balls.
00:02:42.000In two separate occasions, no, sorry, one concession stand lady gave him a ball.
00:02:48.000Another guy tried to give him a ball, but he said, I already got one from the concession stand, people, thank you.
00:02:52.000Then some random dad who's a Mets fan, covered in Mets gear, comes up and he says, my son has too many of these.
00:02:57.000Here's a game ball from First Data Field.
00:06:59.000First Yankees appearance in 12 years in the World Series from 64 to 76.
00:07:03.000And the Reds sweeping four games to none.
00:07:05.000National League Rookie of the Year, Pat Zachary, who then went to the Mets and the Tom Siever deal the following year, won two games in that World Series.
00:07:10.000He was, let's say, 14-7 to 2.76 the RAID to win the National League Rookie of the Year that year and beat the Yankees twice in the World Series.
00:07:19.000That was the Arizona Diamonds beating the Yankees, these Yankees.
00:07:24.000Luis Gonzalez got a base hit off of Mariano Rivera, a little blue into the outfield, and they beat him in the bottom of the nine from the seventh game in Arizona.
00:12:13.000But I'm kind of bombing out on baseball right now.
00:12:16.000So let's take a break and let's have a look at the very black history of punk rock.
00:12:28.000AJ Plus, Al Jazeera, the seek, just not seek, chic, oil chic billionaires in the Middle East have decided to spend some money brainwashing us into thinking that everything we do sucks.
00:12:43.000And part of that, I guess, is telling us that punk was created by black people.
00:14:05.000Short, fast riffs, lyrics pushing back against the mainstream mundane, the original don't give a f ⁇ attitude, and a no rules allow genre for self-identifying misfits that emerged at a time where music was becoming maybe a little too clean.
00:14:33.000There was a huge Jamaican influx in the 70s because they had just declared independence and they kicked the British out and they went, our country sucks now.
00:15:22.000You had one band called Bad Brains, and they were incredible.
00:15:27.000If you found someone that doesn't like Bad Brains, you'd put them in a museum at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a freak, and they could ask questions.
00:15:33.000Like I went to the Guinness Book of World Records when I was a kid in Niagara Falls, and the fattest woman in the world was there.
00:18:34.000But because they're black, everyone is freaking out, especially on the left.
00:18:38.000The New York Times had a big feature on them and they made a documentary and they got so much attention, they got back together and went, uh, hi, we're deaf.
00:18:46.000We're that band everyone is freaking out about?
00:18:49.000They're not even close to as good as Bad Brains, and they have absolutely nothing to do with punk rock.
00:18:53.000But they're black, so let's just cram them in to this ridiculous Arab propaganda.
00:18:58.000go ahead Now, Death broke all the rules.
00:19:06.000There were three black men playing what was considered white people's music at a time where black Americans were known for playing things like Motown and R ⁇ B. You know, we felt natural doing it while we were in our own quarters.
00:21:21.000Alice Cooper and all those great rock and roll bands from the 70s.
00:21:25.000We were really, you know, just kind of, you know, springboarding off with the sound that they was laying down.
00:21:30.000But we were just doing it harder, faster, louder.
00:21:34.000Despite their raw sound and unique and intimidating name, which by the way was totally ahead of its time, they didn't last long as a band.
00:21:41.000They just didn't get the distribution that they needed, but some record labels worried about how to market their name and their sound.
00:21:48.000And so Death kind of disbanded, but the brothers continued making music.
00:21:52.000And it was only 30 weeks later in 2008 that Death was rediscovered and thrown onto people's radar.
00:21:58.000Now, even though Death didn't go mainstream, their music was known underground and by the most die-hard punk fans, meaning they had influence.
00:22:06.000There really was no scene or community to embrace them.
00:22:36.000We were playing what we conceived as hard-driving Detroit rock and roll, man.
00:22:41.000It's also important to note, as writer and musician Greg Tate told me, the difference in how white and black musicians in the same genre were marketed and how that had an impact on who got the credit and who got the fame.
00:22:52.000The American music business is made up of gatekeepers on the corporate side, on the great rival side.
00:22:59.000They very much subscribe to Jim Crow notions of Jim Crow.
00:23:42.000Right now they're 14% of the population.
00:23:44.000Back then, they were probably 10, 9 if we're going into the 50s.
00:23:49.000They made up about 50% of the music business since rock and roll.
00:23:54.000Since rock and roll, young people probably listen to, overall, 60% black.
00:24:01.000If you include rap today, rock and roll back then, Motown, sure there's country music and rock, but for such a tiny percentage of the population, you're hardly being held back by gatekeepers.
00:24:13.000In other words, get your hands off my punk.
00:24:26.000It meant that black artists, you know, historically for most of the 20th century, couldn't make as much money playing their own music, didn't have access to the same pieces, you know, the same opportunities.
00:24:37.000Now, in the 70s, there was another black punk band that really changed the scene.
00:24:42.000Bad Brains, considered one of the most influential punk bands ever.
00:24:53.000The group formed in 1976 in Washington, D.C., getting its name from a Ramones song.
00:24:58.000The punk band dominated in the'80s with their mix of reggae and a very...
00:25:03.000Bad Brains, the only band so far to give us the very black history of punk music, got their name from a white band from Queens called the Ramones, who are often credited with starting punk.
00:25:40.000And that wasn't really cool back then.
00:25:42.000So people had to do something kind of different called Bad Brains.
00:25:47.000All right, let's talk to Saeed again about this one band.
00:25:50.000It's a big punk sound known as hardcore.
00:25:55.000In fact, they, along with Minor Threat and Black Flag, are considered the pioneers of hardcore, which is a genre of punk which is, well, pretty damn fast.
00:26:04.000And DC was hardcore's mecca and also one of the most long-term influential punk scenes.
00:26:10.000And there were also other black punk bands like Pure Hell, Fishbone, and the UK's X-Ray Specs.
00:29:14.000Remember at the beginning of Animal House where they're walking around the frat and they keep getting dropped at the couch with that guy with the big turban and the blind guy and the guy in a wheelchair, the losers, the misfits, the freaks?
00:30:09.000Wars in Cambodia and Vietnam in the 70s or, well, Ronald Reagan's whole presidency throughout the 80s.
00:30:15.000Big part of our punk, especially black punk, isn't a thing of the past.
00:30:19.000It's still a live, budding cultural movement today.
00:30:22.000I realize that, like, not only is rock and roll something that is native to people like myself and to Honeychild, but it's almost like my birthright.
00:30:33.000That's Honeychild Coleman and Sasha Jenkins of the punk band trio, The 1865.
00:30:38.000And yes, their name is referencing exactly what you think it's referencing.
00:31:00.000And by the way, your video is called The Very Black History of Punk Music.
00:31:05.000You gave me one hardcore band, Bad Brains, and now you're getting trolled by Sasha Jenkins and his friends as they noodle around on a guitar wearing a funny hat.
00:31:28.000How about the very black history of Motown or the very black history of jazz or the very black history of rap or the very black history of a thousand other types of music that blacks have pioneered?
00:31:38.000Why do you want to get involved in punk and make such a terrible argument, you hideous five?
00:31:52.000References America in 1865, but when the Emancipation Proclamation brought a lot of promise of change for black Americans, except the racists had other plans.
00:32:03.000Soon after, organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and other weren't really fans of people like myself and this young lady that got together and kind of made it their business to pause their business and make it what is less punk than being in your 40s.
00:32:57.000I'm mad at English people for fighting the Scots for 700 years.
00:33:00.000Did you know that that statue, what's his name, Cantwell or something, the statue in Halifax that they're taking down because he had a scalp on Indians' heads?
00:33:11.000That same guy had a scalp for kilts, and he would murder Scots.
00:33:16.000Scottish people were considered human garbage by the English.
00:33:19.000And I'm going to start a band called 1300 and bitch about how horrible it was to be Scottish back then.
00:33:40.000You look at the climate of where we are now.
00:33:41.000I don't want to necessarily be so literal, but it feels like the same kinds of sentiments.
00:33:48.000The 1865 makes music that looks at 1865 America from the lens of a runaway slave, a white southern soldier, a slave owner who felt no guilt.
00:33:58.000The trio is part of a still growing and very visible black presence in the punk scene, something that was highlighted in the 2003 documentary, Afropunk.
00:34:06.000The documentary really explored trials and good times faced by black youth who were an intimate part of a cultural scene that has always been seen as white by outsiders.
00:34:15.000The film ended up inspiring a bigger cultural movement, including a festival started in 2005 by the same name.
00:34:21.000The Afropunk Festival, which was started in Brooklyn and now is international, basically is about celebrating black artists, black creatives, and black fans in the alternative scene.
00:34:30.000Honey Child Coleman, Sasha Jenkins, and Shauna Shantae, who runs a Black and Brown Punk Festival in Oakland, all say that there's nothing more punk than being black in America.
00:35:34.000In punk rock, I'm saying we are punk rock without even trying.
00:35:38.000The foundations of what people do that creates punk culture, say going on tour, booking your own tour through a like underground network, that's what black musicians had to do because we weren't allowed to play in clubs.
00:35:55.000When we have been pushed to the margins, but we create in those margins and that's That it was my legacy and I never, I never believed anyone who told me I was trying to be white because I love rock and I love white.
00:36:14.000But even though they all agree that there's nothing more punk than being black, they also raise the point of how different the experience is of being either white or black in the punk scene.
00:36:23.000When you're black, you're punk rock all the time.
00:36:38.000And I can't change the color of my skin.
00:36:40.000There is a level of privilege that goes with, I'm going to put a safety pin through my nose and paint my hair, dye my hair green for three years, and then I'm going to clean up and put on a suit and get a corporate job.
00:37:08.000You don't even have a band and you've got a film crew over at your house asking you about your non-existent band as you sit there with a guitar on your belly pretending you guys are jamming all the time.
00:37:22.000And when you keep saying that again and again, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:37:28.000But for you, you know, if you think that you're black and it's making your life hell and blackity, black, black, black, then you create a little mini racist bubble where there really is the Klan following you, only it's all in your head.
00:38:02.000Cred for having punk years, but in my experience working in the corporate world, I can't let everybody know what I do outside of work because it could cost me my job.
00:40:09.000It's depressing as a young person when people are trying to box you into one sort of identity and tell you how you have to be based on like your ethnicity or your class.
00:40:32.000If they are telling other black people that it's okay to be punk and they don't have to like rap and soul and R ⁇ B and they can like hard rock and black Sabbath, then you got a video.
00:41:16.000As a movement, it has this incredibly rich history that, like the people in it, is hard to box.
00:41:21.000And if the black history of punk music tells us anything, it's how instrumental black musicians have been in the creation of American pop culture.