Punk: Is it dead?

m.

They were chose by Malcolm McLaren for what they looked like.

Then, they weren't about the music, they were about the confrontation.

Why, though?

i'm with msp.

This guy says yes!

http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/getback/144976/hot-topic-punks-in-a-fake-punk-world/

i've been reading "please kill me" lately and thinking that I can't really imagine this sort of thing happening again. obviously post-60's misery had a lot to do with it. and since I can't imagine anyone being as naive as they were in the 60's again, I don't see a reaction, a legitimate, real reaction, to culture like this happening one more time. but i'll probably be proven wrong.

when the next one comes, we won't even hear it approaching till its exploding around us. like a V2 rocket.

Now that lots of old fanzines are getting scanned in and posted to blogs, I wish I had the time to make a compendium of "punk is dead" essays from the last 30 years. The perfect topic for the last page of the fifth issue of your 'zine, one issue before you give up, and three months before you get listed in Factsheet Five. Last page of issue four is complaining about skinheads.

OTM. And I'm not dead. Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

i've been reading "please kill me" lately and thinking that I can't really imagine this sort of thing happening again. obviously post-60's misery had a lot to do with it. and since I can't imagine anyone being as naive as they were in the 60's again, I don't see a reaction, a legitimate, real reaction, to culture like this happening one more time. but i'll probably be proven wrong.

― akm, Monday, October 5, 2009 4:18 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

in "enter naomi: sst and all that" by joe carducci he says something like "punk was really just the nihilistic phase of hippie" which i always kinda liked

That's a great line, but so much of the hippy stuff was pretty nihilistic even really early on - punk just came up after the hippies had kids and got all hair-shirted about their nihilism.

Stewart Home reckons that the hardcore remnants of the 60's underground were a key element in London punk: Lemmy, Mick Farren, CR@SS, Charlie Harper, Captain Sensible and of course Maclaren, Westwood and Rhodes.

"The perfect topic for the last page of the fifth issue of your 'zine, one issue before you give up, and three months before you get listed in Factsheet Five. Last page of issue four is complaining about skinheads."

This zine could be your life.

That's a great line, but so much of the hippy stuff was pretty nihilistic even really early on - punk just came up after the hippies had kids and got all hair-shirted about their nihilism.

― Brio, Tuesday, October 6, 2009 9:01 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i'm sort of selling the whole line of thinking short...it's way better in the book which is required reading about the idea of Punk, at least the L.A. branch IMO...

punks were too old to be hippie's kids though, punk is already formed while hippie is still going (as you point out)

greg ginn saw the grateful dead like 80 times or something, i don't know what that means, but it probably means something.

yeah there was a really interesting/flawed book about all the links between the post-hippie UK traveller scene and the Crass punk scene, it came out around 1997 and was called Senseless Acts Of Beauty I think?

punk's still alive here in the Pacific NW. I work at my new job with a 23 year old prep cook who is a punk kid from Montana. he once spent $250 on an original pressing Wilson Pickett record, dunno if that's punk or not. he thinks Against Me sold out and he spent all last weekend skating. he just discovered X and is really into them.

I do see some serious dilution happening, even the hardcore fringe is diffusing into the subculture in general.

for further reference:

are there still punks?

Sort of off the subject, but I'm rereading Dr. Adder, a protopunk sci-fi novel written in 1972 by PK Dick protege KW Jeter. Wasn't published until '86. Weirdest thing about it is the "1972" part. Futurist hippie nihilism reads EXACTLY like 70s punk rock. Except without the actual punk rock...

post excerpt please!

Maybe I will transcribe some later. But not now, no.

Situationist imagery and thinking runs all through UK punk, but you find it in UK hippy rags like International Times - which, like the 60's underground press round the world, are actually really confrontational, in a way that doesn't fit at all with the received image of "hippies".

yeah, the first wave of punks were too old to all literally the children of hippies - though Sid Vicious and Joey Ramone both had kind of proto-hippie moms, right? A drug fiend and a bohemian, respectively.

And if you think of punk of something that was going on prior to the late 70s, you find a bunch of folks who basically were just hippies playing what amounts to (proto) punk rock. Laughner and Rocket from the Tombs/Pere Ubu, Electric Eels, Debris, Iggy & the Stooges, Helios Creed, side 2 of Neu! 75, etc.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_oIBqaixxaEs/Sg3N-3VpxqI/AAAAAAAABbs/4ZsYLp-mzqI/s400/f.jpg

This ties up the the connections very neatly - the UK Underground paper of record International Times published a "Punk Is Dead" cover in . . February 1977!

View it at their archive here (slow download)

http://www.internationaltimes.it/page.php?i=IT_1977-02-01_G-IT-Volume-Q_Iss-6_001

http://i637.photobucket.com/albums/uu92/damien_stone/jams.jpg

The concept of Hippie has really become clouded by the 'hippie lifestyle' - earthy, crunchy mellowness and flaky permastoned Deadheads. The real 60's counterculture was all about psychedelic, sexual and youth revolution NOW. Even the Peace&Love trip was an aggressive pacifism - "freaking out the Squares", "dope, guns and fucking in the streets". You can't get more Punk than the Yippies or Weather Underground.

I'm reading an anthology of articles about the 'Drug Culture' published in 1970 and it's striking how frightened and bewildered the adult Establishment was at the time, where modern-day Hippie is willfully non-threatening and 'peace loving'.

the aftermath of hippie, the long 70's love hangover, is what you see in hippie culture today. the 60's punks either died or got put in jail or became drug zombies or moved to the country to nurse their wounds. the same thing happened to a lot of my beloved peace punks in the 80's. they realized that screaming at a wall is futile and discovered taoism. it's inevitable. short of armed rebellion, it dawns on you that you can't change the system. so, you work on acting locally and all that. that's what the me generation was all about. that's why former black bloc people now live in the woods and brew kombucha for a living. breaking starbucks windowpanes didn't really get them anywhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W8h4W6IBGc

imagine getting fired by some cunt in a clown costume

"Glad to see you go go go go goodbye/ Glad to see you go go go go goodbye"

Struggling to think of a single figure from the punk era who wouldn't have been an HR nightmare. Strummer maybe.

broke: punk
woke: steampunk
bespoke: hrpunk

(xp) Glen Matlock obv.

skrewdriver were good at following orders iirc

pogo in the boardroom!

(but only when your stocks go up)

Line Manager Sensible

http://www.cvltnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Bad-Brains-1979-.jpg

true punk HR

"We're moving the HR Department, the general opinion among the management team is that the ground floor should be used for more front facing departments and the 1st floor for finance and upper management, do you or your team have any objections?"

"I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement"

how perry como can revitalize human resources.

Struggling to think of a single figure from the punk era who wouldn't have been an HR nightmare. Strummer maybe.

Strummer would go AWOL to Europe for weeks to hide from his boss, but at least he never stuck up for his subordinates when they were being bullied incessantly in the workplace

that is a hilarious forbes article

old punker fite - https://consequenceofsound.net/2019/03/johnny-rotten-and-marky-ramone-fight/

Yes

Legit beef or staged?

what a surprise I'm on Team Everybody but John fucking Lydon

I don't think it was staged, Marky looked genuinely mad

Assume Lydon just likes to insult people, especially turning it on whilst in Johnny Rotten character and, much like a Don Rickles audience, you’re expected to play along.

Johnny Rotten really looks like a potato.

Eh...I guess you would not expect any different a result. One thing I always got that was Lydon blamed the nyc punk rock junkies for hooking Sid bad onto smack, so it was not unexpected for him to be hostile to an old nyc punk. Marky also threw some shade towards in the MC5 in that exchange too.

Marky obv. from the apolitical it's only rock 'n' roll school but Lydon is talking garbage, of course.

Before the PiL show last year there was a $50 meet n greet, I assume it was just a few minutes of personalized abuse from Lydon.

Marky is an oaf, Lydon is a clown

And oh I don’t lol why

And oh I don’t lol why

TBH kinda was hoping Marky would get up and deck Rotten that whole time

He doesn't want to risk his wig falling off

And oh I don’t lol why

― curmudgeon

Punk's not dead, I just find it difficult to care about it in 2019.

really sad to watch them argue about the things that happened between 1976-1981

john lydon is a fucking idiot these days and has been a has been for a very long time, but he can never erase the importance of his old bands.

I don't know, John always seems to be playing a character in public. I've heard tell that he's much more approachable in person. God help you if you're a clueless member of the press, though.