I just watched American Hardcore, a documentary about 1980's era hardcore punk in America. I must say, it leaves me with odd combination of pity and enthusiasm.
It fills me with enthusiasm, on the one hand, because the bands are all veterans of an outsider subculture, and a fierce one at that.
It occasionally filled me with a bit of pity, even though that might be a bit condescending. Many of the scene veterans were still wearing the same sort of punk rock wardrobe that they wore more than 20 years ago. IN fact, many of the musicians who were in the important profiled bands were wearing their own band shirts.
It was impossible to view the movie without imagining a compelling viewer/subject role reversal: I am in my mid-twenties, and I still play in a similar style of somewhat aggressive music to that profiled in the film, and I have since highschool. Therefore, I question whether or not I would feel pity or enthusiasm formyself. My interests and passions are not so far off. I am a young man who seems to be deeply in the midst of a set of enthusiasms (sometimes rabid ones) that truthfully, I don't completely understand. I also recognize that these enthusiasms contribute to an increasing sense of alienation from the society around me.
I am certainly not a teenager any more, but I seem to nonetheless recognize that many of the things that moved me then move me still. They have not yet been shaved away by any thirty pieces of silver laid at my feet, nor by any appeal to personal shame for not having "grown up" by now, and for not having dove head first into the cooling waters of the status quo.
No, my blood still runs hot for all kinds of noise, and I don't seem prepared to apologize for it. I'm less prepared to call it nihilism as I am being immersed in a hot experience I don't completely understand. I watched the footage in American Hardcore, with all its blood, sweat, and intensity, and found myself saying "I've been there... or something like it."
Some of the bands seemed to be conscious that they were deep in the throes of a sort of nihilistic alienation, and had nothing to lose anyway. Some seemed to have held on to some kind of optimism, and were disappointed when the political climate remained repressive through Reagan's re-election. I can't say with whom I find fault, nor with whom I completely identify - the committed nihilists, or the crestfallen idealists.
Henry Rollins has occasionally claimed in interviews that intensity is all he has to keep him going these days. I agree - that might be all he has. Should this be celebrated, or pitied?
Rollins wrote his Black Flag tour memoirs, called "Get in The Van" and I read them quite a long time ago. At that time, I was also reading a lot of the old writings of exiled mystics from different religious traditions. I can at least say that the reading experience was similar for both.
Henry Rollins seemed to be deep in the throes of some fucked up mystical experience that he couldn't explain to anyone uninitiated. How could he possibly explain to a 9-5 office worker what being on tour with a band like Black Flag could do to a person? Like the moment where he drags glass across his skin, and Ian Mackaye - his friend from before the Black Flag days - could only cry when seeing it?
I found myself reading that anecdote, and realizing I've been in identical situations, or at least, situations that were chillingly and profoundly similar.
Living outside of society is a inevitably a dangerous choice, and one that is almost always rewarded by pain. Christian martyrs went to the flame thinking that they would be rewarded by heaven.
By Rollin's accounts, the local cops would have seemed to be all too happy if they had the chance to tie Black Flag and the other punks to burning stakes until they repented for their bizarre cultist ways, and would probably have let them burn for the hell of it anyway.
Plenty of culture rebels don't count on a metaphysical first-class ticket to paradise, though they take more than their share of heretical risks. They suffer the hard continuing life that follows in the wake of a rapture never quite arriving, and that they probably never counted on. The only paradise they enjoy is the knowledge that they act (or acted) out of some sense of honesty or authenticity.
Is that an accomplishment worthy of recognition? Or is that a pathetic dupe to avert your attention from, before that kind of thinking infects your own worldly and material focus?
Or, amidst a society the culture rebels could only recognize as ugly and rejecting, they feel they must be ugly and rejecting in kind - and just indulge in destruction as their only consolation. They spend their whole life at that flaming stake, having the conventional comforts burned away from them, if they don't find a better niche of some sort. Ian MacKaye considers any independence from the mainstream a political feat, and when I write that sentence in my own mind, I underline the word "feat."
Even for those lucky enough to scrape a niche, the niche is likewise sort of edged by an inquisition-fire that burnt away many of their other options. Anyone who has ever had to cover tattoos for job interviews should be familiar with this; you are covering a burn scar from that stake, whether or not its one you like. If your scars are displayed where the orthodoxy can see, you are revealed to be one of the unclean, which means you have a hard time finding food.
Some part-time outsiders just flirted with the flame enough to decide that a life of heat wasn't their style. Others burnt everything, and probably didn't consider it a beautiful act of any kind, or even thought much about it at all. They might have agreed with the world when they called them ugly losers, but nonetheless were left with the rebuttal that they continued to exist anyway. What do you do if you can't seem to de-ugly, or perhaps worse yet, can't seem to bring yourself to want to?
I feel that way very often, and deeply.
Were the punks just losers, and malcontents? Did they have a legitimate gripe? Should they have just "grown up" and taken on the roles they were expected to play in society?
The hardcore punks, by the end of the film, seem everything like a broken up tribe. Their idols and gods have long since suffered a humiliating series of iconoclasms or deicides, either through self-immolation or through a series of well placed bribes. The film closes by a resounding remark from a collection of some of the former icons: "It's over, and its never coming back. Go home."
Would society even take them back if they "came home"? Or, is their next best option a rehearsal of their exile: finding and moving with whatever best approximation of their rain dances they can mix and synthesize with those other exiled groups (often an uneasy alliance)? Or, failing even that, should the exiles can go even deeper into an isolated “mystical” experience, since the community milieu for their symbols and totems has disintegrated?
Well, inevitably, I'm sure many of the less successful transitional hardcore punks had to find something to do with their time, and some groups to meaningfully interact with. What happened, I wonder, to the *strongest* parts of their identity or ideals that made them identify as hardcore punks?
Maybe some ex-punks find other overwhelming ideals that are similar enough, and no less strong. Ian Mackaye began his tour of duty as a dubiously self-disavowed Icon of straight edge lifestyle and subculture - a status he earned as singer for Minor Threat and label captain of Dischord Records. Past the zenith and breakup of Minor Threat, he wasted little time in starting fresh with new projects (which I personally find much more impressive). He maintained an incredible, unceasing, and world and decade-spanning pace with his more musically rich and dimensional band Fugazi. He also drove the evolution of Dischord Records from its origins as a label devoted strictly to DC hardcore bands into a label devoted to documenting a more broad and rewarding scope of the DC bands participating in the "underground" scene at that time.
Not every exiled hardcore punk chose the path of Ian Mackaye or any of his counterparts, as evidenced in the film.
Some exiles turn a complete 180 degrees, and commit themselves fully to whatever it is they can feel in their hands: goods, cash money, real estate, or other material rewards. That's assuming that they've covered their tattoos and scars well enough.
Is this “damage control” of lifestyle repair cause for disdain, or an example to follow? To the reformed and assimilated, it’s at least cause for a grudging acceptance, like the softest optimism (or pain-relieving pessimism) of the cynic.
Subcultural tribes ebb and flow into and out of one another over time, and this is certainly no less so for any of the numerous fracture lines of hardcore punk communities. Some go extinct, which is easy enough to understand, but what has frequently perplexed me is the seeming *aimless* tribe-suicide impulse carried out - with zeal -by some of the group's own members. Recruiters or mutineers seem to pop up with new destructive energy against the stagnating "old ways". This is understandable enough if supplied with a new destination or new and vibrant forms, like Ian Mackaye's recruiting for the collectively invented vitality of DC's "Revolution Summer", which was an intentional departure from a particularly violent thug form and aesthetic overtaking the hardcore scene.
What I frequently can't understand, however, is the suicide recruiter who supplies *no new forms*.
The retired hardcore punks seem to want to make the world look less like a snapshot of them when they were neck-deep in their own flavor of stake-fire. They say "it was our time, its over, go home."
Some of the films subjects, while urging us to just go home, still looked like a snapshot - if faded - of themselves in the 1980's.
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I'm sure it felt pretty lonely for the last surviving devotees of the Buffalo cults when the Europeans came in and destroyed their way of life. Maybe they found themselves wearing clothes they wouldn't have otherwise worn, in small doses here and there. I've heard that some kept buffalo teeth on necklaces under their white-people's clothes.
What buffalo teeth do I wear around my neck? There are simple examples, like my Black Flag tattoo (safely hidden from the prying eyes of co-workers), which was certainly more of a devotion to an idea than the actual band.
I know there are other buffalo teeth I hide though, without me cataloging them in public. Some are ideals, or the specters of them, or the permanent susceptibility to other ideals like those abundant in my flavors of Punk. The specters of my punk gods are everywhere, and I only occasionally consciously recognize them as such even when I feel and think around their contours. I’m drawn to many things that resemble that energy and intensity, and that marginalized sense of anger.
In a way, I think I felt the contours of that sort of host of specters *before* being able to name them as punk. There was an important collection of angers, a deep feeling of wrongess, an energy threatening to split me in half without release, and a collection of questions without very good answers from my parents or their books. There was an impulse to seek out others whose seemingly identical collection of specters I could sense instantly, and know that these forces raged and howled in their hosts. There was an impulse to sing the same songs, dance the same dances, and walk the same margins. There was an impulse to compare scars, and stories.
These forces were there before, during, and after I named them punk.
For instance, I've found an occasional recurring theme when writing in my journal, when doing my best to type without thinking. It goes something like this: "There has to be something better out there, I just don't know what it is, and I never will"
Even once I found Punk, I felt it could be so much more than it was when I found it.
I don't consciously identify with looking for any kind of promised-land. I paraphrase the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas from time to time: I tell myself, out loud, as well as to other people that "the kingdom of Heaven is here, all around, but men do not see it." It makes sense, even to a non-christian like myself. Perhaps especially so.
The omnipresent Kingdom of Heaven sure made sense every time I went to a loud, fast, sweaty, and sometimes bloody show. Every sing along was an Armageddon choir. Heaven was even sampled every time I listened to a new Hardcore record. It was a double-sided shellacked slice of Promised Land, and only the elect and initiated would understand it as such. Only those willing to burn for their promised land were invited, or at least those willing to suffer through the all-seeing eyes of daily scorn leveled at the owners of weird hair everywhere. This experience should have come with a label saying "not fucking around".
It was fast, intense, loud, and in a certain sense, fatal. It hurt.
So, Henry Rollins... am I prepared to judge your life as too narrowed because all you've got left is intensity?Do I judge you as worthy of pity, rather than an example by which I become enthused? No; mere intensity is quite a lot to claim as a remnant.
Maybe Henry Rollins is still one of my heroes because he - like Ian Mackaye - seems constantly concerned with what's next. He tours with new music acts, writes new books and publishes other author's works, and even acts in movies and TV shows *without any recognizable signs of slowing down*. He also seems to recognize that there would be no smooth integration into whatever fixed tribe would be willing to scoop him up, especially since tribes often do that sort of scooping as a means of collecting slaves.
That quality - horizon seeking - has been the most important impulse gleaned from my identification with punk, and that example set by the most compelling figures of that era has far outlasted whatever particular imprint the forms or aesthetics has left on me. I don't always feel like I live up to that impulse, especially after a series of hard days of work, but the thought still excites a surge in my blood.
I want to live as intensely as possible according to the ideal I want to see sketched out, at least for my own life. At the very least, I have my own choice of intensities to carve lines into the earth around me.
I occasionally record music I am very proud of, and the style of music and ideas it expresses has continuity with older ideals. The form the music and the ideas take is perhaps best identified with the lit portion of a fuse: it starts burning at some origin point, and keeps burning all the way until my eventual explosion.
I myself am perhaps best identified with a *slave* who lights that fuse, and follows just ahead of the lit part of the fuse. After all, I can either be some other tribe's slave, or my own slave, constantly dragging my own cart of some sort of heavy shit further and further away from the oncoming flame, knowing that the explosion is all that is going relieve me of the constant drag or the unceasing impulse to move forward.
Music, writing, art - all these things are gifts that I've been given (in varying degrees), or curses that I've been forced to live with. My buffalo teeth are in (and on) my skin. I don't have a choice. I'm destined to immolate.
That fuse fire I'm forced to outrun can be phrased as an introspective question: what's next, kid?
To be completely truthful, I really don't know. That's possibly the best answer anyone could hope for.
I'm looking to now, and the "next" that's closest to it. I partially know the pattern shaped by that odd space directly between the present and the nearest discernible future - the alternations between the bliss of accomplishment, and the malaise of aimlessness and periodic depressions in the wake of a momentary goal accomplished. Most of these goals *certainly* play in the shadows of the specter of my mystical hardcore punk upbringing, like some Freudian childhood obsession-diffusion or something.
If I rest for too long, I will wake up on fire. I've been partially there, from time to time, and I don't like it. I would rather be awake as its happening. I'd rather smell my skin crisping, and scream about it with actual words.
My mystical experience is reaching out to take hold of me, whether I want it to or not. There is noise inside and outside my skin that demands to be amplified. Maybe its true what Nietzsche says about mysticism not even being superficial, but I'll be damned if it doesn't feel like its ensnared me as tightly as it can be ensnared. And the pit I'm being dragged into has layer upon layer of echoes - the kind that sound from bottomlessness.
So is it teen angst if I continue moving in accord with the forms I've adopted since my teens, or is it a form of suicide by proxy if I try faking my way through a sort of suburban, sedated sitcom lifestyle?
Myself and a small handful of other young people I know have been accused of having teen angst because they don't quite find themselves readily able to reconcile or agree with the morays of their society and culture around them.
It occurs to me that a patriarchy would *have to* level that kind of claim - whomever is in control wants to be the parent, and the children need to play by power's rules or they are labeled as malcontent or "immature." One does not become an adult conquerer until they drink the blood together from the same kill.
Punk, what it taught you on the margins – including lessons about not drinking blood - and all your very important personal history with that set of experiences and ideas... it is meant to be a "childish thing" that is set aside?
Fuck that. What I learned counts.
There are serious cons that choke the world. We live in a nation that mass-murders other nations, to cite the most obvious example, and angry voices should spread angry discontent about their forced participation in it. Daddy does not always know best, and particularly when Daddy listens to (or creates) state-sponsored propaganda. The ideological state apparatus did not know best in my personal life when a cop big brother put the little sister in handcuffs. The cops did not know best in Tallahassee, when I was on tour, and I saw them tase that 15 year old girl over and over again, saying "you want more?".
My disagreement is stronger by far than any wave of insight anyone in power wants to wash over me - any "profound" lesson they try to teach me that somehow puts the balance of power back in their hands. My disagreement is just as strong or even stronger than whatever rehearsal of it I learned from any howling, throat-scarring hardcore punk anthem I've ever loved.
The promised land of the present is far stronger than any promised land in the suburbs that the powers that be would try to bribe me away with. I'm fed up and disgusted with that myth, and I don't like the role that I've occasionally had to play in it. My younger punk-kid self was smarter than I gave him credit for.
And, perhaps most importantly, I'm still left with the belief that there could be no way of describing to any outsider how Henry Rollins felt when he dragged glass across his chest, deep in the midst of his experience, and neither can I. It is pathologized.
I am not Henry Rollins, but I get the feeling that both of us are probably deeply unnerved by the idea of a gross, stupid, massively destructive (in a slow-motion photography sense) suburban complicity, and we'd have trouble faking it.
Maybe the best I can hope for is to carve a niche. I'm not afraid of the scars or the fire that causes them though.
What's next?
photo by: tyko2000
