Fugazi's In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross

Author:Joe Gross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

“Smallpox Champion”

4:01

“History rears up to spit in your face”

While Native America has long been an inspiration to and topic for the earnest American rock musician, actual Native musicians have been harder to come by.

Link Wray, the Washington, D.C., via Dunn, North Carolina, guitar man whose 1958 instrumental “Rumble” made both the power chord and guitar distortion critical parts of the rock vocabulary, claimed to be at least part Shawnee, but no source seems able to agree on the percentage.

The most famous Native band is probably Redbone, whose joyful 1974 single “Come And Get Your Love” found an entirely new audience when it soundtracked Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) dancing around a dead planet like a space opera Indiana Jones in Guardians of the Galaxy. Chuck Billy, of the California metal band Testament, is of the Pomo tribe. The Navajo punk act Blackfire has been playing since 1989. Those in search of a comprehensive look at such things are urged to check out the stellar Native North America, Vol. 1: Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985 compiled by Vancouver-based record collector and archivist Kevin “Sipreano” Howes, who spent fifteen years scouring flea markets, tracking down artists, and writing liner notes.

But as a topic, Native America has been hypnotizing rockers about as long as rock music has been around.

There’s Native American imagery all over Neil Young’s stuff, from the spine-tingling live staple “Cortez the Killer” to the acoustic “Pocahontas” to a whole lot of his graphics. Jimi Hendrix, a longtime hero of Ian MacKaye’s, was of Native American extract (check out his “Castles Made of Sand” for the full story). Then there’s Cher’s “Half Breed,” about which perhaps the less said, the better.

“Smallpox Champion,” then, is very much in the political punk tradition: a twenty-something white guy looking at repulsive injustice and screaming about it: “Smallpox champion, U.S. of A/ Give natives some blankets/ warm like the grave”

Guy Picciotto: “I’d just read ‘Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee.’ If you’re gonna engage in things like that you wanna do it in a way that’s intelligent but for a lot of young people who are educating themselves, you start building critiques in your head and you get overwhelming feelings about them.”

Picciotto’s lyrical work in Rites of Spring, One Last Wish, and Happy Go Licky was never as directly issue-based as it seemed in Fugazi. Then again, One Last Wish’s most famous song “Burning the Undertow” explicitly references the murder of Roberto Rojas, a nineteen-year-old Wilson High graduate who was beaten and set on fire by government soldiers in Chile.

Guy Picciotto: “Like a lot of kids, when I was 11 or 12 I read ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ [and] ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison which is about the time I started getting into punk, where there was so much politics in punk rock and you’re listening to Stiff Little Fingers and listening to all these bands and forming your worldview.”

By the time Picciotto was in college and playing in Rites of Spring, the Dischord scene was renewing itself a bit and the wide-angle, lifestyle-as-politics (vegetarianism, activism, etc.

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