Punk: Is it dead?

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.

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...

god that book is so great. There's some discussion of it on one of the ILE sci-fi threads. Jeter is a erm, very weird (and not entirely palatable) dude tbh.

modern-day Hippie is willfully non-threatening and 'peace loving'.

The ones who went to, eg, the G8 or G20 protests weren't. Well a lot of them weren't... they will probably go the way of the Black Bloc ppl Skot mentions but there's a healthy turnover, so it seems to me anyhow

(NB I'm not suggesting hippies and anarchists are interchangeable)

Also "you can't change the system"? You can, but the process is longer, more painful, and infinitely more drawn out than it seems like it's going to be when you're 17. I don't know about where you live, but round here, if you're involved in any kind of social activism, ageing beatniks/hippies/punks whatever run the mailing list and take the minutes.

^^^not as sexy as being in a band or breaking a window tho

You can do that too, but changing the system that way(or by being sexy in any other way) is very much a right time/right place thing.

And, by the way, don't tell me you can't change the system. I've been around a while, I've seen it change a lot, and it doesn't happen all by itself.

The ones who went to, eg, the G8 or G20 protests weren't.

...and there's your 21st century punk. the style might change, but the spirit (really bohemian antiestablishmentarianism) remains.

Punk is Dead, Long Live Punk!

(as I put on Stations of the Crass)

Yeah, actually when it comes to politically active types, the flimsy boundaries between hippie and punk pretty much cease to exist. Think this has been true as long as the groups have existed.

If anyone out there wants to raise the "trustafarian" strawman, as far as the UK goes, I can say from personal experience that everyone I've ever met who remotely fits the "crusty punk" stereotype has been from a hard-knock working class background, with a contrarian family background, be it religious or political, that goes back for at least a generation.

^^^this is not true in the US. like, at all.

Huh. I've known upper-crust hippies + punks and working-class hippies + punks. Sneering at "trustafarians" has always pissed me off, though. I don't think there's anything wrong with being middle-class, rich, whatever.

there's something wrong with it when you're asking me for fucking change to buy a 40

Not saying there's anything wrong with that, just that it seems to be the knee-jerk dismissal in certain quarters, and it's very far from the truth in my (UK) experience.

I can't be the first to propose the term "upper-crusties"?

I'd be amazed if you were the first. It's a wingnut standard that the working classes are docile cattle unless disturbed by decadent upper-class lefties.

^^^this is not true in the US. like, at all.

I really don't think it is in the UK either tbh - as it goes, when people run through their repertoire of 'lol alternative lifestyle people are all from wealthy backgrounds and can go home to their parents' houses when they get bored' I tend to assume they have nothing interesting to say BUT it didn't spring from nowhere and Soukesian is working with an unrepresentative sample I fear

So, if it didn't spring from nowhere, where did it spring from? Are you saying there there is NO history of working class leftism in the uk? Just forelock tugging serfs?

I mean the strawman didn't spring from nowhere, tsk

The upper crusty stereotype does have some validity I think. I know back in Glasgow in the 80s I knew a whole bunch of crusty punks, some of whom were from upper middle class families or even upper class backgrounds. Others were from slums. But I think it says more about the pressure in the UK to "know your place" that this situation is accepted as self-evidently hypocritical. TBH their position was very much "it's not where you're from, it's where you're at", which is absolutely fine with me.

(haha I've spent the last six hours listening to this http://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Score-Ten-Voice-People/dp/B002HRE0F0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1255044915&sr=1-1 so I'd've done well to forget British working class leftists)

xpost: Comes from nowhere? Seriously, do you really feel that individuals, yourself included, can have no awareness of their own oppression unless stirred up to revolt against their rightful rulers by bored, sadistic aristocrats? You must hate yourself an awful lot.

I went to school in UC Santa Cruz, which is a haven for this type of shit, and I can tell you I had PLENTY of fellow students who were from comfortable middle class backgrounds (parents paying tuition, etc.) who would travel to SF to sleep in the park and cop speed and whatnot. I know at least one of these people basically went crazy and became full-time homeless. Another one (my sophomore year roommate) died before turning 21. Others just became ravers/tweakers. Most annoying fucking people ever.

I think yr misinterpreting DJ Mens, souk.

Anyway, I don't even have a problem with relatively well-off kids adopting hobo lifestyles. Kids are inherently pretentious, always looking for some way to be cool and a place to fit in. They often do some silly shit in sorting all that out, but as long as their hearts are in the right place, I'm basically okay with whatever. Plus I don't give spare change to crusty street kids on general principle.

No. This is not about Anarchism or Socialism as a passing phase. I know plenty of people, of all classes, who are in this for life. Don't confuse it for a six-month student pose. If you love UK punk, you must understand this, it is absolutely part of the story and applies to the early death/doom scene as well. Reading "Please Kill Me", what struck me was how scared (and incredulous) NY punks were by The Clash. Their kind of leftism was part of the scenery in the UK in the 70's, and they couldn't understand it at all.

Agree with all that. But the existence of leftist lifers doesn't disprove the existence of those for whom is IS a passing phase. Lots of kids of all backgrounds go through a "radical" phase that they eventually outgrow. Rich kids do it, poor kids do it, and kids in the middle do it. Same is true of the lifers. They come from a variety of economic/social backgrounds.

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.