Agent Orange- “Your Mother Sucks Cocks in Hell” (1983) EP
Punk has something to teach us. It always has. When I was 16, punk had something to teach me about how not to grow up to be my parents. Bands like Crass, Drop Dead, the Dead Kennedys, and Los Crudos made me feel bad for some unquestioned habits of thought, especially the errors and limitations of a spontaneous political good will. Discharge, on the other hand, made my own thinking look sophisticated and profound. Then there is the whole culture of punk: its utopianism, the beautiful idea that you can “do it yourself,” and a touching belief that music can be a meaningful way to change the world.
But then you turn whatever age. Let’s call it 30. You didn’t change the world. Being an adult has stopped being an exciting initiation. The main feeling is: another decade of this?
And here punk is interesting again. Because life doesn’t care about you. Sure, there are no merit badges for “staying punk,” but only because there aren’t merit badges for anything. It’s a long slog, and some days you are just a piece of living meat unhappily compelled to work and eat and sleep and go through the motions of your relationships, just because it is too much trouble to do otherwise.
Now, I love philosophy, which has something to say about all this. But it is very high-minded; a lot is at stake in Ethics and Truth and Authenticity and Praxis. Punk starts at the opposite end of human experience: no stakes.
Punk starts from the minimum, almost entirely swallowed-up spark of human life, maybe just the faint, unwanted heartbeat that still means “I have to go to work today.” Karl Marx thought that mankind would attain its species-being in the free time obtained for human development after the revolution. Punk says: our species-being is a pretty ugly thing, for now, but we still have to own it. It can’t wait.
