hey all,
i just wanted to drop a quick word about why this site has been low content and why the show-list hasn’t been coming. there are basically three things that have taken me off of ARTNOISE for the past few months. two of them temporary, one of them hopefully not at all.

FIRST, for my paid work, i run a very large, very hectic after school and summer program here in philly. when summer comes and my program goes from 15 hours a week with kids to 40+ hours a week with kid, my life becomes pretty insane. usually, once this dies down, my life resumes and i get back to things i love like punk rock and this webzine. that didn’t happen this time because…

SECOND, an asshole landlord. seriously. i don’t want to go into all the drama on the internet but suffice it to say, me and my partner had to move twice in one month, and piss away a lot of money trying to fix up a place that was unfixable.

THIRD, and most importantly, OCCUPY PHILADELPHIA. i’ve been politically active in philadelphia for a good while now and it’s been really exciting and humbling to see occupy come together. i could write tons about all my thoughts about the whole thing, but i can’t do it tonight. (if you want to keep tabs on occupy, check their facebook or the occupy philly media site http://occupyphillymedia.org).

but i will say that i’ve long believed that the strength and meaning of punk rock is directly tied to the strength and relevancy of revolutionary political struggle. practically, if you have limited time (like i definitely do) and you have to choose between doing things that support the scene we’ve got or doing things that help us all reach a new level (in our art, in our relationships with each other, in our freedom and overall well-being), i think it makes sense to prioritize the latter. this doesn’t mean that there’s no place for punk rock these days, just that i’ve got other stuff i can do better. if what you do best is make punk rock, get in touch with me, and maybe we can brainstorm how you can make punk rock in a way that supports the struggles going on right now.

ARTNOISE will be back in force again. we’ve dropped off before and come back and we’ll do it again. if there’s important things to advertise or quick notes i want to drop, i’ll post them here. once things calm down for me, the show-listing will continue to be updated.

love to philly, love to humanity,
germ ross

PS: speaking of things to advertise, i just got a heads up about this rad sounding but sadly not all ages show:

January 12th
8 p.m. $8 21+
The Little Bar
736 South 8th Street Philadelphia PA

Cult Of Youth
Anasazi
Hot Guts
SGNLS

Last summer, I wrote up a long review of Post Post’s Meta Meta demo EP that loosely wandered from social movement history into a dissertation on the potential evolution of the late indie scene into a spiritual force for good. Right after I completed it, Post Post dropped Residents, a bone fide studio-recorded EP that takes the band’s heartsick alternative pop into more polished, occasionally transcendent places. Cast in the stylistic mould of Yeah Yeah Yeahs (think “Maps”), Residents is another fine document by a highly literate, technically-proficient band with a bent towards exploring the essential melodrama of human beings’ inability to relate to each other. The second track “Drafts” is a particular standout in this vein, alternating between pathological descriptions of codependency and intimate disfunction (”No / Don’t you go / Don’t you leave me in this town alone,” and later, “No / I can’t go / I will die inside this house alone”) to consoling evocations of humanism (”What a gift to be human”). This is different than the usual emo tropes about petty betrayals and cartoonish self-hatred. It’s more complicated, poignant, and to me it hits a lot closer to the real messiness and vulnerabilities involved in falling in and out of love.

I think it’s this really satisfying mix of depth and accessibility that made Post Post become one of those Philly bands that I like to root for. If you haven’t seen them play or heard any of their music, I highly recommend checking them out. Residents seems to be at least available digitally through the band’s myspace, and their demo is still available as a free download via Awkwardcore Records.

Finally, here’s a live version of “Drafts” from a performance at Haverford College on 12/11/09…

So months and months are going by and I’m not writing about music. Mostly it’s been because I’m busy (working again, trying to take care of myself, etc). But reality can feel like a problem too. I look around me and everywhere I go I see beautiful people dying off before my eyes… choking on obvious addictions, debilitated by various forms of abuse, or just generally getting beat the fuck up by the way things are right now. There’s a lot of pain right now and not a lot of obvious things happening to stop it. So why am I writing about punk rock? I’m sure I could connive a poetic answer to this question but the basic gist of this intro is just to say that I don’t feel as able to write the long tracts that I used to about random albums that peak my fancy. In order to keep doing this thing that I love, I’m adding in this (hopefully) regular feature called USEFUL STATIC where I write some brief, disjointed little mini-commentaries on bands or pieces of audio that I find exciting/important.

The first installment of USEFUL STATIC is a plug for the local grunge/metal/hc-punk act APE!. What got me interested in APE! is simply that they play shows pretty regularly here in Philly and therefore have their name pop up over and over again on the Philly show-listing. A few days ago, I saw some messageboard post hyping their bandcamp site and remembering the name I figured I should get a better idea of what they sounded like. I’m glad I did. After a couple listens to their free EP The Dirger I have to say I’m totally sold. It’s obvious that these people have listened to some Melvins and Flipper records and judging from this EP this project must be their vehicle to share their love of fuzzed out heavy guitars with the world. The vocals throughout consist of sloppy, metal-inflected yelling without too much affectation or crooning. There’s not a track on this thing that wouldn’t feel right at home on one of those late 80s/early 90s Sub Pop compilations.

Clearly APE!’s not really offering anything earth-shatteringly new in terms of their style, but for me they get away with it by doing a convincing job of ripping off the right people in a sub-genre that still has some life left in it. Besides, if the material on The Dirger is any indication, this is exactly the kind of noisy, aggressive shit that would be awesome to see live (provided, of course, that the rest of the audience wasn’t too drunk or aggro).

Here’s the link to their bandcamp site including the pay-as-you-will download of The Dirger. Enjoy, people!

http://weareape.bandcamp.com/

hey all. i just wanted to send out a note of apology for the lateness of the show-list. right about the time that i usually start compiling dates for the upcoming month i got word that i was going to be laid off my job. i know it’s supposed to be punx not to work and all, but the reality is that the circumstances of my life that make this potentially catastrophic.

right now i’ve got to put energy into sorting this out and so it’s going to be a bit before i can begin making the listing happen. in the meantime, you can check philly shreds, WKDU’s philly haps, and R5 for a few important pieces of the scene. i want to especially encourage folks to go to the post post show this saturday at kung fu necktie (7pm-10pm, review below). they’re a great band, seem like nice people, and they’ll be releasing a really solid new ep that night.

so yeah, the listing is by no means done and i will try to make the august dates happen asap. thanks for your patience.

i also just wanted to say that moments like this really clarify for me how much our social/political/economic situation doesn’t work right now. i’ll never pretend to have the worst shake of things, and i’m sure there are ways that the crises i experience are less crushing than they might be for other folks in different positions. but that doesn’t mean that bullshit in my life doesn’t hurt me or doesn’t hurt people close to me. it doesn’t mean that my experiences aren’t bound up in the same systemic forces that are driving people out of homes, out of health, and out of sanity across this city, country, and world… the same systematic forces that are killing people quickly and slowly with violence and depression… the same systematic forces that inject poison into our lives like oil gushing into seawater.

i’d say that all this is tragic but as i understand it, tragedy is more on the level of misfortune or bad luck. what makes things so terrible right now is that all these variations of poverty and pain we’ve got are just predictable outcomes of a setup that has no regard for what we need, and total regard for the accumulation of power and profit. it’s hurtful, it’s criminal, it’s suicidal, but within the terms of our social organization it’s also a foregone conclusion… a false-tragedy… a farce.

and my feeling today is that i love myself too much to accept this condition, and that i love other people too much to see them beaten down by these inventions. and since i know that the system is powerful and that it will take a lot of folks, a lot of whole communities, to make something equally powerful enough to challenge it, i guess i want to ask you (if you see yourself in this) to open yourself to the project of elevating life beyond mere survival and slow death. i want you to open old wounds and take a hard look at all the pain and the trauma you’ve got because of attacks you suffered or deprivations that were imposed on you. i want you to take the burden of that pain off yourself and i want you to see the connections between your pain and my pain and the pain of everybody else around you (recognizing the differences between us all).

as i want to heal, i want you to heal, and i want every suffering body out there to heal as well. the reality is that things are so bad, we’re all going to need each other. and this kind of collective healing, in the context of today, is a revolutionary project… a transformation that we’ll know in our bones and our souls, and that we’ll witness in the seizure of power from the government officials, corporate entities, and socio-economic logics that are breaking us today. there’s a lot of good writing on this (better writing than this), but there’s no complete map on how to get there. the beginning, as far as i can figure, comes from telling our stories, building connections between ourselves, and being increasingly clear in our collective commitment to pursuing the things we need and desire. there’s more to it than this… so much more… but this where is my head is right now.

with all love.

germ ross

Post Post
Meta Meta EP
Awkwardcore Records

I want to start this review off in a sort of stupid direction. I don’t want to begin with some dissection of this band’s style, musical ability, message, or anything like that. I don’t want to rattle off reference points and mark off what scene they belong to and who should listen to this. I want to open this thing with something relatively superficial. I want to talk about signifiers… about names.

At first blush, Post Post just struck me as “clever,” you know? Generic indie rock wordplay, minor intellectual fronting with a liberal arts sense of humor… the usual thing. Normally, I guess I’d stop paying attention at this point. Most of the time, band names are little more than the least stupid thing the group could agree on when they started playing shows. They’re usually kind of throwaway, a put-on, without much relationship to the actual music (cough… I’m looking at you, Dismemberment Plan). Who the fuck cares about a name?

This is usually a sane way to approach things, but as I got into Post Post and grew to love the music that they make, their name kept coming back to me. It’s almost like I’d made up a story about these two words, a story that helps me understand and position this band in a context that’s bigger than the usual “sounds-like,” “looks-like” fodder that most record reviews are built on. As crazy as it may sound, in this story, the words “Post Post” take on the weight of almost perfectly summing up the moment that I hope we’re moving into right now musically, culturally, and politically. In this story, “Post Post” is what it means to grow up out of post-modern nothingness, and to become something new, meaningful, and beautiful. “Post Post” is to move past the recent fad of declaring history to be over, of declaring that the forces, struggles, and positions that defined our old historical progression have magically evaporated or become too unfashionable to take seriously… that the contradictions that once burned bright and hot in our lives and in our social reality have been finally resolved. And artistically, it means a renewal of the premise that art can serve as a means of honest expression that takes sides, provokes, reveals truths, and creates strength through an acknowledgment of vulnerability.

To give context for this idea, once upon a time folks risked their lives and their material comfort fighting for justice, freedom, control over their work, and liberation along lines of race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class. Behind the scenes, the state brutally repressed those movements, killed a few folks, bought off a few more, and put most everybody else in jail. Commentators, corporations, and all the people in power took the moment of relative quiet to announce that the slate had been wiped clean, that the benevolent few at the top had voluntarily transcended the blood and bad manners of the past. The world had supposedly blossomed into a utopia of “post-racial,” “post-feminist” social harmony. Whatever narratives survived about the past struggles were cleaned up and turned into inspirational bedtime stories. The activists and revolutionaries left standing found themselves reduced to cartoon characters in the popular imagination… curiosities at best. Whatever problems remained in this new order could only be accounted for through the failings of individuals and a few constantly redefined “bad elements.” This mirage of social peace was sold to us at a heavy cost: we had the same problems, but now we had only ourselves to blame. The songwriter David Bazan hit the full depth of this deception when he sung the lines “the class war is over / and everyone wins” in a song that was ultimately about suicide. This is roughly how they drowned history.

As a suburban punk coming up in the late 1990s, I stood in the wake of this transformation… the heyday of the post-modern condition. The same systemic forces that were erasing memories of resistance and committing genocide in urban ghettos were producing alienation and psychological dysfunction on my relatively privileged side of the class lines. On a cultural level, this translated into the full-blown retreat of the broader alternative (aka “indie”) music scene from functioning as a real site of resistance. Though the scenes I was a part of were filled with kids like me—full of pain, social anxiety, and desperately looking for connection and a different life—the spaces I found myself in weren’t centered around liberation or even bringing people together to gain strength from shared experience. What pervaded the scene at that time was estrangement on the deepest possible levels, a feeling like we not only had to keep space between each other, but publicly we had to put space between ourselves and anything we might feel or believe. We played out the script that we were given: there was nothing wrong, there was nothing that needed to be taken seriously, no causes to be joined, no fights to be waged, this crushing alienation that drew many of us into the scene could be remedied through vapid socializing and cool points.

Irony, that great chicken-shit strategy for making statements the ultimately state nothing, became an essential cultural currency during this period. To admit anything, to even put something serious on your fucking t-shirt was to be vulnerable to ridicule or sideways glances. Except for small tribes of fanatics—anarcho-punks, some straightedge kids, the few emo kids that wanted more from their scene than self-indulgent melodrama, and the riot grrl true-believers that had survived its commodification—it felt like everybody was just hiding in view. Where the punk rock nation once had the symbolic and emotional character of being at total war with society, the 1990s indie rock scene it helped spawn often felt disconnected from a coherent grasp of even personal/emotional struggles. There were places in the scene, places as vast as they were utterly lifeless, where truth had been abandoned in favor of pure artifice. Too much of the art that was coming out of our community was sustained with a core of little more than dumb jokes and fashionable posturing. The outsiders had made outsiders of themselves. Our post-modern rock scene was devouring itself, and as I got older, it only got worse.

In 12-step programs, there’s a notion that change doesn’t come until you first recognize that your life has become unmanageable: that the shit you need, you ain’t getting; the shit you do to fulfill your needs, it ain’t working. On a cultural level, I’d like to think that we’re getting to this point: that those of us that take a conscious approach to engaging this generation’s music scene are beginning to recognize that in order to have art and community that meets our needs and our desires, we have to do things differently. Philly’s Post Post may not be an outwardly conscious band (they’re certainly not as outwardly political as this batshit review I’m writing), but in my view they are doing something differently than a lot of the indie rock bands out there… namely, the songs they write, the music they play, it all feels honest to me. The tracks on Meta Meta are emotionally rich, often heartbreaking, but without self-pity. As lyrics go, lines like “I wish I wasn’t this way” and “I don’t ever want to be sober” are about as straightforward as you can get in expressing what it feels like to hurt. Michelle Zauner’s delivery—belted out in impassioned crescendos—only serves to drive the point home. As beautifully lush as Post Post’s sound is, as gifted as these musicians are, and as much as their music conjures up similarities to well-marketed bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there’s a plainness and a directness here that stands apart from other easy-on-the-ears acts who are more comfortable hiding behind wit and intellect than they are getting up on stage and just communicating who they are and what they feel.

On Meta Meta, there’s a kind of fearlessness and a willingness to stand exposed that is rarely heard from a pop-inflected indie rock group. It’s fearlessness like this that makes me hopeful. The post-modern conditions of our reality taught many us to deride truths, deride the deeper narratives that frame our individual and social lives, and took away many of the ways we had to partially understand and communicate the validity of our experiences with each other. Today, we cannot go back: we cannot rebuild old struggles, rewrite old love songs. But we can evolve. We can find new ways to express meaning, new methods to come together and get what we need. The phrase “Post Post” describes our situation—historically we stand in the aftermath of an aftermath. And it also raises the obvious questions: What do we do now? Where do we go now? To me, the band Post Post implies an answer: we write new love songs, and we go forward.

Post Post’s demo ep, Meta Meta, came out Fall 2009 and is available for download (with donation) or purchase from Awkwardcore Records (http://www.awkwardcore.com). On August 7th, they will be having the release show for their newest ep, Residents, at Kungfu Necktie.

hey ARTNOISE faithful. this has nothing to do with punk rock but also EVERYTHING to do with punk rock and i wanted to help spread the word. – germ

ART FOR LIBERATION with Elizam Escobar and Joserramon Che Melendes
Friday, July 16, 2010
7:00pm
The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St

Calling all poets and playwrights, radicals, culture workers and community organizers! Join us for a conversation about art in the everyday work of social movements.

With special guest Elizam Escobar, a renowned painter and art theorist from Puerto Rico who spent twenty years in prison for his involvement in the Puerto Rican independence movement. During and since his incarceration, his art has been a vital component of Puerto Rican organizing on the island and in the U.S.

Plus performances by poet Joserramon Che Melendes (San Juan), Spiral Q Puppet Theater, and members of MMP Arts and Culture Collective.

Also featuring a special one-night exhibition of ZAPATA VIVE!, a portfolio of prints from La Escuela de Cultura Popular Martires del 68 (Mexico City).

Because Art Makes Resistance Irresistible!

Co-sponsored by Books Through Bars, Centro Pedro Claver, MMP’s Arts and Culture Collective, the National Boricua Human Rights Network and Spiral Q

$5 suggested donation to benefit Centro Pedro Claver

Leatherface – live Brooklyn/Philly, March 5/7, 2010

Yes, the rumors are true… I went to see Leatherface twice last weekend. In two different cities.

Granted, Leatherface is a legendary British punk band that can still throw down better than anyone; and granted, the two cities were Brooklyn and Philadelphia, which are a mere two-hour, ten-dollar bus ride from one another… but the whole enterprise, to a less-rocking individual, could have been termed excessive. To me, it was just right.

The rundown:

The March 5 Brooklyn show went down at the new Knitting Factory on Metropolitan Ave., on the eastern edge of Williamsburg. This was my first time at the new location. It doesn’t have the charm of the old Tribeca spot (which — crucially for us Philly transplants — had a balcony and an old-worldiness that recalled the Troc), but it has good clean acoustics, and a bar next door with a glass wall so that you can see the band even if you didn’t buy a ticket.

I had bought a ticket. I was right up at the front of the stage, and the band sounded amazing. The set pulled pretty evenly from new album tracks (God is Dead, Broken) and older classics (Springtime, Not Superstitious, How Lonely). I’ve heard people say that, in the Leatherface lineup, Frankie Stubbs’ voice almost functions as another instrument — it sits low in the mix, and adds that essential grittiness to an otherwise fairly polished sound. There’s so much complexity in his vocals — the way he sings sounds like a punk band, but there’s such thoughtfulness in his lyrics and in his delivery that I found myself moved even as I was rocking out.

And there was a lot of rocking out — a lot of energy, a lot of stage-diving, a lot of dancing. I danced until I lost everything I had — my hat, my scarf, and my wallet. But everything was miraculously returned to me by bemused onlookers.

This brings me to…

March 7, Philadelphia! I trekked down with a crew of dedicated New York Leatherface fans. After some haggling with SEPTA, we got ourselves to the Northstar bar, where I was reunited with fellow ARTNOISE staffer Germ Ross.

This show started out a bit rockier. Northstar has rules against stage-diving (as evidenced by all the sternly-worded MS Word-generated signs tacked throughout the space), and there was a fair amount of security near the front of the stage. Throw in some technical difficulties, a stone-faced, cross-armed crowd, and a bizarrely obnoxious heckler (who goes to a Leatherface show for the sole purpose of standing in the crowd and taunting the band? I’m baffled), and you had a distinctly unpromising beginning.

About twenty minutes into the set, though, things started to click: the band got their guitars in tune, people uncrossed their arms and began to dance, and a few songs later I was in the middle of one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long while. IF YOU EVER HAVE THE CHANCE TO SEE LEATHERFACE ONE OR MULTIPLE TIMES, DO NOT MISS IT.

I lost my scarf for good this time, but Germ was kind enough to give me his.

Layers/Quake
tape 2009
self-released

Deconstruction is to punk rock as gasoline is to internal combustion. Punk rock propels us forward. Through punk rock we are able to feel something different than we used to feel in our normal lives. When we are in the grips of punk rock, we are able to know and taste and sweat and shake with a transcendence—with a sense of power in ourselves and in each other—that is beyond words, that is deeper and more profound than words. This process, this holy fucked up experience, is fueled by an intentional breaking shit down to its rawest, most basic components.

There are many modes of art that move people. There are many modes of art that impress or entertain people. What makes punk rock different than many modes of art is that punk rock demands that we all take part in its creation—that it is only realized out of the love, the closeness, the positive frenzy we share together in common. “Talent,” “expertise,” or any other arbitrary pretense that elevates the artist above the audience or shuts any of us out of the collective act of making shit together can thus be seen as fundamentally poisonous to the project of realizing punk rock. Such elitisms hold us back, turn us against each other, and in the end they will keep us from getting what we really want. Our art must be democratic or it will not be. Our art must be articulate and explosive enough to rock people’s souls, but at the same time it must also be rough enough and honest enough and humble enough to make any of us capable of its creation. This is how you make punk rock.

I write these words more or less in response to the Layers/Quake tape that came out back in August of 2009. Layers/Quake is an instrumental-heavy, female-fronted, drum/guitar 2-piece that’s been playing around Philly a good bit over the past couple months. Their tape 2009 really hits at a lot of what I find valuable in punk rock music and is probably one of the finest masterpieces of DIY rock that I’ve heard coming out of the city in a bit.

As you might expect from a self-released cassette debut, the production values of tape 2009 are raw and dilapidated. The drums crash in blurry cacophonies, the guitars are massive and overblown, the vocals are variations of frantic howling and distorted harmony, the lyrics are almost universally undecipherable. Banging out 14 tracks in less than 24 minutes, Layers/Quake make the most of their stripped-down format, diving headlong into song after song without pause, transition, or apology. Overall, this is less a proper album than it is documentation—a simple recording of two friends throwing molten lava at each other for fun and brutal self-realization.

This isn’t music that lulls you with catchy choruses and pleasant melodies (although there’s a few points where they come remarkably close such as “just gazer,” “feel it,” and “have it all”). This isn’t music that fronts intellectual or impresses you with well thought out composition. At its core, this is ass-kicking music. This is shit that’s about crescendos, contortions, crushing weight, and regular bursts of full-throttle intensity. Halfway between Pink & Brown, riot grrl, and The Breeders; between bratty punk and pummeling guitar-driven instrumentals, Layers/Quake is yet another Philly band that is out there killing it right now—creating music that is alive, powerful, and provoking our passionate engagement.

If you would like to pick up a copy of tape 2009, get in contact with the band. The tracks are also available for free via the band’s website: http://layersquake.wordpress.com.

Last month, local extraordinaire Sam Allingham, along with a crew of other roustabouts, organized a Valentine’s Day cover show of Magnetic Fields’ entire 69 Love Songs album at Chacharazzi. The best thing about this show — other than its shameless celebration of a 4-hour album about heartbreak — was that it invited anyone and everyone to come onstage and sing along with the band.

Germ and I were happily in attendance. Beer, song, and dance flowed freely; and the performances themselves were remarkably unabashed and heartfelt. True, much of the crowd was friends with the band and with one another, which contributed to the open atmosphere; but there was also a larger sense of campfire community that comes with any good singalong. The line between performer and audience becomes blurred; the event becomes not about watching and consuming, but about participating and creating. It is truly the best kind of show.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a cover-show junkie. The day after gorging myself on all 69 Love Songs, I went to a riot grrrl cover show in Brooklyn and danced to local incarnations of Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre. I’ve attended awesomely creepy Glenn-Danzig-based cover shows for the past two Halloweens. What’s more — and this is the kicker — I record my own acoustic covers in my spare time. My computer is full of them. I’ve got renditions of everything from Green Day to Eric Donaldson to Hank Williams, and my productivity — if you can call it that — shows no sign of slowing down.

I love covers because I believe that they gesture toward every song’s potential to achieve immortality. If a two-minute, three-chord punk song lasts as long as its creator’s music career — well, that will be pretty short. If it last as long as the vinyl and polycarbonate that it’s been recorded on — that’s a few decades, but still not a very long time. But if a song can find a new home in the guitars and voices of everyone who listens to it — and if those people go on to share their versions with others — now we’re talking about posterity. It’s a humbling, beautiful thing to think about. And it’s a continually refreshing challenge to discover and learn the songs that I love enough to try to make my own.

[This is the third installment of TO MAKE PUNK ROCK, an ARTNOISE manifesto. The first installment, containing the preface and introduction, was posted on 08/02/09 (available here). The second installment, containing "What is Punk Rock?" and "Nihilism," was posted on 10/03/09 (available here) - germ]

Lemon! Vanilla! Cherry! Mango!
Water ice! Water ice! Water iiiiiice!

-”Water ice,” Rizzo Machine

Punk rock is people art. It’s shit that anybody can make. Punk rock is stupid, raw, loud, noisy, un-tuned, broken down, and totally fucked up. Punk rock is screaming like a lunatic while rolling on the floor. Punk rock is laying bare every idiot thought and impulse, and profoundly asserting them as if they were the most meaningful sage truth. Punk rock is a beautiful practice where kids that never properly learned to make art are convulsed and overtaken by an urgency towards expression that overcomes all their understood limitations. Punk rock is a talent-less, deranged medium that summons forth its existence not from studied, learned technique but from a simple recognition that all human beings are capable of transcendence—into revelation about the essential substance of their existence, into revelation about things larger than themselves, into beauty, creation, love, truth, poetry, the electrical rush of connection, etc.

Democracy—the practice of recognizing everyone’s capacity for creation and the necessity for everyone’s collaboration in order to create—is another means through which punk rock wages war against alienation.(6) Through alienating society, people get told over and over and over again that they are powerless to engage their lives or the world in a way that changes things or allows them to actually manifest their real needs and desires. Folks wake up, go to work, and waste their creative powers doing shit they have little control over, and very little personal stake in. Creativity is regularly pulverized into routine production—a thing done by isolated experts or technicians, repeated infinitely with only minor substantial changes, and carried out in the proper place under the proper conditions. Even though all the elements of society are made possible through people’s work and activity (if one day all the workers called in sick, society would grind to a halt), people in society are simply expected to follow orders and play out their assigned position—whether that position has them making car parts, cappuccinos, babies, or simply making customers happy.

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