About a year and a half ago, I stopped writing about music. It seemed to make a lot of sense at the time. I knew I had limited resources to put into personal projects and it felt like the more time I put into engaging and supporting the music scene here, the more frustrated I became with it.

Through my work on ARTNOISE, I had been developing this powerful vision of what music and art could be, what punk rock meant, what qualities and characteristics made bands and recordings transcendent or transgressive. But it seemed when I looked out into the punk communities, the experimental communities, the hipster/indie/whatever communities that I was trying to support, this vision I had about art’s transformative potential always appeared to be buried under heaping piles of scene bullshit.

This bullshit took many different forms. There were the corporate and pseudo-corporate forces steadily working to hype meaningful artists into alternative celebrities. There were the cliques, the in-groups, the hierarchies of who-knows-who, who-plays-what, who-books-where that constantly locked people out or put people in their place. There were the pretensions, the expectations for people to constantly prove themselves, and judge others. There were the sometimes disguised, sometimes explicit undercurrents of sexism, racism, classism, transphobia, and homophobia that played out in varying degrees throughout the scene. More than anything though, there was the irrelevance—the feeling that at the end of the day most of the participants in these communities I was attached to were simply content to party, to play, to be seen, heard, and self-congratulated on their gentrified little islands around the city.

So I stopped writing about music and stopped trying to actively support the scene here. I put time into political work with a few different organizations. I started writing about politics and studying to figure out what the fuck was going on, and where I might fit in any struggle to change things. It was a good period. I could convince myself that I was doing “real” work. I accomplished a few things. I learned a lot more.

But something was still missing…

It took me awhile to figure it out… too long I think… but somewhere along my walk away from punk rock, I finally realized what had brought me there in the first place. I might’ve thought I was leaving punk rock for “the struggle” but in the limited scale of the things I had pushed through growing up depressed in a suburb-fucked, middle class existence, punk rock had everything to do with my struggle, with how I had made it through and how I envisioned myself making it through. I had started connecting dots. I remembered how I came to art as a means of expressing pain that I wasn’t allowed to acknowledge in my household. I remembered how many of my early mentors were artists, how many of my first real friends were punks or kids connected to punk rock. I remembered their hurt and their struggles too. I remembered my first concerts, how alive I felt, how different the rules were from anything I had experienced in my life. I remembered how strange and terrifying it felt to feel alive.

Punk rock wasn’t just a sideshow or a scene. It was a method that myself and countless others used to get out of similar positions of deep social alienation, a method we used to resist our upbringing, to join together collectively, to achieve some measure of healing for ourselves, and to seek some measure of deeper healing through projects for social transformation. All of this was contained in the actual praxis of punk rock. It had carried me in this direction, and it had done the same with many, many others.

Of course, none of this negated those realities that had driven me from the punk scene in the first place. Considering its potential, punk rock really was in sorry shape. But by taking stock of my own life, it started to feel more and more like this idea that I was somehow “above” the problems I saw in the scene was just a self-righteous delusion. The truth is that punk rock’s limitations were not so different from the limitations I’d fought against as a white kid coming up in confusing situations of material comfort and psychological poverty. I’ve learned a lot of ignorant and oppressive things, I’ve practiced a lot of self-defeating actions. I’ve been pushed away from authenticity, I’ve been driven towards professionalism. I’ve fooled myself into thinking I’m better than other folks, I’ve hurt people that were standing next to me in the same basic social position. Almost every trap and pitfall that I’ve seen folks in the punk scene fall into was shit that I’d also been stuck in at one point. This is probably what made punk rock’s failings so personal for me. In running away from punk rock, it was like I was trying to run away from the pain and mistakes of my own past history.

So now—after a year and a half—I’m here and I’m done running. I have problems. Punk rock has problems. We all have problems. Once we except this, the question then becomes how do we move forward? How do we heal and transform ourselves? How do we collectively fix punk rock and re-make it into something alive and vital? This piece of writing—To Make Punk Rock—is my half-crazed attempt at laying out a few answers to these questions.

As I’ve been trying to come to terms with the painful experiences of alienation that brought me to punk rock, I’ve come to believe that the first step towards recovery begins with the development of consciousness—understanding your situation, what you’ve got, what you want, what hurts you, what helps you. Consciousness provides the foundation for action, for creating positive shit in the world, for avoiding negative shit that will get in your way. As powerful as punk rock has been for so many of us, punk rock has rarely offered much in the way of a clear consciousness about what it really means to make punk rock, or participate in its creation and evolution. Sometimes various bands or punk spokespeople offer vague prescriptions or indictments in this vein (saying “this is the punk thing to do” or “that was not the punk thing to do”), but these edicts are typically limited in scope—at best, they’re just jumbled pieces of a puzzle; at worst, they just don’t make any fucking sense.

The cost of this lack of clarity, this lack of a clear methodology of how to make punk rock (or even an understanding of why folks like us are driven to make punk rock) is that if we’re not aware of what we’re doing, then over and over again, we will find ourselves hurt, alienated, and stuck in the same bullshit we’ve always been stuck in. If we don’t know what we want from punk rock, we doom ourselves to eventual heartbreak and disappointment within punk rock. This was true for me, I suspect it’s true for a lot of us, maybe all of us.

For the first time, To Make Punk Rock puts forth an articulation of a vision for a conscious theory and method of punk rock that’s been rattling around on the ARTNOISE site since it started in 2004. This vision comes out of a lot of odd-ball readings of punk rock history, out of a deep appreciation of outsider artistic and musical traditions both inside and outside the approved limits of “punk rock”, out of internal introspection, and out of years of observation and participation in local music scenes. It is influenced by the countless bands that have inspired us at ARTNOISE, by the music and art that first drew us to the scene, and ultimately by everything that inspired us to this create (and now re-create) this space. In my articulation of this vision, I have also borrowed a lot of knowledge from a whole mess of writers, theorists, and sometimes close friends in radical left, anarchist, feminist, and queer political traditions. My debt to them is like my debt to punk rock, something that can never be fully repaid.

Nothing about this text is meant to be complete. I don’t have all the answers and a project like this leaves a lot of room for mistakes. It’s unclear to me whether or not I even know how to write in a way that exactly makes sense. Even still, I think there is something here that is worth contributing, and something in these ideas that might offer a positive challenge to punk rock and to all the kids that make it happen. As always, I’d love to hear people’s feedback, additions, or disagreements. I might’ve poured my heart and soul into writing this shit, but your response, your engagement is the only thing that can make this text come to life. This shit is conversation or its nothing. So let’s dance.

all love,
germ ross
July 2009

PART 1: Why do I defend punk rock?

If you consider punk rock as a popular movement of ideas and practice that believed in things and fought for them in the world, then looking at our current situation should make it clear how totally punk rock has had its ass kicked over the last several decades. It is not enough to say that punk rock has been defeated since its conceptual birth in the 1970s. It is not enough to say that punk rock simply lost the war. Punk rock has been smashed, its ideas erased, its history forgotten or rewritten, and all its content that once threatened the social order has been co-opted and turned into a means for deriving profits from young people’s social isolation. Punk rock—which once formed itself in direct opposition to fashion and commercial exploitation, which once literally scared the crap out of mainstream society, which once connected groups of artists and musicians as stylistically diverse as Suicide, X-Ray Spex, The Wipers, Television, Bad Brains, or Sonic Youth—is today just another brand name genre defined more by a lead singer’s goofy eyeliner than by the real content of a manifested artistic process. In the era of Green Day and My Chemical Romance, the social threat of punk rock vanishes and all we have left are a lot of bullet belts and pricey fetish gear.

So it should be telling now that even a phrase like “punk is dead” has become a cliché in itself. The punk rock that stands before us is not even a parody of its former self. It is not even simply a corpse. What we see as punk rock today is our flag seized by the enemy. What we see as punk rock is slavery and consumer alienation repackaged and sold as personal liberation. Punk rock is now just another fashionable looking cage in a world full of such things. Everybody has sold out.

Given this context, it is worth asking “why defend punk rock?” Why should we even use the words “punk rock” when their current common sense meaning has been so distorted and abused both by predictable shills in the music industry and by the hipster cliques that divide and police the underground music scene (whatever some people’s best intentions might be)?

For myself, I choose to defend punk rock as a terminology because it has a history, because it still has some positive meaning to people other than myself, and because somewhere beneath all that has been commodified and co-opted, I still think there are ideas and ideals connected to punk that can be resurrected as weapons against our current circumstances of alienation, despair, domination, and destruction. More to the point, I defend punk rock because—despite of all of its shortcomings and current limitations—punk rock saved my life… just like it did for countless other kids who somehow grew up feeling hurt, alone, and hated.

And now, recognizing this debt, I think it’s our turn to save punk rock. Now it’s our turn to reconceptualize an evolving punk movement in terms that are once again challenging, honest, and full of meaning. Now it’s our turn to take a hard look at the labels we use, at the rituals we participate in, and at the scene we’ve built and to figure out where we’ve been limited and where we’ve limited ourselves. Finally, it’s our turn to figure out and name what punk rock is, what it isn’t, what its best potential is, what it can give us, what it can allow us to do, and from that position of clarity we can reassemble a living, breathing punk rock that moves us all forward instead of sticking us alternately in cultural poses from the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s. And once we can recognize that most dangerous and powerful possibility of what punk rock could be, what punk rock could become, we should challenge ourselves and others with that vision, and we should soberly consider the value and necessity of tearing down all that’s been built that falls short or gets in the way of realizing that vision. When the old shit fails you, the only way forward is to create something new.

Punk rock is dead. Long live punk rock.

[The next section of TO MAKE PUNK ROCK is available here.]