Shocked rocks
squat in return
to her roots
The former East Village squatter jams with John Warner, a fellow former
squatter.
BY SARAH FERGUSON
Michelle Shocked helped rock
in the New Year at C Squat
on Monday night. The Grammy
nominated folksinger turned up at
a party hosted by the Museum of Reclaimed
Space (MORUS) to perform a
raucous take on her 1988 song “Graffi -
ti Limbo,” backed by radical ’zine artist
Seth Tobocman and his band, Continuation
of Struggle.
Shocked said she connected with
Tobocman by chance, after the
Guggenheim Museum contacted her
about her song. It tells the story of
artist Michael Stewart, who was beaten
to death by New York City transit
police in 1983 after he was caught
tagging at the subway stop at First
Ave. and 14th St.
The Guggenheim is planning another
retrospective of Jean-Michel Basquiat,
who made a painting about Stewart’s
murder. Shocked said the curators
there wanted to understand why this
young man’s death had such an impact
on local artists at the time.
“It was like I had to educate them
about the way the underground worked
back then,” said Shocked. She said she
was inspired to pen her song about
Stewart’s murder after reading about
it in Overthrow magazine and seeing a
mural that Tobocman painted in Stewart’s
honor on the corner of Ninth St.
and Avenue C.
“I could only remember the name
Seth, so I had to look him up on the
Internet,” Shocked said of Tobocman,
who she worked with briefl y in the
1980s doing benefi ts around issues of
housing and police brutality. After they
reconnected, she and Tobocman decided
to collaborate for the MORUS gig.
“Being here tonight is really great,
it’s like the community welcoming me
back,” Shocked said after performing
at the former East Village squat. “I feel
like a homecoming queen.”
Before she made it big in the folk
scene, Shocked toured with the Yippies
and Rock Against Racism and lived in
a squat on E. 10th St.
“There was no roof, just clear plastic
sheeting, and at night the rats would run
across it,” Shocked recalled. “They’d be
looking down at you and you’d be looking
up at them,” she laughed.
After switching up from “anarchist
skate punk” to born-again Christian,
Shocked elicited a storm of controversy
when she made what were widely construed
as homophobic remarks during
a 2013 concert in San Francisco.
Shocked insisted her words were misunderstood,
and she’s been slowly rebuilding
her career since then.
Now “more sober than sober,”
Shocked didn’t stick around to party
at C squat. Instead, she took off in the
rain on a motorized scooter to meet up
with some Africans in Brooklyn who
were “watching the new year come in.”
“That’s more my speed these days,”
she smiled.
PHOTOS BY SARAH FERGUSON
Michelle Shocked in her customized Rangers jersey. She admits she
knows nothing about hockey and removed the first “R” and “S” from
“Rangers.”
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Beltsville/Rockville Part 1:
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