punkfish - a response

so when other blogs have really great posts, i have this tendency to rant in the comments section, and i'm not sure people really appreciate that. so i'm trying something new. this is in response to Henjin's inspired (and inspiring) guest post on tesco's blog and keep in mind this is all just my perspective:

to begin with, you're right: punk is dead

that is the movement, the music (if music can die), not the attitude. the attitude is laying in wait for the right moment, the next great adventure, for its time to cause havoc again. i suppose you might say that it is waiting for a messiah - but then, aren't we all.

for those of us who grew up in the eighties and came of age in the nineties when punk had already made its point, become a "movement" and then a fashion, we had to discover punk backwards - DK was one of my first and i had to get to the beginning in order to realize that, punk had suffocated in its own puke and like all subcultures, it fell victim to the aesthetic principle: if you don't look like us or listen to the "right" music you're obviously the enemy. but that was in the eighties and i was still using kool-aid and permanent markers to color my hair.

by the nineties, as rebellious and violent as the punk-culture had become, you could actually go to HotTopic at the mall and for a few hundred dollars(!!!), come out looking like a street punk - if you hadn't noticed, this is a contradiction. most of the punks i knew in the nineties were strutting around like over-stuffed peacocks and projecting the "fuck you - i'll look any way i like!!" attitude to - well, everyone. these punks were aching for the same meaning, the same release that punks in the seventies fought for: the ability and expression of rebelliousness; but the media and fashion had already gutted the rebellion. (this is definitely not unique to punk - making something mainstream is a great way to tame anything out of the ordinary - it works kinda like kryptonite).

i didn't consider myself punk at this time and in fact i'm not sure i ever have, not even when i had a 4-in mohawk. i'm not so good with labels, you see, and besides i died my hair so much because i wanted to be born with purple hair (or blue or green or or or...). i had punk friends though and one of them (with a tri-hawk at the time) sat me down long before i ever "looked punk" and explained how i was like the seventies punks, the ones who thought too much and decided that the best way to be heard was to stand out and yell.

so where does all of this leave us in 2005? to be honest, i'm not really sure - i've basically lost interest in new music. "punk" fashion is now worn by pop-idols and many would-be punks are listening to techno, trance, house and lounge - some of which, like any music genre, is really good. i know there are still underground punk and hardcore scenes in basements across the country and college radio - if you can find a good one - is still a good, if random, place to find music that hasn't been stripped to fit the crap that mainstream radio pushes between commercials. Hey - there's always internet and satelite radio right?

there's a few punk and rock bands out there that i can still dig - Happy Anarchy for one, Flogging Molly for another, but as a whole it feels like since mainstream music is between waves so is sub-culture rebellious music - afterall, the two mirror each other like evil twins. my advice? listen to whatever you like, it makes no difference to me.

thanks again to henjin and tesco for inspiring this rant.

- mysfit signing out