Muddying the message: Punk

I don’t want to get into a debate about current punk music. That’s another thread. This one’s about the “mainstreaming” of punk. I saw a teenybopper with PUNK scrawled across her shirt. I saw a preppy guy with PUNK on his fucking visor. A visor. Punk music and attitude are supposed to be underground, harsh and radical. Not something to sell clothing.

Another thing. Stop with the history of punk! http://www.theonion.com/onion3809/sociology_101.html is the latest example, although satire. It seems that people have to prove they are indie music historians by saying “oh yeah, the velvets had a lot of influence on the CBGBs crowd” and thinking they’re hot stuff. VH1 did a special on it. If someone wants to know the history of punk music, they will research it themselves. Although some corporate stuff is downright funny (look up chipmunk punk by alvin and the chipmunks), most of it is to make money and not say anything.

Listening to punk music does not make you a punk. The lifestyle is shaped by the attitude and message. The Boston Tea Party in the pre-revolution colonies was more punk than anything you’ll see on MTV today. The attitude is about non-conforming and rebellion. The message is to think for yourself and look at what’s really going on. The music is just a medium for the message.

If you’re a true punk, you’ll piss off everybody in the system. If you’re wearing something ablazoned with PUNK to seem counterculture, you’re stupid. Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.

Are there still people who take punk seriously?

Marc

Was there ever anyone who did? :slight_smile:

Yawn.

I only opened this thread because I thought I finally did something deserving of a pit thread. Now that I did open it, Im dissapointed.

To address the OP
[sub]low blow coming up[/sub]
Red: Did you have this discussion at the “punk rock” coffee shop over latte’s and a brownie?

can anyone say malcolm mclaren?

sex was the store’s name, right?

I apologise for this. It was uncalled for. I am just slightly tired of hearing this argument. A true punk wouldn’t give a fuck if a teenybopper wore “punk” attire. It doesn’t matter. No offense red but I am pretty sure you are even younger than me (I’m 28)and both of us pretty much missed out on the true “punk” era. I would say punk is a useless word now thus making this arguement futile and nothing more than a discussion on current trends.

Are there still people who stuff feathers up their butts?:eek:

My peeps!:smiley:

Is pissing off “everybody in the system” a worthy goal? Does it require me to think for myself? Can I be a true punk if I don’t piss off the nice people at the grocery store? What if I want to keep my job, and feed myself, and choose to not get fired by pissing off my boss?

Does anyone want to sponsor me? I’m going to become a true punk.

I feel that I somewhat ascribe to the attitude of punk. I have friends who take it very seriously. One is in jail right now for stealing lawn gnomes :slight_smile: I like to think that they didn’t adopt the message or lifestyle to please anyone else.

Pezpunk, I think you’re right. I guess my real problem is that it is (or was) a real social movement that had real consequences that is now being used as a marketing tool. Someone else on the boards said that the generation after a movement steals the ideas and wears the clothes (basically). Think of hippies in the 60’s vs. the 70’s. I think that marketers are selling kid-friendly clean-smelling punk to people and are kind of dishonoring, or at least forgetting, it’s roots.

I guess I come off as kind of a snob towards it. Like someone who has seen an indie band go big and then hate that other people like it who weren’t there at the start. I was not around at the start of the punk movement, but I can at least acknowledge it. I don’t want to make it seem like I was there at the roots and know everything about it.

AlbertRose: I guess what I was getting at is that one would make the people who don’t think angry. People motivated only by greed or hatred are examples.

What is ‘the system’, anyway?

Does anyone know if I can take back pezpunk’s take-back of his low blow?
Anyway, there was a really good thread about this (in Cafe Society?) a couple months ago (lost in the purge, this is really starting to get on my nerves), I think it was called something like ‘Aging punker checking in’ or something. Anyone remember that thread? Sigh. Everything was better back then, in those brief weeks between 12.07.01 and 3.11.02.

“Hey! Let’s all wear fake paratrooper boots and dress as far down as we possibly can! And see who can be the most smolderingly pissy! And even though we all share the same epidemic boredom and apathy, we still have the gumption to call ourselves alternative!
–Wammo, “There is Too Much Light In This Bar”

No real point; this line just popped into my head as I was reading the thread.

Dr. J

23 year-old jaded motherfucker here.

I run the website (see below) for the longest running punk zine in the midwest (such as it is.)

My cred, by most definitions, is impeccable. For quite a few years, though, I haven’t been able to muster the energy to give a fuck about it.

I listen to what I listen to. Quite a bit is “underground,” but quite a bit is as corporate as the Backstreet Boys.

MC5 & the Stooges: Electra
Dead Boys, Saints, Talking Heads, etc: Sire
New York Dolls: Mercury
Sex Pistols: Too many majors to name.

And those are just the ones I can remember hungover on a Sunday afternoon.

Punk has always been about the appearance of rebellion, packaged, sold, recycled, and repackaged.

Luckily, good indie bands that sign to majors have a tendancy to turn to shit after a couple of years, so it’s pretty easy to maintain, but still, what’s the point?

The real rebels are fighting slavery in the Sudan, or going to the barricades at WTO meetings, or whatever. It doesn’t fucking matter what kind of music you listen to, what kind of clothes you wear , or how many peices of metal you have in your septum.

I’m just tired of this shit. Quoting bands is lame, but the New Bomb Turks got it right:

Sorry for the incoherence.

Just to establish my punk credentials, I’m listening to Sister Ray live at the Boston Tea Party 12/12/68 as I type this ;).

Like 98% of people who nowadays like punk rock, I also came to it too late (for me it was 1992 after 5 years in a heavy metal wilderness), and I also started off by believing that punk rock had/would change(d) the world, and was the only thing that mattered. But then I looked at what punk had actually done. How much had it changed the world outside of music? Probably not at all, pretty much like the hippy movement which it mirrored. At least the hippies could claim (probably wrongly) that they’d stopped the Vietnam war … what could the punks claim? That they’d pioneered ripped t-shirts?

You can go on all day about whether punk is a music or an attitude, but really, it’s a music style. The fact that most of what is now called punk is crap is neither here nor there … I also used to be one of those people who called Johnny Cash “a real punk” until I was kicked in the ass (metaphorically speaking, luckily ;)) by a serious, knowledgable country music fan who pointed out to me that punk is not the only musical aesthetic that matters, it’s just one of many. Punk rock was never about any one thing, except making music that was fun and energetic (or at times boring and lethargic).

There was no ‘golden age’ of punk - there have always been hangers on, posers, rip offs etc. If you want to find out what the ‘real punks’ were about, go read some fanzines from 1978, where they discussed in all seriousness why Motorhead shouldn’t be admitted into the hallowed status of ‘punk rock’, because some of them were hippies, or why the Saints can’t be real punks because of their long hair. Sure it annoys me that VH1 isn’t doing a special every week on the Urinals or the Electric Eels (the most astounding and over the edge punk groups ever), but that’s what CDs and tapes are for - so you can pretend you’re in Cleveland in 1975 or San Fransisco in 1978, rather than Melbourne in 2002.

[This is excerpted from a Phd thesis on the sociological impact of punk rock Phds on rebellious teenagers in the early twenty first century]

Appropriate of nothing perhaps, but in the new Rolling Stone there’s an Absolut Vodka ad called “Absolut Pistols” which features the “Nevermind the Bollocks” album cover with the Absolut Vodka shape superimposed on it.

-Myron

Good on Spence, as usual. Especially if he’s got any original domestic Celibate Rifles pressings he’s willing to part with.

See, I think that the attitude of punk has existed for a long time, but that it was just given a name in the 70’s. As I cited before, the Boston Tea Party was an “punk” kind of act. So was the entire revolutionary war. It was our way of saying “fuck you Britain! We’re not gonna take it anymore!”, in the way that only people in powdered wigs can do. Swing music and bootlegging were also good examples of the punk ideas.

It hasn’t really been about being able to claim that you did something. It’s the act of rebelling and being independent. Like the Ramones said, “I want something to do.”

I am curious to know how stealing lawn gnomes is punk. Does it represent the raping of the middle-class establishment by subverting their symbols of decadence? Is it a statement of independance and rebellion against the laws that govern lawn ornaments, the laws that bind us and limit us as regards small statues of gnomic men fishing?

It occurs to me that judging someone by their apparent financial or social status, or assuming you understand their motives because of said appearance (“I saw a teenybopper with PUNK scrawled across her shirt. I saw a preppy guy with PUNK on his fucking visor.”) is about as UN-“punk” as you can get, laddie me boy.

You do realize, don’t you that the Boston Tea Party was largely organized by a number of wealthy Boston merchants such as John Hancock, who were at least partially motivated by their own economic motives?

Personally, I think the application of the term “punk” to areas aside from æsthetics to be a bit of a stretch. I will agree that trying to pass off the sort of visor that would usually say Abercrombie and Fitch as a punk item is pretty ludicrous, though. But I don’t see “punk” as the message, rather the medium. Of course, to quote Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message,” or at the least there’s overlap.

I wouldn’t agree that he judging someone by their financial or social status. I think he was pointing out that punk and preppy are incompatible æsthetics.