Sunk Pucks

My musical tastes tend to evolve in historical fashion. My starting point, the first time I really decided to get "into" pop music, was the early Rolling Stones, back when the thunder of the arena hadn't bleached their simple swagger. From thence, I have simultaneously gone forward and backward: Forward through 60's Invasion and Garage rock through to 70's Punk and now, 80's Hardcore (the move to Fugazi is tempting), backward through older and older blues (most recently I got into Big Bill Broonzy, a contemporary of Robert Johnson) and Jazz. Everything fits onto a gigantic Critical Tree in my head.

That said, I'm not getting a lot of what passes for punk these days. The music is starting to bore me. In the fight between the "arties" (music for creativity's sake) and the "social realists" (music for the revolution) that came in the wake of the Sex Pistols demise in 1978 and the DOA failure of the New York scene, the social realists won, hands down, driving the poor arties to New Wave and other excuses for bad hair. The social realists, meanwhile, insisted on making punk serve the call to arms of the New Tommorrow. The result has been as monotonous as Stalin-era Soviet painting. If a band's not emulating Black Flag, complete with screaming and stuffing every concievable musical phrase into a 3-minute song, they're emulating the Descendents, with trebly melodies and insufferably nasal and whiny vocals. Maybe I'm getting old, but it's all starting to hurt my ears.

Worst of all is the way the genre has marketed itself to oblivion. I refer to the hyphenation. Each sub-sub-sub-genre comes complete with costume, tune template, and ready-made audience. Reality overtakes parody: I used to joke about things like cow-core or emo-oi, only to see them sprout into being. Got a song about your sensitive side? Bang, you're emo, whether you like it or not. Got a riff lifted from Gene Vincent? You're punkabilly or psychobilly. Got a skull somewhere on your record? Welcome to horror-core. This is Glenn; he'll be making fun of you.

The point is, it's become as unlikely to hear something you haven't heard before on a punk record as it is on a Britney Spears disc. Punk, which was supposed to eschew the same old thing, has become the same old thing, dedicated only to cloning itself, with the same clothes, the same sounds, the same preachy solipsistic thug liberalism. Punks are the Teddy Boys of the Left.

The preceding is prologue to me adding Conservative Punk to the linksheet. I do so with a few caveats. The site has yet to really impress me. It defines itself as an antidote to Punk Voter, which is fine as far as it goes, but somehow insufficient. It's not enough to be negative, to define yourself as against the tide. Destruction may lead to creation, but, contrary to all those folk Jon Savage quotes in England's Dreaming, it is not creative in itself. Left to itself, destruction merely frees up space.

In other words, it's well past time for punk to learn how to praise, how to build, how to appreciate. Such things have worn the label of "uncool," for way too long. Snideness and gesture do not sustain: they must be followed up. This is going to require thought and effort, and openminded-ness (real open-mindedness, not the kind that leads you to what you already want to think).

And music. Let's not forget the music. Tell your truth with a smile and a swagger and they'll believe you believe it, and that's half the battle. Thunder in the night forever.