Cafeteria Food

Punk, compassion, and public service.

We are not even a month into Trump’s second term, yet it has felt much longer owing at least in part to a months-long observance across online platforms of the “vibe shift” this renewed administration entails, and which was initiated within hours of Election Day 2024. Whether in celebration or in premonition, the vibe shift is protracted and seismic, washing over America like the suds of deep-cleaning exfoliant. If people less inclined to change were casting out harbingers of “uncertainty” in the election’s lead-up, they surely may be too paralyzed with fear to bask in validation. But at the same time it is worth considering that the rhetorical proportions of the vibe shift may not consistently match up with its realty, at least outside the near-term.

Vibe shifts worth their name and force are nothing if they do not engender vibe settlements. Only once the consequences of a shift are secure and taken as granted, their origins mostly obscure, and any questioning of them is seen only as heresy is any of this meaningful. A proper vibe shift molds communal and individual psychology to such a degree as to create a new kind of citizen. This is why Curtis Yarvin and his ilk talk continuously of the New Deal and the post-WWII consensus by which we acclimated ourselves to a skeleton of centralized liberalism. Rather than echo Yarvin I wish only to borrow the basic thrust of his argument for my own purposes in highlighting a much overlooked, and not unrelated, vibe shift, so minuscule in its genesis yet so vast in its outcomes.

People in my elder millennial age group who came up in the turn-of-the-century punk scene are apt to understand it in the context of either post-Nevermind or post-Dookie. The spectrum of snobbery may offer some compelling substitutes, but I agree from an aesthetic and cultural standpoint. Nirvana and Green Day lent an aspirational quality to punk, showing how much you can achieve within the genre’s limited strictures. But that is to tell only part of the story, and that part is rather abbreviated compared to the ethical and political context by which we are more accurately post-Fugazi.

We tend to think of defining moments in punk in the same scope we apply to history more generally: grand, panoramic, near-mythical. Nevermind replaces Michael Jackson’s Dangerous on the Billboard charts; the Sex Pistols spoil the Queen’s Silver Jubilee from a boat on the Thames. Yet epic events are convenient concealers for more modest precursors. Like, The Velvet Underground at Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1967 would be nothing without The Velvet Underground at Summit High School in 1965. Some catalysts don’t even have an exact date. I cannot pinpoint the exact show in the late-1980s when Fugazi first enforced their prohibition on moshing, I only know that once it was in place, and consistently applied over the course of the band’s existence, it took hold of our collective consciousness, it reconciled punk to civil society in a way that was impossible in its earlier waves, and it affects how we perceive freedom as a whole even now.

Anti-moshing was one part of Fugazi’s ethical brand. It was attendant with their control of ticket and record prices, their refusal to sell t-shirts and other ephemera, their insistence of playing with the house lights on, and their overall commitment to independent culture amid every possible temptation to do otherwise. Respecting the space of your fellow spectator was simply your contribution; it’s fun to be included! And all told this was hardly demanding. Fugazi was not Agnostic Front and any defiance was left at obvious provocation. Moreover, it was far less sweeping than the abstinence-based moral reforms of Ian MacKaye’s youth. Controversial as the straight-edge program was it was also not a set of decrees, as MacKaye was at pains to remind everyone. The anti-moshing stance on the other hand seemed comparably anodyne in the more rarified alternative rock atmosphere, and hardly like anything approaching behavioral control, especially as it became something like convention.

In the light of others’ lived experience all of this seems ludicrous. After all, moshing is not extinct and some concert conditions are hardly what you’d call safe. I’ll address that later. What I’d like to consider now is what follows from the basic position from theory to practice.

In addition to being a logical byproduct of MacKaye’s own credo, anti-moshing is an outcome of the moral-mindedness of the Dischord Records DC scene entire, through which punk became a communal concern and individual impulse became peripheral. Following Bad Brains, negative reaction gave way to positive assertion. It was not enough to play in places that would have you, but to play in places with a purpose. Fugazi played so many benefit shows that they could be tabulated. Punk had formulated a General Will. The “I” did not disappear but it became subservient to the collective “you.” In that conception it was not so difficult to appreciate the equality your body had with the bodies beside you at a show. And the band stopping to make an example of some misbehavior was simply an extension of the performance.

Less is said, of course, about the shift in dynamics between audience and performer. If the mutual antagonism between early punk bands and their crowds was not desirable, it at least maintained a certain equal plane between them. Through Fugazi’s ethical ingenuity, however, they contained the crowd and liberated themselves. While you as a spectator could not nudge or jostle your neighbor or form a special space to do whatever, the band could play a single song for as long as they wished, or could sing while hanging upside down from a basketball hoop. Thus a new compact was formed. Not only did it spread to other, less likely, bands like Botch and The Locust, but it framed punk altogether in a more rigorous civic-mindedness that went beyond show venues, lyrics, and zine screeds.

In May of 2021, the Linda Lindas, then a trio of two teenagers and a 10-year-old, debuted their song “Racist, Sexist Boy” at the Los Angeles Public Library. The song itself was nothing punks haven’t heard before. In fact it was something of a throwback, which made sense as it went viral among a certain age group, garnering the praise of Hayley Williams, Tom Morello, Thurston Moore, and author Viet Thanh Nguyen, who said “Racist, Sexist Boy” is “the song we need right now.” They have parlayed the attention into a record deal with Epitaph, an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and on the soundtrack to the riot grrl revival fantasy Moxie covering Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl.” Realizing perhaps that they should impress more than their parents’ friends, they’ve shifted more to power pop, yet their initial moment is another small gesture signaling the next stage of a wider cultural shift.

People have their own ideas as to how accents of pink hair and piercings found themselves on social workers, medical examiners, and librarians. The scope of Fugazi’s influence may be debatable, but I don’t think it’s dismissible. First because the Dischord model proved highly imitable in college towns (Olympia being a prime example) where it gained a social pedigree that bordered on the aristocratic and an intellectual pedigree that bordered on the clerical. But also because of the logistical realities of DIY culture at the time. Not simply the demands of organizing shows, making zines, and starting labels, but in the archival demands of the amassed printed and recorded matter. That combined with experience in food co-ops, shelters, youth enrichment programs, reading groups, and other collective activities, punks acclimated themselves to institutional life without sacrificing their core principles.

Such a fusion occurs neither consciously nor without an underlying need. Less in the need to secure justice or to propel progress, but more in the need to keep down what Fugazi’s example had replaced.

Hardcore and alternative rock emerged in what might be called a Promethean era of punk. That thymos you keep hearing about now was already fueling doomed Great Man pursuits in the west coast scene alone. Darby Crash sought a lowlife form of demagoguery—influenced by Scientology, Nietzsche, and Fascism—at the expense of his talent and his life. Henry Rollins’s time in Black Flag was given over to a Jim Morrison-aping stage presence with all the charisma and clarity of a bubbling tar pit. To the extent that the post-Fugazi context still functions at its purest level, it is in the sensitivity to these impulses, which never entirely disappear, and in fact tend to mutate within the Fugazi mold. Such as what happened with reactions to later straight-edge such as found in Starkweather and Integrity. And public service equivalents are no doubt taken into account. Though the Fugazi model is not without its own ironies, or perhaps its own necessary evils.

Could this shift have happened collectively? Could it have been truly grassroots? In a sense it was. Not much could’ve been accomplished without the combined efforts of a mass of people, almost ant-like in their movements, forging the network of self-made culture. But the top-down element, the guiding moral spirit of a select elite (add to Ian MacKaye, Calvin Johnson and Kathleen Hanna), is not negligible. By their examples and their rhetoric, they gave weight to collective effort beyond mere utility, as proof that collective effort was distinctively better than the individualist, antisocial alternative. Even if that ambition had mixed results it was not at the cost of legitimacy. People who grew up in the shadow of Fugazi, as their nearest elders are want to point out, have a softened attitude to punk. The violent outburst at Woodstock ‘99 are simply aberrations while the nihilistic atmosphere of earlier punk as depicted in Suburbia and The Decline of Western Civilization is unthinkable. Moreover, the relationship with authority, as guided by their own sense of compassion, is more congenial. Even if certain modes—like the apparent Hüsker Dü fan Tim Walz—fell short of their aspirations.

But the greater price of compassionate punk is the reduced value in freedom as a realizable end in itself. Freedom at its most basic being the voicing of the individual conscience, especially when it parts from the goals of solidarity. Instead, freedom exists in the same way that a dome of mashed potatoes exists on a cafeteria tray, pushed to the plate’s edge by a compassionate loaf. If that seemed nutritionally sound to one generation, that may be empty calories to the successor. Not that compassionate punk follows a prearranged destiny as a doomed, ignoble pursuit. Only that the main course, left out too long, has acquired a gamy texture and a greenish-grayish hue. And an impatient young are not likely to risk food poisoning to appease the faded ideals of the ascendant elders.