Billy Hough has been a Provincetown original for a long time, as fans of the singer and songwriter’s stage show “Scream Along With Billy” will readily confirm. Hough and bassist Sue Goldberg have been doing their weekly live show, currently at the Grotta Bar, since 2006.
Now Hough has a new gig, which grabbed my attention when I was copyediting this week’s arts section. He’s teaching a weekly class at the Governor Bradford called “Punk Rock High School,” and his timing is perfect. Punk is powerful, he says, at times of great distress.
“This is a good moment to scream at the hierarchy or the patriarchy or whichever ‘-archy’ you’re pissed off at,” he told Eve Samaha. “The idea is to give people an outlet.”
Punk rock was not my own favorite variety of protest music back in the day. Although I was a fan of Devo’s send-up of robotics and regimentation, I mostly listened to classical music, where the closest thing to punk’s in-your-face defiance might have been the “Dies Irae” from Verdi’s Requiem or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
I came of age in the Vietnam war days of Pete Seeger (“Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”), Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Country Joe and the Fish (“Come on Wall Street, don’t be slow”), and Jimi Hendrix’s brilliant, screaming version of the national anthem. Later, Teresa introduced me to John Prine, who sang “your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore,” probably the most appealing anti-jingoism song ever composed.
Those songs certainly don’t qualify as punk, but Billy Hough has a broad definition of the genre, as he includes in it classics of the civil rights movement like Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.” Reading about his new class, I began to imagine that it might not be too late for me to form a band of two or so and write “a brilliant three-chord punk song.”
Hough is surely right when he says we need to find ways to express our outrage and that music is a powerful way to do it.
That point was well made in the New Zealand parliament last Thursday when legislators took up a proposal by right-wing politicians to reinterpret the fundamental Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, between the Indigenous Maori people and the British crown. Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, at 22 the youngest member of parliament, stood, tore the bill in half, and initiated a haka — a traditional Maori singing, chanting, stomping dance — with a deep, resonant scream. She led her compatriots in a loud yet peaceful protest that riveted observers, brought the proceedings of the parliament to a halt, and focused world attention on an attempt to undermine the rights of her people.
Hough would probably say that haka qualified as a totally punk move. And it made me think that, the way things are going, maybe civility is overrated and it’s time to do what Bob Marley told us to do: get up, stand up. And while we’re up, do some strategic screaming.
