Justin Brannan is best known as the guitarist and founding member of Indecision, a hardcore band formed in Brooklyn in the early ‘90s. Comprised of schoolmates working through adolescent passions, angst, and ideas with loud music, the straight edge outfit would become a fixture in the New York and worldwide hardcore scenes—as did Brannan’s later band, Most Precious Blood.
Brannan and his bandmates faced the same problems as many underground bands: rough tours, run-ins with the authorities, tiny labels, and finding work to pay the bills when they were home. However, those punk rock realities prepared him for the trials and tribulations of his first week in office as a New York City Council Member representing the 43rd District: a busted water main, a snowstorm, and a raging fire. At the end of the day, he’s the guy responsible. “It’s very sobering,” he says. “It’s not like winning the lottery. There’s certainly gratitude. You’re excited and grateful that you won, but now, I’m representing 150,000-some-odd folks in the neighborhood where I grew up. It’s a humbling thing—you’re faced with the responsibility and the faith that’s been placed in you by voters.”
Brannon is a lifelong activist. He has championed for AIDS patients, the environment, and animal rights. He worked for several nonprofits and studied Journalism at Fordham University. He worked at the radio station WNEW, where he got involved in labor union organizing.
In between tours, he found temp work at Bear Stearns, one of the “too big to fail” banks—that failed. As Most Precious Blood were winding down in the mid-2000s, he landed a full-time job there and worked his way up to the Wealth Management Division. “When I went in for the interview, I had a handlebar mustache, just to be a dick,” he shares. “I didn’t really want the job, so I didn’t even shave it—and they still hired me. Bear was interesting. I was there for the collapse of civilization, but it was the antithesis to that kind of Goldman Sachs, Ivy League, robotic culture. They didn’t care if you had an MBA, they wanted you to have a PSD: poor, smart, and the desire to succeed. You had a lot of misfits. At the time, the head of the firm was a guy who got his start selling scrap metal.”
Brannan’s foray into politics began in 2011 when he landed a job with Democratic Council Member Vincent Gentile. After a stint at the New York City Department of Education’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, Gentile hired him back as Chief of Staff. When Gentile retired last year, Brannan sought to fill his boss’s seat, enduring a brutal six-person primary, then a tight three-way race in the general election.
Both Indecision and Most Precious Blood toured hard, often playing in out-of-the-way venues to kids who rarely had such acts in their town, but New York was always home. “I had spent so much time on tour—10 years on the road, away from my neighborhood—and realized what a special community I was part of,” Brannan admits. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
As he raised his right hand at his swearing-in on January 21, inky hints of his tattoo sleeve were visible. “Growing up, I wanted to be a member of the Ramones, not a member of Congress,” he explains. “I didn’t have JFK’s picture on my bedroom wall, I had a Smiths poster. I think, certainly, being in a hardcore band, meeting kids from all different walks of life, realizing how much we all have in common, and dealing with the types of insane situations that you have to deal with out there on your own prepares you for just about anything.”
“I was never a guy who believed that politics mattered,” he adds. “The pace of the typical political process was glacial. It just left me feeling disillusioned, disaffected. I didn’t think voting mattered or my opinion counted. So, I certainly never thought I’d run for office one day, but I think I fell in love with local government. It’s where the rubber meets the road. It was a place where I was able to get results for real people in real-time. To take a page out of Saul Alinksy’s book, ‘Rules for Radicals,’ you cut your hair, put on a suit, and change the system from within. Activists are the ones who move the needle, but I eventually decided that instead of standing outside and throwing rocks at the building, so to speak, I was going to try to find my way inside.”
Local politicking starts at the street level. Brannan began campaigning shortly after Trump was elected in 2017, expecting to talk to constituents about the white-hot issues dominating the national conversation. “I was knocking on doors to talk to people about things like immigration, things that are on everyone’s mind,” he says, “but the questions were like, ‘What high school did you go to?’ and ‘What are you going to do about the dog shit?’ It all reminded me of how beautifully parochial local politics can be,” he laughs.
Brannan is focused on working with the Department of Education to tackle the opioid epidemic, make his district the cleanest and safest in the city, and demystify how local government works. He wants to get people involved, especially those who have felt shut out of the democratic process.
He is also heartened by the number of people he comes across in the sphere of his job who have roots in punk and hardcore. “You’d be surprised,” he notes. “Once or twice a week, I run into someone who says, ‘I was talking to my husband about you. He loved Indecision, and he’s so glad you’re an elected official.”
