Last month, local punk bands performed at a fundraiser show for charities that help those affected by the ongoing genocide in Palestine. St. John’s has a flourishing punk scene, sometimes referred to as ‘Fogtown Hardcore.’ Punk musicians are known to engage in activism through their art, and these performers were no exception. Attendees saw captivating sets from Steel Toe, Doberman, Lovelace, Sick Puppy, Hang Your Head, and Lifejolt. Using a “Pay What You Can” model, the show raised over $1400 for Palestine relief.
The Muse interviewed Lovelace members Etta Cessac-Sinclair (vocals, she/her) and Ruairi Hogan (guitar, he/they) on their thoughts about punk music and protest.
How did you get into playing punk music?
Etta: I started going to the scene after I moved here because I had no friends, and I was like wow, music seems cool, because you watch movies of bands and then you’re like ‘wait, that’s happening all around us.’ So I’d go to shows and I would think this is so cool, but I’m kind of bad at my instrument. I felt really alone, and I started playing guitar because I would write poems but no one wants to listen to poetry, so you gotta add guitar underneath it. That’s how I got into songwriting.
Snitfit was my first punk, ‘against the machine’ band. [It] basically happened because Ruairi was like ‘there’s no riot grrrl bands in the scene’ and I was like ‘I’m a girl, I’m political.’ Ruairi knew I was political at that point because I’d argue about feminism to him, so I think that’s why he asked me – and because I’d talked about Bikini Kill once.
Ruairi: Me and another friend just really wanted to start a riot grrrl band because there’s none in the scene here, and we thought ‘who’s a girl who cares about politics?’ and that brought us to Etta. We just wanted to make super political punk music because we thought it was kinda lacking in a mostly white, non-POC, non-queer led scene, and we wanted to bring up marginalized people with our music.
Etta: It’s just fun – I think everyone agreed immediately that we could do it. Ruairi writes amazing riffs, and our drummer was really good at what they did. We brought more friends who are girls in to get other perspectives, it was very important to the music obviously. Lovelace happened when Snitfit went through some hardships, and we were like ‘screamo is so cool’ or emo, scram, punk, whatever you want to call it. We do some really cool kind of slow riffs sometimes with yelling over it, and then it gets faster and there’s more yelling.
How does activism and protest come into punk music?
Etta: I think it’s the most important part. If you sound terrible … but your lyrics are punk, then you’re punk. If you can’t play your instrument … but you’re just repeating one line that’s really good … that’s the most important part of punk. I can’t talk from a very big position, that’s just my opinion, but I think a lot of people share that. The Slits sucked at their instruments, but they just had that raw energy.
Ruairi: I feel like punk was always built off moreso leftist activism. Over time, I feel like that’s been lost and now it’s just kind of like ‘we can be shitty at our instruments and sing about whatever.’ I’ve been in bands like that, but I feel like there is a need to bring back super big political messages in punk music. It’s a platform, literally anyone can make it, everyone has a voice and everyone can use their voice.
Is activism something that you keep in mind as part of the songwriting process?
Etta: Obviously when I’m writing for Snitfit, in my head I’m like … I need to make a political song, whether it be ‘SECOND WAVE‘ or ‘GROPE‘ which are overtly political … Even if I’m talking about my relationship with someone I know I’ll bring up a little bit of nuance, like maybe a power dynamic … it’s political in nature.
I sing so much about these political movements and I’m like ‘what do I do in my day-to-day, other than sing about them?’ I wish more of us would sing about political things, and then act on them.
How has the local scene has responded to the event?
Etta: Really positively. I think once people saw the poster that said ‘Palestine Fundraiser’ in a really big font, they were immediately interested. Obviously if it’s a house show and there’s good bands … people are going to show up. If it’s for a fundraiser, people always show up.
Ruairi: It is pretty positive because the topics the scene usually touches on should be pretty obvious things like ‘apartheid is a fucked up idea’ or ‘capitalism is evil,’ which I feel like is a good thing.
Etta: Before our show today, we made sure the snacks we bought weren’t on the boycott, divest, sanction list too.
Do you have any specific songs or lyrics that resonate with this cause?
Etta: I have a song that starts with a poem from a Canadian–Palestinian woman, Rafeef Ziadah, ‘We Teach Life, Sir‘ and in that song I say ‘that’s not war, that’s a hospital, that’s not war that’s a fucking school, that’s not war that’s children on the street.’ The next verse goes ‘that’s not justice, that’s brutality, that’s not justice, that’s murder, that’s not justice, that’s just death.’
Your song “GROPE” with your other band Snitfit, talks about attacks on bodily autonomy, and sexual assault culture, how does that relate here as well?
Etta: I love that song, that’s everyone’s favourite song of Snitfit’s. It’s both super personal and relates to everybody, that’s what I really love about it. [It] samples from Bill Clinton and Donald Trump in the middle to really solidify the point that these people who do really bad things get really great positions in life. It does nothing against them, no matter who you grope, or who you sexual assault, or anything, you can just get to the top, and the women go downwards.
That’s so evil, it’s traumatic, and obviously women can still succeed after that. I’m not saying that it has to happen at all, but it does happen, and that’s what that song is about. In the music video we did the song in front of anti–abortion protestors.
How do you find being a woman, or being a queer person informs your support for these causes through your music?
Etta: It’s just my lived experience, you know. That’s what I write about, everything I know. When I try to write about things I don’t know I research it like crazy, like the song I wrote about drug overdoses, I researched for like, 10 hours or more. Reading such sad stories of families whose kids died from fentanyl overdoses, I cried. It was the same when I wrote ‘Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’ for Snitfit, the name is to the point, I spend a lot of time researching stuff outside of me. But in me, because I’m queer, and a woman, it just feels more personal, like I need to talk about this or my bodily autonomy is going to get taken away.
Ruairi: It feels very empowering, like taking it back. When I was younger I was really small and skinny, and one of the only openly queer boys, and growing up in … Newfoundland, there’s a lot of people who do not fuck with that. One of the biggest things we’re writing about is, these seem like obvious topics that are wrong, and people look past that like, ‘feminism, that happened already, people treat women right,’ but that’s not true, that stuff still goes on.
In my school, I see a lot of homophobic stuff going on, and borderline hate crimes going on, and that’s happened to me personally just going through the school system. But having a band to actually address these topics and speak on them in a way that people can easily understand is really cool, and people are with you. It’s a change from everyone thinking you’re weird, and gay, to having an audience that’s similar and being like ‘I lived through this.’
