How Punk Rock Failed Me, Part Two
In any subculture that gets recognition, the purism soon follows. Especially once that subculture splinters off into other little subcultures.
A large part of the joke, I think, is that people could never agree on what was and wasn’t “punk.” From what I understand, that was even the case in the 70s. In the Village and on the Lower East Side, the same argument was still going on twenty-five years later.
Some people thought it was fashion. They went out to be seen, after spending oodles of cash and hours of time on their clothes, shoes, and hair, getting that look right. How are people like this any different from the girl who spends whole mornings flat-ironing her hair, and whole afternoons dribbling away money on 57th Street?
There were the gutter punks who spared for change on St. Marks all day, allegedly living in squats in Alphabet City, but plenty of them actually went home to the suburbs at night and slept on clean sheets.
Probably my least favorite “punks” were the activists — NYU students, usually, who hung out at ABC No Rio and made a big show out of doing Food Not Bombs. This kind of thing looks great on paper. What could be bad about mass volunteering for social justice?
But what I found was, a lot of the people who get involved in social activism tend to be hateful, holier-than-thou snobs. They proselytize. They are smarter than you are. They are making the world a better place, and if you’re not doing it the same way they are, then you are helping to destroy it. They are as bad as Born Again Christians — worse, maybe, because you expect Born Again Christians to be smug.
I will never forget the time I offered to volunteer at the now defunct “anarchist” bookstore Blackout Books. The other volunteers were put off. I hadn’t read enough Karl Marx or Emma Goldman to be able to spout off quotes, in place of my own thoughts, during our conversation. If I sound bitter here, it’s because these kind of people wind me up. I can’t help it. I value the ability to think for myself, as opposed to rattling off someone else’s long dead rhetoric. What kind of anarchist enforces a secret handshake?
I deplore the hypocrisy of a movement that bills itself as a safe haven for outsiders, but is instead an exclusive clique with the same undercurrent of expected proprieties you’d find at any debutante ball.
You’ll notice that I haven’t even mentioned music yet. Neither did most of these people.
To Be Continued.
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