What Is Punk?: An Outsider’s Take on the Outsider of Rock Music

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