To the parents of America:
First the good news: punk is dead!
I know what you’re thinking. “I’ve heard that one before; always from punks themselves.” True! But I mean it this time. Finally, the great ironic anti-slogan is now incontrovertible fact. Punk simply no longer exists. Society has changed to such an extent that punk can no longer be accommodated. Where it appears to function, often as small and trivial clusters in economically anemic municipalities across the nation, it is merely as a facsimile.
But now the bad news: just because something is dead doesn’t mean that it’s not viable at a later date. While science has yet to master reanimation of the physical corpse, the corpses of concepts are fully capable not only of being revived, but of reviving in a better, more robust condition. It might be better to say that punk is only mostly dead—lying dormant, waiting for society to let its guard down and give it a pulse.
For you parents across the nation, the potential of nü punk (as opposed to “new punk,” which is made-up bullshit) is a matter of serious distress. What if their children are the very incubators of this terrible catastrophe? No one can know for certain just when and under what circumstances nü punk will emerge; so it helps always to be prepared. That’s the easy part! For while punk’s forthcoming outward appearance may not be predicted, its internal spirit never waivers from past iterations. For all of its reputation for disruption and anarchy, it’s among the few truly reliable things in human life.
This pamphlet is designed to guide you, anxious parents, through the various types of punks, their strengths, their weaknesses, and their overall disruptive potential. I have assessed four distinct types of punk (the critic, the devotee, the marginal, and the loiterer) and matters related to these types (polemic, censorship, gatekeeping, and conformity) that are sure to reappear and be adopted by your nü punk progeny.
To be sure, these are not to be considered as rigidly separate. A marginal punk is by necessity also a devotee punk, though not a critic. A critic can be a devotee but not a marginal for the same necessity. But a devotee can be a critic and a marginal and still basically function. All three types, at various points in their involvement, has been a loiterer. I have furthermore avoided the “rock journalist” tendency of being encyclopedic; becoming a little too precise, too enthusiastic, too thrilled by trivia and data, categories and variations. They aren’t much use. Indeed, controversial as that seems, you will soon notice how little punk actually has to do with “bands” or “music.”
The Critic
The first gesture a punk makes, once it is made clear in themselves that that is what they are, is a rude one. They take an assessment of their surroundings and find much to be rude about. Many of the punk’s entry material—Sex Pistols, Green Day, Ramones, Stooges, and even some Clash—reinforce this initial impulse. There is nothing worth giving a fair hearing that won’t hear you to begin with. The early punk is brash, impetuous, and disorderly. They are decadent in their tastes and polemical in their style of expression. In every sense, they are critical.
Even the self-harm the early punks engage in is an expression of outward hostility to a culture that made them and wanted to exert total control over their bodily integrity. Danger, disregard for manners, simplistically radical politics, and general existentialist if not fatalist thinking drives the punk critic. Punk criticism presents itself loosely, though the punks themselves, out in the world but more intensely among their peers, practice that criticism to a high degree of purity. A punk learns—or perhaps intuits—early on that the punk’s only true vice is compromise. Yet on the whole, this mode does not last but a few years. Some punks, long on excess for its own sake, will not survive it. Some punks will exhaust themselves into retirement. Others will ascend to a more sophisticated understanding.
Even so, the critic is the platonic ideal of the punk. It cuts closest to pre-existing countercultures and, not unrelated to that, pre-existing marketing strategies. Its crude formulation easily latches on to echoing youth-centric emanations that seem every bit as awkward and as aesthetically distinct from its contemporary mainstream as critical punk was.
Critical punks can replicate widely, but they degrade the more they multiply. Antiauthoritarianism is their only consistency, which, never clearly expressed to begin with, tends to degrade as well into sheer solipsism and perpetual, directionless antagonism. The punk critic always risks delinquency on the one hand and indolence on the other.
A DIGRESSION ON POLEMICS—Argument alone may not separate man from animal, but rigorous and spirited argument might. Anyone so educated can point to examples of polemic of greater intricacy, erudition, and intensity than that which is offered by punk. Punks are not one to indulge in sophisticated discourse bespeaking of nuance and a desire to persuade. Nor are they any more willing to embrace deliberate rhetorical conceits that suggest satire. (Satire is not unheard-of in punk, but it is not natural to its impulses, which cry out for earnest redress and the yearning to be understood.) Punk does not engage in argument properly so-called.
Punk polemic is undomesticated polemic: instinctual, immediate, reactionary in the strictest sense. It disdains grace and does not find virtue in patience. It feels no camaraderie with its interlocutors. It prefers to hound its opponents into silence. It resisted the discipline of democratic and representative process. Even Jacobin rhetoric in the National Assembly appears liberal by comparison. It is too moral to be tethered to procedure. It is too anxious to arrive at consensus. Its end is to arrive at clarification against the obscurity of the culture punks are resisting.
There is something pre-modern in its character; moved by a logic that many thought was rightly extinguished in the march of progress. If punks are humanist in principle, they carry it through the mouth of the barbarian, and the inquisitor.
The Devotee
If a punk matures without lapsing out of it, they become committed. Commitment instills devotion. Devotion reorients how they think about and act within punk. The net-positives of punk become more concrete with the solidifying and more sustained connection with the punk community. Devotees are less inclined to recklessness. Inarticulate and directionless destruction (in deed and in word) decline in their appeal. Devotees see perpetuation of a good as the better method of resistance to societal evil, even as good and evil are not usually in their vocabulary. They move to create; where they can’t create, they shore up the creations of others.
Devotees assume a protectiveness, even a territoriality, as a result, and can easily reconcile themselves with impulses not typically or happily associated with the punk mentality. A devotee can, in the name of their community and its creations, assume the role of guardian or censor. They can, if need be, “pull rank” in order to undo disruptions or get ahead of any threat of disruption. Punk devotion is authoritarian in the main. Punk devotees defer to higher figures as readily as they assert their force over anyone perceived to be lower; though how that lowness is arrived at is never clear or consistent across scenes. But the will of the collective carries; and ethics are handed down by uncompromising example, if not by decree.
The peak of the devotee collapsed as the 2000s gave way to the 2010s and the internet gained in influence over mass culture. The devotee is a humanist, pre-digital type. It is, moreover, anti-irony and anti-detachment. People affect a stance or style of devotion without the responsibility or intimacy that gave it substance. The critic has reasserted itself but has not matured. Without physical spaces, there is nothing concrete to maintain and no people with whom to cohere in any meaningful sense. Post-digital punk deals in rhetoric and signal.
A DIGRESSION ON CENSORSHIP—No one in their own conscience believes themselves to be capable of censorship. Certainly not the censorship they imagine, handed down across the decades like civil libertarian lore. No one wants to reflexively suppress ideas they find repugnant. No one wants to ban pornography, violent video games, to obscure perfectly natural nudity, or edit out swear words. They would never, in the words of Allan Bloom, “bolster corrupt or decaying regimes.” Even the sympathies that attend account-suspension and other combat tactics against “disinformation” seem half-hearted and barely real. These are the self-soothings of people with no apparent communal obligations beyond carpooling, let alone any serious beliefs. People, in other words, who would not last long in punk.
Punk is not, in spite of popular conceptions, a mere label. You cannot affix it upon select attitudes as one would affix a USDA sticker on meat. You cannot attach it to utterly anodyne activities (like voting Democrat; or Republican for that matter) like a proxy baptism. Punk is a peopled collective. And like all peopled collectives on the face of the earth, it is rife with conflict, dissension, and chaos that is not limited to performance. It is brought together under the shared conviction of its rightness. But punk is not, at the same time, a constitutional order with articulated rights. Punk’s “ethics” are duties by another name. Application of those duties manifest differently within the collective. The community and the individual are sometimes at variance in this process. This puts onus on the community to achieve its own cohesion and to clarify the proper ethical approaches. Under such solemn auspices, censorship is punk as f—k.
The Marginal
A subculture takes shape when enough people escape from a social center and into its margins. The margins are a dark place where new styles and customs may assemble themselves as resources and imagination dictate. Punk is no different from other subcultures in this respect; yet its understanding of margins within its own community takes a different, indeed, more functional and fundamental understanding.
The punk space is identified by its own kind of center: a mass of furious activity (more on that below) in which custom and instinct are intwined. Both for those in the moment and those looking at a certain remove, the center is the culmination of punk, the total and purest expression of the freedom for which punks make constant claim through more rhetorical means. Even when, as mentioned before, that freedom is put under restriction, it is no less a significant conveyance of punk culture. It is spontaneous and uninhibited to degrees both envied and feared.
But punk has its own margins, to which many punks sequester themselves on their own accord, either out of temperament or out of some greater need. Those of the former camp will more easily notice the wall that the latter camp form around the more vola
AN INTERRUPTION ON GATEKEEPING—Gatekeeping and censorship tend to be conflated as at least coming from the same kind of mind. Censorship and gatekeeping go together like a hydrogen bomb and an atoll. But in truth they are not only distinct concepts, but entirely opposed. Unlike censorship, gatekeeping appears good on paper, demonstrating courtesy and sensitivity toward the needs of others. Diversity is not a light issue to the gatekeeper; quite the opposite, it must be handled with the greatest delicacy, which is to say, an exacting vetting process. Gatekeeping, purely conceived, is a kind of custodial duty.
But in practice, gatekeeping is too localized, too arbitrary, and too petty to meet proper custodial standards. The gatekeeper’s idea of custodianship is to cover any mess with sawdust and power up the buffer to move in randomized patterns. Gatekeepers are insecure; they exert an influence that is mostly pretended against outsiders while they themselves feel like they are barely accepted in the community they keep clean. As such, they hold to a level of purity that is impossible to exist outside the imagination without a series of freak historical opportunities falling into place at the exact right time. Gatekeeping is a sweeping, savage, yet simultaneously imprecise anti-migratory policy, policing one set of values while overlooking other, often more malicious, factors in the community.
tile activity. These form specific functions to better accommodate the mass they surround. They tend the doors, they man the merch tables, they provide security, logistical support, financial and labor support, and other managerial tasks on which the center depends.
The marginals are not limited to the show venues themselves. They are on the album liner notes, in the press releases, in the contracts, and other paperwork and attendant materials that keep scenes running. This, even to me, is the most boring part of this essay. But punk should be a place where boring people—or people who can tolerate doing boring things—should be welcome. Punks can’t do without systematizers, bookkeepers, and chaperones. Should it ever reach a place where it can do without them, then it has reached a point past its own humanity.
The Loiterer
When you think of “iconic” images of punk, your mind is sooner to go to an individual signifier. An individual album cover may register immediately, or an individual punk’s personal aesthetic expression of the culture. But iconic images are not necessarily representative or even true expressions of any collective movement. For truth in punk, you need to look at a punk’s face, particularly when that face is on the verge of sinking amid a mass of barely distinguishable faces.
There is no punk if it doesn’t have witnesses. If the devotee carries the flame, the loiterer is that flame’s fuel. Even in sparse numbers in some basement in bumfuck nowhere, the loiterer is at once a reliable accelerant within the basement and a long-range transmitter beyond it, where they create more loiterers. Why else are we here because they can be created so easily and propagate so widely?
That said, it is easy even for the more rarified versions of punk to look down on them. Bands have had a notoriously complicated relationship with their crowds, seeing them often as antagonists (which they could be in their particular ways), as something to be ignored, or as something to be galvanized for some ill-conceived end. They are, in a word, likened to and derided as nothing more than fans.
Yet where would the bands be if the loiterers weren’t there? They are the cohesion that every punk works for. They are as much the creation of punks as their tools and the perpetually truant wards of their state. Their strength is in their lack of individualization, their near-feral herd instinct. They are the most absolute of units. If the top three extol and honor the commitment of punk, the loiterers in their mere existence prove that that commitment is no joking or passing impulse.
AN INTERLUDE ON CONFORMITY—Conformity is one of those things that’s always happening to someone else. A conformist is someone who acquiesces publicly to a given set of rules or customs even if they do not hold them as true or wise for their own sake. That in itself might not be enough. By that standard almost everyone on earth who cherishes their personal tranquility and bodily security, even if they don’t care all that deeply for maintaining the delicate fabric of society, is a conformist. Most people are groaning, indifferent rule-followers for the sake of convenience. The conformist fully deserving of the distinction gives their vocal consent and their seemingly heartfelt enthusiasm for the dominant morality; their motives may be pure even if their thinking may be limited.
The poser, in our present context, is the conformist par excellence. Posers find themselves under scrutiny not because they are disrespectful toward or ignorant of or lazily committed to the spirit of what they profess themselves to be, but because they are so hyperconscious of it that they tend to overcompensate. They treat every habit or ritual of the punk as a kind of iron dogma. They must present themselves just right and master every detail less they invite still more scrutiny for apparent falsehood. The sin of the poser, as it is of the conformist, is in trying too hard.
Obedience occurs when acquiescence is in perfect harmony with personal belief. The person who obeys does so with an honest heart and a clear conscience. When you are in possession of the truth there is no need to try, to provide proof, or to seek approval of presumed betters. To the Free Thinker—the kind of person you’ve never debated before ever—there is no apparent difference between the obedient or the conformist. Though the difference is clear enough on careful examination: the obedient have firm judgment, conformists have clouded judgment, free thinkers believe themselves to be exempt from judgment.
Appendix: The Corpse Poser
When I was 19, I got knocked on my ass in Philadelphia. It was 2004; my college friend Ryan and I drove down from our quaint steel town campus to see The Dillinger Escape Plan play at the Trocadero. This incident took place before Dillinger had even got on stage. We were still enduring The Locust’s set when a burst of energy erupted from the crowd in our exact direction. Ryan was standing directly in front of me, and we hit the floor like dominoes.
I recovered from the shock fairly quickly, but it was shocking. We were standing at the far back edge of the crowd where I had assumed we would be more or less unperturbed by the maelstrom at the center. But when I peered over the people in front of me, I could catch glimpses of the manically flailing bodies in hooded sweatshirts with bandana-obscured faces, and that safety seemed rather tenuous. It was indicative enough at the other end as well. At some point in the set, Locust singer Justin Pearson stopped the show to direct his attention square into the pit. “I just want you to know that everyone here thinks you’re a bunch of assholes,” he said. The cheering crowd drowned out the rest of his chastisement. They resumed playing to no discernible change.
Even in my naïve sense of security I knew any intervention into the crowd violence would result in fuck all. Perhaps it was because The Locust is not the kind of band you can enjoy while sitting still, if at all. Perhaps it was because Pearson was haranguing the crowd in a bug costume made all the more ridiculous by how it accentuated his rail-thin frame. Perhaps it was because it was Philly, and Philly shows are like that. The year before at a matinee show at the much smaller First Unitarian, American Nightmare flat out left the stage because multiple, and seemingly very personal, fights kept breaking out in the pit.
Or perhaps it was because the moral authority The Locust was trying to exert over the crowd was already a spent force by that point. Mid-2000s rock culture was struck with an anxiety that vacuums left in the previous decades needed to be filled by the next available substitute. Everything that seemed spontaneous and anarchic at the time—such as Aaron North of The Icarus Line smashing a case in the Hard Rock Café containing Stevie Ray Vaughn’s guitar and trying to play it—looks now like recitations of ritual. Homages to the past—such as Bob Mould performing at a tribute to himself with No Age, Ryan Adams, and Dave Grohl—seemed to double as auditions. But each failure only widened the vacuum. And every gesture was expended as if from a carpet emporium during a going-out-of-business sale.
It is typical to cope with these changes by accepting their Spenglerian inevitability and to rationalize to the point of fawning every fashion that is ascending in their place, whether irony or the digital age or a new generation or just progress qua progress. To mourn what is lost and irretrievable is barely thinkable. Mourning is arrogance. Becoming a corpse is nothing to be proud of. But sometimes a corpse just wants to say “Fuck you.”
i tried to like this and my computer froze (punk is not dead)