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Is Punk Dead?


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1 hour ago, irishtexan said:

Yep. And I said it doesn't make sense. If you want to call Fugazi a punk band that's fine. It's all subjective. And I'm just taking the piss out of everyone and fucking around. That's why genres are stupid. It's all music. 

44 minutes ago, Patricio Swayze said:

I really think there has to be a delineation between punk music and punk ethos to have this discussion. Are hip hop artists that started by selling tapes out of the trunk of their cars punk?

I get behind all of this.  I always equate it to the similar question is art dead?  As a vehicle for expressing a new and original form/ideas, yes.  As a vehicle expressing feelings of or rage against isolation, alienation and inadequacy, or narratives/storytelling within an evolving landscape, it's fine, just keep kicking people.   Love hate these arguments, mainly because some are so dead set on a definition.  Even reading about who coined the word punk involves circles of pretension--everybody in the day wants to lay claim to it. Who gives a fuck.  it existed before a definition and good music is not limited to one.   

Edited by Mdhorn
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11 minutes ago, G650 said:

Plus there are all sorts of other bands, from terrible like Five Finger Death Punch to not so bad like Greta Van Fleet.

Greta Van Fleet is reviving old rock to the new masses.  But everything's new to them.  It's gotta be difficult to be young and play and find out that every riff has been done before many, many times.  Oh well, they're still fun and have to play it to get elsewhere.

Anyways, originality really is largely based on ignorance--it's original by our experience because we don't know any better.  Doesn't mean it didn't already exist, just that the whatever-ologists didn't know about it.   Post-punk gets traced back to the 70s and is probably what most punk falls under.  

I'll go back to reading about peoples experiences and clapping madly because people still passionately care about it.  Cheers.

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I read this in McSweeney's yesterday and felt very seen:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-pair-of-gen-z-men-in-the-northeast-regional-quiet-car-loudly-discussing-pitchforks-100-best-albums-of-all-time

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PAIR OF GEN-Z MEN IN THE NORTHEAST REGIONAL QUIET CAR LOUDLY DISCUSSING PITCHFORK’S 100 BEST ALBUMS OF ALL TIME

by ELIZABETH BASTOS

Your opinions on the discography of the last fifty years interests me about as much as you think it does a middle-aged woman traveling coach to Boston with a L.L. Bean boat tote filled with crackers. I read mild. I read invisible. I read that probably all I listen to is “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead.

It’s easy to assume that I don’t know who Fugazi is. It’s okay, insult me—you can barely grow beards. Here’s the thing, though: I know who Fugazi is. And you will never grow beards because of the xenoestrogens in your plastic water bottles. Don’t be fooled by my comfortable and supportive footwear, my tie-dye rainbow Crocs; I know a lot about music.

So it was insufferable for me to endure you two loudly opining in the Northeast Regional quiet car on the Velvet Underground’s 1970s New York scene. On DC punk in the 1980s. On trip-hop and Aphex Twin and post-punk and De La Soul and hip-hop and the country revival and New Orleans bounce and Ye and on which bands sucked Nirvana’s teat derivatively. Oh, you went on and on. I felt like I was trapped in one of those podcasts where know-it-all bros one-up each other. But I kept my mouth shut.

However, when you struggled to name the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist, I thought, It’s Flea, you total asshats.

Then, as we were pulling out of Newark, one of you shrieked, “High key, dog, why are the Pixies on this Pitchfork ‘Best Albums of All Time’ list? They’re ass. Dog, they’re 100 percent derivative of Nirvana.” All my Gen-X senses started to tingle. 

You belittle the Pixies? You diss Black Francis? On the way to Massachusetts? On my gal, the bassist Kim Deal, you didn’t have a crush at Smith College in 1992? Were you not even born?

I leaned over my Amtrak headrest and hissed, “Boyx, that’s cap. You’ve been talking out of your asses since Union Station.”

I continued, “In ‘Five Classic Albums That Wouldn’t Exist Without Pixies’ Surfer Rosa,’ Jochan Embley wrote, ‘Grunge owes so much to Nirvana, but Nirvana owe a great deal to Pixies.’ Kurt Cobain publicly said he was trying to rip off a Pixies song when he wrote ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ Nirvana was trying to sound like Pixies, you morons—Death to the Pixies.”

I went on: “Disc one of Death to the Pixies is the random-button scrambling of the Pixies’ studio discs; disc two is a convincing live show that repeats a few of the songs and still doesn’t make you feel that you’ve heard too much. There are, of course, plenty of arguments to be made for the band’s original sequencing, but since the Pixies are as adept at pop hooks as they are at punk screech, the set works to freshen songs you know well — an effective reintroduction to a group that perhaps sounds even greater now than it did when making an LP a year in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Gigantic indeed.”

You looked at me. My hair askew. My eyes blazing behind my +1.25 rainbow readers that, yep, match my Crocs. My seltzer sloshing in my hand. I hoped you were thinking, Holy shit, dog. We’re meeting a real-life strega for the Pixies. Stregas for the Pixies are the rarest, most righteous, ass-kicking, music-knowing mothefuckering fairies from planet ’90s. Josh, I wonder how she’s going to bless us? I don’t know, Jeraboam, but I am sure she will… somehow.

Instead, you said, “Jesus Christ, lady. All right already.” You turned away from me. I heard you mutter, “Damn, dog, that’s one furious grandma.” You put on large puffy headphones and were silent all the way to Providence. There, you disembarked.

I’m sorry. If you had been nice — if you had been like, “Wow, strega, you know things! We judged you incorrectly as boringly into ‘Ripple’ like every other oldster, but we were wrong, you’re an arrogant, loud, obnoxious music knower—you’re one of us,” I would have shared my water crackers with you and intricately detailed the post-Pixies solo careers of Frank Black and twin sisters Kim and Kelley Deal.

After you left, a nice lady about my age boarded and asked if your seats were taken. I said, “Only if you have a favorite Pixies song and can defend your reasoning at a volume appropriate to the Amtrak quiet car.” She pulled her readers off the top of her head where they were nestled in the gray bun of her hair and let them hang around her neck on their rainbow-beaded lanyard. She sized me up and said, “‘Gigantic.’”

See, sirs, it’s not so hard to get along with me.

If you do land a podcast—and I sincerely hope you do, because I’m not sure you are good for anything else and I actually, grudgingly, liked your take on Iron Maiden—please consider me. I bring something unexpected to your podcast: the entire audience of Gen-X women in menopause.

Here’s to Blood on the Tracks, boys, the best Dylan album, and don’t argue with me.

— Liz

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On 9/22/2023 at 9:58 AM, Patricio Swayze said:

I really think there has to be a delineation between punk music and punk ethos to have this discussion. Are hip hop artists that started by selling tapes out of the trunk of their cars punk?

yep. A band like Beat Happening/Calvin Johnston is as punk as it comes in my book - no spiky, green hair or distorted guitar, but all ethos.

Same way i think Daniel Johnson was punk as fuck, slipping cassettes of his music in the burger bags he served while working at McDonalds in Dobie Mall.

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Taking a piss at the Blue Flamingo, og bathroom, a chick waks in, hikes up her dress and pulls out  a crank bigger than your arm. Best punk bar, ever. Better than Rauls. RIP Austin.

One of my really terrible bands played there. The carpet was wet and every time our bassist would go to sing/scream in the mic he would get a hefty shock. Drug dealers outside, punks and trans folks inside. Loved that version of Austin.
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7 hours ago, Patricio Swayze said:

The carpet was wet and every time our bassist would go to sing/scream in the mic he would get a hefty shock.

That reminds me of this old warehouse we used to practice at. We had some sort of loop or short or something, and the mic would shock the fuck out of you. We like covered it with a sock or something lol.

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