“What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.” —Don Delillo, White Noise, 1985
Lee Bains III & the Glory Fires are as much dimed-out guitar punks as they are critical social theorists. Every bit the well-read, piss-and-vinegar frontman, Bains has committed himself to the admission of guilt and the processes of reconciliation and restitution. His new record, Youth Detention//Nail My Feet Down to the South Side of Town, is an interrogation of guilt and complicity in systems that criminalize people of color, objectify women, institutionalize white supremacy, enforce hetero- and cis-normativity, gentrify marginalized neighborhoods, and countless other structures that we’re socialized to support.
This is all filtered through the barroom clatter of southern guitar rock. That weathered, archaic form is repurposed here to serve a new function, a vision distorted with punk vigor and a renewed sense of agency. In fractured recollections of confrontations in churches, schools, soccer fields, and the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, Bains is coming clean, revisiting his past with a critical lens to recontextualize his present.
This is the necessary first step forward; sunny declarations of positivity and progress are empty bluster if they’re not prefaced on an acknowledgment of guilt. As Confederate monuments in New Orleans were hauled away by crane, a familiar, back-patting narrative cropped up: the traitorous, evil elements of the south were being scrubbed away by the righteous, moral north. The idea is that the north represents a pristine ideal, unaffected by white supremacy or discrimination, unsoiled by the south’s prejudice. Problem is, the north benefited from black slavery, too. Isolating and pathologizing it as a ‘southern problem’ avoids self-reflection, or admission of complicity. It sanitizes the insidious reality that these power structures aren’t local to a time or a place or a people; in doing so, it enables and further embeds those violent systems. Bains might be detailing his personal experiences in Birmingham, but what rings true is that these minutiae aren’t isolated; they’re everywhere.
Unless we’re willing to confront and vocalize the ugly reality of our tacit participation in these regimes, we will continue to preserve them. At a forum in 1969 with Dick Gregory, in his typically no-nonsense way, James Baldwin laid bare the issue: “It’s a problem of whether or not you’re willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it.” —Luke Ottenhof
Youth Detention guided that. One of the songs that hit on that was “Nail My Feet Down to the South Side of Town,” and I guess part of what I was trying to talk about in this record is a relationship to stasis, and to displacement. I was trying to talk about youth, and the socialization that happens in youth through interaction, and trying to talk about criminalization as it plays into that in ways that folks are detained and restricted through the law, and also through the sort of more hard-to-pin-down systems that run underneath our lives, and the way that we think about ourselves and others. I’m also trying to think about memory and the way that memory is constituted and reconstituted through time, and the way that memory then not only informs our notion of the past, but refracts on the present moment.
I was also trying to speak to that notion of creating something new out of something very old. I was trying in the title, and in various different points on the record, to think about that linguistically, and thought about some of the objectivist poets who were into that idea of creating something new out of something old using the language itself, so the second part of the title, Nail My Feet Down to the South Side of Town, uses all of the letters of the first part, Youth Detention. So then hopefully that latter part of the title complicates and enriches the meaning of the first part, while literally using the first part in its entirety.
We’re doing a show to mark the release in a couple weeks in Birmingham. It’s gonna be kind of a block party thing, and [Tim Kerr’s] gonna do a mural on the building. He’s gonna do portraits of people from Birmingham, folks who fought for freedom in their various ways. He’s gonna do Angela Davis, Fred Shuttlesworth, Sun Ra, and Spider Martin, and he was talking about, ‘Well, who else in Birmingham could you think of?’ We were just rattling off black folks from Birmingham in our public memory who have pushed really hard for the sake of liberation and truth in these various mediums, and we were struggling to think of white people. There’s a reason for that, and that is that a power structure’s sole purpose is to enrich its own power, and Birmingham is one of the most segregated cities in the world.
So in any event, these normalizing systems happen in these sorts of contexts. Something that just completely perplexes me and fascinates me is the way that power operates, and the way that individuals can be subjugated by these power systems due to other individuals becoming subsumed and becoming complicit in their workings. It’s bewildering, and at the same time, there are corollaries. I think to Jim Crow Birmingham, and how many people either actively or tacitly supported that regime. The fact that these are human people, a lot of whom I’ve known and honestly thought a great deal of as people, is a mindfuck. And to me what it shows is the importance and the power of these broad systems.
I think a lot of times, I feel like I’ve been told by art that, ‘Man, it’s just about loving your neighbor,’ in these simplistic terms. But what we can see is people who, on a person-to-person level, have the capacity to be sweet, loving, neighborly people involved in supporting these structures that just fucking grind people under its boot. The silver lining I see in that is that if the individual can have these certain characteristics or beliefs exploited to support a terroristic, white supremacist regime, their other characteristics can be exploited to support a democratic, egalitarian, equitable society. In these songs, hopefully as they talk about these massive systems and the way that they do grind folks up, they also show these spur of the moment, very human, innate acts of resistance against them. I feel like those acts and those urges need only be organized, and need only be directed in concert with one another, to have huge outcomes.
I found that moment, where an organizer with a megaphone led that Assata Shakur call-and-response, so unifying and empowering and so reverential, to be looking to an elder, essentially, for guidance. I believe [there’s] a lot of power in memory, and a lot of power in listening to those with different experiences or with more experience. I found that particular moment of unity and reverence for that elder’s wisdom at a different place in time—but one so relatable to the present—really empowering and humbling.
I’ve never been to Palestine or Israel, and as an artist, I feel like to get in and talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the ground there is something that would be doing a massive disservice to Palestinians and Israelis and anybody who wants a sense of truth from that perspective. But I do have experience in Birmingham, Alabama with that conflict and the way that it plays out in the lives of folks whose family members were displaced, in conversations in churches that have to do with that sort of intersection of international policy and evangelical christianity, so I feel like if I root my perspective in its place, with all the narrowed focus and limitation that entails, hopefully that can get to the nature of these broader systems somewhere down the line.
I think that maybe knowing that those things can never be fully achieved, that authenticity isn’t some gold ring that you can just grab, but at least that it’s an ideal to strive for. That’s something that I definitely do strive for, and to be honest at different times playing independent rock music the last 10 years or so has felt at times a little bit like an isolated perspective. I’ve been fortunate over the years to get to know more and more bands and songwriters who are aspiring to that same thing, and that’s really galvanizing.
I think for me, I felt that in rock and roll, or in some of it. I guess to me that’s that feeling, is that a group of people from different backgrounds and belief systems and experiences and ethnicities, religions, genders, whatever, that we can be in this space and fully be ourselves yet fully be together in celebrating that togetherness. I guess that’s how it feels to me.
There is a lot of violence, clearly physical but there’s a lot of epistemic violence, psychological violence that rises from our notions of masculinity and only fester because of our reticence to investigate masculinity, what it is and what it isn’t. I’ve mostly learned from people who don’t identify as conventionally masculine or male.
The fact that these ideals are so rarely talked about, let alone questioned, certainly for me created a lot of internal violence or pressure that, through the ways that I was socialized to understand maleness or masculinity, couldn’t really be let out, or to do so would have indicated a departure from masculinity. With hetero- and cis-normativity, the degree to which a boy ceases to be boy-ish or masculine is the degree to which he ceases to exist at all. You’re just less of a thing.
I do identify as a ‘dude.’ I love who I am, I’m trying to get there and that’s part of the process for me: loving and accepting and being who I am and the fact that I identify as a man. If I’m in that, then I’m allowing space and celebrating all the space in and around that, that other people can occupy, that I myself can occupy. I love my home and I love my communities and my neighbors, and that’s why I feel called to talk about this stuff.
I feel like the more I write and talk about it, the less I know, but I’m familiar with my neighbors, with my people, and I know because of that, that they aren’t two-dimensional characters in a melodrama, and I know that as long as they’re not, then they, like I, have the capacity to wreak havoc in the world and hurt people, and also they have the capacity to lift one another up and make room for others, and I’ve seen it happen time and time again.
I have been worried about some of the rhetoric I’ve seen around it, and some of the narratives that I see being spun around their being taken down, and a lot of the rhetoric I’ve read is feeding into this notion of American exceptionalism. The idea that the union army was essentially fighting for righteousness, just as it always had done and just as it always will do, and we’re finally taking down the statues of the traitors; I think that’s a fucking dangerous road to walk down.
Assata Shakur was quoted as saying that an important moment in her shift in political consciousness was when she realized that the Civil War was not fought to free the slaves. The Civil War was fought to keep slavery in the south, but you didn’t have an army raised up to say, ‘You know what, I think it’s about time we did the right thing here.’ I think that’s seldom the case. I think it is important to bear in mind that just as a lot of Robert E. Lee’s southern plantation owners, and some of my family, grew enriched on the backs of black slavery, so did a lot of northern capitalists and British capitalists and Canadians. Colonists all around the world were a couple steps away in the chain of economic relationship, but the system had much broader support and impact than just the southern U.S. or Haiti or Brazil. It reached back to Europe where it started.
Guilt is a state of having done wrong. Regardless of how we feel about it, it doesn’t change the fact that if you’re guilty of fucking running into your neighbor’s car, it doesn’t matter how you feel about it, you’re fucking guilty of it. I think guilt is a concept that is commonly erased in this moment. It’s important to me to think about that, to think about guilt being a state, a fact, and hopefully a catalyst for redemption, for making restitution.