[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.
The flip-side of the dull, dehumanizing realm of production is consumption. Through consumption, people starving (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally) to fulfill their needs and desires are able to indulge themselves and temporarily make their lives a bit more bearable. If a person has been made to feel ugly, they can buy clothes or cosmetics and maybe for the rest of the day they’ll feel better about themselves. If a person has been made to feel bored or unfulfilled, they can buy DVDs or video games and maybe for a couple hours each day they can distract themselves from how they actually feel. In this way, all the wounds that society inflicts on us can be briefly anesthetized for a price.
I want to buy
I need consoling
I need something new
Something trivial would do
I want to satisfy this empty feeling…
-”Spend, Spend, Spend,” The Slits
Of course, despite the hefty price tag, all these acts of consumption typically just stall the feelings of emptiness hurt, loneliness and alienation. In these exchanges, humanity is negated and the realization of human desires becomes increasingly impossible. The consumer becomes merely a passive receptacle for prepackaged junk and chases fleeting hallucinations of satisfaction like an addict chasing their next fix. People work jobs and make things they don’t care about only to take home a check and buy up things that others made and didn’t care about. Everywhere shit is made and bought up, yet almost nothing is created. Nobody ever gets what they want; for all our frantic searching all we ever find is more debt and a deeper, more profound sense of dissatisfaction. This is called life.
Art—supposedly the purest embodiment of human beings’ capacity to express themselves, their desires, and their truths in the world—under these conditions is also subsequently negated. In a society that refuses creativity, art becomes yet another detached commodity built for passive consumption. Art is produced by “experts,” “professionals,” people with training (or—exotically—untrained people that successfully “fake it”), or individuals whose creativity has been advertised or endorsed by corporations and moneyed social elites. “Artist” becomes yet another mundane job; an artist’s name becomes yet into another exclusive band name for the marketplace.
suffer for your sins.
pay you by the hour.
follow any trend that comes their way.
they will pick your life apart
and throw away your art.
finding something new is never hard.
entertainment.
-”For Your Entertainment,” Unwound
Artwork produced by these magically important “artists” is ultimately bought, sold, or hermetically sealed inside galleries, museums, or other socially sanctified boxes in which people can try to connect with something that feels human before they go back to their dull, inhuman lives. Like most objects of consumption, this “art” is thus manufactured in many flavors: the most bland and least challenging work is marketed for those seeking escape in bland reassurance, and the “edgier,” more controversial work is marketed for those seeking escape in some thrill of imaginary social upheaval. Whatever the flavor, the brand, the market, proper art becomes a hollow affect of meaningful creativity—it is just another junk commodity distraction masquerading as something expressing deeper meaning. Art is reduced to entertainment.
This is true of all such art in society whether it rots in galleries or gets vomited out on the radio. Through the corporate record industry, the entire premise of music is continually destroyed. Manufactured bands and artists fade in and out rotation and popular consciousness based on carefully constructed marketing schemes and the whims of fashion and style. Everything blurs together. The new hit singles are written by committee and are predictably molded into the shape of the old hit singles. “Singers,” “musicians,” and “song-writers” are constructed that in reality do not actually sing, play music, or write songs. Audiences fill stadiums (and empty their wallets) just to watch a spectacle of video screens, costume-changes, lip-syncing, and theatrical choreography. This is called music.
They hate the music they play.
Kill DJs
for fuck’s sake.
-”Kill DJs,” Leatherface
The record industry works to bind all music within a straight-jacket of commerce and commodification. Music is incidental to what they do, it is just a means to an end… just another way to turn a profit. This is why the industry is constantly pushing music in the direction that it does—making music less and less messy, less and less human, more and more polished, more and more ready for the market. This is why we have all these music groups and “rock stars” that have been wholly manufactured and assembled for mass promotion and consumption—bands of recording “artists” that did not even exist before an entrepreneur made them exist, and whose formulaic music is totally fashioned to insure a successful process of capital accumulation.(7)
While these “fake” bands might be the most obnoxious and unfettered expressions of industry logic, the reduction of music to a salable good takes its toll even on the “real” artists that bought into the industry only after years of establishing themselves locally or in the underground. Even the less compromised musicians find themselves stuck in a position where they are separated from, and placed in a towering position over their audience. Even the less compromised musicians face enormous pressure to mitigate their creative expression against the needs of corporations looking to make profits through airplay and product tie-ins. Even the most honest musicians find their truth nullified by the inherent dishonesty of advertising strategies and manipulative hype. Sooner or later, the industry erodes all artists. It chips away at their intentions, their expression, the human creativity that is at the core of their art. It reduces art to manipulative exchanges in which feigned creativity and emotional resonance function as little more than bait laid out in a commercial trap.(8) More than anything though, the music industry obliterates the capacity of people to realize art through a participation in artistic expression. It seeks out great art only to put up walls around it and start charging admission. As art becomes a professionally produced commodity it becomes wholly subsumed into the larger spectacle of consumer society.(9) It becomes an empty husk of real creation. It is bullshit held up on a fucking pedestal.
I took a record of pretty music,
Now I’m putting it to you straight from hell.
-”Loose,” The Stooges
If alienating society makes art impossible outside of a shallow routine of production and consumption, then the project of realizing creation—of constructing living, breathing, human things that embody meaningful truths and expressions—demands no less than a total war against everything that we’ve been told art is supposed to be. This is the connection of democracy to punk rock. This is what makes punk rock dumb fucking music and this is what makes punk rock music so fucking powerful. When society tells us that real art only comes from real artists, that real art looks this way, that art is something you just look at, just listen to, or that only certain people get to decide what art is worthwhile, the democratic impulse of punk rock is what gives us the basis to extend our middle fingers, to reject the poison of these arbitrary limitations on human creativity, and to put forward a different concept of art without artists and rock without rockstars. Democracy means the rejection of elites, the rejection of experts, the rejection of rule by the privileged or talented few. Most importantly though, democracy also means the rejection of passivity and the active inclusion of everyone in the process of creation.
In the context of the music scene, punk rock has always had some idea that experiencing music was more than just flipping on a record or standing in a crowd with your arms crossed. Punk rock is not something that happens because X band plays song Y up on a stage.(10) It is not something handed down in a neat little package for people to mindlessly and soullessly digest. Punk rock is art that only happens through everybody’s active participation. At the punk show, there is always the promise of a kind of transcendence—the potential to reach an experience of something which is so ecstatic, frenzied, and bigger than you that it cuts you to the core and rips you out of your normal place in the world. But this moment of transcendence can only happen through the intense collaboration of all the people in the room: between the performer and the audience, between everyone with everyone.
This process can take on infinite forms. It can be seen as a collective submission to the creative moment—where both the band and audience lose themselves to a greater experience of the music over which neither has total control. It can be seen as provocations, as moments where bands taunted or tortured their audiences, goading them towards an unsettling realization of their own violence and anger.(11) It has been seen in moments where shows melt into strange interactive games with no leaders and unclear sets of adhoc, ever-changing rules. Even fighting at punk shows can be seen as a manifestation of this idea that art cannot be experienced unless the rules break down and we all actually touch other.(12) Again, punk rock happens collectively or it does not happen. The punk stage is not a pedestal, it is simply another barrier to be challenged or ignored.
This overall logic extends past the simple organization and dis-organization of punk shows. Participation—the challenge of creating things in a way that encourages others to come together in the process of creation—is one of the driving forces in the evolution punk rock. It is what makes the resounding stupidity of our art—with all its messiness, impatience, carelessness, and snot—ring out like a fucking battle cry. Through every piece of broken-down shit that we make, we affirm to ourselves and to the world that art can and should be mangled up and deformed. Our interest is not to produce the most polished, well-manicured nonsense that sets us apart from each other and locks out those who can’t or don’t want to follow the rules. Because we need collaboration, because we need people to join us, to create together with us, our art must be art that brings people in. Rather than aspire towards perfection, our art must glory in imperfection and simplicity, it must show every seam, honor every mistake. In the end, our art must show off how fucking easy it is to make art.
We see this ethic in the decades-long persistence of punk rock DIY scenes and subcultures with their emphases on collective self-reliance, personal authenticity, hand-crafted aestetics, and impassioned anti-professionalism. We also see it in generation-upon-generation of punk rock bands playing short sloppy songs, using basic chords, and rejecting showy guitar solos and theatrics.(13) We even see it in the pantheon of influential and celebrated punk rock vocalists that by any traditional standard can not and should not sing. These individuals—people like Darby Crash, Lou Reed, Penelope Houston, Kim Gordon, Kurt Cobain, Kathleen Hannah, Frankie Stubbs, Yasuko Onuki, etc—demonstrate plainly that coarse delivery or a lack of vocal range does not stop a person from expressing something beautiful or heart-wrenchingly honest and human.(14)
To say that punk rock is dumb fucking music does not mean that punk is unable to say profound things or is unable to create profound things in the world. Punk rock is profound, so profound that it does not let pretense or high-minded bullshit get in the way of the truth it seeks to communicate. Towards this end, punk rock recognizes so-called “talent” for what it really is. “Talent” is just a wall that tries to separate those who can from those who can’t. “Talent” is the arbitrary dividing line separating the elites who are allowed to express their humanity in creation from all the rest of us who can only hope to shell out cash for the fruits of their “genius.” “Talent” is the essential falsehood that keeps producers producing and consumers consuming—the lie obscuring the death of art, the lie that passes off the fucked-up organization of society as the natural, inevitable order of things. “Talent” is an embodiment of our present situation of social alienation and as such “talent” is the enemy of punk rock.
Without all these elitist mystifications, without all these social hierarchies that are thrust onto our lives, real talent can be seen as just the raw capacity to create—no more, no less. In spite of whatever we’ve been told, we are all talented in this way. In this way, it is the most ordinary thing in the world: something we all can do, something we all can develop, something we all can aspire towards. At the same time, the consequences of this idea are beyond earth-shattering. The best works of the most celebrated artists in history are nothing compared to the total creative potential of humanity itself. People working collectively, working equally with each other, dialectically with each other, working in a way that continually draws out the most inspired, most challenging truths from each other, represents a creative force capable of painting anything that can be felt, imagined, or thought of onto the living surface of reality itself. All things become possible and through the process of realizing these new possibilities, we can all be radically transformed into something greater than we once were—more human than we once were. This is the kind of cosmic power that punk rock taps into when it makes the audience an equal part of the show, when it throws off the rules that govern what art should be or shouldn’t be, when it creates spaces or methods that support others in finding and realizing their creative voice. This is what makes democracy an essential part of what keeps punk rock alive and what will keep punk rock moving forward. In the end, none of us are fundamentally better or more important than any of us. We all have potential, we all have immediate limitations, and we are all have an interest in helping each other push past those limitations. The more we are able to see this and act together in this, the more powerful we become, the more powerful our creation becomes, the more powerful punk rock becomes.
[The next section, "Revolution," will be posted as soon as it is completed. - germ]
(6) It is important to note the difference between these ideas about democracy and the misrepresentations of democracy that are applied to “democratic” governments like the United States. Strict majoritarian electoral systems of “democracy”—like the US system of government—are at best a very narrow setup for people to come together and create and recreate society in a very limited fashion. At worst (and it seems more typically) these systems simply serve to mask or legitimize massively anti-democratic social arrangements beneath a shallow veneer of popular participation and consent.
(7) In describing this phenomenon of media-mogul assembled groups, I’m particularly thinking about a wide span of vaccuous pop groups like New Kids On The Block, Backstreet Boys, The Spice Girls, NSync, Hannah Montana, etc, whose entire existence is owed to corporate/private capitalist schemes to extract profits from young people. Also, the term “capital accumulation” is an economic term for one of the most basic processes in all capitalist production and reproduction. In this context, you could describe it as the industry’s process of making and selling crap so that they make more profits, which they can then use to finance making and selling even more crap, so that they can make even more profits, and so on…
(8) To be clear, what I’m trying to say here is not the usual knee-jerk condemnation of any punk or indie-whatever band that sells out by signing to a major label. Whether or not a band is on a major does not determine whether their music has power and it does not determine whether you or me or anybody can find meaning in their work. For one, I think of scores of bands on independent labels whose music I find to be as vapid, useless, and market-driven as what gets played on the radio. Secondly, I can look at bands like Sonic Youth and Nirvana, who signed major and then subsequently gamed their positions to promote underground acts, and often criticized and promoted opposition to the industry forces that were propelling them into popular consciousness. Without Sonic Youth or Nirvana, I don’t know that I would’ve had the reference points necessary to figure out the real power and promise of what music and art can do.
My point here is rather to talk about how the overall logic of the industry limits everybody and how the commodification of art severely limits the realization of art. This is not a question of greed but a question of the way that people come to understand music within the terms of the marketplace.
(9) I use the term “spectacle” here in reference to the concept popularized by Situationist writers like Guy Debord. Their insights (many of which they actually ripped off from other smart folks) have made a huge contribution to my understanding of the dehumanizing aspects of the social realm of production and consumption and have helped me see specifically how that shit effectively destroys art as anything but a simple commodity for exchange and consumption. Unfortunately, a lot of their writing can be confusing as fuck.
(10) “X band” should not to be confused with X, the band.
(11) The liner notes for the re-release of the first Suicide album talks about numerous instances where their antagonistic performances would descend into a chaos of threats and thrown chairs as audience members were literally moved to attack the band. After one performance in Belgium, this may have ultimately led to a small-scale street riot outside the club.
(12) This is not to in anyway meant to glorify or promote violence at shows. Without taking back the point I made above, I think that the actual practice of violence at shows is hardly a democratizing force in the scene. If anything, punk violence often excludes a whole range of folks, including many women, non-jocks of all genders, smaller people, anybody not interested having their face side-kicked, etc. Physical interaction can be a very powerful way of connecting with other people and reaching past social alienation, but balancing freedom to interact with others against other people’s needs for physical safety is a really tricky thing to try to figure out. It doesn’t help that at shows the rules typically get set by the folks who see themselves as more physically powerful and/or care the least about what others need.
(13) I think it’s important to note again that I’m not trying to pigeonhole any given song-structure or musical form as being “the” punk way of doing things. In my view, unchanging aesthetic rules like this—even if they were originally grounded in a positive intent or were responding to something as potentially obnoxious as hippie/prog rock jamming—end up being poisonous to music and art if there is no room for continued change or evolution. The Wipers’ Greg Sage (gloriously ornery fucker that he was) was on to this when in the face of punk rock trending towards shorter, faster songs, he decided to put out the ten-minute punk epic “Youth of America”—an awesome, challenging piece of music. Moves like that go a long way to explain both why the Wipers’ music still feels so vital today, and (not coincidentally) why they remained squarely out of fashion for pretty much the entirety of their run.
(14) To be clear, by “pantheon,” I mean “bullshit list I made up of people I think are influential.” Listed in order, these individuals are singers for the Germs, the Velvet Underground, the Avengers, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Bikini Kill/Le Tigre, Leatherface, and Melt Banana.
