Racism or Propaganda — Burning Bright Media

A ping chirps from my computer…it’s an alert, a Facebook alert letting me know Almataha has just posted. I glance over at my computer and open my Facebook page with no thought to it. As if my mind is programmed to automatically respond to the sound of a Facebook ping. The sound of the ping creates a craving in my mind like Homer Simpson thinking about donuts. Mmmmmm… Facebook…give me more Facebook. It’s the constant upward stream of useless information that has burrowed a tunnel through my mind penetrating the pineal gland releasing that oh-so-satisfying serotonin sensation. Man, it feels so good, so I do it some more, and then a little more, and more, and more, until this little tunnel becomes a huge canyon. At last the serotonin runs dry like the Colorado River trying to make its way to the Gulf of California…What the fuck! What the fuck is happening? It’s as if I have no conscious thought while doing this. I can close my eyes and see the revolving Facebook post replaying over and over in my mind.

As I start reading Almataha’s Facebook post this appears to be a brutal story of racism and homophobia. A story that if it’s true, will leave a tremendous size stain on the reputation on one of the great punk rock bands in the last 30 plus years. Almataha is announcing they are pulling off the New Year’s Eve ticket they were scheduled to play. I’m shocked, not only are they pulling off a big ticket that includes Reagan Youth, The Hacks and Chemical X, they cite the reason why is a Facebook page that claims Reagan Youth is a racist and homophobic band. I’m speechless at this point, it takes a few moments for thoughts to start collecting in mind. I’ve never before heard this about Reagan Youth…and what about Streets Denver (The Streets of London) where the show is taking place? They wouldn’t have a racist and homophobic band play there. Streets Denver (The Streets of London) has made it loud and clear “NO CLUB COLORS, NO BONEHEADS, NO NAZIS, NO PROUD BOYS, NO RACIST, NO BIGOTS, NO ASSH*LES - STREETS IS FOR THE PEOPLE”, this is what it says in all capitals above the front door of the club.

I need more information so I visit the “The Real Reagan Youth” Facebook page. At first glance, it’s a powerful strike against Reagan Youth. It does appear that they are saying homophobic and racist slurs. But it doesn’t take long for red flags to start appearing and questions to arise. Yes, things are being said, but clearly they are in response to things that are being said about Reagan Youth…where are the screen shots of all the conversations, both sides of them? Yes, context does matter…some prickly language is being used but not in a way that it’s attacking a race or ones sexual orientation. Other questions that arose…how long ago was this? Are any of these members still in the band? And what started this battle?

I reached out to all 4 parties that should be involved in this conversation. We are not going to run from this and we’re not gonna assume any truth. Let’s talk to everyone involved and see exactly what’s going on. I contacted Almataha, Reagan Youth, Streets Denver (The Streets of London) and I did attempt to reach out to the owner of the Facebook page, “The Real Reagan Youth”, through people who seem to be connected to it. And due credit to all of them, they were all willing to talk about this in some capacity.

First we met up with Reagan Youth at Streets Denver (The Streets of London) before their New Years Eve set. Both Paul Cripple and Tibbie were extremely eager to meet up and talk about what was going on. By this time, some of the pieces to this story started fitting together but Reagan Youths voice must be heard.

My first question to them…”What is Reagan Youth about?”

Paul Cripple…”We’re about exposing the evils of society. We are an anarchist band and what I mean by anarchist is your own personal anarchy. Revolutions don’t work because just another tyrant will take over. Total liberty, the only true liberty where no one imposes any authority on another.”
Paul continues talking about new material Reagan Youth is working on…”When we play our live sets we play songs from the first and second record and we have songs that are going to be on a third and final album of the life and times of Dave Insurgent, New York City during the eighties, reaganomics and shit like that.”

Matt…”How much influence does Dave Insurgent still have on the band?”

Paul responds…”He’s our spiritual guide, our master of ceremonies.” Paul continues…”He’s not a martyr, on second thought maybe he is a martyr in a sense. If he didn’t die in such a crazy, fantastical way, people think it just him that died…no…a serial killer chopped up his girlfriend. The serial killer was so lazy he left the body in the back of the pick up truck. They finally pulled him over because of a broken tale light and found Tiffany’s body in the back. 2 days later Dave Insurgents Dad backed out of the garage, hit Dave’s mom in the knee and she died of internal bleeding.”

After explaining Dave Insurgent’s tragic ending…losing Tiffany to a serial killer who was preying on prostitutes, losing his mom a couple days later in a tragic car incident and then Dave Insurgent taking is own life a few days after…Paul Cripple surprises us all as he pulls out his guitar and starts talking about some of the new material that is going to be on the upcoming album…

…this is best for everyone to listen as Paul Cripple explains…

No doubt the best part about talking with Paul tonight is seeing and hearing how excited he is with the new material. He couldn’t wait to talk about it and share a little taste of what it’s going to sound like. But I had one last question that I need to ask.

…”What was your thoughts when Almataha pulled off this ticket.”

Tibbie jumps in and says “We went to their house last night.”
Paul adds…”Yeah and they’re really cool.”
Tibbie continues…”The didn’t know…they saw some stuff on the internet that’s old news. I contacted them and we got to hang out. We got to play in their studio and it was a lot of fun. When Paul describes Reagan Youth as anarchy I think of it like this, having fun in the face of oppression, finding the positivity in a super negative oppressive experience.”
Tibbie goes on to explain this fight that was going on between Reagan youth and a group of punks from Philadelphia…”There is a small group of people that are ex-band members that are super bitter and want to destroy the band because they’re not in it anymore. It’s all nonsense and petty stuff that divides everyone up. To get to meet people as a result of this and not indulge in internet drama is awesome. We just hung out with Almataha and had a great time.”

At this point both Paul and Tibbie seem cool with Almataha. I start wondering why they are still off the ticket. Tibbie explains Alamataha booked a DIY show after pulling off the ticket. They’d have to pull off another show to get back on this one. Later while talking with Johnny from Almataha he added he had safety concerns. Almataha is an underage band with the exception of Max and Johnny whose daughter Bella plays guitar in the band. Johnny decided it’d be best for the kids to stay with the DIY show. Tibbie did say that they’d be happy to do a show with Almataha another time.

Tibbie continued….”I talked with them (Almataha), I always tell people if you have a problem with me or the band just contact us, we’re not like…unapproachable. It sucks, it is old bitter news. Paul did go rage crazy to a group of people who were saying horrible things mainly about me. They were saying I should get a boot to the face, I should get curbed, I’m a whore, I should kill myself and so Paul retaliated. He’s been through major trauma, like some major shit and is unbelievable that he survived it. So of course he leveled it up and went psychotic defending me. Years later this comes out all one sided as if Paul went crazy out of nowhere. I’m like Paul doesn’t just go crazy out of nowhere, he was defending me. Some of his comments are way over the top, it’s not even stuff we believe but he was in the heat of the moment. He’s Croatian (laughter!) he went European mad.”
One last comment from Tibbie about this group who created “The Real Reagan Youth” Facebook page…”It’s like they’re wearing the punk uniform to be super oppressive. They are making up these offensive things to try to destroy us, it’s so weird.”

Paul and Tibbie both could’ve talked longer but it was time for them to take the stage. it’s been a little while since they’ve played on stage but no one at the show could’ve noticed. Reagan Youth killed it.

When the news broke of Almataha pulling off this ticket I reached out to them. They were incredibly responsive and wanted to talk about what had transpired but wanted to wait until after Reagan Youth played. They didn’t want to bring anymore negative news to Reagan Youth than what had already been thrown at them. So a couple days after the show we met up and had pizza with Bella and Johnny from Almataha.

After introductions and small talk Johnny started with a brief history of the bands name…”We pronounce the bands name (al-ma-tay-a). The proper enunciation is (al-ma-ta-ha) and it’s literally a crappy google translation of the maze in Arabic. We decided to call it (al-ma-tay-a) because that is what people usually say. In my head I say (al-ma-ta-ha) because that’s how it’s properly pronounced. I wanted to call the band The Maze but there were like 5 shitty EBM bands already called The Maze.”

Matt…”What does the band stand for?”

Johnny turns the question to Bella…”Do you have the answer for that Bella?
Bella…”Just being cool to one another.”
Johnny continues…”Yeah, pretty much. It’s pretty obvious we’re an anti-racist band. We’re anti-facist, we’re anti-Trump. I had a concept behind the whole Idea when I was writing the songs. Besides having a project with my daughter (who is Bella), the reason I chose that name, The Maze, because in my view we’re in the maze constantly, life its self is the maze. We are rats in this maze we have to navigate, it’s your peers, it’s society, it’s the government in general. It’s all these things we have to do, paying your taxes, going to high school, all of these expectations and pressures that everybody has in everyday life. To me that is the maze. I thought that would be a great name for the band to conceptualize what we stand for.”
Then Johnny goes on and talks about playing with Bella…”On the other side of it for me it was starting a cool project with Bella. Bella was getting into punk rock, she was getting into playing music, she had her guitar in her hand constantly and still does. I wasn’t playing in a band at the time and had some songs I’d been working on born out of a bad experience I had with another local band that I played bass with for a minute. I said hey, I have these songs do you want to develop them with me? The whole was to teach her how to be in a band, teach her the business side of it, how to act on stage, how to be a professional, etiquette, how to write songs.”

Bella started off playing bass in Almataha and switched to guitar. Johnny also plays guitar but because of work isn’t always around and doesn’t want the band to miss some of the great shows they played. So if he’s in town he’ll play and if not the rest of the band will hold the fort. Johnny will still help with the song writing and the recording.

Johhny…”We opened for GBH. We did the Fireburn which was amazing. To be able to play with Todd Youth before he passed away was amazing. We got the Exploited show with Total Chaos even though Exploited had to cancel. Even getting the Reagan Youth show was really cool..It’s been a fun journey for me personally as a dad. As an older musician, I’ve been playing for 25 years, this is the most popular band I’ve ever been in. Now I know the secret, start a band with your teenage kid…(laughter).”

Johnny then opens up about what lead Almataha to have a band vote if they’d pull off the Reagan Youth ticket.

“I’ll start at the beginning of what happened. I saw a notification on Facebook that someone posted on the events page for the show. It was a girl from Philadelphia who was posting screen shoots from “The Real Reagan Youth” page and she’s saying things like I can’t believe that Denver would allow this to happen and why are they playing with these horrible people. I wasn’t able to read all of it because who ever is in charge of the events page immediately deleted it. Literally 30 seconds later Max our drummer messaged us and said hey did you guys see this crap that people are saying about the show and how apparently we support Nazis. I thought he was referring to the post I saw but he was referring to another post from another person from Philadelphia that lives here in Denver now. They didn’t really name us by name but we know these people have a problem with Almataha and we really don’t know why. When they first moved here they loved us. They came to our shows, they would say things like this is our new favorite Denver band. And then all a sudden they unfriended all of us. Someone said it had something to do with something our singer had said. Who knows, we never got the details. Finally I called up the guy and said hey what’s going on. He said we don’t like the way you guys post stuff so much. Every time I turn on my phone there’s always notifications from Almataha. We were like okay, that’s really weird, we’re a band and we want to have fans so we’re going to advertise. So after that I blew it off and we haven’t talked to them since.”

We’ve heard both from Reagan Youth and Almataha about the New Year’s Eve story. We’ve talked to them both about their bands and about Almataha pulling off the New Year’s Eve show. It is clear that both bands are on the same page and it’s clear that both bands were determined to see something that started off bad finish good. Here’s Johnny’s explanation of what happened and how he felt after meeting Reagan Youth.

…”I felt like it’s an example of internet bullying. It made me mad that we were so reactionary. I felt like we were all a victims of some global prank and the timing of it was horribly suspect. To have them start talking shit the day before the show. Why weren’t they talking shit 2 weeks ago? Why weren’t they talking shit a month ago? And then come to find out that these people who were from Philly who has a problem with us anyways were involved with all of this…it makes me mad.”

I reached out to some of the people that were posting this stuff about Reagan Youth on Facebook. I’ll be honest, it didn’t take long for me to call bullshit on it. Clearly “The Real Reagan Youth” page was created from Putin’s 2016 election playbook. It’s a propaganda page that construes partial statements to create and illusion of truth. We the people have an obligation to be more curious about the news and information we are consuming. It’s not our governments responsibility and it’s not Facebooks responsibility to control the news and information that makes its way to our Facebook pages. It’s our responsibility to confirm and verify the news we choose to be truth.

At last I was able to catch up with John from Streets Denver, formerly called The Streets of London. It’s obvious John is way more excited to be talking about Streets Denver than he is talking about the 24 hours leading up to the New Year’s Eve show. I don’t blame him, the club looks great, both inside and outside, they’ve added an additional bar, they’ve moved the stage and painted a kick ass mural behind the stage and they have added more stage lighting. Streets Denver has a great vibe and John is ready to have an amazing year. As it says above the front door as you’re walking into Streets Denver…NO CLUB COLORS, NO BONEHEADS, NO NAZIS, NO PROUD BOYS, NO RACIST, NO BIGOTS, NO ASSH*LES - STREETS IS FOR THE PEOPLE…Streets Denver is inclusive, the people in Streets Denver are tolerant and if you’re not, you’re not welcomed. Streets Denver has rebooked shows to exclude bands that have proven themselves intolerant. As for Reagan Youth, it’s a story of propaganda. They did play New Years Eve and they kicked ass!

I’ll finish with a photo gallery shout out to Chemical X and The Hacks, 2 of my favorite locals here in Denver, who showed up, kicked ass and put the explanation point on the end of 2018!