Punk Crock: Punk Rock Whistling Eternal Yesterdays by Eugenia Williamson

[HuckleB]

http://thebaffler.com/salvos/punk-crock-williamson

"For a movement that famously proclaimed there was no future, punk rock has had a remarkably durable half-life. Forty years after Television’s legendary residency at CBGB, the world is awash in punk. In the last twenty months, former Village Voice rock critic and punk champion Robert Christgau wrote a memoir about his downtown New York youth, Kim Gordon published her memoirs, Viv Albertine published hers, Richard Hell released the paperback edition of his, Patti Smith released the follow-up to her National Book Award–winning memoir, and HarperCollins signed Lenny Kaye, Smith’s guitarist, to write a memoir of his own.[*] Ramones fans can look forward to a forthcoming Martin Scorsese–helmed biopic and a documentary promising new footage of the seminal band, whose last founding member perished in 2014.

Punk has cracked the upper echelons of the tech sphere too. Earlier this fall, in a pictorial called “The Stylish Men of Tumblr,” the New York Times introduced the world to Pau Santesmasses, a thirty-nine-year-old product manager whose own Tumblr account is devoted to “modern architecture, skateboarding, and punk rock”—thus apostrophizing a movement of self-professed anarchic rebellion as if it were a tasteful accessory. Photographed atop the grand, dramatically lit staircase in his employer’s Manhattan offices in a pristine gingham button-down, skinny khakis, and shockingly clean sneakers, Santesmasses described his shirt as a “punk-slash-mod thing.”

...

Punk, we greasy teens soon learned, was once the rightful province of a worthy few able to discern reality from simulacrum, irony from sincerity, punks from poseurs, shit from Shinola. Punk was diametrically opposed to massification; like an ailing Victorian child, it would die if exposed to the slavering crowd. The thrust of this purist insider aesthetic was neatly summed up in the first track of the debut (and only) album from L.A.’s great crash-and-burn hardcore punk outfit the Germs—“What We Do Is Secret,” a dictum that was almost instantly repealed in a series of cinematic and literary productions devoted to the sainted memory of martyred Germs founder Darby Crash. (The Janus-faced nature of punk’s tetchy relationship to commerce was also embedded right there in the Germs original lineup, which featured Belinda Carlisle, who would go on to front mega-pop New Wave leviathan the Go-Go’s before posing for Playboy, marrying a Republican fund-raiser, discovering Buddhism, and—of course—publishing a memoir.)

...

On a recent trip to New York, Ariel Pink, a musician I like very much, played a secret show a few blocks from where I was staying. I found out about it on Twitter hours after the fact and I just felt lame. Had it been 1975, I would have remained blissfully unaware for days, maybe years. First-person accounts of the past allow the beholder to believe she would have been alongside the people that mattered, not left in the dark. In the end, this non-exclusive sense of belonging is the great benefit of any lingering purist allegiance to punk, no matter how commodified, cynically exploited, or otherwise doomed it proves to be. As that embarrassingly decrepit Boomer icon Mick Jagger put it a half-century ago, in a line almost certainly repurposed in a Martin Scorsese soundtrack: “Our love is like our music—it’s here and then it’s gone.”

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A fair start to a longer discussion, for those who might be entertained by such a discussion. And, as the author notes at the bottom of the article, both Patti Smith and Viv Albertine wrote very good books that addressed feminism, art, and life, much more than their punk histories.

[kwolf68]

1. Could be a good discussion

Punk rock is great and despite my love of progressive rock, punk was great when it came out. The music industry needed punk and punk would influence music of the 1980s...punk influenced new wave, heavy metal and would itself morph into hardcore. Then the 1990s it blew up, it ditched the harmony-less harmonies and developed some great bands/songs in the 1990s.

I appreciate the ethos of punk rock as well in bettering yourself and your world...whether it be the straight edge wisdom of Minor Threat or the extreme intellectual brilliance of Bad Religion, I loved the movement in each of its incarnations. What I also liked about punk and what I think gives punk its edge is sometimes it seems like they didn't care if they made a nickel off the music (which of course was almost never true).

[Throd]

2. Like everything else, punk got co-opted by the marketing department.

[HuckleB]

3. For many, I think the marketing department was always in charge.

It just worked better than they planned.

[Throd]

4. I remember in 1980 everything in the punk scene was strictly DIY.

I liked the whole underground vibe of it all. By the mid 80's the whole thing was just another fashion accessory, ideology need not apply.