A Day-Long Celebration of Intersectional Punk Rock

Los Angeles’s A Right to Defiance festival will feature performances, panels, and workshops that refute the notion that punk rock is a straight White man’s genre.

Fuck U Pay Us lead singer Jasmine Nyende. (Image by Martin Crudo)

For all of its sneering, anti-authoritarian nihilism, early punk rock was always pretty much a White man’s game. This isn’t to say that there have not been great female punk bands or punk rockers of color, but they stand in marked contrast to the overwhelming whiteness of the genre. Some forty years after the emergence of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones however, growing numbers of women, people of color, and queer musicians are channeling punk’s adversarial ferocity to take on white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.

Organized by Jasmine Nyende, lead singer of “Black femme and them punk band” FUPU (Fuck U Pay Us), A Right to Defiance is a day-long festival celebrating the intersection of queer/punk/POC cultures. Programming includes two panel discussions moderated by the Bitchface podcast, a looming workshop courtesy of common threads, videos by SNATCHPOWER, Nevin Kallepalli & Nhà Sàn Collective, and performances from experimental ambient/noise act Tabor Dark, blistering LA-based garage rockers Trap Girl, and New Orleans’ own Edge Slayer, “an intergalactic Demoness who traveled from the negavrrse to heal the human race with emotional dissidence!”