Keith Dòu and the Inkdwellers
One of the most influential and well known musicians of the 1970’s, Keith Dòu was the lead member of the infamous band the Inkdwellers. Dòu was the youngest child of Chinese immigrants who moved to America to escape the violence being perpetuated by the US overseas. With this in mind it should be no surprise that Dòu found himself struggling against adversity from a very young age and with it he would see the many injustices and atrocities being committed within his own country. Dòu would, luckily, find community within the rising punk movement of the 1970s, it was here that he would meet friends, his future bandmates, and develop a do it yourself, we can do it together, form of activism. It is also here that he would grow a love of music and proved to be a quick learner with the instrument much to the glee of his peers.
Band members of The Inkdwellers sit on some steps with fans.
Dòu would often attend protests against the violence being enacted by American troops overseas and he would often get in trouble for it with his parents, but in his own words someone had to put up a fight or the wave of oppression would wash over everyone indiscriminately. Dòu was notable for incorporating his experiences as a punk and activist into his works and his music was controversial for its unrestrained criticism for the United States as well as the many oppressive institutions existing within it. He was extremely tied in to counter culture activism and would help to plan protests and boycotts which placed him right in the crosshairs of the powers that were at the time. In fact over the course of his life Dòu would be arrested countless times for a variety of reasons related to his activism. However Dòu, for all his individual resolve and unique personality, was extremely tied into his community. He would regularly help out with charity work and public kitchens. To Dòu punk was a calling not an aesthetic, and it was perhaps for this reason that he took an extreme dislike to current American sweetheart Dylan Rose.
It should be noted that the animosity towards hippies was not just confined to Keith Dòu. To explain it we have to consider that the Punks came after the Hippies in American history and that the two counter culture groups had very different approaches to activism. The Hippie movement, born during the 60’s, was a very passive movement that preached non conformity but did heavily focus on the idea of active resistance. As discussed in the article on Harmonia many Hippies did not support the idea of violent resistance and would often take a, “why can’t everyone just get along and be friends,” way of thinking. In Dòu’s own words hippies ultimately were not resisting against the government but their parents, and he stated himself to find their ideology very disappointing and in its own way conformist. To him the movement was simply ignoring the larger issues in America, and additionally he found them to be a group that valued comfort and good feelings over personal risk and true social change. It also did not help that many Punks would see the Hippie movement’s methods and ideology fail against the power of the state in the years leading up to the birth of punk culture in the US. Peace and love and holding hands did not work, and after multiple wars of occupation, the World Fair Incident, countless squashed peaceful protests, and multiple hippie artists leaving/speaking against more forceful protests aiming for social change, the youth of the 70’s were thoroughly tired of Hippie culture.
It was for all these reasons that Dòu despised Hippie culture, but he also spoke vocally against its constant appropriation of Asian aesthetics. To him the movement was built on people wearing clothing and symbols they knew nothing about and more importantly did not actually believe in, and to Keith this was endemic of the Hippie ideology as a whole: Adopted aesthetics, no real substance. Hippies were also, beyond being cultural appropriators, notoriously racist communities in which people of color struggled to find acceptance and respect. All these things rang true of Dòu’s much beloathed band the Harmonias. In the words of Dòu the Harmonias were the worst kind of Hippie in that they joined the movement to make capital off its popularity, as the last of the big hippie bands they often broke what little ideas the movement had and in Dòu's eyes were a bunch of posers dressing up in hippie clothing to make a quick buck off a dying cultural wave. As mentioned in the article on Harmonia the band would play at venues where protesters tried to drive away people, for the sales from the event would go to various harmful causes. Seeing the Harmonias ignore these protesters and play anyways was the first time Dòu remembered taking a dislike to them.
In 1974 Keith Dòu and his band the Inkdwellers would make it big riding the cultural wave of Punk and, through their clever use of recently appropriated character Maisy the Mutt, would quickly outshine the Harmonias in notoriety. Dòu had been an enjoyer of Maisy the Mutt’s older cartoons since he was a young child. However, much like myself and others, he found himself dissatisfied and disturbed with how the character had been sanitized and scrubbed clean for about nine years since Ivan Hoths death. He would take the character’s history into his own hands, frequently writing and alluding to her past in his songs and popularizing the character as a symbol stolen from the at the time monopoly Stencil Line. Dòu would go on to release many more songs following his rise to fame, many of which poked fun at former cultural darling Dylan Rose; the musician would often go out of his way to hassle and poke at the nerves of the hippie vocalist and by 1976 the two would be regular rivals with Harmonia making response albums. Dòu notably did not do much with his newfound fame beyond platforming social issues he found important. On stage he called for the independence of Puerto Rico and reparations to the countries of Korea and China which nearly got him dragged off stage before fans overwhelmed authorities and he was allowed to continue playing.
The music of the Inkdwellers could be very haunting at times, much like a certain cartoon dog it had real actual bite to it and drew in those curious about the themes discussed in it. Death was one such constant theme in Dòu’s songs, he said in interviews that death was such a large inextricable part of American culture yet that the country and its citizens preferred to make up the illusion of death being something that only occurred in factory farms or overseas in countries ravaged by our military. He found it to be a strange way to exist in a country built on death and hoped that his music would force listeners to think more deeply about their state in the world, history, and how they dealt with death in their lives. Dòu’s music also fought against the complacency he saw in previous generations (especially in the hippie movement) his music attacked the songs of Dylan Rose and claimed that: No, America was not ok, things were quickly falling apart and real change needed to happen now. The songs he wrote were meant to be a wake up call to anyone who thought they could sit out the brutality within and outside their own country and provoke them into taking action before it was too late.
One of his most well known songs, Gravedigger Deduction, went like this:
“Fifteen bodies and fifteen heads are rolling round my front door
Sixteen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty thousand corpses and more!
When you add em up and double down, you will find deep beneath the ground
A river of thrills that never ends, come on priest use your head!
We aren’t making it out of this century alive but neither will they
We aren’t making it out of here but we bloody our hands
We can’t make a damned thing better unless we count the dead
We can’t figure it out can’t figure it out alone!
I’ve been watching, I’ve been thinking bout what led us this way
My senator doesn’t answer my letters so I reach him another way
With a brick through his window and a knock on the door
My new friends they throw more, and we drag him out, and knock him out!
We aren’t making it out of here alive, but those that come after they’ll ride the tide
That we created, that we awaited, that was won on bloody hands,
Death marches on but so do we the fight will never end until we
Tear it down!
Burn it up!
Tear it down!
String it up!
Tear it down!
Beat it up!
Tear it down!
Freedom isn’t something that can be too much.”
In the year of 1978 Keith Dòu would be brutally murdered outside a venue as he and his team packed up and prepared to leave. The assailant would shoot Dòu twelve times in the chest and then attempt to flee before being tackled to the ground by fans and band members. Dòu was rushed to the hospital but would tragically die en route. The perpetrator Will Bennings was revealed to have been a cop, and although it would take many years for the truth to come to light, he would eventually confess to having been paid off by his friend Dylan Rose to commit the murder. It was a bleak end to a beautiful life, Dòu’s death would spark outrage across America as the movements he was part of redoubled their efforts. Dòu would become a martyr for social change and the fight against authority with the punk movement remaining strong right up to their eventual triumph over the state in 2019.
To this day Dòu’s grave is regularly visited and decorated with gifts from adoring fans, his importance to Punk culture is indisputable and the connections and communities he helped continue to thrive as a result of his compassionate nature. The Inkdwellers members are all still active and they meet up yearly to celebrate their history, Dòu’s life, and the success of their community in making the world a fairer place to be in.