I’m not sure it’s possible for anything to be punk anymore. Now, it’s true that I’m becoming an old fart reactionary as the hair falls out and the bills come in, but it’s not just that I think everything was better when I was a kid. It’s also not that I think it’s impossible to make interesting, fun, ground-breaking music anymore. It’s that for me, the essence of punk was a reaction to a set of conditions that don’t (indeed, can’t) exist anymore: the bloated pretense of most popular music of the early/mid-seventies, the concentration of the music industry in the hands of a few major record companies, the smell of naivete and fuzzy-headed mysticism that still pervaded so much of popular culture at the time, and not least of all the economic malaise of the mid-seventies, the sense of severely circumscribed opportunity.
Today, any musical act that even approaches the level of self-importance and humorlessness achieved by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, and even (god bless 'em) The Who at times, is quickly taken down several pegs by the press and fans. The tendency is still there, of course, but (largely as a result of punk) no one will ever take it seriously again.
The current consolidation of the music business, and the “entertainment industry” in general, in the hands of a very few extremely large conglomerates, might seem to offer a new opportunity for punk, but it remains far easier for an upstart band to create and distribute their own CDs than it’s ever been before. I railed against CD as a format for several years, when there were only a couple of plants in the world that produced CDs and their production capacity was monopolized by Sony, CBS, and Warner Bros. (et al.). I never anticipated the flood of rereleased material that would hit the market later, making long-unavailable music readily accessible again, nor the degree to which independent labels (and now individuals) would obtain the ability to produce and distribute CDs. There’s no comparison with the pre-CD world, where producing and pressing even a 45, much less a full album, was a difficult and expensive proposition far beyond the means of any but the most successful bands.
During the first go-round, punk not only kicked over the walls, but also ripped up the foundations, of these conditions, ensuring by the mere fact of its having happened, for instance, that no one would ever assume that you had to have millions of dollars worth of gear and a major record deal to be regarded as force to reckon with, either in the music industry or society in general.
Finally, the relative prosperity of the last ten years or so means that the kids who’re the age at which punk is a viable position have never had any reason to be other than optimistic about the future. They’ve never pounded the pavement trying to find someone who’ll hire them for a minimum wage job. The essential frustration at the core of punk is missing today. Even the acts and stances that would have marked someone out as unhireable before the early nineties are just another fashion statement now – odd hair colors and styles, facial and body piercings, and unorthodox clothing styles have been part of the mainstream business culture (at least in the Internet segment) for several years now, and no longer put those who sport them beyond the pale. The stakes are a whole lot lower than for a kid the same age with the same clothing, hair color and piercings in 1977 – I daresay none of them has ever been offered a job making tea at the BBC. There are still kids who’re angry at the world and who’re looking for an outlet (always have been, always will be), and punk as a style will always appeal to some subset of them, but the targets for their anger are less obvious and less universal now than they’ve ever been.
Punk’s not dead, but like a lot of us, it found out that sometimes being successful at what you set out to do is the first step toward becoming irrelevant.
