Last week, as three members of the punk group Pussy Riot sat in a cage in a Moscow courtroom, the gates of the Russian embassy in Washington received an ear-splitting strain of disapproval. Four guitar-screeching, drum-thrashing bands—Mobius Strip, Sad Bones, Brenda, and the appropriately named War on Women—played a public, outdoor set in solidarity with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, the Pussy Riot members who today were sentenced to two years in prison on trumped-up hooliganism charges.

Demonstrations are a fairly common phenomenon along D.C.’s Embassy Row. The series of rallies for Pussy Riot, though, have been somewhat different from the norm. For one thing, many protests outside foreign embassies are dominated by natives of the same foreign country. For another, most of them involve the standard litany of chants, speakers, and signs. And of course, very few of those protests involve punk rock. But if engaging in guerrilla musical dissent represented an appropriate tribute to the women of Pussy Riot, it also harkened back to an older, long-forgotten form that's native to the nation’s capital: The punk percussion protest.

In choosing to bully a feminist rock band, in fact, Vladimir Putin created almost the perfect vehicle to rouse the spirit of the old D.C. punk scene, one of Washington’s truly homegrown musical products.

It’s not hard to see why devotees of the capital’s activist music scene see kinship with Pussy Riot. The band cites as one of its main influences the riot grrrl movement that grew out of the D.C. hardcore scene of the 1980s. That scene, in turn, was always wedded to the local activist community; there’s very little daylight between Dischord Records, the label that produced Washington bands like Fugazi and Minor Threat, and Positive Force, a punk-rock-fueled social advocacy and service group. And back in the ’80s, that scene had a foreign-policy agenda.

In 1985, Amy Pickering, a member of the all-female hardcore band Fire Party, sent her fellow rockers anonymous letters encouraging a “Revolution Summer.” The idea called for protesting all manners of injustice, but top of the list was South Africa’s apartheid regime.