“What’s With Washington?” is WAMU’s new listener-powered journalism project. We invite folks to send us their burning questions about life in the D.C. region — no subject is off-limits — then we ask the public to vote on which questions we investigate.

In one of our latest rounds, a question from Centreville resident Alisa Pappas touched a nerve, drawing thousands of votes.

“Why do Washington audiences seem so subdued?” Pappas asked. “Are we really cooler customers than in other cities?”

As editor of WAMU’s Bandwidth — and a longtime audience member at D.C. concerts — I had no qualms tackling this one.

So what did I discover? Are D.C. music audiences really the tamest in the land? Check out my story on WAMU’s website. I’ll also discuss my findings on today’s edition of The Kojo Nnamdi Show, joined by go-go artist Michelle Blackwell and Black Cat club owner Dante Ferrando. Stream or tune in at noon.

Top image: Ace Cosgrove performs at the 2015 Landmark Music Festival in D.C.

“Chocolate City”
Parliament
George Clinton
Otis Redding
Atlantic Records
The Beatles
Wilson Pickett
James Brown
Juliette Lewis
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Mad magazine
Burl Ives
The Surrealists
André Breton
Public Enemy
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
The Futurists
The Nation Of Islam
The Final Call
Sub Pop
Mudhoney
Nirvana
White Fence
The Slauson gang
Kevin Bacon
Bill Clinton
The Washington Post
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CNN
John Lennon
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Mark E. Smith
Terry Hall
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Stereolab
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Bruce Springsteen
Mötley Crüe
John Waters
NPR

Now, Gray’s website has expanded to include venues in nearly 20 cities around the world, and he’s looking for more submissions to flesh out his database.

On Kojo today, Gray spoke candidly about his own disability — Gray has cerebral palsy and uses a walker — and how he came to understand how it affected his life.

“When I was younger… I didn’t think of my disability. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s… that I really started to realize that disability is an oppression and accessibility issues do exist,” Gray said. “I used to kind of feel like my disability was just something that I had to — not necessarily get over, but just deal with. And I never really questioned the accessibility of a venue or why can’t I go to this show.”

Gray said when he started checking out punk shows in the D.C. area, part of the scene’s appeal was its inclusiveness. But accessibility didn’t get equal billing alongside other social-justice issues.

“There’s a lot of bands in D.C. right now that talk about inclusion, and this isn’t me dissing them in any way, but I never hear any of them speak about accessibility,” Gray said. “I’ve never once heard a band on stage say, ‘By the way, this venue had two dozen stairs, and this isn’t right.’ That’s never happened.”

Stream the entire segment — called “The Local Music Scene and Disability Rights” — on kojoshow.org. It’s well worth an attentive listen.

Also read: Is D.C.’s Music Scene Shutting Out Disabled Music Fans?

The last two years have brought a huge resurgence of interest in the scene’s bygone days, exemplified by the “Pump Me Up” exhibit at the Corcoran last year, Lucian Perkins’ Hard Art DC 1979 book, the fanzine archive at University of Maryland, two recently launched punk-rock archives at George Washington University and D.C. Public Library, the D.C.-themed episode of Dave Grohl’s Sonic Highways HBO series and a whopping five documentaries—one of them still in the works—related to D.C. punk music. (And I admit that Bandwidth has been a gushing faucet of D.C. punk coverage lately, so as the website’s editor, I play a role in this, too.)

But why is all of this reflection happening now?

Today’s Kojo guests—Positive Force co-founder Mark Andersen, Priests singer Katie Alice Greer, the GWU music archive’s Tina Plottel and myself—grappled with that. Andersen rejected that nostalgia alone is driving the deluge. (Because punk isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about the present, he said.) But the activist couldn’t explain why the recent past has been such a fertile period for, well, the past. Cynthia Connolly—the Banned In D.C. co-creator who called into the show—didn’t seem to think this moment bears special significance. She said it seemed like a coincidence, because many of the aforementioned projects took shape years ago and happen to be wrapping up now.

But here’s a theory I neglected to bring up on the air today: In an interview back in July, Punk the Capital filmmaker James Schneider told me that folks should try to preserve the past now because redevelopment is erasing D.C.’s cultural history. “With the city changing so fast, on so many fronts, it’s more important than ever now to ensure that the city’s identity is firmly anchored before a remodeled city takes over,” he said. When these films, archives and other projects began coming together, was it because their creators saw gentrification beginning to erase history? Or is the barrage, like Connolly said, coincidental?

In the hourlong segment, Andersen also made key points about punk rock’s relationship with activism and gentrification’s impact on the very poor (versus the less-urgent effect it’s had on middle-class artists), and we mulled over whether D.C.’s current scene has maintained the sense of social responsibility that’s depicted in the forthcoming documentary Positive Force: More Than A Witness.

Ultimately, today’s show wasn’t all about nostalgia, even though that’s what we set out to discuss. But like many of the ideas revived in these allegedly nostalgic films and archives, we found that talking about the past brought up issues musicians and activists are still wrestling with today.

Listen to the segment over on the Kojo Nnamdi Show website.

Image by Flickr user rockcreek used under a Creative Commons license.