#5: i'm not titling this after that jawbreaker lyric, you know the one
in which the Discourse alights on one of punk's stupidest, and most ahistorical, circular arguments
This weekend, a couple of Twitter things happened—one, a TikTok of a MAGA teen deeply misunderstanding Green Day’s American Idiot made the rounds (the record is 16 years old; I am, continually, Methuselah), and two, a 2018 photo of John Lydon wearing a MAGA shirt popped up again. All of this prompted people who don’t really have much connection with punk to talk about punk, and it was annoying.
One of the tropes that resurfaced during this deeply irritating whirlpool of discourse is the idea that you can’t be right-wing and punk, which … you very much can, and to pretend otherwise is to turn one’s back on some very important history of punk ambiguity. (I outlined a bit of it in the intro to this list for Pitchfork in 2016; here is a brief scholarly primer about punk’s usefulness in the ‘70s and ‘80s as a neo-Nazi recruitment tool should you want to read it.) The reason that white power skinheads don’t show up to shows the way they did even into the ‘90s is because there was a good decade plus of concerted effort to kick them out, which involved a whole lot of fistfights. And the fact that punk in-jokes about the validity of the first Skrewdriver record (“before they were racist”) are now well into meme territory is because of punk’s ongoing essentially apolitical nature.
Punk is misread as a fundamentally political (and a fundamentally leftist) movement because there’s plenty of vocal leftism in the canon, but if you’ve actually spent any time sincerely being involved in the subculture it’s pretty clear how untrue that is. The essence of punk is reaction, is opposition. It matters what you are in opposition to; it could be literally anything. And as punk is over 40 years old at this point, the search for Authenticity which every serious punk engages in at some point is often a fundamentally conservative, backwards-looking affair. (More on this in a later newsletter.) There is definitely punk truth, but it is born out through a complex matrix of relationships rather than in concretized aesthetics and canon knowledge. (Which, again, fundamentally conservative!)
One of the great things to me about digging around in punk history is exactly how complex an affair it’s always been, just like any other human endeavor. There are people who do incredibly cool shit and people who do incredibly wack shit and sometimes—often, even—they’re the same person. There are endless petty fights and endless GOOD fights and endless debates about meaning, too, in which it becomes incredibly clear that punk is more of a vector than anything else. The more you know about it, the less single-minded and simplistic it seems. The tensions of punk, the creative and the destructive constantly trying to balance one another out, are one of the aspects of this by-turns-frustrating-and-terrible-and-wonderful subculture that’s kept me around for so long (the others are obviously a few good friends, love of records, and a general set of ethics that gels well. Also I love running around and yelling in a band, it’s good for me).
In summation, stop arguing about corny dinosaurs who haven’t done anything relevant in years and listen to records that make you feel alive.* Even better, make music that makes you feel alive.
*I will say that in the case of the MAGA teen and American Idiot, a record so mainstream it is literally a Broadway musical, the retconning of George W. Bush as … not George W. Bush from liberals rehabbing his image as Part of the Establishment in the process of their own move rightward and conservatives lambasting him as Part of the Establishment as if they are not is very, very fucked up. If I have one Middle-Aged Radical Hobby Horse, it is “We didn’t spend all that time protesting the Iraq War for this shit.”
This was like a cool glass of water on a hot day, as a black man who went to punk clubs in Orange County and Riverside I know how right wing punk can get. Much appreciated 🙂
This is something I've been saying for years. For every Propagandhi there's a Cock Sparrer. Conversely for every Lee Ving there's a Stza.
People, unless they're actually part of the culture, think that politically punk is leftism all the time but it's a really blinkered view that only reinforces the fact that the mainstream is pretty damned ignorant of counterculture whether it's ours, the hippies, the ravers, the goths, etc. They come up with stereotypes with a few grains of truth but it's mostly bullshit that doesn't hold up to any serious scrutiny.
I figure in our case, from my point of view anyway, it's likely because of the attention that got paid to the left leaning bands early on like The Clash (and X, D.O.A, etc) which was about the only exposure to our culture most people in the mainstream ever had, until the 2nd punk explosion in 1994 and with that a good number of the bands were left of center also.
tldr: The mainstream doesn't understand anything but itself, and even that's debatable