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A
Collection of Thoughts on Punk:
The Music, Its Politics and Its Principles (1976-2001)
The
definition of punk has long been a catalyst of arguments among those who have
something to say about it. Did it begin as a musical genre or as an attitude
that led to music as its main form of expression?
Has punk evolved into a particular sound and image that no longer need its
principled past to exist? Is it dead?
I
began with no idea of how to approach or write about these over-debated
questions. The more I researched,
the more it seemed that the dominant force behind punks very existence
and propagation lies in its contradictions. Nearly everyone who considers
himself/herself a fan or creator of the music and/or a follower of the punk
ethic has something to say about the question, What is punk?
I came across two different approaches for writing on these issues.
In the first, the writer would take a well-researched approach, often in
the form of a graduate thesis. In
the second, a kid would decide to write about his/her own (usually
un-researched) opinions on and encounters in the punk scene surrounding him/her. Although both types of writings were important, I
decided that simply projecting my opinions in an incomplete and under-researched
article (like the kid) would be too narrow-minded of an approach.
Instead, what youll find in this article is a compilation of diverse
opinions from across the punk spectrum (musicians, fans, critics, and
sociologists). These accounts have
been compiled from every corner of the Internet and carefully ordered so as to
show a limited chronology, but more notably, mass contradictions among
perspectives.
Punk
social practices were constituted as responses to the material reality of white
working class existence in Britain and a largely white, although less
homogeneous, lower middle class in the United States during the middle
seventies.
-Tony
Lack from Consumer Society and Authenticity: The (Il)logic of Punk
Practices
(http://www.uoregon.edu/~ucurrent/uc3/3-lack.html)
It
was a good time. It could have gone
anywhere at one point. It kept people on edgeAt the end there was a pointless
rerunning of a B movie, packed with the obvious.
It shouldnt have been. It
could have been courageous, and an absolute change.
And yes, we could have won.
-Johnny
Rotten (Lydon) of the Sex Pistols
(http://www.utdallas.edu/~atrue/PRETEXT/PT1.1/PT1Sirc.html)
"One
thing I wanted to bring back to rock 'n' roll was the knowledge that you invent
yourself. That's why I changed my name, why I did all the clothing style things,
haircut, everything. . . . That is the ultimate message of the New Wave: if you
just amass the courage that is necessary, you can completely invent yourself.
You can be your own hero, and once everybody is their own hero, then everybody
is gonna be able to communicate with each other on a real basis rather than a
hand-me-down set of societal standards."
-Richard
Hell
(http://www.fastnbulbous.com/punk.htm)
"The
body becomes the base-line, the place where the buck stops.
To wear a mohican or to have your face tattooed, is to burn most of your
bridges. In the current economic climate, when employers can afford to pick and
choose, such gestures are a public disavowal of the will to queue for work,
throwing yourself away before they do it for you"
-Dick
Hebidge on British Punks from Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things
(http://www.utdallas.edu/~atrue/PRETEXT/PT1.1/PT1Sirc.html)
that
is not to say that Punk was in any way a "grass roots" movement. Punk
music and Punk subcultures were fully media-tized from their inception. After
"missing" the early bohemian movements almost entirely and finally
picking up on the beats and hippies as they were on their way to becoming
sterile breakfast table conversation, the media was ready for Punk. Punks took
many of their cues from the media. The subculture quickly became a
self-fulfilling prophecy
-Tony
Lack from Consumer Society and Authenticity: The (Il)logic of Punk
Practices
(http://www.uoregon.edu/~ucurrent/uc3/3-lack.html)
Bands
like the Ramones and the Talking Heads would evolve out of the punk rock
movement, and become influences for those who shared a similar distaste in what
was occurring in the music industry. Some say the underlying roots of punk was
the frustration and anger from being treated as sheep, while others say punk
stemmed from the politics of boredom. It was both.
-From
History of punk rock: origins and significance by Charles Oh
(http://mt.essortment.com/punkrockhistor_rapl.htm)
As a musical genre,
Nihilist Punk was a commodified anti-commodity. Punk music in the United States
announced itself as part spectacle, part Pop art, and part frantic noise. Many
musicians could barely play their instruments. This lack of precision and polish
became an integral element of Punk music. Over time, even those who did play
well self consciously introduced dissonance and spontaneous mis-takes into their
playing. The dissonant sound of early Punk, coupled with the unabashed admission
that its musicians were in it for no less utopian reason than the money, lent
Nihilist Punk music its authenticity.
Punk
immediately discredited the music that preceded it; punk denied the legitimacy
of anyone whod ever had a hit, or played as if he knew how to play.
Destroying one tradition, punk revealed a new one
-Greil
Marcus
Listening
to punk was only "a preliminary stage" (Graham 103), it was music you
listened to in order to take further action, records to play en route to the
ultimate rejection of records.
-Geoffrey
M. Sirc in Never Mind the TagmemicsWheres the Sex Pistols?
(http://www.utdallas.edu/~atrue/PRETEXT/PT1.1/PT1Sirc.html)
Mostly
punk was funny. We couldnt
believe we were getting away with it.
-Pete
Shelley of the Buzzcocks
(http://www.spin.com/new/features/punk/punkintro.html)
"We
did it because we had to, we were genetically programmed to be adolescent and,
anyway, there wasn't anything else to do on Friday night."
-A.A.
Gill "On-the-spot reports", The Sunday Times, 27 August, 1995. London,
U.K.
(http://www.film.queensu.ca/Critical/Chamberlain4.html)
To
summarize, the punk movement was the same, time-tried rejection of existing
rules and the rowdy voice of change: a statement of discontent through an
inarticulate voicing of problems: loud, if not clear, shocking and forthright.
Trying to read any more into punk was as pointless and futile as making sense of
adolescence.
-From
The Quintessential Punk by Bryn Chamberlain
(http://www.film.queensu.ca/Critical/Chamberlain4.html)
The
Sex Pistols imploded partly because they stopped loathing the rock star system
and began coveting it. Such is one of many contradictions at the heart of Punk:
after killing rock 'n' roll, they attempted to find their identity in it. They
transgressed the democratic impulse of punk for industry elitism; as the
carnival got old, they decided to check out the academy.
-Geoffrey
M. Sirc in Never Mind the TagmemicsWheres the Sex Pistols?
(http://www.utdallas.edu/~atrue/PRETEXT/PT1.1/PT1Sirc.html)
when I started I
didn't have anybody to use as a source of inspiration.
I didn't want to sound like anybody else out there, or come up with
versions of things that had already been done.
So my sources were film, theatre
-Johnny
Rotten (Lydon) of the Sex Pistols
(http://www.otal.umd.edu/~jpaolett/grad/punk.html)
Indeed, if the Sex
Pistols meant anything at all to me and most of my friends in the LA punk scene,
it was that a few quick bucks could be made off of a bunch of unemployed,
gullible teenagers But I believe that what was really missing from the 4Cs in
1977 was not a lack of interest in punk qua Sex Pistols but a lack of interest
in the other punk movements, some contemporaneous with the Pistols, some later.
These movements survived much longer than the Pistols simply because they had
something to say that not many people wanted to hear; as a result, they had to
fight to have it heard. Black Flag screamed at us: "Fuck this city,
man/It's run by pigs/They take the rights away from/All the kids"
("Police Story"). Moments after recovering from the crippling pain of
a police baton, words like these ones take on a whole new meaning.
-Writing
as Slamming Richard Hansbergers response to Pedagogy of the Pissed:
Punk Pedagogy in the First-Year Writing Classroom
(http://www.ncte.org/ccc/7/sub/49_sirc.html#Email)
Now,
in the middle nineties, we look up and realize that, while we were busy
narrating punk, history, and punk history even as the style gave way to heavy
metal, rap, country, and "alternative" on the charts, kids in the U.S.
were still quietly but enthusiastically doing punk in a variety of forms.
"Grunge," especially Nirvana, purported to be punk in its
aesthetic, but its success obscured the actions of a handful of purists in D.C.,
New York, and Berkeley who still reacted against nutty-crunchy west coast
culture by "hating hippies," denouncing corporate major label culture,
living in Marxist cooperatives, and teaching themselves and one another to play
ska and three-cord-three-minute blitzes.
-Greg
Wahl from Narrating Punk: Masculinity, Genealogy, Patriarchy
(http://www.otal.umd.edu/~jpaolett/grad/punk.html)
"Bands
such as Black Flag, Fear, the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, DOA, Agent
Orange, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, Red Cross (later known as Redd Kross),
TSOL, DI and the Dead Kennedys tended to espouse egalitarianism,
self-respect, and social change."
-Brian
Flota from Pedagogy of the ________: Does Punk Belong in the
Composition Classroom?
(http://home.gwu.edu/~flota/punkpedagogy.html)
"The
sell out is the pre-eminent concern for Straight Edge Punks. A wholehearted
rejection of spectacle, self-promotion, and excess, Straight Edge asceticism is
a pared-down, lean (needless to say masculinized) bid for authenticity, romantic
resistance, and the negation of the system.
-Tony
Lack from Consumer Society and Authenticity: The (Il)logic of Punk
Practices
(http://www.uoregon.edu/~ucurrent/uc3/3-lack.html)
"The
guy on the corner begging for food doesn't care if Green Day sold out. He wants
a place to sleep and some money for food. The world does not revolve around
punk. But apply that kind of rebel ethic into expanding to life beyond punk, and
being prepared for a time when we too may have to be fighting government clamp
downs the way people in the old Eastern Block countries did."
-Jello
Biafra of the Dead Kennedys
(http://www.requestline.com/archive/oct98/jello/text2.html)
My
contention, however, is that there are still some common characteristics between
what my students call "old-school" punk and the neo-punk of today
From my own research into and experience with punk subcultures and ideologies, I
deduce the following principles of "punk":(1) The Do-It-Yourself
(DIY) ethic, which demands that we do our own work because anybody who would do
our work for us is only trying to jerk us around;(2) A sense of anger and
passion that finally drives a writer to say what's really on his or her mind;(3) A
sense of destructiveness that calls for attacking institutions when those
institutions are oppressive, or even dislikable;(4) A willingness to endure
or even pursue pain to make oneself heard or noticed;(5) A pursuit of the
"pleasure principle," a reveling in some kind of Nietzchean chasm.
-Seth
Kahn-Egan in Pedagogy of the Pissed: Punk Pedagogy in the First-Year Writing
Classroom
(http://www.ncte.org/ccc/7/sub/49_sirc.html#Kahn-Egan)
But
most of all, punk's legacy lies in its introduction of self-employment and
activism. It illustrated that anyone can do it themself, without reliance on the
commercial media or the luxury of having financial abundance. Against the
backdrop of mass consumer conformity, the punk rock movement made a statement of
individuality that was heard worldwide.
I
never wanted to have a record label per se. I wanted to put out records, and I
hated the record business so much that I couldn't stand the idea of someone else
putting out the records, because I could never trust them to do it.
-Ian
MacKaye, Fugazi, etc founder of Dischord
(http://www.salon.com/people/conv/2001/01/08/mackaye/index1.html)
"We
certainly could have made a lot more money. The main
thing is merchandising, T-shirts and whatnot, and we never really thought of
doing this band in terms of how we were going to make ends met. We thought, 'If
we keep stuff cheap, anyone who wants to can come see us,' and that's great. If
we only charge $5 at door, some people will come and see us even if they don't
know who we are, maybe just because they have nothing better to do that night,
and that's great. Not even everyone will like us, but they may have nothing
better to do. We never thought of it in terms of the bottom line, in terms of
making it work. Nothing gives you more freedom than if you're not beholden to
someone because you're charging $15 to have them watch you. It's not like having
to maintain this huge spectacle or presence. It's not like we have to be
Siegfried and Roy or something."
-Guy
Piccioto of Fugazi
(http://www.meanstreet.com/launch/nov2001/fugazi.html)
Many modern punk bands
are influenced by political affairs, but express their social and political
frustrations in a manner that sounds Greek to the majority of the punk
community. Its hard to agree with someone when you have no idea what
theyre talking about.
-Matt
Preira from a review of the Operation Ivy Album Energy
(http://www.underfoot.cc/commentary/?com_num=132)
"Personally,
I dont consider myself to be a punk rocker, but Im in a punk rock band.
Punk rock is the way you think. Its not about the way you look and not the
way you act. Its not necessarily some angry, rebellious subculture where
people want to overthrow the government. Its about individual choice and the
way you think about the world. Bad Religion will always be a punk rock band
because that is the criteria by which we write our lyrics."
-Brian
Baker of Bad Religion
(http://www.guitar.com/features/viewfeature.asp?featureID=211)
It's
not so much "Fuck capitalism' as "Fuck greedIf you're the guy next
door starting your own business and trying to get successful and make a good
life for yourself and your family, then more power to you. The problem is with
the huge corporations and the WTO and the world conglomerates that are just
trying to control everything. Basically, you have to let your conscience and
your morals set your guidelines What we're trying to say is open up your eyes
to the world around you. If people say we're not offering any solutions, I'd say
that's the solution: open your eyes."
-Ray
Bradbury, Pennywise
(http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2001-08-09/music_feature.html)
"We're
totally suburban punk. None of us grew up in poverty; none of us haven't been
able to eat food. We're rich suburban white kids, we just rebel against
boredom.
-Mark Hoppus
of Blink 182 from Punks Suburban Babies
(http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/20001103/A23179-2000Nov2.html)
Just
as Americans need to take back the nation, punks need to take back punk rock.
The first step is to examine our society and political climate under the
harshest scrutiny, and Anti-Flag does just that, using punk rock as a vehicle to
protest and address social inequality.
Siemond Chan on Anti-Flag
(http://www.citypaper.net/articles/062101/mus.picka.shtml)
"Punk
rock died when the first kid said, 'Punk's not dead! Punk's not
dead.'"
--
David Berman of Silver
Jews on "Tennessee" (Bright Flight, 2001).
Maybe
the only band who has any original punk spirit is a band like Marilyn Manson.
Punk is dead.
-Unknown
(http://www.punksucks.8k.com/dead.htm)
Punk
forms a permanent theater of tension--the dominant culture vs. the dormant one;
the mainstream and the underground. Punk might have imploded as a medium, as a
show, but as a state of mind? As that, it's going nowhere. It's here for the
long haul, as long as modernity lasts
-Geoffrey
M. Sirc in Never Mind the TagmemicsWheres the Sex Pistols? (http://www.utdallas.edu/~atrue/PRETEXT/PT1.1/PT1Sirc.html)
Punk rock was
never supposed to be about the past, unless it was tearing down society's
bullshit and building something better in its place, and the very idea of a
biography runs counter to punk's principles. It's not supposed to be about who
you were; it's about who you are. After all, the best punk has always been about
change.
-Scott Puckett,
Publisher, Sick To Move, PunkRockAcademy.com
(http://www.downbylaw.com/bio.html)
The
punk attitude as I see it, is to fuck shit up in a cool way.
-Jello
Biafra of the Dead Kennedys
(http://www.requestline.com/archive/oct98/jello/text2.html)
In October last year, I
had the chance to sit down with Mick Jones for a bit We didn't talk about
politics. We just talked about the music, because the rest simply
wasn't as important.
-From
Toward A New Manifesto For Punk by Scott Puckett
(http://www.punkrockacademy.com/stm/essay/punk2.html)
To me, what mattered about punk was the
promise it held out to anyone who bothered to listen. It wasn't the ideology or
the politics, though those were also integral. Simply put, it was the humanity
contained in the music, the understanding that there are certain fundamental
things that all people can understand - loneliness, frustration, hurt, fear,
etc. - and that just like everything else in life, punk would face it head
on.
-From My
Love Affair With Punk by Scott Puckett
(http://www.punkrockacademy.com/stm/essay/punk1.html)
If
you actually made it to the end of this long, disjointed attempt to show all
sides of punk, then you probably have something to say yourself.
Send your thoughts, and
Ill add them to the list
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