It's dead stupid. Get over it.
Punk shits me. Especially the dogmatic little dweebs that insist it’s a British creation. Super-especially the talking rectums with monkey-see-monkey-do eyebrow piercings (which I always have to fight temptation to grab and twist) and Green Day t-shirts today that insist in proclaiming it’s “not dead!”
Even if you do place some tiny bit of credence in the British perspective on this matter, it was dead by 1977, everything since is just marketing. *FLOOMPH* – like a firework factory fire, it burned very brightly and very, very briefly. And was a wonderful thing, while it lasted.
In actuality it was a much broader cultural explosion fueled by the general social despairs of the times – in Britain particularly, as the entire country was falling to pieces whilst the proletariat was being distracted by the bread and circuses of the Royal Silver Jubilee, a crisis which eventually resulted in Thatcherism as radical remedy, compounding everyone’s despair. There were a LOT of pissed off people. This was also the birth place of the industrial scene, best exemplified by Throbbing Gristle.
At the fringes of those times there also arose a different breed of performer, usually soloists, that can only be described as bards – poet minstrels – who vented their rage with words rather than noise1, best known probably John Cooper Clarke, one angry, angry bastard. But no one captured the bleakness of the times better, I think, than Patrik Fitzgerald.
I stumbled this gem today from Fitzgerald, and it’s one of my all time favourite things2. A blackly Cynical response in 1981 to the newly anointed Maggie Thatcher, who was at that point only beginning her Master Plan to dismantle the entire British social fabric. Very similar to what many parts of the world are experiencing now, so as apt an anthem for our times. Minimalism rarely sounds this good. So enjoy. Or don’t.
Animal Mentality
It’s only being given time to think that creates boredom
I could be better off some other way
Don’t give the opportunity to think to me, it’s not worthwhile
Just take that opportunity away
Just give me things to do, nothing to think about or look at
I’ll work until my body breaks
I’ll live a life as long as or as short as you’ll require me too
A life as long as those things take to do
Just, [just give me animal mentality, just give me animal’s mentality]*4
Then i’ll get by, ok? ok??
I don’t know why you educated me, i knew you hated me
It’s only sadism – your favourite game
Teach people vaguely how to walk, then chop their legs away,
Then laugh at them becase they’re lame
It’s only being given time to think that creates boredom
I think about it and decide that i am free
But freedom’s just like boredom – nothing worthwhile to fight for
Then just give me animal mentality
Then i’ll get by
[just give me animal mentality, just give me animal’s mentality]*3
Then we’ll all get by, ok? ok.
Animal mentality.
.
1 – It is this legacy that lesser populist ideologues like Bill Bragg came to trade on. As always, the hard work is done, the path is laid and they follow on and cash in. Much as buffoons like Becky Watson and PZ Myers have done with atheism. Nothing new, just a horde of ready made chumps only catching up on what happened a decade ago sitting there ready to exploit.
2 – From the Tonight EP. Yes, I have it on real vinyl. This video version is ever so slightly different to what’s on the EP – I have no idea where it is from.
grey lining 
November 12, 2011 at 2:31 am
Agreed in general.
I am old enough to have lived through the age of punk. I distinctly remember the parties held in the flat above mine in the Detroit area. We were not in Detroit proper, but just north of 8 Mile. Their parties started at 10:00pm or so. They would crank up really crazy loud music from some local band who exclaimed “we suck”. They had almost no furniture. This worked well for them since they spent the whole night getting drunk and slamming each other. Bam, bam, bam… you could hear the smashing into the walls and each other. It would all end at about 2:00am when I am sure they would be a pile of bloody drunk corpses sleeping on the floor. Now that was punk! I was too fucking scared to join in and I have always had an aversion to pain for some reason.
Sometimes I was brave enough to go to the clubs in Hamtramck which is an old suburb that is inside the boarder of Detroit. People would slam dance and pound the crap out of each other while the band played relentless G, C, G chord combinations. That was punk.
On the flip side, I really like Green Day. It is a bit like punk except that the boys can actually play their instruments. But really… this is not want punk was and it is not what punk was about. Green Day is a good band, but they aren’t punk. No way. There is no more punk and there is no more punk scene. It’s okay with me really, cause those kids really scared me. It was like fight club…. except for real.
November 12, 2011 at 2:37 am
You’re describing what we here call “jock-core”, a term of extreme derision – just alpha male bonehead music, college rock for keg parties. It’s awful, simply awful, no creative spark at all, no message, nothing new, just a replay of a replay of a replay. This type of dumbness probably began with Suicidal Tendencies (who’s first album is a classic regardless) being overrun by an idiot following.
Been waiting in vain for something new, interesting and genuinely terrifying to parents to happen for 25 years now, but there’s been nothing. Just apes aping apes. Maybe this new world craziness can provide a spark. Who knows? There’s always Taqwacore – which seriously is one of the few things that gives me hope about the middle east.
November 12, 2011 at 2:50 am
Yeah… I guess this is what we had here in Motown. We are not really a place known for our intellectual core. It’s mostly wrenches and grease around these parts. (Still, some of us make some pretty fuckin cool cars).
I guess if you are looking at minimalist music Green Day is a pretty good fit. I am impressed that there are only three (sometimes four) of these guys. Did you ever see their Grammy performance? Yeah… it’s commercial…. yeah… it’s an award show…etc. Still, to me, these four guys rocked down the frickin house.
I can sorta see why people feel this is part of the punk tradition.
November 12, 2011 at 3:02 am
It’s sad – Detroit *is* one of the spiritual homes of punk. The Stooges, MC5. It’s actually a term is use with other connosieurs – “man, they sound Detroit”. Seriously. Hellacopters – that is the greatest Detroit style band of the last decade.
November 12, 2011 at 3:04 am
Punk isn’t dead, it’s just not the same. It’s an expression of anger by a group that feels it’s all they have left.
Some serious punk?
NWA – Straight Outta Compton
Public Enemy – Bring the Noise
on and on. Punk was damaged most by being thought of as a genre instead of a loud, furious outburst of anger. I’m probably alone in this view, but it seems to work.
November 12, 2011 at 3:16 am
The original punk? Jerry Lee Lewis.
No, “punk” was rapidly commodified and became one of the most uniform, conservative and conformist alleged counter-cultures the world has ever seen. Vegans in studs and leather. This is where I’m coming from. The *attitude*, that’s another thing altogether, there are pockets everywhere. The one rule is, those that talk about “punk” are very definitely not.
November 12, 2011 at 9:08 am
I was born about 20 years too late to have lived through the punk era, but I did experience the death throes of heavy metal. Though perhaps its fuse burned longer, metal is just as dead as punk and one of the most rage-inducing sights in the last decade is the sort of gauged ear, Mohawk-wearing try hard with rivets in his skull wearing a T-shirt bearing the logo of Seether. Insipid, soulless garbage!
November 12, 2011 at 10:29 pm
What I think of as ‘true’ punk, was the stuff from the late 70’s. I was quite into the new wave side of things which was a variety or offshoot of punk. I was into both, but mostly new wave.
That whole time, metal was happening elsewhere, both pre and post punk. To me though, it felt like metal (and what we called “hard rock”) was where one was EXPECTED to go musically if one didn’t want mainstream crap radio. The metal was only sometimes enjoyable as well. Most of it I didn’t like, and I was rarely in the mood for the ones I did like.
Luckily when I first heard some punk/new wave music at high school acid parties, I was just nuts about it. Here in Toronto, there was even a radio station willing to play all the alternative stuff, CFNY. I was underage for drinking, but I snuck into clubs just to see bands.
There are some playlists on my youtube page, most of which are new wave and punk, stuff from the late 70s and early 80s mostly, if anyone wants to hear music like they just don’t make it anymore!
http://www.youtube.com/user/ScentedNectar#g/p
Needs some organizing and fixing of some dead links, but lots there to listen to.
Oh hey! I can embed vids here.
Lene lovich – Home (Live)
Downtown • The B-52’s
November 12, 2011 at 11:07 pm
The be all and end all, the guys that, by their own admission, are Slayer’s greatest influence. Bow down in awe and respect, Discharge –
November 13, 2011 at 6:44 am
You do know that Discharge is from England.
hey Franc, look at the flyer they have up at 0:21
November 13, 2011 at 11:49 am
Yeah, and I bet Discharge blew those pussies off stage.
November 13, 2011 at 2:04 pm
And Motorhead is from England. Didn’t say everything British sucks. Just 99.9%
November 13, 2011 at 10:29 am
I’ve never heard of Discharge, but every time I see a band like that, with their unsophisticated, raw style, and they’re out there just doing their thing because they loved music (or mayhem, as the case may be), I get kind of bleary eyed and nostalgic, because it’s as if we’ll never have that again.
I can’t say that from experience. I was too young (and growing up in Texas) when all this was taking place, but you’d have to be blind not to recognize the difference between then and now.
They had no money, no contractual obligations, and they weren’t afraid of going out on a limb. Today, everything is comodified, predigested, and sanitized.
I don’t know, I don’t feel like I’m expressing myself very well, or able to put in words what I’m thinking. I just can’t help but think that that must have been a terribly fun time in their lives. It must have been awesome to go to a local club like this and just have fun and not give a shit about anything but the music.
And those flyers! Those awful, hand-drawn promo flyers reproduced on bad copiers. They’re brilliant. Everything now is so “sophisticated.” And who uses flyers now anyway? It’ll be announced via Twitter.
November 13, 2011 at 12:40 pm
As I am fond of saying, you haven’t lived until you’ve been vomited on by ice cold vomit. My first experience was at 15, circa 1980, at the Civic Hotel, Sydney (now a primo yuppie cocktail bar, of course). One of those pubs that was fully tiled so it could be washed out with a firehose every morning. I was fucking terrified and sitting on the bar watching locals _Progression Cult_ (Discharge clones) next to a spiky haired kid about my age. He glanced at me and smiled, then his eyes glazed and he let forth a fountain of spew all over me, thankfully chunk free, but as icy cold as the beer that was poured from the tap. He chuggalugged too quickly. I guess most folks would be put off by that, but for me it was a defining moment. This was *freedom* and it’s only vomit. And you can’t get any more antisocial. I was home.
I can’t say that from experience. I was too young (and growing up in Texas)
Don’t bemoan Texas – you gave us Millions of Dead Cops, Butthole Surfers and many many more.
They had no money, no contractual obligations, and they weren’t afraid of going out on a limb. Today, everything is comodified, predigested, and sanitized.
Or no fear, no concerns, no pride, no shame and absolute contempt for the world. In short – old school Athenian Cynics.
And those flyers! Those awful, hand-drawn promo flyers reproduced on bad copiers. They’re brilliant. Everything now is so “sophisticated.”
Yes – the DIY ethic, that is the key. Once that is lost, the movement dies. As I said, as far as I am concerned, it was dead in Britain by 1977. Discharge moved off in a different direction, one of the few to keep innovating. The rest were just apes. America picked up the baton and upped the ante at that point with hardcore, which to me shits all over Brit punk by an order of magnitude in every way, but especially anger – Bad Brains, Black Flag, Minor Threat etc. Extreme anti-commercialism and anti-fashion, with the main thinkers driving it, to my mind, Greg Ginn (SST Records, now based in Texas!) and brother Raymond Pettibon (who changed his name from “Ray Ginn” because it sounded like “Reagan”) who created much of the artwork that defined the movement –
Just try and commercialise that image… That’s a nuke going off out the window, not a tree, low quality scan.
Of course, hardcore too was dead by 1986, killed by of all things, the new commercialism that ended up spawning Nirvana and forever stupifying the subculture.
I’m still waiting for kids to get angry again. I don’t hold out much hope, between ‘tardbook and shiny junk from Apple, I think this entire generation is lost.
November 13, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Need to clarify the specificity of the date 1977 – I mean by then, the actual creative explosion had concluded, the rest was repetition and assholes like Malcolm McLaren cashing in. The initial creative burst could very much be paralleled to Dada. Of course there was a lot of great stuff after that.
November 14, 2011 at 10:29 am
Thanks for those comments, Franc. You’ve listed more bands and people I need to check out. In reality, none of that was my scene — as I said, I was much too young. My interest in this kind of stuff is more, idk, intellectual I suppose. I’m much too responsible and cautious to live, or have lived, like these people did. I’ll fess up — I’m more of a tourist than anything else. But I can’t help but be drawn to antisocial works. But what is even more fun is how “decent” people get so worked up and bent out of shape over it all.
Speaking of vomit, have you seen that vid (I’m sure you have) of that guy who takes a beer enema, then squirts it into a glass, which his friend drinks, and then pukes back into the glass, then drinks again…
November 14, 2011 at 11:25 am
For your (safe) education, I recommend –
The Filth and the Fury” – though largely Sex Pistols-centric, it is a great overview of the UK scene, and
American Hardcore – a way too short overview of the US scene.
November 14, 2011 at 1:02 pm
Oh man, thanks, I’ll definitely check those out. I do like those kinds of documentaries. I saw Hated years ago, but I don’t remember much about it. I need to see that again, too.
November 14, 2011 at 2:05 pm
Speaking of vomit, have you seen that vid…
Dallas, if you ever join the words “ass” and “smoothie”, put a “.com” on the end and put it in your browser, I’ll never forgive myself.
November 15, 2011 at 5:42 am
Franc: Dallas, if you ever join the words “ass” and “smoothie”, put a “.com” on the end and put it in your browser, I’ll never forgive myself.
You frighten me. You know that?
November 13, 2011 at 10:31 am
Thanks for the Clarke and Fitzgerald info. I don’t know them at all.
November 14, 2011 at 8:19 am
Just for something to do, I mixed the Ramones with a kaleidoscope. Best at full screen and the 720 setting…
November 14, 2011 at 11:28 am
How can anyone not love The Ramones? Rock-n-Roll High School is the Citizen Kane of rock movies too.
November 14, 2011 at 12:46 pm
love The Ramones, but Marky was fairly recently part of an “all star band” called Osaka Popstar and they were one of the worst band I’ve ever heard. truly dreadful, beyond awful. I had the displeasure of seeing them live at Fiend Fest 2006. (I was not there for them)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_Popstar
November 15, 2011 at 4:03 am
Hmmm, I don’t see a video embed icon here, so I’m not sure this is going to work, but other people have done it, so….
If not the URL is below it.
I love this.
July 19, 2012 at 6:42 am
Punk isn’t dead. Fuck off cunts.