VIRGINIA'S 80S PERFORMANCE ART PUNKS

Have you ever watched a video on Youtube and wished you could call up the person starring in it instead of just leaving a comment? Of course you have, because our generation is disconnected from reality and can't distinguish the boundaries between the internet and real life. Case in point--I knew next to nothing about this group of 1980s musicians/performance artists except that they were from Virginia. Apparently, nobody else knows anything about them either (except for Piper from Puro Instinct who supplied the initial tip-off), so I was lucky to have stumbled upon this large well of Youtube time warp mystery mud. Now I'm soaked.

After examining the facts, I know they have recorded over 100 songs but have never put out an album. They have never toured. They have never been name dropped. They are not a cult band. They did not influence anyone. Besides their sparse Youtube channel, I'm not sure I could even prove they exist. The music itself is a strange brew of performance art, punk, and smooth, silk-shirted early-90s R&B. At times that particular cocktail (along with the no-budget recording technique) puts Hegemony in some kind of weird bent-Ariel Pink-ian ballpark. But it's important to keep in mind that these guys predate him by 20 years.

Now, in 2010, Hegemony is BACK. It's been 23 years. Where did they go? Why is their music amazing? Why not call them up to chat? I did. I was expecting to interview a band, however an elusive Svengali-like 5th Beatle with the very Lord Of The Rings-esque name "Winnorf" answered. This is the first Hegemony interview.

Check out this video first and you'll get a better idea of why I was so into it. If you have more time later you should do yourself a favor and get familiar with their longer pieces. Sometimes it's sped up and slowed down as if the VCR dub was powered by an exercise bike, and other times it's just non-actors dryly reading revolutionary jive to the camera without blinking.

Vice: Hello this is Vice. Who am I speaking with?
Winnorf: This is Winnorf.

Oh… hi.
I'm the one who shot the videos and wrote a lot of the songs. I actually founded the band years ago.

Oh really? OK. Are you one of the people in those photos I saw?
I am not in any of the videos or photos. I just put it together. It's a long story.

Do you mind telling it to me?
The band started when four black kids were in the 6th grade. And when they grew up they asked me to be their manager. So I put together the band and wrote some songs. One of the members had somewhat of a behavior problem, and at one point he decided the army was a better idea than doing rock and roll. I then went to the Chrysler Museum where Michelle Franklin worked. She was a guard at the museum. I like to say she's the museum police force. She keeps people from scratching the paintings--and I put her in the band. She had her own act at that time. It was actually a one person act and also on the fringes of the punk scene. I put her in the band in 1985. Reagan was president. The band stayed together a long time. Hegemony, as a band, existed since 1981, but the earliest song I wrote for the band was in 1961. After a while we parted ways and nobody knew where anybody was until I accidentally ran into Michelle in a parking lot six months ago. It had been 23 years. The drummer went to Florida. Charles, or 2D as we called him, went to France and became a gospel singer and made a lot of money. He has an album of his own--a CD. He came back to America and I put the band back together again. We got all the original members back together except one, because we haven't found him. We're looking for him.

What's his name? I understand this is a blog and not a milk carton, but it couldn't hurt to throw that out there.
Danko or Toni Davis. And we don't know where he is. He was the drummer. Everyone else is back together though. All this time I kept the music in a box. We have hundreds of original songs--that's a lot of songs.

There seem to be tons of videos too. What was the focus? And what made you want to make the video art in conjunction with the music?
I can't say that I stole anything, but I watched a lot of foreign films. Everyone in the band is really artsy.

What's it like to be back? What have you done since reforming?
Well, after finding everybody we got a Twitter account. When the band was around the first time we didn't have computers. It was a different world. Computers--at least the internet--was a real black swan. It just came out of nowhere.

It seems like at the time you were using everything available to you to make your art. And now that you're back, do you still plan on using everything at your fingertips? You have Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, and Youtube.
We are definitely not primitivists or Luddites. We didn't have the equipment then and we didn't see this coming. I hadn't been to NYC in like 20 years, but when I got back I noticed everybody had cellphones. We really enjoy the new media--it gives us a chance, because no one has heard our music. We used to play at Cogans, which is a small bar, on Tuesday nights. The reason we played Tuesdays was because it was open mic night, and we showed up every Tuesday until they got sick of us.

How many Tuesdays was that?
Every Tuesday for two years. They closed down, I think. They sold it out. Cogan's Instant Art is now Cogan's Pizza. You got a crowd there because you had Punk rockers, folk singers, imitators, jokesters… anything. We were never well-received.

What was punk rock like at that time and in that area?
It was a very interesting scene. They had just a few places--Taj Mahal, the Corner, and Cogan's Instant Art. Taj Mahal eventually got shut down because they had a band--I'm not sure if it was The Teen Idles from DC or not--but they had a band that came there and they tore the place up. They took the tables and turned them over. The management closed it down after that and the scene died.

The Teen Idles… that's Ian Mackaye's band before Minor Threat. They were responsible for killing the scene? That guy gets accused of everything.
I don't know who that is, but they were from DC if I remember correctly. There were a lot of groups in the area--The Waxing Poetics, The Leftwing Fascists, X-Raves. Michelle, however, was a little bit different because she was a performance artist. She was not just a singer. She did the Jimi Hendrix thing you know, eating the guitar. She also came out dressed like a nurse.

Are you going to start playing shows? What does the future hold?
Well, we don't know. Our goal is to save the music. We spent so much time working on it, we don't want to lose it. We want to put out a CD. That would be a good objective. We also want to play again. We don't know where this is going--we didn't do it for the money in the first place.

So if someone asked you to put out a record, which you've never done before, you would do it?
Oh yes. We'd definitely do it because we want to save the music. We've recorded so much. The earliest song we recorded was "OOOGA BONGA."

What's "OOOGA BONGA" about?
It's actually a song about depression, although it sounds like it's a song about happiness. It talks about going away to a place where everything is just happy, but you have to read between the lines to see what it's about. I'm not the focus of the band, it just happens to be a song that I wrote.

So you're kind of like the fifth Beatle or something?
I'm the glue that holds it together.

It definitely feels like some glue huffing was going on.
What?

Never mind. Anyway, there seems to be some radical politics that creep into the music. Here's a line I wrote down while I was watching your videos earlier: "The Class struggle will continue until the fascist insect is defeated."
I guess it creeps in for me because that was a satire on the 60s. In the 60s I had been all over the country. I went to the Black Panther HQ in Washington DC right after Fred Hampton was murdered by the police, and being a white boy I just walked right on in--they just talked to me like I was one of their best friends.

What did the Black Panthers teach you?
They taught me that the news media is not accurate.

There seems to be a lot of radical ideas in the music. From the lyrics, visuals, and arrangements right down to the use of pre-programmed beats from the Casio or whatever.
Yeah, well, you're right. We did both. We did regular drumming and programmed beats before it got to be popular. It may have been a Casio because we never had much money. We have been as poor as you can imagine--the band was not a career, it was a friendship.

It seems like it wouldn't have mattered… like you could have had even less gear and still would have been making songs. That's the way I feel when I listen to the music at least.
I mean, we started out beating on trash cans because we never had a drum kit. We just took the cans and turned them over and beat on them--so we've made a lot of progress over the years.

TOBIAS ROCHMAN

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