punk music is conservative

if you watch some tv shows from the mid 80s, you'll find that people seemed to think that punk rockers were really terrifying--there were plenty of shows with punks as villains forecasting the moral bankruptcy of the new american generation. and if you listen to the sex pistols or black flag or even the misfits, you can certainly understand where that reaction might have been coming from. not that the "adults" were actually listening closely to this music and parsing the lyrics.

but of course the kind of ethics that a group like minor threat represented would have seemed hunky dory to the protestants that invented the famous work ethic if you had just taken away the chains and grown the hair out. minor threat sang about tearing down a wall, but they were all about building up something, and as ian mackaye's career progressed he became more and more invested in the idea of documentation, taking an almost anthropological zeal in creating a lasting record of the DC "scene" with seemingly no interest in marketability or even broader social relevance. each of his releases as a label head is a little snapshot of his community, which is about as far as one could get from the kind of sensibility that was behind the PIL creating albums that were actually objects like metal box, attempting to denaturalize the idea of commodified music and cast light on the nature of consumer society.

these days it seems like conservative punk has gotten the upper hand--maybe it takes a conservative impulse to keep plowing along after thirty plus years. the bands and artists that were for the radical critique of everything existing haven't had the staying power of the conservers and documenters, and that isn't particularly surprising.

ten was a violent explosion of teenage nihilism, but these days, when something is lost, eddie wants to try and get it back again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E1UxWOFSvw

this is something else. totally something else. at first it might seem pretty punk to make a statement against us bombardments, but if you think just who the us is bombing in pakistan, this song can cast the often naïve politics of punk rock in quite a different light.