Swimming in the Flood

Cole Becker is driving through sunny Los Angeles, CA down Slauson Ave. As one-fourth of the Oakland-born punk rock outfit SWMRS, Cole is enjoying a brief moment of rest and relaxation between tours. Only a few weeks ago he and the band—which includes his brother Max, as well as childhood friend Joey Armstrong and Seb Mueller— were wrapping up a lengthy U.S. tour and only a few weeks before that a sweeping England-European one. And so Cole has been spending his days off-stage in Southern California—where SWMRS cut the finale of their tour—visiting his girlfriend. On this particular day Cole intends to follow a rather simple plan: go to the library, flip through some magazines, smoke some pot.

It’s an almost comical, quintessentially Californian game plan—the kind someone who’s only ever seen movies or television shows about the place might dream-up how punk rockers like Cole might spend their afternoon—a caricature of life under the shadow of palm trees and a Hollywood sign—that I can’t help but toss a joke his way. “The California dream,” I call his plans. He laughs. Over the phone the happy-go-lucky nature of Cole’s temperament is ever present—and sitting myself in the living room of a Santa Barbara apartment—borrowed for the weekend from a high-school friend, my fold-out bed still unmade at one-thirty on such a carefree afternoon—I’m inclined to share his laid-back zeal.

But the calm is temporary. Cole’s mind is sharp and eager— the inertia of SWMRS lengthy and exhausting tour, done in support of their sophomore album Berkeley’s On Fire, still has a hold over his body and mind. And for good reason. Behind the thousands of miles SWMRS has put into touring these last two years there is a darkly-chaotic day in February 2017 in which the U.C. Berkeley Campus erupted in protest against the presence of right-wing, fascist groups. Cole was in the crowd that day—growing-up around feminists and favoring the punk-rock reclamation by riot grrrl had put him there—and out of the media storm that exploded from that day SWMRS had scribbled in raw clarity a simultaneous digestion and response of it in the form of BOF. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how

that particular event seemed like it was kind of an explosion based on the tension between negative media and positive media. And how much of that is just horribly negative and kind of created to divide us and to reinforce the mental barriers that keep us separated from one another.” It’s those barriers—political, ideological, any -ism that keeps people so polarized that they stop seeing one another has human—that SWMRS want to tear down. BOF is just their sledgehammer. And there is urgency to what Cole wants the band to accomplish. When I ask whether he thinks things are better or worse since that day in February, Cole gives an emphatic: “Fuck no.” But trying to read the barometer in the shit-storm swirling around us is besides the point. He calls even those protests back in February “quaint” compared to the “barrage of shit” that’s now thrown at us on a daily basis.

“There’s a deep existential dread of like: ‘Ah man, like I don’t know if we’re gonna be around for much longer.’ And I think if you believe we have the power to stay around for any longer than the nuclear apocalypse then you have to contribute to instilling that hope in other people too. Because hope is ultimately what drives people to contribute to that kind of conversation and framework.”

“Your T.V. lies. We’ll be alright,” Cole wails against the giddy, off-kilter melody of the BOF’s title track. “Too many, too many motherfuckers confusing this freedom speech with swastikas.” SWMRS doesn’t pull any punches. The band take shots at Milo Yiannopoulos and Vladimir Putin in true punk fashion, but for all their raucousness SWMRS is refreshingly articulate—penning songs so dangerously close to current events with poignant precision—and offering more than just trite anthems to “fight the power.” “

I think, ultimately, the goal of the music was kind of to contribute at least one piece of media that was from a place of wanting to dissolve barriers between people. And create something positive and build spaces that aren’t pretentious and that have somewhere everyone can go feel like they can finally be themselves and be understood.”

108In a lot of ways, SWMRS is in the best position—and most difficult—to tear down those walls. The spaces rock and punk rock are performed in have inherited an oppressive air of toxic masculinity: whether it’s what Cole refers to as the “club-house” mentality in music—where newcomers, like the female, teenage fans SWMRS adopted after touring with AFI, are made to feel unwelcome at shows—or the disgusting frequency of sexual assault that occurs at concerts across genres.

“We’ve played hundreds of shows in our lives and grew up with feminist parents and feminist friends—and we actively are trying to support a feminist framework—and we didn’t even realize how common sexual assault is at shows,” Cole says, a bit of incredulity still in his voice. “That was a big moment where we were like: ‘Okay, this is happening and every single girl in the crowd knows that it could happen to them and zero percent of the men—who aren’t doing it—realize that it’s happening.’ So how do we get everyone onboard making that stop?”

Awareness and financial support are near the top of Cole’s list. He gives a shout-out to the England-based Girls Against, a group campaigning to bring to light and stop sexual assault in the music community, that not only brought the issue to the attention of the band but gave them ideas on how to address it.

On this last tour, the band started the SWMRS Fund, a place fans could donate to a variety of causes and organizations—the Climate Justice Alliance, Girl’s Rock Campus Alliance, National Bail Fund Network, and the Third Wave Fund—to name a few. But for Cole and company even that wasn’t enough—the band knew they needed to revamp the entire way they approached their live shows as well.

“When you’re onstage and see a heavy, kind of violent pit, it’s a really cool thing to see—and it’s not that fucking cool to experience. Just seeing how a fourteen-year-old-girl is made to feel so unsafe by a circle pit that’s really thrashing and heavy hitting—that kind of behavior builds barriers. Punk-rock requires too many pretenses—but it changed my life and it changed our individual lives as a band—and so realizing that we had to adjust a little bit this space and the way people act in this space.”

Cole fondly recalls listening to The Clash and Patti Smith for the first time—when he was 10-years-old—but his induction into the music that changed his life occurred over the years and in spaces that never sought to drive him away. He talks about not only wanting to introduce their teenage-pop fans to punk—to a genre and style of expression the band finds so beloved—but also introducing that community to those teenage-pop fans themselves.

Cole wants to unite the youth under music in a way that rock did in the 60s and 70s—something modern rock is failing to do in a big way. “Rock-’n’-roll got stolen by the fucking man,” he bites. “Music is something that is so intuitive. It doesn’t need—it’s not like Hollywood where you need a big team of people to make it. And yet rock decided to follow the focus group mentality of catering to everyone else and how you think you’re supposed to make music. And it was created in the vacuum-bubble of the Hollywood music industry for the past fifteen-years. Of course it’s dead. That shit was dead from conception.”

And so SWMRS has looked to modern hip-hop—a genre and community that Cole believes is smashing barriers not entirely because of how it sounds—but rather its ability to connect and unite its listeners around a feeling. “And that’s why underground rock music is kind of myopic—because all these fucking people are playing dress up Iggy Pop. And I think that’s why hip-hop is so inspiring because it’s so original and so intuitive and so instinctual in a way that a lot of contemporary rock just isn’t.”

Cole steers SWMRS clear of those pitfalls by looking to artists outside the mainstream—he even uses that word tactfully, understanding of the unnecessary combativeness that exists between mainstream and indie music fans. Tierra Whack—a Philadelphia-based rapper who Cole reveres in the same breath as Tupac, calling her “a self-taught student of the craft of writing lyrics and rhymes”—is who he puts on to get through the day when the shit-storm outside feels particularly heavy. He admits to knowing every word on her debut album Whack World and her “fucking insane” music videos. An understatement to be sure: a quick dip in videos for her songs “Whack World” and “Unemployed” are a trip—and they ooze the kind of sharp and visceral

emotions that Cole—and by his estimation, the youth—are hungry for. Then there’s the Mexico Top 50 chart on Spotify, a place Cole heads to when he needs a fix of Latin pop— which, according to him, is having a “fucking moment.”

He also turned to a number of other hip-hop acts before their BOF tour to incite some inspiration for how to capture that “feeling”—that indescribable, wordless empowerment that the band found in punk rock—and give it to their fans in a way they could understand, even if they weren’t as baptized in the scene as the band themselves had been. One of them was Kendrick Lamar. After seeing the rapper perform in concert Cole was invigorated by his ability to transcend racial barriers at his shows—but more importantly, took it as proof that music could be offered-up to such a diverse crowd and injected in a way they could all understand and share.

“He has so many white fans and he could be that guy who’s like: ‘Look if you don’t understand where this music is coming from then like get the fuck out of here.’ [But] he takes that time to establish with the audience: ‘Hey, now you’re in a new space and it’s going to work in here because it has to work like that if everybody wants to have a good time.’”

And so everyone is welcome at a SWMRS show. From hateful people to those experiencing a world of hateful people—and the overlap between the two that is so often overlooked—just as long as they play by the rules of the space the band has carved out at their concerts. In an era of hyper-polarizing politics it sounds almost counter-intuitive—but Cole and company—for all the assumed pretense of being rowdy, rabble-rousers and anarchists that comes with being punk rockers—choose not to fight fire with fire.

“Death to the mother-fucking fascist insect. This shit makes me so sadistic,” rages Cole on “Lose Lose Lose.” From hate to the way we are glued to glowing screens—and the vicious media cycle that perpetuates them both—BOF sees SWMRS making the case that anything that pushes us farther from one another is not part of the solution. There’s a void that needs filling—an imperative need for change in our culture. For Cole, it’s a little less than obvious that music is a means of doing that: “Changing culture

is how you change the world,” he tells me with a steely resolve. Some people might think that naive or a woefully simple solution for the issues we face; but maybe it is that simple. And SWMRS—since before they took that name— have been about change. When the band was just Cole, Max, and Armstrong their name was Emily’s Army—named after their cousin who suffered from cystic fibrosis—and the trio played with the purpose of raising both money and awareness for the disorder. Music incites changes. Twoyears of touring in the tinderbox a Trump presidency has transformed the American social and political landscape into—Cole is no less disheartened.

“We had hope in something that was broken. Our country has been broken since the beginning. Our world framework has been broken and this is all just kind of proving that,” Cole tells me over the phone, the weight of these heavy realizations doing little to sink his hope—the opposite actually—they buoy it.

“And so now is a really important time for people who do have a platform to generate some excitement with the fucking kids. Because ultimately the burden is going to fall on us and if we can’t get excited and get organized and ready to take on this four-hundred-year legacy of colonialism and stolen land and stolen bodies—if we can’t get excited to take on the system that’s finally fully unraveled— like we have a big opportunity and so we have to mobilize and get people excited to build it.”

It might just have been the sunshine, but Cole’s titanic capacity for hope—hope in SWMRS, hope in punk rock, hope in the people connecting at their shows—was as hard a feeling to shake as the ear worm that came with the band’s kinetic songs. And if it all came down to one punk rock band to save us all—one voice between us and the apocalypse—however unlikely that might seem—and yet, maybe in more ways than we like to admit, it does—our money would be on SWMRS to keep us afloat.

“I’m not stopping at all, it’s summer in the district and it’s humid. I’m trying to get you to fall in love with the music, it’ll save us all,” Max cries out in that searing croon of his on “Too Much Coffee”—and we couldn’t agree more.