I have had my doubts for quite some time now whether "punk" is any kind of thing to believe in, once you are past the age of 25 at the very latest. Doubts voiced here and there, sometimes subtly
Just the other day I read something that bolstered the doubts even more. A review at Louder Than War of a memoir by Steve Diggle, who nowadays essentially = Buzzcocks
The book is called Autonomy: Portrait of a Buzzcock. The reviewer is Dave Jennings.
"Autonomy is one of Buzzcocks greatest songs and maybe one of the songs that best captures the essence of what Punk was, and still is, all about. Be who you are, take no shit and, as far as possible, control your life and live it the way you want to....
"Diggle believes he was born to be a Punk, relating a tale of when, as a seven-year-old, he was part of a gang that literally smashed up one of their nan’s house. This independent, untameable streak continued through being expelled on his final day of school and avoiding work like the plague...."
Hang on, wind back a bit there: your foundational self-mythos is that you and a bunch of fellow untameables went around to one of the gang's granny's place - no doubt full of cherished keepsakes and mementoes of a life nearing its end - and you smashed it to pieces? I know the Damned, ludicrously if irresistibly, sang about "gonna smash it up til my dying day", but making a lovely old lady cry is something to be ashamed of, quietly repented of in the sleepless small hours... not something you'd foreground in a memoir...
But wait! There's more:
"Diggle’s life of autonomy veers into some uncomfortable areas such as heavy drug use... and the difficult to comprehend fact that he drove away from his girlfriend, who was holding their baby and begging him to stay, rather than suffer the constraints of a relationship and being a parent."
Yes, difficult to comprehend... and yet so commonplace... bog-standard shit bloke behaviour, nothing especially punk rock about it
Except in a certain sense it is pure punk rock.
"Life as a Punk Rock icon gave him what he feels he needs, the omnipresent sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. As Charlie Harper would say, “Born a rocker, die a rocker”."
I know, I know, there are other ideas of punk - DIY, collectively run performance spaces, all ages shows, Maximum Rock 'n' Roll, Crass, riot grrrl, etc etc - anti-authoritarian, concerned, altruistic, committed to causes - wholesome, earnest, idealistic... But I suppose what I am saying is that actually the real punk, the true punk, is the "and we don't care"/ "got no emotions for anybody else... I'm in love with my self" element. That's the the core of it - and it's why it appeals to boys aged 15 to 17 above all...
In a funny twist, of course, if ever there was a thing as "gentle punk" then it was Pete Shelley, who appears to be the opposite of Diggle.
Although apparently there's some tell-all stuff in Autonomy about Pete....
A while ago I made the point that Punk was basically micro-Thatcherism:
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Oh, I like this, even as one of those hopeless secular humanists trying for an eventual extinction of monarchy that you mention. I think Reagan formed a similar wish-figure seemingly born from the country's earth for the US - a movie star in a cowboy hat with a tenderly genial manner and a heart of stone, capable of being both indulgently warm to those he protected and unstintingly 'tough' (cruel) to those he opposed, a grey-haired father of the nation
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DeleteAnother example of the kind of archetype Reagan was consciously embodying - the legendary conservative radio broadcaster Paul Harvey:
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Harvey
Thanks Tyler - that's much appreciated.
DeleteI think the problem that reformists have with the monarchy is that they don't realise that it is composed of two very different things, which are:
a) the Royal Family, who are a deeply dysfunctional set of very flawed human beings, and
b) the institution of the monarchy, which is a vastly powerful and ancient spiritual force.
Discrediting a) is very easy, but discrediting b) is nigh on impossible.
To give the devil his due though, this is a great late Diggle song:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X_BerOXVjE
Absolutely vintage chorus.
Woah, that is some deep digging there.
DeleteI mean, yes, "Harmony in My Head'. Etc.
100% agreed on the core appeal of that particular strain of Punk being to teenage boys. In my crowd Punk meant the trinity of Pistols / Damned / Stranglers, and nothing else attracted any interest at all. Maybe pre-fame Adam and the Ants.
ReplyDeleteBut surely Nik Cohn would tell you that's the core appeal of all rock'n'roll.
There was a funny exchange on social media recently where someone asked for "lyrics that have not aged well", and someone replied with the lines from 'I Saw Her Standing There' about "she was just seventeen..." Presumably thinking of 80 year-old McCartney making an advance. And ignoring the fact that he was barely out of his teens when he wrote it.
The problems come when the adolescent art intersects with the real adult lives.
Is this strain of male misbehavior specific to punk? It seems like it's always been a part of rock music, as well as other genres (and writers like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.) The number of punk lyrics featuring slurs really went up exponentially in '80s America, but from a distance, it's hard to tell what was genuinely meant as satire and what was really hateful.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's not like punk invented this whole-cloth, it's rooted in rock and roll. The examples that spring to mind instantly are the ones that are the most punk-antedecent - the Who's "It's A Legal Matter" (literally about what Diggle is said to have done - man's stifled by domesticity, mind befogged by all the household furnishings and baby clothes, decides he gotta split), the Stones of "Under My Thumb", "Yesterday's Papers", "Heart of Stone", etc.... all of which then amplified by the garage punks in America.
DeleteIggy not so much in the songs (although "I Gotta Right" - "to move, any old time" does manifest-o it) but in some of his interview statements ("I never want to end up stuck in a kitchen with a hag with food falling off her face and her coming at me and me taking it")
Dion's "The Wanderer".
In turn all, that rooted in / prefigured by the Beats (Kerouac and Cassady in On the Road always sponging money off aunts, giving girlfriends the slip, cackling in the car as they speed off). Ginsberg talking how the perfect utopian organisation is the boy-gang, "not society's perfumed marriage"
Punk amplifies, hones, distils - and adds a whole new brutal level of anti-sentimentality.
Part 2: the fact that so many punks acted out like typically shitty men in the name of rebellion parallels the mixture of rhetoric about destroying music and starting over at Year Zero with sped-up Chuck Berry and Who riffs.
ReplyDeleteAs others have noted, this is part and parcel of the basic appeal of rock, and possibly pop in general - license for your destructive urges - but I would definitely argue that punk is where it went from a motif to the main event. Where once the 'lumpenhippies' (to steal Charles Shaar Murray's wonderful term) were viewed mostly as tedious annoyances dragging down the rest of the counterculture, now they were effectively the ones at the center, and everyone else had to maneuver around them to develop the more constructive, interesting varieties of punk you mention.
ReplyDeleteThere's a wonderful scene in the long-unreleased documentary MC5: A True Testimonial (you can see the first part here - what I'm talking about starts at 9m15s: https://archive.org/details/mc-5-a-true-testimonial-disc-1 )about how the main figures in the group worked out some of these warring impulses for themselves
To paraphrase something you said in The Sex Revolts, "I know what I'd rather listen to."
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