Thursday, August 16, 2007

Punk is Dead

There, I said it! Happy now?

Punk is dead, and has been replaced with snot–nosed white suburban asshats. Punk died the night Sid Vicious OD’d. Punk was anti-establishment, anti-mainstream, it was all about damning the man going against the pop culture, and setting your own rules. Now? Now I am left with this? Screamo, emo crap!? I like most of the music that bands like this put out to an extent. But the scene, the community, ha there is none. It is a bunch of middle class kids trying to be hip and cool, making sure they have the right fashion, which is exactly what punk was against. What happened to the anti-government, doing things our own way?

It was an angry pit last night. And not in the comradely way of fuck the man! They were angry at each other. Years spent learning passive aggressiveness from parents who bottle everything up, and the combination of too much testosterone. Yes, moshing is a time to let this out; I know this. I love this normally. But in the pit you have a sense of community, brotherhood with each other. There is certain etiquette you follow while moshing. RULE #1: When someone falls down you help them up. You do NOT kick them in the head! When someone loses something and you find it on the floor you hold it up in order for the owner to claim it. You jackasses don’t know what slam dancing is anymore. Shows are not fucking excuses to kick the living shit out of someone just because you feel like it. The show didn’t call for that kind of anger; it wasn’t a super angry show! When I, yes a girl, has to break up your fighting because you pushed the kid down into me and started punching him, it is NOT OK!! You told me to lay off; I said fuck you this is not what shows are for. I am not afraid to start something because I will pull the “I am a girl” card and get you kicked out because you are ruining the concert I came to see. All of you fuck dweebs who can’t play nice in the pit and get pissed off because someone ran into you a little extra hard, need to leave now.

We no longer have a movement to be angry with; no one talks about taking down the government. We put our anger aside and then take it out on each other. Are we seriously too apathetic of a generation to not be able to direct our anger to, oh I don’t know, the government who is fucking shit up? The war? There are millions things to be upset about, but you have to take out on people you haven’t met. That’s it, I am done! You all have ruined a great show for me. You come here to hook up and to be in the scene. I hate your mainstream clothes, your crappy hair; and by the way you look like a fucking girl! Seriously? Man-pris? You are wearing man capris?

*Storms off, to kick the shit out of the next scene/emo asshat she sees.*


From SLC Punk:

Stevo: The Fight: What does it mean and where does it come from? An Essay: Homosapien. A man. He is alone in the universe. A punker. Still a man. He is alone in the universe, but he connects. How? They hit each other. No clearer way to evaluate whether or not you're alive. Now. Complications. A reason to fight. Somebody different. Difference creates dispute. Dispute is a reason to fight. Now, to fight is a reason to feel pain. Life is pain. So to fight with reason is to be alive with reason. Final analysis: To fight, a reason to live. Problems and Contradictions: I am an anarchist. I believe that there should be no rules, only chaos. Fighting appears to be chaos. And when we slam in the pit at a show it is. But when we fight for a reason, like rednecks, there's a system, we fight for what we stand for, chaos. Fighting is a structure, fighting is to establish power, power is government and government is not anarchy. Government is war and war is fighting. The circle goes like this: our redneck skirmishes are cheap perversions of conventional warfare. War implies extreme government because wars are fought to enforce rules or ideals, even freedom. But other people ideals forced on someone else, even if it is something like freedom, is still a rule; not anarchy. This contradiction was becoming clear to me in the fall of '85. Even as early as my first party, "Why did I love to fight?" I framed it, but still, I don't understand it. It goes against my beliefs as a true anarchist. But there it was. Competition, fighting, capitalism, government, THE SYSTEM. That's what we did. It's what we always did. Rednecks kicked the shit out of punks, punks kicked the shit out of mods, mods kicked the shit out of skinheads, skinheads took out the heavy metal guys, and the heavy metal guys beat the living shit out of new wavers and the new wavers did nothing. What was the point? Final summation? None.

Stevo: I rest my case on this: In a country of lost souls rebellion comes hard. But in a religiously oppressive city, where half its population isn't even of that religion, it comes like fire.

HerionBob: Well, it's a crazy fucked up world and we're all just floating along waiting for someone who can walk on water, man.

*Storms back* By the way I blame this on our nation’s puritanical “afraid of sex”-ness; our nation’s sexual frustration has turned into a blood lust. *huff* But that is a different post.
*Storms off*

4 comments:

Linus said...

That was a "grumpy old man rant" that rivals the best I have ever posted!

Let me add - I agree that punk died on 2/2/79, but in a way it was born dead... a stillbirth, if you will. The ideals of punk have always been so hard to achieve that it has always been filled with posers who just came out for the violence and the drugs. The real punk eventually outgrows the shows and the scene and becomes a movement of one.

Teh Dr. said...

Both you and Linus hit on a point, but didn't really expand on it.

Punk is not a single entity, not a stand alone complex. Punk, if I can liken this to biology, is not a single deviant organism. Rather it is a population, a species. Like all species it evolves--it changes and moves ahead to face new challenges. It is unique among all other species, however, in that the adaptation of this species is not dependent on the survival of the fittest. Instead the dropping off of the fittest is required for the survival and adaptation of the species. Those that drop off, like you, or Linus, or myself, we are the driving force behind its adaptation. We are, like Nietzsche described, the deviants that a strong system must be able to survive and tolerate in order to stay strong.

So back to the point. Punk is not dead, it did not die for us. Rather, we are the ones who died. We are no longer living members of the species, and it has adapted without us. But this is not a bad thing for punk or for us. For a species who's very existence is dependent, based on, its deviance from the norm--the man if you will--it must include individuals who will become deviant from itself. In that way punk will always represent deviance, especially from its own ranks.

MightyMightyMax said...

I would argue with Brian's point. I would reason that as the genre has changed, it has become a new genre. It is no longer punk. What exists today, while heavily influenced and inspired by punk, is something different and can't really be called punk.

Anonymous said...

I disagree, I believe it is no longer punk as we knew it, but that is the nature of punk...to outgrow what we know it as. -doktorsmith