Facebook | The Che Underground

This is a bit of a detour for Che Underground: The Blog. I started the site back in 2008 with some friends to revive and preserve our memories of our San Diego music scene from the early ’80s … And while it’s slowed down in recent years, I intend to honor that mission for the long run.

For the short term, however, I’d like to offer this platform as a halfway house for people who are disturbed about how Facebook’s recent enforcement of its “real names” policy is likely to eliminate many friends who live under names other than the ones on their birth certificates. Whether it’s noms de punk, drag names or other pseudonyms, people have a right to identify themselves as they want. (Meanwhile, Facebook has a right to make its own rules — but it will have to assess how those rules affect participation among those of us who don’t like those rules.)

When we started Che Underground: the Blog early in 2008, it addressed a void in our shared history: Searching online produced very little evidence of the bands and friends who tugged at the fringes of late-’70s and early-’80s San Diego. (We started with a circle of bands who played the Che Cafe and other venues together in ’83 and ’84, then expanded out.)

The ground has shifted since then. This site itself is bringing in more than 10,000 visitors a month, including all sorts of new arrivals from the old days — but even more interesting to me, a slew of new online efforts are taking off, powered by Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and more. (I’ve recently been enjoying the Injections’ new Facebook page and Ray Brandes’ YouTube channel, to name just two vectors for San Diego underground history.)