You know the story. Turnstile is a hardcore punk group formed in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2010. Led by the energetic frontman Brendan Yates, they occupy a unique space in the history of American hardcore music. After years of gritty, orthodox hardcore, they pivoted towards a distinctly polished, anthemic style that has become their trademark. While hardcore puritans have argued ad nauseam over the legitimacy of Turnstile’s hardcore label, they have the largest following of any punk band. They act as a sort of brand ambassador for the genre, keeping true to their roots while using a creative, accessible sound to bring new fans into the scene. Whether stage-diving on NPR Tiny Desk or headlining their free show in DC, Turnstile masterfully proselytizes young punks to the storied hardcore community, and commands a large crowd and rumbling pit with the skill only gained from years of hardcore performance.
What you don’t know is how we can make this about us. Assigned to cover this important and historic concert for American University’s best college radio station are your three intrepid authors; Brady Sternberg, Colin Szustakowski, and Logan Finn. Veterans of the music scene, and the most honest of fake punks, we scored this article by asking really nicely. Join us, become fake punks too by reliving this concert through our dullard prose.
Earlier this month, days before Turnstile announced their concert on the National Mall, we found ourselves heading to what was self-declared as the “first punk show on the National Mall since Fugazi.” It was thrown from a stage next to the Washington Monument called the Sylvan Theater, which must have had a use at some point but now sits almost entirely dormant, slowly falling apart.
We arrived at a small but enthusiastic crowd, maybe a hundred people. There might have been a few more souls in the audience if it hadn’t been for the unexpected, whipping rain that soaked through all our shirts and socks before the opening band even took the stage. This was made worse by the fact that the first band kept getting delayed because of audio issues. They eventually had to accept those issues rather than fix them, because as soon as they started to play, the music was interrupted every few seconds by the thumping of the rain guards they’d had to place over the speakers.
Safe to say that while this event was great, the conditions for audience members without umbrellas, shivering in the cold rain, overshadowed the upsides. So we decided to go home early, as any real (fake) punk would.
We’d been planning to go to the Turnstile show since it was announced. So, Saturday morning, as we picked up mysterious cups and scrubbed the floor, erasing any evidence of the party from the night before, we listened to Turnstile on a large speaker that filled our house.
In the middle of this cleaning session, Brady got a call from his girlfriend. She was already at the show, hours before its start time, saying the crowd was filling in quickly and that sections might get closed off. We knew this show would be bigger than the last one, but how big could it really be?
As we approached the monument from the Smithsonian Metro stop, the swarm of people clearly walking to this show grew and grew. Once we reached the monument and could see over the hill, the stage was in front of us. But more importantly, in front of that stage were thousands upon thousands of fans waiting in a fenced-off area.
This was no Sylvan Theater show. We could see there was still some space left within the barriers, so we rushed down the hill, past thousands more scattered around, to try to make it inside the dedicated concert area before they shut it down completely.
We slithered through the crowd to get a good spot, until we hit a wall of bodies and decided we were close enough for now.
To kill time, we analyzed the crowd around us. Downwardly mobile twentysomethings, washed-up has-beens, and one woman in a cool Kneecap jersey.
“Cool Kneecap jersey!” said Colin.
The woman smiled and we continued standing around waiting for something to happen to us. It turned out this woman in the cool Kneecap jersey was not just any woman, but media personality, human rights activist, and former adult film star Mia Khalifa. She later posted Brady’s shirt on her Instagram. A friend spotted it, so we’re basically best friends now.
The crowd grew restless, and by the fifth fake-out fade-out of the pre-show music, the show began. Hassan Wadi, the global director of Human Concern International, bringing the energy of your favorite summer camp counselor, took the mic to introduce the band and their purpose for this show.
Turnstile chose to dedicate this surprise last performance of their tour to raising humanitarian aid for Palestine, Sudan, and Lebanon. As of this writing, they have raised over a quarter of a million dollars. Wadi told the story of his organization, and the story of a Palestinian girl he met who benefited from their aid. They brought out the giant QR code, and then, the band.
The show started and pulled no punches. Instantly you could hear the funky percussion from the intro of their hit song “BIRDS,” and once the whole band came in, the crowd, tired from sweating it out in the sun waiting for this show, was energized again, jumping up and down to the beat. This energy remained for the next few songs as they flew through some of their heavier cuts back to back with few or no breaks.
Some of the show became a blur, but there was a point where we found enough of an opening in the crowd that we worked our way to one of the many pits near the stage, shuffling left and right, moving forward person by person. Even with the size of the crowd, the pit felt like any other punk show: a bunch of sweaty freaks (ourselves included), bumping around and two-stepping over the concrete slabs, absorbing all the heat from the sun. And as the songs became slower and sparser, people took breaks from moshing, using the pit as a place to slowly dance in circles, enjoying the band’s more synth-filled cuts.
An intoxicating feeling swept through the front of the crowd, where exhaustion and ecstasy beaded off the foreheads of a thousand punks. No one said a word about what every attendee understood to be historic. Young faces held up on the shoulders of their parents smiled in awe of the rippling ocean of DMV (D.C., Maryland and Virginia) punks. They were too young to know it, but someday they’d thank their parents for how lucky they were to be a part of this. Chants of “Free, free Palestine” swept the lawn, and for just about the first time since Trump’s election, there was a place where it felt like the people in DC had the power over their city, over their music, over their Mall. Tens of thousands of punks chanted and moshed in earshot of the White House, unashamed of what the music meant. Turnstile made their appeal again for donations to charity, then closed with a synth-driven instrumental from their most recent album, Never Enough, letting the emotions simmer and settle for an audience that knew today’s moment was reaching its end.
We set out in search of those we knew but hadn’t caught sight of in the maze of dancing bodies. EMTs tossed out bottled water to tired concertgoers. Crowd members had lost many shirts but made up for it in as many cuts and bruises.
The Metro was a lost cause. We retreated to Chinatown for food. In the words of one of our friends whom we marched home with, “that was historic, right?” We didn’t know what to say, but we knew our answer.
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Photos by Ava Terry