> I know throughout the whole 80s MRR was there taking
> folks to task for this sort of stuff and if I recallc
> orrectly Bad Brains didn't get a free pass. Tim
> Yohannon would ask bands like Iron Cross why they were
> named what they were, even though Iron Cross (the DC
> band) had an African-American member.
Not a free pass, but they were given a lot more leeway than other bands would have been. Iron Cross are actually an excellent example - most of us in the DC punk left steered clear of them because of what we saw, rightly or wrongly, as an unapologetic inclination towards fascism. (Having a black member didn't really suffice as an excuse in a scene where the leading 'Nazi skin' was black.) That's what we would have seen as the defining feature of Iron Cross. Whereas with Bad Brains, it would have been more like "Good band, bad politics"; with Iron Cross the "bad politics" was all that mattered.