Punk Forum Responses

1. WHAT IS PUNK?

On October 20, 2003 Kody Jones wrote:

Punk started as a way of venting your rage at the corruption of society. Punk is about saying "To hell with conforming." The culture (funny how that word is so similar to cult...huh) was about getting away from governments, music industries, and just the superficiality of the entire "civilized" world. Nowadays punk is about just the opposite. Punk has become about wearing name brand clothes, whereas it used to have ideas, it has become the fad, what teenagers listen to to be cool. (kinda hurts my pride, really, me being a teenage punk.) What started out as a true form of rebellion is now a conformist's choice in music.

On September 15, 2003 Justin Bard wrote:

Punk. To me punk is simply nothing but doing what one wants to do. Some equate punk with writing two minute songs with three chords. Some equate punk with anti-mainstream. Some equate punk as a new form of political thought. Some think its a DIY ethic. Punk is all those. Punk is neither of those. Punk just may be undefinable. Punk was a word that defined a small scene in NYC but was marketed over in England as that thing that "kids are doing these days." Once punk became this "thing everyone was doing" and a fashion, it became silly and contrived. To quote Legs McNeil: "Overnight, punk had become as stupid as everything else. This wonderful vital force that was articulated by the music was really about corrupting every form-it was about advocating kids to not wait to be told what to do, but make life up for themselves, it was about trying to get people to use their imaginations again, it was about not being perfect, it was about saying it was ok to be amateurish and funny, that real creativity came out of making a mess, it was about working with what you got in front of you and turning everything embarrassing, awful, and stupid in your life to your advantage." I full on agree with Legs with the exception of his use of punk in a past tense. I don't think punk ever really died although some would have you believe it did (some say it died with the death of Sid Vicious, or when Kurt Cobain killed himself). Punk just divided into two things: punk fashion and punk ethic. Punk fashion is what is alive in the mainstream media with stuff like Blink 182 and Sum 41. I think the punk ethic (the idea that Legs McNeil presents) is still alive and well today and its bands that aren't labeled as "punk rock." Its evolved to different things and not just music. People took the punk ethic and morphed it to their lifestyle. I recall a quote from Dennis Lyxzén (International Noise Conspiracy, ex-Refused) who said that "reading is punk rock." One of my favorite bands, A Silver Mt. Zion, just released an album called "This Is Our Punk Rock," showing their interpretation with 15 minute long songs with a choir. Richard Hell still writes and publishes books in his older years... I think that's pretty punk rock. Jean Michael Basquiet painted on everyday objects and made them art... punk. So I think that punk is whatever you make it to be. If it represents ones human spirit, then it is punk.

On July 18, 2003 Gary Lain wrote:

"Punk," because it indicated such a wide variety of modes of expression, was always an unstable signifier. Certainly, to my mind, it was always easier to explain what punk was not; "that's not punk" being one of the operative clauses of the period.

Moreover, since circa 1990, which marked the period in which punk was appropriated into the official culture as a style stripped of its radical cultural/political implications, "punk" on this level, has ceased to have any intrinsic meaning beyond its historical connotations.

So that, given the above, I'd rather focus on whatever it was that punk meant/means to me as an individual. At this point, it would be customary to demonstrate my credentials on the topic: a long, annotated list of shows attended and records purchased; a demonstrable, detailed insider's knowledge of the key players and major events; an easy familiarity with the appropriate slang and jargon (easy answer: there really isn't any); and a strong, succinct opinion, one way or the other, on Lipstick Traces and the use of "London Calling" in a Jaguar commercial. Here I'm half-mocking the insularity of the punks, as well as the ease with which this sort of "street cred" can be faked (all of which was well-spoofed by The Tubes [of all people] in "I was a punk before you were a punk"). But this phenomena, I'm guessing, is characteristic of any underground, marginalized cultural movement. There was a very real sense in that being a punk was all you had, and so this identification was valued seriously and intensely by those that shared in it.

Which leads to a consideration of punk as an exclusive (but not, of course, in the sense of catering to the wealthy) social grouping. The nature of this exclusivity might certainly be seen, anthropologically, as universally determinant, to varying degrees, in any social grouping. It is interesting to note that Western societies, at least according to their official cant, privilege inclusiveness and diversity as being among their celebrated "values." But what is proffered in reality is access to a diffuse, transparent, invasive, superficial and banal cultural milieu that at essence can only muster the anonymous consumer as its primary site of subjective identification. This is your reward for blending in with the melting pot: you get to buy stuff at the mall and be infotained. So there is a very real sense in which the socially exclusive nature of punk can be seen as an oppositional strategy in relationship to the bland material enticements and specious ideology of the official culture.

That said, based on my own experiences with the San Diego hardcore punk scene during the 1980's, I can offer the observation that I've never been involved with a more diverse group of people. Not only was the scene itself factionalized; politics, attitudes, aesthetics and behaviors were quite varied. Often the only thing anyone seemed to have in common was their shared codes of identification.

Furthermore, the uniqueness and fragility of punk as social identity was reinforced by prevailing market forces. Many among the first wave of punk bands in New York and England in the mid-to late 1970's were signed to major record labels in attempt to cash in on the latest "teenaged" music trend. The majority of these bands had relatively small sales and this, combined with their radical form and content (and the band's own irreverent, indeed venomous attitudes towards the labels themselves), led to them being dropped by the majors. The host of younger bands forming in the wake of the first wave were subsequently ignored by the major American labels. So that, for any punk band forming after this period, there was the very real knowledge that prospects for commercial success (or even a living wage) were slim at best. At that point, any band identifying itself as punk did so out of enthusiasm and commitment (and a strong dose of foolhardiness). What arose in reaction agains these restrictions was the formation of an underground network of independent record labels and promotional tools, often formed and managed by the groups themselves, operating at barely self-sustaining profit levels.

At that point, to be a punk was to be commercially marginalized and culturally untouchable. This led to a very precise and concrete awareness that the identification as a punk was reinforced by real world conditions: it was not simply another prefabricated lifestyle to be donned and then discarded in a leisure class search for self identity. It was instead an existential choice fraught with some personal peril and invested with tremendous meaning generated by the participants itself. It was, in a word, freedom.

Subjectively, how it all felt, was this: when you became and shared in being a punk, this identity permitted the play of your desires, your politics, your aesthetics and provided a means of locating as a unique individual with in a dynamic, distinct social group. It was a spontaneous, intuitive group exercise in the creation of meaning. And outside of that...was nothing.

So to see the whole thing co-opted in the early 1990's, sold out for a song on the strung out byways of yet another Lollapalooza tour, well, that was pretty fucking hard.

2. PUNK REGIONALISM (click on link to the left)

3. PUNK EXPERIENCES

On October 20, 2003 Kody Jones wrote:

Punk, in relation to me, is more of an idea than a culture. I listen to Dead Kennedys, Sex Pistols, NOFX, and anything that has any real meaning, or none at all. My literary experience with punk is confined to people like Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, or Noam Chomsky, not really punk, but with a punk point of view. I have no real experience with punk art, besides my own taggings. As far as fashion goes the only time I look like a punk is when I go to shows, then it's ripped camoflage pants, combat boots, a T-shirt I scribbled something profound on, liberty spikes, and my punked out leather jacket. Normally I dress in jeans and a plain t-shirt, (still wear my combat boots though). I look like any other kid who refuses to go with the fashions. A nice punk memory is when I lived in a small, rednecked town, I quickly became known as a punk, which got me a lot of heat, then one day these three jocks finally acted out, they knocked me down in the hall, so I spit in their collective face (the guy in the middle) and they proceeded to hospitalize me. That is what I think of when I think punk, spitting in the face of conformity.

On September 15, 2003 Justin Bard wrote:

Punk Experiences. I'm going to quote Iggy Pop's ideas of punk (which I also agree with): "You see, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise is in fact the brilliant music of a genius, myself . And that music is so powerful that it's quite beyond my control and ah... when I'm in the grips of it I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever felt like that? When you just couldn't feel anything and you didn't want to either."

It's that quote that makes me want to play music. When I play music I think of that quote and I know EXACTLY how he means. That's all I really have to say.

On July 13, 2003, Michael Filas wrote:

I'm more of a punk now, at least intellectually, than I was in the late seventies and early eighties when I used to go to shows as a kid in the bustling Hollywood punk scene. Although film and print documents of the that scene feature serious punks decked out in full regalia, both in dress and attitude, there was a constituency of voyueristic lads there for the raw infectuous energy of the music and the thrill of the pogo pit before it was called a mosh pit. The small minority of girls at the shows were always full-on punks, at least in their fashion statement. For my friends and me, it was an interactive freak show. Anyway, this circuitous trip down memory lane is my way of confessing that in my youth I was able to enjoy punk without much more than a superficial connection with the alienation--as a youngster looking for a good time, I responded to the humor implicit in all the bottom dwelling of the lyrics and antics of the bands. Thus, the most biting--and ultimately serious--politics of punk slipped off my teflon consciousness like a scandal off of Ronald Reagan. Years later, in graduate school, I developed a philosphical affinity with the anarchistic and nihilistic impulse in punk literature by writers such as William S. Burroughs and Harold Jaffe. Recently, I've also found lots of punk music that was beneath my radar back in the day. If it didn't get on the air on KROQ in the late seventies and early eighties, then I probably missed it. Bands such as Fear and the Germs were playing in LA, but I only started listening to their music when my current upstairs neighbor and one time punk, Colin Loggins, started lending me records from his vast collection. Much of punk is so extreme or marginalized that I discover it only by happenstance, from a friend's recommendation, or surfing the web--not a particulaly punk endeavor. There's not the same rage, physical congress or crude energy in my Internet browser as there was on the beer and sweat soaked dance floor of the Whisky-a-go-go in 1980, but it's still fun to listen to punk, read punk, and watch punk films. Some of you, like me, may even be interested in punk scholarship from, for example, a social, literary, historical or cultural studies perspective. To extend a proper punk greeting, then, I spit and snarl in your general direction, and I really don't give a fuck if you like these ideas or not.

PUNK INQUIRY & STUDY SITE (PISS) FORUM RESPONSES

`PUNK INQUIRY & STUDY SITE (PISS) FORUM RESPONSES`