The Ghosts of Punk Past
Historically, punk has been associated with youth culture. There is good reason for this. The protagonists of the movement were young when punk burst onto the scene, and many of its most recognizable figures were young when they first captured the attention of the mainstream public. This made it an easy target for its critics from previous generations. The whole affair could be written off as an excess of youthful rebelliousness, passion, restlessness, and idealism, irritating perhaps but harmless in small quantities. What was needed, these critics mused from the comfort and self-satisfaction of their bourgeois lives, was a little moderation. The antidote was simple: give them a little time and they’ll grow out of it.
Many punks did in fact grow out of it. They hung their black leather jackets in the back of their closets, mute testaments to more dissident days. They let the blue and green dye wash out of their hair, only to reveal an abundant harvest of grey. They took whatever job helped them make it to the end of the month with less hassle and less hustle. They bought dress shoes. They went to the dry cleaners for the first time. They told themselves that they were making room for the up-and-coming generations of new punks, still wet behind the ears. Speaking in platitudes, a symptom of aging if there ever was one, they talked of “passing the torch” and of a “changing of the guard.” Gradually, they even stopped going to shows.
There was no shortage of newcomers to take their place, eager to form bands of their own and put out their own records and organize their own tours and write their own zines. True to the spirit of punk, these young pups were unafraid to break new ground, to branch out into uncharted waters, and bend punk into unforeseen and surprising shapes. They were nipping at the bit, they were foaming at the mouth, they were screaming into their mics, they were brimming with it, whatever it was, convulsing up there on stage, in synch with the music, in unison with the audience on the other side of the stage, their co-conspirators. Sure, earlier punks had blazed the proverbial trail, had set the mile markers, but there was something in what they were doing that was entirely different, something tailor-fit to their own experiences and their own sensibilities.
In this way, punk proved more malleable than its original three-chord formula and two-minute song structure suggested. Branching off into myriad subgenres, it sped up into hardcore; went melodic and introspective with emocore; fused into a secularized version of Christian ethics with straightedge; flirted with orientalism with Krishna hardcore, confronted its own sexism with Riot Grrrl; hit the brakes with slowcore; doubled its caffeine dose with grindcore; got a little sloppy with noisecore; allowed itself to become sappy with pop punk; unravelled into something that is retrospectively being referred to as posthardcore; and, all together, as the nineties wore on, gave birth derivative genres like indie, math rock, post rock, Midwest emo, and other such artificial categories and/or figments of the imagination.
According to this account, punk would constitute some type of countercultural palimpsest, with each successive generation inscribing its experience on top of the text left by the previous one, creating a rich and varied if not somewhat chaotic manuscript. From this, one would be tempted to conclude that punk, having inadvertently stumbled upon the fountain of youth, was nothing more than a rapid-fire succession of clusters of young people, encapsulated in their respective present tenses, each synchronic iteration cut off from the rest, consumed by its own pressing concerns. Its history might pose a problem for its historians but not for its participants, too busy, as they were, wrestling with the pressing issues of their own times. Punk, in this way, could indeed be construed as a malady of youth, an infection, a dysfunction, nothing that time couldn’t take care of, that greatest of all healers, capable of straightening even the most deviant of paths.
There is, of course, a problem with this account. It sidesteps the troubled relationship that punk has with its own past and fails to capture the nuances of the unique way in which punk ages.
First of all, punks age, which is to say that some of us age as punks, without leaving the scene, for that fact of the matter is that there are many who do not “grow out of it” but rather stay at their posts, as the rearguard, holding down the fort, playing in bands, working the labels, putting out records, organizing tours, setting up shows, helping the newcomers, the Ian MacKayes and Kent McClards. This is to say that punk, sometime early in its history, stopped being only youth culture and became an intergenerational and multi-layered affair.
How much more so nowadays when punk, fully intergenerational, self-consciously reflects on its own past, recycles its past signifiers, and mounts revival movements of its respective subgenres? Aesthetics long passed their expiration dates become the object of renewed interest, not only by the original participants, now middle-aged, but also by younger generations who, inspired by punk’s past, are forming bands in a similar vein. Such is the case with nineties DIY punk. Screamo bands who have been inactive for decades are dusting off their amps and tuning up their instruments to play shows and, in some cases, record new music. They share the stage with new bands, eager to carry on the tradition, giving it their own flare, their unique imprint, taking it in new directions through a complex set of negotiations with the tradition.
But it is not only the individual punks who age. The movement itself ages. We have long since reached the point, in other words, at which punk has a past and a tradition of its own, a past that it carries around with it, a past that it engages with in a way that necessarily determines its future unfolding. Seen in this way, punk is more than the sum of its synchronic slices, the succession of its present tenses. It stretches out diachronically, assimilating new features as it sheds the residual ones that have proven no longer productive or relevant. Like all traditions, it is selective and necessarily implies forgetting as well as remembering, the jettisoning of some elements and the privileging of others. And, like all pasts, its past has no ontological density upon itself but exists only as representation, that is, as a construction of the past in light of the needs and demands of the present. The more conscious this process is, I would argue, the better.
Punk has always been good at confronting the present. This is part of its design. As with many political and aesthetic avant-garde movements, it came into existence as radical rupture. Its irreverence for the past and its rejection of tradition was equalled only by its disdain for the status quo. The old rules did not apply, and the present state of affairs simply wouldn’t do. As such, proposing a clean break, the first punks were future facing.
And, for a time, punk was young enough not to have to worry about its past. Still light on its feet, having such a small amount of past in its reserves, it was easy to keep it at bay. But the past, once it accumulates, has a way of refusing to stay in the past, a way of intruding in the present and rearing its head, as they say. The more we ignore it, the more it pesters us, the more it interpellates us. There comes a point when it refuses to be ignored any longer, when it demands a response. For punk, that time has come. And it remains to be seen whether it can address its past as well as it does its present.
Many historians have already written their versions of punk’s past. Early on, Dick Hebdige famously defined it as a countercultural system of signs, a set of rules for rebellion, an outward style that could easily be coopted by the culture industry and commodified as merchandise for private profit. In a similar gesture, Fredric Jameson blunted punk’s political edge by reducing it to a postmodern reaction to the institutionalization of high modernism. Many other historians have made similar attempts, as still other will write their versions. Few of these accounts, however, coincide with the experiences of those of us who participate or at one time participated in the movement. What is needed, then, is another version, a view from the inside.
This difference is precisely the distinction between history and memory. Where the former quantifies the past, the latter concerns itself with its qualitative aspects, that is, as lived experience. As such, this last task is not the responsibility of historians but of punks. It is a story that cannot be told from the outside. Punks must take it upon themselves, the weight of the past, assume responsibility for it, the burden of memory, engage with it, transmit it, use it for fuel and ammunition.
Yet, the telling of the story from the inside is a delicate matter, fraught with all the trappings of any testimonial endeavor. There is the danger of going too far, of drifting too far from the shores of the present, of abandoning ourselves so much to the subjective that we lose sight of the historical realities that we are attempting to address. There are many forms this can take, such as distortion, romanticization, idealization, rationalization, self-aggrandisement, and even outright falsification in some instances. The gravest danger, perhaps, is to give into the temptation to develop a melancholic attachment to an idealized past, set in contrast to a present framed in terms of lack or loss or decline. This fixation, of course, often leads to a loss of agency, an inability to act, and a disregard for the present.
The type of memory that I am talking about here, in fact, does the opposite. It heightens punks’ sense of agency and potentiates their struggle in the present. It involves nothing less than the construction of the collective memory of a movement, an archive of its past struggles, conscious of itself as representation, open to subjective and indeed affective elements yet bound to the social and historical realities that it addresses. This offers punk that possibility of recognizing its traditions without becoming traditionalist, the possibilitiy of harnessing the power of its past and channeling it into effective strategies for radical aesthetic and political praxis in the present. To some degree this is already underway. I only wish to suggest that the more consciously and the more conscientiously we engage with this process, the more productive and effective it will be. Hey, along the way we might just discover that, despite what we have been told, aging is punk or at least, when done right, it can be.
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