there was a time in my life when i celebrated afropunk the way some folks celebrate the super bowl…
i don’t know if that’s a wee bit too dramatic or anything, but… there it is.
something that started out as a kind of “in the know” meeting of Black punk and hard rock acts at various spots in nyc by the mid 2010s had taken on a life of its own as a kind of… a festival of all things considered to be Black and alternative (and all the controversies that spawns…)
i feel like i started attending heavy right when it was really blew the eff up. i remember being there with friends, remember seeing the sprouts of something that featured a festival-like atmosphere… i do remember that jaunt over to cmdr. barry park over near the navy yard in brooklyn.
i remember it being free. (yeah… that’s how long i’ve been going)
but – to me, at least – once you started hitting ’15 and ’16, that’s when it started to truly become a “thing” in Black culture. this is when i noticed that you had to really make a plan to attend. that you got scanned at the entrance. that the headliners were THOSE folks… danny brown, thundercat, syd… tv on the radio, toro y moi, death grips… jill scott, the roots… GRACE. JONES.
but also this is when you started to see that this became kind of an… “event” to see and be seen at. adorable Black kids (young adults… be easy) coming from all over and dressed out of their damn minds for their one or two days in this brooklyn place they’ve heard so much about. wild hair, wilder get ups. i absolutely loved seeing the whole thing.
i wonder if in some time – years and years from now – they will publish books or whatever on this time in young Black culture.
but i think by 2018ish, the whole scene had become a bit of a drag, maybe. been to quite a few of them by then, and year after year of the same two-day outdoor festival is… well, it’s a lot. was getting harder to convince myself to make that trip down, to plunk down that money, to wait those seemingly hours for water, for food, for… facilities.
the artists started feeling samey – “oh, it’s afropunk… so you know (blank) is going to be there…” – the spectacle started feeling samey. the more time went on, the more corporate it started to feel…
maybe it lost a wee bit of magic, i don’t know. “i’ll take off a year or two”, i said.
oops. (oh. right. “the world ended…”)
the pics you’re seeing are of afropunk brooklyn 2022 – the first time they held it after everything shut down back in march 2020. a friend asked if i was going, and i couldn’t think of a reason not to.
there was a lot of that: testing the waters to see what it’s like to be around a LOT of people again. and i had a good ass time, pretty much. i think it was 30% “oh, i remember why i got sick of this…” followed by 70% “OH, YEAH I REMEMBER THIS!!!” it was afropunk, and it was great to be back…
…but that’s probably it. probably my last one. was hoping the rebirth… was just that. but when i see anything about the fest now, it feels more like trying to save a brand than something you NEED to do. might be wrong, might just need some tinkering, might need something bigger and brighter to come along.
me, i’m just glad i got to hang with a bunch of Black oddballs again. that’s worth wearing a flimsy wristband for an entire weekend, i guess.