When will music critics get over punk?

there's that nationalism thing again though isn't there...punk seems a uniquely british thing, and framing everything around it seems part and parcel of this desperate rage-against-dying-of-light desire to remind everyone, over and over again, that despite all this foreign muck of the past decade or so, britain WAS relevant to pop music once, we invented the damn sport, ah back when half the map was pink &c &c.

Lex this is going to be one of yr statements that gets 500 replies. Anyway - no, people all over the world are as precious about punk as the Brits are. I think you could make a case that in the UK it's a particular narrative of punk that's been mythologised, and in the US (and elsewhere) it's a sound, or set of ideals or principles.

dead kennedys + black flag + bad brains + minor threat = all the punk you'll ever need.

just. plain. bollocks.

a few recent cover stars from those publications I read...

plan b: the gossip, deerhoof, sunn o)))/boris
the wire: melvins, joanna newsom, smegma
rock-a-rolla: melvins, mike patton, sunn o)))/boris
terrorizer: rotting christ, mastodon, gojira
I don't buy it any more, but kerrang's cover stars are always, always americans. usually panic at the disco as far as I can tell.

not much UK love in there.

however, NME seems to have razorlight or the artic monkeys on the cover every week, so fair play.

when oh when will uncut magazine get of the fence and start talking seriously about americana, the little-englander xenophobic BASTARDS.

mmm. casual nazism. well done.

did you hear about ian stewart? he went too far to the right.*

(*shit joke for those of you aware that the lead nazi twat of skrewdriver was killed when he drove his car into the central reservation. sheer poetry.)

wtf is this shite passantino

xp

xpost

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41040000/jpg/_41040452_touch_203.jpg

crap. why would it have existed for that time only?

i'm sure you can work up a punchline to this.

Has the boat sailed on that "NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST" meme yet?

sunk at launch

-- lex pretend (lexusjee...), January 8th, 2007. (lex pretend) (later)

: (

But you have to admit the British music press have turned it into an art form, and one that is practised 364 days a year.

this is a more important factor in the problem than anything relating to sound-content back in the day: a critic imputes cage-rattling political-generational value not so much bcz this is "in itself" a mark of serious content, as that this will get the critic "taken seriously" (ie given a job) --- this is an enormously corrupting dynamic

Also the fact that Nick Kent had no choice but to take Sid's beating at the Nashville since each needed the other.

you truest punk on internet!

xpost

the shape of the world is just very different -- and punk helped change it back then, for good and bad, so it is a ROTTEN guide to new tactics for change and overthrow

Me too! And I still liked lots of punk records this year -- The Spunks album was great; Jo and the Muth!@#$%^ers made one of my favorite singles of the year; DC Snipers and Wolfgang Bang and Towers of London were fun! I don't get how punk is any less valid than any other music out there; that's just goofy. Sure, 99 percent of it stinks; how does that make it unique? Then again, I haven't read the British music press since the mid '80s, so what do I know?

All new NME writers should undertake a 12 months open learning course on the history of music from 60s - 00s. Once completed only then will they be unleashed on reviewing music.

Woebot will do the 70s progressive rock section.

http://www.idolator.com/?op=compiledresults

I think it's a uk music press thing, chuck.

oof, i've ben asking myself this for 20 years.

Therefore, punk fulfills a need. Or, rather, once identified, it becomes conceptually indispensable. Punk is a lens through which culture, music, values and the human experience can be viewed, organized and judged. There are many such lenses available, of course, but punk is unique and valuable in its particulars.

It is as difficult to conceive of pop culture/music without the thought-tool of punk as it is to do so without recourse to house, jazz, rap, folk, surrealism, impressionism, cinema verite, beat poetry, socialism, etc. All of which exert a similarly strong framing hold on the discourse.

Shoegaze = fake bastards with delay pedals. No wonder I love it!

HEY!!!

(ciao Ned!)

What IS in Switzerland these days? Yello and the Young Gods can't do it all by themselves.

Probably some metal band.
They had Celtic Frost and Coroner, pretty good stuff.

But but but they don't have splashy Europop albums! (Do they?)

Had forgotten about Celtic Frost, yes.

'Punk' as signifier is a combination of easy reference point and handy dullardry. Like most genres.

Yeah, it was called Woodstock.

Sure, there'd been tons of "oppositional, adolescent" music prior to punk. But punk is still very specific in the particulars of its expression: angsty, angry, sordid, pop-besotted, goofy, tragic, self-destructive, self-loathing, self-involved, bleakly romantic, blackly comic, nihilist, suicidal.

It's a yin-yang thing. Although the socially/politically/personally rebellious music of the 60s came in many flavors, it was ultimately codified into an Appollonian set of signifiers in the pop consciousness. We remember Woodstock oppositionalism in terms of togetherness, idealism, collective empowerment, human potential, optimism, constructive destruction and so forth. We recall it as something essentially positivist and engaged.

Again, it's a boring truism that punk is the negativist, Dionysian doppelganger of the 60s counterculture. While bands like Crass were basically hippies in punk clothing, punk's lasting contribution is the juvenile appeal of squalid, annihilatory destruction for simple destruction's sake. Punk visualizes the word as a cancerous, rotten sewer of greed, corruption, brutality, and vice - a playground of worms in which we writhe for a while and then die.

Combine punk with glam or early rock forms, and you get a blast of ferocious raw power that cracks jokes in the face of death. Combine it with the emotional/political concerns of the hippie era, and you get a furious, despairing crusade for social justice waged in gutters and slums.

But it remains a distinct conceptual object, and I argue that it's absolutely indispensable, now that we've formed it. Dunno that formalizing a whole fistful of disparate narratives into punk really was fair, in the long run, but what's done is done.

http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/shaft/857/university_challenge.JPG

http://www.narvesen.no/pub/config/dir_struc_root/Nyheter/Black-Sabbath-200.jpg

Tom was asking whether or not it was, retrospectively, such a great idea to lump all these different narratives into one monolithic "punk" meme. I dunno. But, like I said, what's done is done.

And Sabbath isn't exactly the same as punk, anyway. Sabbath is an earthly manifestation and punk is the ideal essence. Combine punk with Sabbath and you get sociopathic Norweigian geeks in corpsepaint burning down churches and feasting on one another's brain meats.

Look, I'm sorry, but these are formulations I can't get past.

Or, like, Husker Du.

These are mostly Greil Marcus' ideas anyway. Perhaps he presents them in a more acceptable fashion?

R'n'RftR'n'RS:

Exactly. Them too.

(ie given that x and and z are in the identical genre territory, the siginficant thing about what they're doing is pretty likely to be whatever it is that distinguishes them one from one another, ie exactly NOT the "essence" that places them in the same category)

I tend to resist these kinds of conclusions outside the self, let's put it that way. As a projection it can be whatever you want it to be, but it's not a universal value.

x-post with Mark, who puts it far more eloquently.

I think this issue is kind of the main difference between the US and UK claims to punk. Americans who are precious about owning punk are really, really not about the formalizing of the genre, and not really so much about CBGB's or the late 70s. They're more in a Lester Bangs mode, I guess, where the spirit of punk starts with 60s garage rockers and the MC5 and the Stooges. It's the kind of grand American romanticism where something is less about a place or event and more about some ongoing native spirit of nowhere-town teenage whatever. Which means that making the claim that the US is punk's real home necessitates working against formalizing it, so that you can go around saying that the Sonics or the Velvet Underground or some band on Nuggets is the real root of punk.

Whereas the UK claim to punk seems way more time- and place- and scene-specific: a fire lit in 1976 that burned through 79 in particular clubs with particular figures, etc. There's certainly "spirit" attached to it, but any feelings that punk was a uniquely British phenomenon are based on the claim that "it happened right here, right now," etc. And that necessitates formalizing, because the claim is that punk is an discrete, identifable event.

Why does punk persist in the critical imagination? In part because bands continue to think/feel/create in punk's musical shadow. Sure. But also because punk's philosophical/conceptual shadow is so long and so profound.

My argument is that punk is an indispensable conceptual object. That once we've grasped it, it reorganizes the way we view the world, and becomes a part of everything we subsequently experience, whether we know it or not. Like surrealism, or impressionism, or postmodernism, or metafiction.

Nabisco OTM, of course. I'm an American, and I'm talking about what is (perhaps) a uniquely American vision of punk.

When will music critics get over Dylan?
When will music critics get over rap?
When will music critics get over dancepop?

I am going to keep nagging at this, I realize. But I'm almost incredulous at these grand claims, frankly. I see Nabisco's point about the grand narrative via Bangs and all, but these days I more see the willful *limitations* of such an embrace. Sure it can reorganize your mindset, then it locks it down and never lets it go, from what I can tell. And the end result is irritating, not least because it presumes not merely a philosophical consistency of some sort, but a sole artistic mode of expression. It's a fine enough cul-de-sac but that's all it is!

Or, you get Raw Power

http://destination.rock.free.fr/rockint/images/rawpower.jpg

That's what I said upthread, so I pretty much agree, obviously! I think it is still thriving and cherished as a sound, or it seems to me to be, though the ideal doubtless precedes the sound for the people making it. I don't think it's uniquely American - European punks take ideals (and a sense of community, another thing missing from the UK 'punk legacy') seriously too.

In all humility, I have no idea what this means. I have no lit-crit background, though I may be ignorantly borrowing certain coded terms and repurposing them to suit my own ends. I'm really just thinking aloud, and thinking in a reactionary manner at that.

surrealism/impressionism/postmodernism/metafiction = all ways of tidying away the actual world (of people doing stuff) in order to "think about it philosophically" (ie miss the point of people doing stuff)

"becomes a part of everything we subsequently experience" = veils us from all subsequent experience to tidying stuff back up into a nice marketing genres

(i am being slightly disengenuous here as it was very massively a stage i passed through c.76-8?, and i feel a necessary one -- but then i think betrayal is the founding aesthetic-political encounter)

My argument is that punk is an indispensable conceptual object. That once we've grasped it, it reorganizes the way we view the world, and becomes a part of everything we subsequently experience, whether we know it or not. Like surrealism, or impressionism, or postmodernism, or metafiction.

You've got this wrong-way-round, then. You're talking about expressions of self-destructive nihilism and/or pyrrhic rebellion; punk was merely the application of this pre-existing tendency in Western thought to pop music (and marketing).

So I guess my answer would be that music critics will get over punk whenever the entirety of western culture gets over the ideas of art it's been fond of for the past 150 years, or whatever? And in the meantime, the "essence" of punk is so widely interpretable -- and assigned to so many different practical techniques, acts, styles, etc. -- that we can go on endlessly changing what music sounds like without having to give up on our vague notions of punk-essence in the least.

= if i say "i am influenced by punk", it is (probably) a statement about sound and content with a view to drawing the attention of those who like the sound or content

however once the attention isd drawn and the audience gather, the key to the content of my activity isn't what i share with my "fellow-punks", it's what i offer that they don't -- or perhaps (slightly less psychotically) it's my particular contribution to the general discussion

Punk in the UK press surfaces as oppositional not in the sense Adam is using (oppositional to life, or bits of it) but as oppositional to other music. "I Hate Pink Floyd" rather than "I am an Antichrist". Punk's status as narrative rests on the idea that it was the ultimate "next big thing", a cleansing fire that wiped out what came before, shamed current mediocrity and hit rock's reset button. Of course punk didn't really do these things at all, but this narrative gives writers a very powerful (and more importantly, very easy to use) example to judge current music by.

The result is resignation and decline, because of course nothing can live up to punk's erasing power, and because it's a self-unfulfilling prophecy: in order to be a second punk, the new thing would have to erase punk itself, which within the self-defeating terms of debate is impossible. We need a new punk to do what punk did, but nothing can do what punk did, because if it did, "what punk did" wouldn't matter anymore.

The UK press doesn't use rap or teenpop or Dylan in this way, so doesn't need to "get over" them.

xposts.

every single person that likes "punk rock" i know love sabbath.

metal and punk haven't really been "at odds" for like 20 fucking years, jeez louise!!

also, nabisco is dead on that in the U.S. punk is perceived as an ongoing thing...not really tied to a certain style or bands. absolutely correct.

http://www.myspace.com/ganglionofthedeep

There's nothing comparable, really in the US punk history, unless I'm forgetting something.

***

Ned: I totally understand yr. point, re: conceptual lockjaw. Abstracted thought-objects are useful tools, but they can also be blinders, or excuses for lazy, uncritical thinking. OTM 100%.

But that shouldn't discount the utility of formalized thought systems. Languages, too, can impede understanding, after all. I'm not arguing that punk should continue to loom large in the critical imagination, but merely trying to explain why I think it does. And it does.

Personally, I think the punk-as-essence thing I'm arguing IS intrinsically valuable, as I think all the conceptual tools I mentioned are intrinsically valuable, but I don't wanna make that the subject at hand.

***

Mark S: Gotcha, but I'm not so far above the fray. I like having tools with which to organize my thoughts, and don't think that recourse to such tools necessarily entails being hamstrung by them.

***

Nabisco and Ed III: Totally OTM. Of course the ideas that I and others often (perhaps lazily) shorthand as "punk" have been around for a long, long time in various forms. Punk is a particular crystalization, however, and one with a lot of cultural/conceptual traction. Punk isn't entirely some abstract essence, after all. It's inseperably grounded in a particular set of moments/personalities/sounds/fashions/icons. I'm not saying that it has to be of utility to everyone, but it's awful damn useful to me.

And it's worth noting that however important criticism may be, it's reflective by nature. In large part, punk exerts a hold a critics simply because it exerts a hold on bands/audiences.

***

Way back when, Ned said the people just wanted to rock. He was right, of course. In many ways, what I call punk is just something that resulted from the confluence of that desire (built of a decade's worth of flabby "progressive" pop) and certain then-popular fin-de-siecle memes. But it worked. It took hold. It took a bunch of secret art-world narratives and gave them to the people, and the people took them to heart.

It lasts, for the most part, because it lasts. And we'll stop talking about it when it ceases to matter.

You're going to have to do a LOT of unpacking here.

I get the impression sometimes that "the 60s" (or even "Woodstock") in the US served/serves a similar function, but I think probably pop culture in the US is just too vast and changeable for these kind of narratives to lock discourse down in that way.

xpost

Which I liked very much, I don't think I've ever seen that part of the story articulated this way.

IOW, it's not surprising that everyone will bow to the word "punk" if all we necessarily mean by it is "new / exciting / 'doesn't play by anyone else's rules' / etc." -- the sorts of people who praise rock bands are rarely found praising them in any other terms, and especially not in terms of being traditionalist / boring / playing by everyone else's rules.

Funny thing is, I've never read Lipstick Traces, though I understand that what I'm talking about is, by and large, Greil's dead horse. I used to enjoy his Artforum column in the mid-to-late 80s, though I remember little of it now. That's probably where I was initially exposed to this point of view.

***

Nabisco: "...Adam's issue is the rather broad collection of people who respond to the word "punk," well outside of those who feel like listening to actual/codified punk-rock music."

Totally, exactly, 235% OTM. Fuck, I'm getting tired of saying that. I should just short it to NOTM. Anyway, punk has much more utility now, at least in American popular discourse, as a way of philosophically organizing the world ("totally fucking punk rock") than as a targeted reference to a particular sound, fashion or period of history.

***

Ned, re: unpacking.

Fuck, Ned, the unpacking is killing me. Suffice it to say that I was merely quoting the received idea that punk came along to kill Pink Floyd.

It has about the same level of generality! The only big difference I can find, apart from complexity, is that "this artist is bad-ass" elevates the artist above you (artist is special), where "this artist is punk" tends suggests they're One of You, rather than facing you from the industry side of the table.

That second part might be one of the big unfollowable failures of punk, kind of in the terms Tom's talking about upthread: punk wants to overthrow the industries that mediate music, so that it comes "from the people," but of course that's impossible, and they most they could ever manage was to secede into a kind of mini-state of indie labels, with a smaller group of listeners still aligned with a smaller mediating power structure. The attraction to "punk" these days just seems like an endless call to somehow finish the work, which can't ever be finished -- but at least the word "punk" keeps it revolving and on its toes now and then.

I wasn't saying they were at odds, I was just saying punk doesn't have a monopoly over metal on some of the persona stuff some crits are a lot quicker to attribute to punk; Alice Cooper was countering hippie complacency 5-6 years before ("I Love the Dead" fan) Rotten et al.

That's exactly why punk is such a useful conceptual tool, even if you only use it to deconstruct its own mythology. "Punk" is the way that we've elected, as a culture, to codify the myth of the revolutionary creator in a rock 'n' roll context.

Hell, you might as well ask why "rock" persists in the critical imagination...

Not having it as a shorthand might be more useful, really, because (a) we'd actually have to use words to talk about what we mean, and (b) we wouldn't keep confusing the ethos we like with the particulars of punk 77 (e.g., forever thinking "loud and fast" must equal "rebellious").

And, as such, is about as useful as "that's so metal!" and "keepin it real yo!"

It's useful because it's broadly appealing, fashionable, and endlessly recyclable. It's useful because it's useful to the culture at large, and I'm interested in the forces that shape the culture-culture I inhabit.

We don't have culturally current, "bankable", creator-destroyer myth in film or literature. We only have punk. That's the way we've chosen to talk about the ravaging fire of the new. That's the way we've named the romantic allure of self-negation, of life outside all rules and laws.

Should it be so? Who knows, and such quibbling is entirely beside the point. Punk gives us a set of icons that perfectly embody the myth, and new ones come along every day -- youthful, haunted, explosive, erotic, beautiful and deliciously doomed. Not incidentally, punk also gives us a concrete root SOUND, a physical transmission that bypasses the intellectual faculties to speak directly to human emotions and the nervous system. This pure sound encapsulates the exhilaration of annihilatory creation better than any poem, film, essay (ahem) or performance art project ever could.

"Punk" is the way that art, especially musical art, now wages war against complacency, against humanity, against old people and their boring shit, against decency and indecency alike. Will it always be so? No, of course not. But I think it'll be quite a while before anything else comes along to claim the throne.

***

Ed III:

No. It's more than that. "Punk" is as useful as "hip-hop". Which is to say, "really, really fucking useful."

But (predictably) I think I'm right, too...

***

I kinda hoped that the "youthful, haunted..." bit would sound funny, but perhaps the calibration is off.

Shrug.

Or it could be the way you've reduced such an artistic impulse to a single, loaded term.

I can listen to a blistering drum n bass mix by Arsenic and say "totally fucking punk rock" or "that's so metal" or "they keepin' it real yo!"; all three are appropriate reactions, but each speaks to my personal background/blinders more than it does about the music. Cf. Ned and others on the tyranny of terminology.

ONE OF US

YES, YES^^^^^

Because John Lydon is ageless and nothing says "lack of complacency" like the 100th band to sound exactly like the Ramones 30 years on.

When I spooled out that ludicrous "deliciously doomed" thing up there, I wasn't suggesting that you or I might find it delicious or even that we might choose to describe art/music/life in such grotesque terms. I was talking about the structure of the meme itself, how it's conceived and consumed not by critics, but individuals and by culture at large (if such a thing can be said to exist).

Punk as a lifestyle, as a way of approaching life and art and society is alive and well in America. It's alive in mainstream commercial culture as a signifier of youthful sex appeal, artistic truth, and countercultural authenticity. And it's alive in non-mainstream, individual culture as a way of dealing with life, forming sub-groups, and assigning value to things.

It's alive in music, in advertising, in literature, in film and in everyday life. Differently for different people, but in ways that connect and add up. That's what I'm getting at.

http://www.fodderstompf.com/IMAGES/disco/boot/pksamp.jpg

I like "punk" because it's a lens. You can pick it up and/or put it down. If you pick it up and hold it to your eye, it changes the way things look. And that can provide information about the thing itself, about the viewing eye, about the analyzing mind, and about other stuff.

Therefore I defend the conceptual object. Just like I'd defend the hammer. As a tool. As a thing that can be of use. Hell, it's especially useful in decoding how "punk" is viewed/manufactured/consumed by society in general.

Whereas if all you're saying is "punk is an interesting lens to look through now and then," I'm not sure anyone would argue with you. Most lenses are interesting to look through, sure.

Yeah, that's cool and everything, but you seem to want to romanticize the hell out of that. Victoria's Secret sells bras by preying on women's feelings of inadequacy, and people who romanticize punk are probably trying to sell you something, too. Let's ruminate on that instead of reiterating the "Punk is a signifier for all that is fucking crazy and dangerous!" meme.

It's alive in music, in advertising, in literature, in film and in everyday life. Differently for different people, but in ways that connect and add up.

You sound like one of those commercials for cotton or plastic. Punk's in the cereal you eat, it's in the car you drive, punk cured yr uncle bob's cancer...

Fuck, fuck, fuck the unpacking. I'm starting to hate this, but I can't stop. It's like picking a scab. On the subway. While people stare. Or at least I assume it is. To the subway scab-pickers, I mean.

"You keep vacillating between (a) admitting that punk is a fairly vague ethos we appeal to fairly casually, and (b) trying to claim punk is a specific thing."

I do that because I think it's clearly both, and I think that the two things are inseperable. They inform and expand one another.

***

"And I'm far less convinced when you're doing that second part, because it hits a lot of false notes. E.g., I don't follow film, but there are endless new-creation myths in literature and most every other art I know anything about -- 'On or about December 10, 1910, human nature changed.'"

See, I'm convinced that the problem is that I'm not explaining things well. My point was that punk is the way we currently codify the myth of the artistic creator-destroyer in Western pop culture. We don't have a comparable myth in film or literature. We have individuals and works that embody the myth, but we don't have a cinematic or literary genre that simply IS the myth. And if we do, it isn't alive an well in malls, on MySpace, in high schools and on TV. Punk is how we collectively conceptualize the "beautiful, damned, doomed" thing.

"Metal" and "goth" figure in there too, of course, but that's outside the sphere of the discussion as I'm framing it.

***

"E.g., punk is not just "the way we've chosen to talk about the ravaging fire of the new" -- it's also the way we've chosen to codify and curate the events of the past, the way we've chosen to identify things teenagers have been doing for decades, and the way we've chosen to refer to various styles of music, mainstream and not. E.g., punk's icons don't "perfectly embody the myth" -- that's vaguely oxymoronic, and has cause and effect mixed up. The myth consists of our received wisdom about what those icons did, which -- myths being myths -- tends to turn out to be mistaken, slanted, oversimplified, exaggerated, etc."

The myths are very old. The human symbols we choose at any moment to graft onto the myths are new. The old myth denatures the particular individual, but the individual colors the myth. It's a loop.

And the myths are absolutely, perfectly true as used. The actual life story of the individual avatar is just window dressing, to be modified at will to suit the needs of the myth. There is no falsehood in this. The needs of myth trump historical accuracy at every turn. This is as it should be.

***

"E.g., saying "Not incidentally, punk also gives us a concrete root SOUND" -- this is what I meant about fudging between the ethos of punk and the specific sound of punk rock in the late 1970s. Just by the nature of punk's aims, these cannot be the same thing for very long. If your punk ethos is all creator-destroyer, going back to the concrete root sound will neither destroy anything nor create anything; it's not punk anymore."

I'm not sure this is true. The root sound of punk is very similar to the root sound of metal and of rock in general. It's the sound of angry, inarticulate, disaffected adolescents given control over very loud machines. So long as the resulting sounds are the product of certain kinds of feeling/activities, they will tend to induce certain emotional/physical responses in the listener. Such music will always be associated with "punk rock", even if it don't superficially resemble '77 punk at all. And I argue that the association is both valid and necessary. Punk persists in music because it is so very loosely defined on one level, but so incredibly specific on another.

Have you ever picked up an electric guitar and plugged it in to a TON of bad amplification and screamed your fucking lungs out as you played it? Have you ever done such a thing as a drug-addled, hormonally imbalanced, self-destructive adolescent?

It's a very, very specific feeling. And it has everything to do with the joy of destroying the world. You could do it with a guitar, with a synthesizer and even, perhaps, with a laptop (a ruggedized laptop, at least). This music ties in to the whole creator/destroyer "essence" bullshit I was talking about earlier on a very primal level, but it's a particular instance of it.

That's why I think "punk" has so much cultural traction. We don't fetishize Artaud simply because plays and essays don't speak to people on the basic, primal, instinctual level that loud noises do. Punk rock music took this creator-destroyer meme and made it into something physical in the world that human bodies could feel and respond to even if the idiot at the mike was screaming in a totally unfamiliar language. The sound clothed and seemed to encapsulate the meme, and that's why the meme and the sound are still associated.

Hell, there's even a cool set of clothes to go along with it. As long as teens are using loud, violent art to rebel against something, punk's fingerprints will be all over it. Well, for the next couple decades, anyway...

I'm not saying that punk should signify the things it seems to. I'm just trying to parse the language. And I think the things signified ARE important, no matter how you personally view them. They're important because they influence so many people and are so alluring (therefore contagious).

YES, "punk" is a lame/lazy piece of shorthand that conflates several seemingly unrelated things:

1) The sound of electrified adolescence,
2) A set of late-70s/early-80s fashion memes (ideas, clothes, sounds, attitudes),
3) An ancient creator-as-destroyer myth, and
4) The romantic allure of self-destructive behavior.

But it fucking WORKS, people. The lame shorthand conflation has burrowed into the mind of the world and made a home. It influences bands, kids, advertising executives and television networks. Hell, it even influences art critics.

I'm not saying it's a good thing. But I AM saying that any critic who doesn't see the importance/relevance of this is either foolish or willfully perverse. (Please to note that willful perversity can be an admirable quality in a critic.)

AAAAAH!!! Kitty picture is so cute!!!!!

I like this better than anything else.

How did you and your friend coax that conjoined tapeworm to triangulate around those filing cabinets?

I'm not talking about punk as music, or even as a set of factors that influence musicians

OTM

what you ARE doing, Adam, it seems to me, is letting us all know how you have discovered that a word ("punk") has shifted what it signifies, like all words do; it no longer refers to only: 1) a stick which burns slowly and is useful for lighting fuses 2) a male hustler 3) a style of music popular in the late 1970s or 4) a person who likes that kind of music but - and this, i believe, is the sum total of your point - that is also now signifies a certain admirable attitude that a lot of people see in the latter two definitions. this happens with many, many words. sometimes the words are so valorized and glamorized - like "punk" - that they become what frank kogan calls SUPERWORDS. "cool" for instance. or "bad," for a little while. "rock" too. people argue over whether something they like is more [superword] than some other thing, or if something can TRULY be called [superword] or whether it's just pretending, etc.

the question isn't asking "when will people stop using 'punk' as a superword," though. it's asking "when will music critics stop slavering over the particular sound of particular bands that were popular in the late 1970s." note that critics have, outside of a few rarified circles, gotten over "hot jazz" but that people like paris hilton continue to use "hot" as a superword. trying to identify and describe some essence that links the way it's used now with the way it was used then obscures far more than it reveals about the things you care about, i.e. the "culture at large," how ideas change, etc.

Way back when, I said this: "...punk = authenticity of [white] adolescent oppositionalism, rejection. Therefore, 'punk' fulfills a need. Or, rather, once identified, it becomes conceptually indispensable."

This point didn't seem particularly controversial or even to me, but I went ahead and made it anyway. What the fuck, you know? Anyway, my words were criticized by various people for various reasons, and I happily (perhaps foolishly) attempted to defend them. Unfortunately, along the way, I got defensive, and in turn wrote about 10,000 more words than were strictly necessary. I understand that some of them may even have been flowery.

I've said several times that I'm not a punk and don't have any special fondness for punk music, ideals, fashion or politics. But I do think that "punk", as a cultural formulation, is useful and resonant in a way that is no longer true of "hot jazz".

That's all I'm gonna say. I'm not pretending to break new ground, and I suspect that the way I'm saying this is somehow more objectionable to folks than the point I'm trying to make.

also, coincidentally, punk today.

So if anyone other than Peaches comes up with any actually revolutionary popular music in the next year, American or British, I would be genuinely surprised.

This thread is making me want to eat my own face.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/music/story/0,,1982677,00.html

(from the Guardian/James Brown thread) have anything to do with the impetus for this thread?

To me, his appeal lay largely in the fact that he lived more like an outlaw rock'n'roller, or a black punk rocker, rather than somebody you'd associate as being one of the Brand New Heavies' influences.

In the 1960s, it took balls of steel to stand up for civil rights as loudly as James did. There was his promotion of black capitalism and his refusal to temper his music in any way for whitey. There was also the funny stuff he did, like brandishing a shotgun at a meeting with an insurance company because he really wanted to know who had used his personal toilet. Because he'd taken so much PCP, the toilet enquiries ended up in a police chase with 23 shots fired at his Jeep.

b/c this is a genuinely reprehensible use of "punk" as a concept.

You should join in the Dom-Lex dogfights! Might change their tune a little (or not...)

Oh, and brandi, that post alone could have entire books devoted to its solution. I'd just put it all down to unalloyed contrarianism... ;-)

but it isn't even that earnest! like most graun articles these days i physically couldn't read it because it was wrong in detail and in general. you may as well say picasso was the first punk if you're going to say cinema in 1907 was a flickering newsreel of the boer war. i'm not even sure why we're calling him the 'first' 'modernist'.

"Was Arthur Askey the first PUNK?" Lucy Mangle is made to investigate.

ILM IS BACK BABY

Wrong dude, wrong. I (and I'm sure a lot of other people) just get a little fatigued by the long convulted posts. That's all. It just makes you an easy target sometimes. Just ignore my dumb shit. And besides, you are completely OTM on the Infinte Jest thread!

Not a chance. Charlie Harper will still only be 73.