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| Big Mario's Pizza, Seattle. The inspiration for this piece came while listening to punk in this booth. |
It’s easy to picture arena rock: conjure up the tank-topped
falsetto greatness of Freddie Mercury or the white and black, mime-from-hell
makeup of KISS. It’s easy to conjure up an image for pop music: Madonna in a
wedding dress, maybe Miley Cyrus donning a skimptastic outfit while belting out
sounds defiantly if you’re a bit younger. However, it’s always been hard for me
to picture punk rock. Sure there’s the green mohawk. The iconic sweat-torn jean
jacket complete with band patches. But then there’s also an underlying
infatuation with pizza that comes to my mind. Vans skate shoes. Skateboarding.
MTV. Jackass. Even heartthrob actor
Ashton Kutcher.
Why does the idea of punk lead me down so many different
avenues? These associations confuse me not only because punk seems to be very
special in this regard, but also in that I associate a food for which I have an
innate childhood love with a musical genre I claim to care nothing about. Why
do I connect a certain food or shoe brand with punk alone and not with any
other type of music? This was the type
of question I found myself confronting when I started the stud-filled journey
to identify what punk music means to me.
Growing up listening to the likes of jazz smoothies Al
Jarreau and Kenny G on my parents’ early nineties stereo system, the punk rock
genre has always been near-impossible for me to define within my own musical
schema. It’s easier for me to explain some specific genre like Norwegian black
metal or psych soul. These are genres that emerged out of necessity of location
or blending of genres. Trying to disseminate the layers of a musical system
like punk, something so essential to the music being created today, is like
trying to reverse engineer a milkshake.
All it takes is a listen to a few songs from post-punk rockers
Butthole Surfers to understand why the concept of punk is so hard to pin
down: the Surfer’s sound ranges from grunge to metal to what this outsider
believes to be almost straight-up radio-play indie rock. Tinges of psychedelica
a la Pink Floyd and Gun’s n’ Roses acoustic balladry mesh seamlessly when one
listens closely. It doesn’t help that a quick internet search reveals that the
Butthole Surfers might be categorized into Noise Rock, the No Wave movement, or
just plain sell-outs after a controversial signing to Capitol Records in 1992.
Maybe a true (I use the attribute loosely here) punk fan
would tell you that Buttonhole Surfers are the furthest removed from punk. They
took the money. But the slow commercialization of a genre of music has happened
since the money-making side of music began. Another punk fan might say the
exact opposite: that Butthole Surfers epitomize the punk sound. It’s not that
this is a new phenomenon within the categorization of music. Fans disagree on
what defines a genre. Genres change. Let’s take the aforementioned musical
genre of jazz for example. Since I’m much more familiar with this family tree,
and since it’s been around significantly longer than the punk genre, I think it
might lend some insight into how complex a musical genre can get within its own
contributors and listeners.
In the twenties, listeners would have associated jazz with
big bands, heavily-scripted solos, and a certain clarinet-playing white guy
whose playing encouraged a light-hearted dance from its listeners. By the late
fifties and into the sixties, however, jazz became more counter-culture, a
commentary on big issues (see Mingus’ Fables
of Faubus), and took on the pre-rock image of the badass sticking it to the
man. Now, jazz seems to have moved towards a multitude of different sounds and
attitudes towards the genre. Perhaps, as jazz illustrates, it takes decades to
evolve a genre to the point of accepted coherence, but in punk’s case it seems
like the timeline is more fluid in defining the genre. Bands emerged during the
mid-seventies that took punk in entirely different directions at the same time.
As I read Patti
Smith’s Just Kids a number of years ago, I couldn’t imagine punk being
CBGB and the Talking Heads, this idea that punk could be glamorized in a
late-seventies New York setting where famous artists and writers flocked to the
same area as movie stars and trying-to-make-it, retail-working poets. I thought
of the Ramones’ self-titled album (released in 1976) as having defined the
genre at the time. Patti Smith’s music was much more contemplative in both
lyrics and execution. There was also something about old poets representing an
influence on punk that rubbed me the wrong way.
Near the end of the book, however, Smith discusses the
recording of her seminal album, Horses.
She cites three sources as inspiration for the album’s songs: “The gratitude I
had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy
I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility
for one’s action” (249). In this passage, I finally found a clue. I’ve always
struggled with the concept that one can associate a certain attitude with a style
of music, but here Smith, discussing her own music, unwittingly combines a
number of tenets which clearly outline what punk is supposed to represent on
the whole: not just one attitude, but a series of inclinations joined together
to create an art form.
It is within this set of attitudes and beliefs that people
like David Byrne or his recent associate, Annie Clark (St. Vincent), might fit
under the punk umbrella: something that is one part showmanship, one part rock
and roll, and one part belief system. Certainly this breakdown is a broad one,
and naysayers might argue that other genres of music throughout history have
had these three characteristics.
There are, then, other intangibles that make punk what it
is. Take its place in time for instance. Punk emerged during a time when free
speech was not only embraced but pushed to its barrier in terms of comfort. It
has become a symbol as the bullhorn for a culture of people. It has also become
a commercial enterprise as is evident in the Vans Warped Tour. T-shirts and
band merch have almost become a necessity to young fans of the genre. There are
so many little things that make punk difficult to define. Maybe what I’m
looking for is too complicated, or maybe I’m over-complicating a genre that is
simple by nature.
In the end, this is the understanding I have come to in
terms of what makes punk so unique and defines it at the same time: it is a
series of contradicting attitudes, attitudes that have bonded over time and
become one unit. Like braided streams forming a river, the culture-hungry NYC Patti
Smiths of the world are equally as punk as the skate-punk bands hocking
five-dollar sew-on patches in backroom DIY venues while sucking down greasy
slices of pizza in lieu of payment. It is in embracing this fact that I found
resolution to the question, what is punk? Punk is not one idea, but instead the
evolution of ideas over time to form a coherent ideology. Punk is what you make
it. Give a shit, don’t give a shit. Think deeply, turn off. Dance in a crowd or
listen carefully alone. Make a boatload of money or scrape by on pizza. Destroy
the system altogether or rebuild it to your liking. Punk is all of these
things. Punk is none of them.
Recommended Listening:
·
Horses
by Patti Smith
·
Stop Making
Sense by Talking Heads
·
Electriclarryland
by Butthole Surfers
·
Ah Um
by Charles Mingus
Recommended Reading:
-Just Kids by Patti Smith
-The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper
