What Is Punk?

Date: 2009-01-28
Source: Master_Extraction (lowgenius.net)

Original Text

So an old friend – OLD friend, talking like third grade here – started up this group on Facebook, “I Was Punk Rock In Kalamazoo in the 80s.” Which is pretty cool, you know, because like it did with nearly every other genre, Kalamazoo had a thriving ‘scene’ of punk fans and skateboarders that eventually grew to a very strong little group of good musicians and ardent fans.

Of course, I was more into the mehtull thing at that time, so I wasn’t really part of the ‘scene.’ I would – modestly – suggest however that my life and times during that period were pretty damned punk, even if the music I was in to wasn’t.

At any rate, I made a couple of posts on that group, including a tongue-in-cheek assertion that there really wasn’t much of a “punk scene” in Kalamazoo prior to the advent of FAQ and the God Bullies in the mid-late 80’s.

It seems that a few folks have taken exception to this. Which is fine, you know, dissent is the heart of freedom. But then I saw this message.

“Even Gillian Anderson from X-Files fame said in a Rolling Stone interview that there was a punk scene in Kalamazoo…she states that the scene came to be as a result of the Grand Rapids’ punk scene. Although, I do question that GR had a punk scene, but it definately didn’t start the scene in KZOO. Maybe, John was hanging out in vans with the other hessians and didn’t notice the fact that Kalamazoo has a long history of punk music and the scene surrounding it. You had The Virelles, Violent Apathy, Scooter and the Worms, The T-Snakes…shit they were putting out vinyl records at the start of the eighties. Of course there was a scene. Maybe you weren’t let in.”

Rather than getting into some ego-driven recital of exactly who the hell I am and what I was doing at that time, which would even bore me, I’d rather take a look at a long-disputed question: “What is ‘Punk’?” So, framed as a response to the above, here’s my take on it:

….

“Maybe I wasn’t let in?”

Yeah. That must be it.

Or maybe it’s that I never tried to GET “in,” didn’t much give a rat’s ass about being “in,” and reject wholesale the notion that there’s some standard for membership in “punk.” Maybe when I think of a ‘punk scene,’ it requires more than a bunch of fairly affluent suburban kids with wacky haircuts and skateboards gathering together in large homogeneous groups to protest homogeneity and groupthink. “Ford Chevy GMC” was pretty punk. Dropping an F-Bomb at a gig in a church was definitely punk, but it didn’t win any contests 😉 (inside joke, kinda; Chonk’ll know what I’m talking about if he happens across this, if he even remembers that gig). Riding a skateboard, having a mohawk, or smoking dope in college does not, in and of itself, make anyone “punk.”

The problem you get when discussing punk – or any other genre, really – is that as time passes it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the actual roots and spirit of the movement from the parroted imitations that came along later. It happens with every genre, and with alarming predictability and regularity.

Step 1: Do something new and/or different that a small, select group of people – usually your friends – really dig the hell out of.

Step 2: Spread the word. This happens when all your friends start bragging to their friends about this cool new band they know. “I KNOW THESE GUYS YOU GOTTA LISTEN!” This…is the beginning of the end. The first time I heard Metallica on a fifth-generation bootleg cassette in a walkman while smoking something out on the corner of Idaho and Oregon when I should have been in Jerry Swoboda’s 8th grade Algebra class (with some of you! 1983 ftw…), the seeds of Metallica’s ultimate acquiescence to the mainstream had already been sown.

Step 3: The second wave. This is when your friends’ friends take what they’ve heard and start imitating it. In most cases this is straight imitation with little original content or value; in a rare few, you get a substantive addition to or expansion of the genre. See: Soundgarden’s expansion on the legacies of Sabbath, Zeppelin, and Kiss.

Often this comes as a backlash against the original genre –

• Sabbath and Zeppelin took the blues and added distortion plus classical and middle-eastern and even jazz and funk influences to create heavy metal as a backlash against the pop harmonizing and peace-love-and-granola mentality of the Beatles and the ‘Summer of Love’ bands (often by reaching back farther in musical history to pre-rock blues artists like Johnson and Dixon).
• The Stooges and MC5 (and later the Pistols, Misfits, Black Flag, and others) took that, kept the distortion but tossed out the pomp and self-indulgent noodling of ‘dino rock’ and turned it in to punk (often by reaching back to farther in musical history to early rock and even doo-wop vocal groups for song structure).
• The early LA hair bands like Crue took that, kept the anger and distortion, but rejected the strongly anti-musical tendencies of early punk and reintroduced things like melody and harmony (and the relentless pursuit and objectification of women), often by reaching back to the early Beatles through Summer of Love groups.
• Then Green River, Mal-Funk-Shun, and Soundgarden (among others) took that, rejected the image-consciousness and relentless pursuit of the opposite sex, and reintroduced things like more complex lyricism, alternate tunings, and classical and middle-eastern influence, often by reaching back to…Sabbath, Zeppelin, and Kiss.
• Then Offspring 2.0 (from ‘Come Out And Play’ forward), Green Day, and some other bands took THAT, rejected the introspection and darkness of grunge, and reintroduced a more raw, basic sound…by reaching back to the Stooges, MC5, Pistols, Ramones.et. al.
• Now we seem to be in a space where bands are rejecting the harder and angrier edges of music and getting back into basically writing pop songs, looking down their noses at bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and Nirvana and looking back to the mid-80’s synth-pop bands like the Thompson Twins, Tears for Fears, Simple Minds, and others of that ilk, but adding to it the more organic musicianship that the grunge movement returned us to.

In each case, obscurity and innovation are replaced gradually by mainstream acceptance and dilution. In each one of these cases, the bands in question for the most part will deny obvious influences that don’t fit their “image” – Offspring’s obvious Beatles rip-off “Get A Job” being one classic example; at least Cobain admitted to copping the “Louie Louie/More Than A Feeling” riff for “Teen Spirit,” ya know?

I don’t mean to take anything away from the scene or anyone who was in it. As for me, at that time, the only reason I ever got near campus was to gig, drink, score grass, and pick up women. Maybe if I’d ever have learned to ride a skateboard, I’d be cooler or something, but I was a BMX kid, and a metal kid, so that tended to leave me pretty empty-handed in the “punk scene.” Oddly enough, I still managed to have friends, get laid, make money, and eat along the way in spite of this painful rejection.

But what strikes me most is this: The idea that anyone “wouldn’t be let in” is about as un-punk a notion as I can imagine. The whole foundation of punk was a big ‘screw you’ to the cliques and cliches and trendy masses; that foundation was certainly carried forward through early hair metal, thrash, speed, all the way through grunge and Punk 2.0.

Relying on the unsolicited opinion of a TV star – or Rolling Stone magazine for that matter – to validate your musical tastes doesn’t strike me as a particularly “punk” approach to things. I mean, no offense to Ms. Anderson, but what in the hell could possibly qualify her as an expert on punk rock? Has she ever played an instrument? Oh, I see, it’s this:

*DAVID: There was a punk scene in Grand Rapids?

GILLIAN: It was small – for a while, my boyfriend and I were like the couple in the Grand Rapids underground scene. It spread to Kalamazoo [Mich.], which is close by, where underground bands go to play. And we’d see people like Butthole Surfers and Circle Jerks there.

(Rolling Stone, 20-Feb-97)

Which is great, and accurate – lots of underground and punk bands did come through Kalamazoo, and several notable examples of the genre were either started there or first gained popularity there (see: Violent Apathy), but Ms. Anderson is no more an authority on the matter than anyone else who was there, and less so in my opinion than anyone who was actually there and making the music. Except for maybe Joel Wick, who actually booked most of those shows in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

But like I said…what do I know? I’m just one idiot of many who was actually making music at that time rather than standing around trying to convince people I was cooler than them because I’d heard of a band they hadn’t. Maybe to some folks “punk” is about hanging out with a few hundred people just like you and riding skateboards while listening to fifth-gen retreads of surf and pop songs from the 50’s and early 60’s. To me – and the people I learned from – punk was about rejecting the very ideas of ‘acceptance’ and ‘validation,’ and if that means sleeping in an old fruit-packing warehouse or a beat up VW microbus (chartreuse optional; eleven long-haired friends of Jesus optional) with nothing to put your head on but the pillow from your bass drum, living on cans of shoplifted tuna mixed with mayo packets swiped from the Wendy’s downtown while caring about nothing outside of “how do I get my heart and soul into this instrument”…then so be it.

When it’s all said and done, what remains is this: “punk” as ethos is directly contradictive to the notion of being “let in” or having some kind of trendy little clique of insiders who are “in the know.” It’s not about the haircut, the skateboard, how much time you spent at the K-Club or whatever – it’s about an attitude, a point of view, a way of life. As such, it’s as flawed as any other philosophy, and that’s fine.

And there’s certainly nothing wrong with celebrating your memories – I do it here pretty constantly, as broken and full of holes at those memories can be sometimes. I guess maybe what pisses me off is being told by some person who almost certainly watched me play during this period that I wasn’t “let in.” Of course, I wasn’t “let in,” foo – I was what you were trying to “get in” to. I don’t happen to recognize the name of the guy who made the statement I quoted, but there are two things I’d be willing to bet money on: 1 – he’s paid cash to watch me play (a sucker bet; anyone who lived in Kalamazoo between 1983 and 1994 and enjoyed live music has almost certainly paid to watch me play something) and 2 – when I started gigging and playing in bands in late 1983/early 1984, he was still skipping around a middle school or high school in some suburb with an allilgator on his shirt and what we used to call a “fag tag,” listening to Wham and trying to get his fingers in a cheerleader.

Perhaps I wasn’t “cool enough” to be part of that “inside” scene and all, but I guess where I came from, the last thing in the world that punk was or ever should have been about was being “cool enough” to be part of some “scene.” Scenes may have grown up around me and my friends; scenes may have coagulated around some of us.

Okayl, I’m being disingenuous, obviously the scene that I was a part of in the early-mid 80’s did indeed grow and coalesce into something larger.

But I certainly never set out to be any “part” of any “scene,” – indeed, by the time things really started breaking out in Kalamazoo, I’d already been there and done that years before – and I find the notion of some guy that spent a couple of years hanging out at a small midwestern college listening to the Circle Jerks telling me that I wasn’t “part of the scene” when I’d been covering the CJ’s, Bad Brains, Misfits, and the Pistols years before nearly anyone in that area – certainly in my age group! – had ever heard of them to be pretty damned ridiculous. Yeah, I went to a more mainstream place, because the nihilism, anarchy, self-destruction, violence, and (especially, for me) the anti-musicality of the punk I’d been exposed to by that point was just not my thing…I like melody and harmony and I like to think that musical skill is a factor in being a musician, in any genre. I listened to it, I covered some of it, but it was never really my bag, and I have never, at any time in my life, claimed or wanted to claim that I was a “punk” or in a “punk band” or a “punk musician.”

But that doesn’t change the fact that before there were ‘Friday Freebies’ or ‘Barking Tunas,’ I was the reject kid with the drunk old man, psycho mom, and inability to relate to my peers, making music because it was the only way I could be who I was, the only place where I was free to let my mind and heart and soul take me where they wanted me to go, whether that was anger, introspection, sex, love, or whatever…and that seems pretty “punk” to me.

What “punk” is today could be up to just about anyone to define, but what punk was then was certainly NOT about how many friends you could get to agree with you or how popular you could be or what a great “scene” you were “part of”; just the opposite, in fact. Punk was about the wretched refuse, the rejects, the nobodies; punk was the voice of the voiceless who were so tired of being rejected by cliques, bandwagons, and the mainstream that it no longer mattered whether anyone was listening or not, just so long as you could say whatever was on your mind and to hell with the consequences.

Some people got the haircuts and lots of trendy friends…and frankly I don’t see a whole lot of “punk” in that. It’s the same tired high-school clique mentality that punk – and I – loathed, rejected, and raged against, and still do to this day.

Maybe I’m just idealizing, but it seems to me that anyone who’d walked in to one of those early gigs – any of my bands, or any of the other bands that were cropping up at the time like Desacrator and FAQ – with that kind of “hey we’re the cool kids and you can’t sit at our lunch table’ mentality would have taken a skateboard (or a drumstick, I developed a pretty deadly aim with those things over the years) across the mouth in short order. I don’t mean to suggest that anyone was less cool or less committed or less in love with the music or whatever; I can’t possibly make those judgments. What I do mean to suggest is that when it’s come to quoting the X-Files and Rolling Stone to validate your opinion of a given ‘punk’ scene, you’ve pretty well conceded the argument no matter how tall your mohawk is.

Punk isn’t about being so popular that you can find a few dozen or a few hundred people to tell you how punk you are; punk is about being so lonely and out-of-synch that you’d crawl out of your bedroom window at seven years old and go fall asleep on some girl’s porch (remember that one, Kilo? Maybe slightly before your time, it’s fuzzy…) that you had a crush on because even at that age the loneliness, rejection, and lack of love and peace in your mind and family life drive you to behaviors that by any modern measure would have you loaded up with prescription psychotropics and locked into a padded room as you move from desperately hoping to find friendship and comraderie in any kind word to violently and pre-emptively rejecting any attempt at friendship and comradierie. The young see this as rejecting the greater society – those of us who manage to survive such insanity realize that it’s really just a defensive posture to try and stop the pain of being rejected before it starts.

Punk isn’t about gaining acceptance among your peers; punk is about telling your peers to screw themselves because you’ll do things your way and damn the torpedoes.

Some people got the attitude…and some of us never lost that attitude even though to this day it continues to be a primary cause of financial loss. Some people were just born with it, or shaped in to it at such an early age through familial-social dysfunction that they may as well have been. While some people were trading in their mohawks and nose rings for well-manicured lawns and picket fences, others remain committed today to finding truth behind the lies, rejecting populism and popularity when they come at the cost of your sense of self, and questioning authority even as we become authority.  While some of us bowed to material “needs,” cut off the hair (or let the sides of it grow out), got married, and settled down in to a nice suburban life where we could cheerfully reminisce about our naughty college days; others stuck to our guns, stayed true to ourselves, and continue to eat crap for it every day.

THAT is punk, and the last thing it is, is glorious.

Rather ironic that now the crap some of us eat comes from the exact same people who cite our friends, venues, gigs, and music as support for their own ‘street cred.’ Maybe that break in continuity and logic is the root of Kalamazoo’s failure, ultimately, to live up to its grand potential. “Yeah, I’m more punk than you because I was actually AT the shows…that you weren’t invited to be part of because you were playing the damned things.” (Full disclosure: I never played the birdcage outdoor gigs at WMU, nor did I ever play Barking Tuna, nor did I ever really hang out on campus much at all to speak of other than going to Rick’s for various gigs. I did, however, play just about everywhere else; my musical ‘career’ had already come and gone once by the time most of the people I grew up with, and most of the people who were part of the “scene” in Kalamazoo punk or otherwise were out of high school.)

Sorry, but that’s not “punk,” that’s the same old self-aggrandizing elitist bullshit dressed up in a mohawk and nose ring regardless of what bands are on the soundtrack. Somehow I just can’t see Johnny Thunders or Wayne Kramer or Joey Ramone or Ron Asheton or Johnny Rotten getting behind that kind of attitude.

Punk is not about acceptance into a clique, but about rejecting the very notion of cliques; punk is not about having the right uniform, haircut, or brand of skateboard but about waffle-stomping the whole idea that there is such a thing as the “right” uniform, haircut, or brand of anything. Punk rejects these things out of hand – for a period, it even rejected the idea that you had to be a musician to be a musician – and in my own humble opinion anyone trying to bring such notions into the context of a discussion about any “punk scene” or “punk music” should be bludgeoned to death with a 500-pound lead replica of Jerry Only’s forelock.