the purefinder - archives - Thu, 2004-08-05
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punk, the apparatus of the state and dead hedgehogs
Pffff... excuses and irregular posting - it has to stop!
Well... It'd be nice if I could guarantee my future productivity and reliability, but I'm feckless and idle _and_ I have commitments and distractions. My recent distractions have mainly involved inventing computing challenges for myself; I've managed to solve most of these, but my genitals have become no larger and people have not (yet) been acclaiming me in the street. I've managed to get miscellaneous LInux audio (and midi) applications working and I've been thus able to attempt to practise my guitar productively - playing frenzied, filthy and ferocious metronomic hardcore as my computer biffs and bangs out a template for me.
So, anyway, enough of the preamble; I've been meaning to write this thing for three weeks - now is its time.
Punk is important to me.
If I hadn't listened to, and been spoken to by, the music I listened to in my youth I wouldn't be the person I am today.
This is possibly true for all of us; there is undeniably a tendency for us to warmly remember the music and cultural produce of our youth because it allows us to feel young when we are not. I think I'm in a slightly different category; when I listen to punk music it makes me feel like me - the person I became comfortable being.
It isn't that I am a punk obsessive - I don't collect illegible antique fanzines, and Sham 69 badges and puke coloured vinyl 7"s. I just _know_ that listening to punk, and spending the start of my adult life in the punk underground/sub-culture of the 80s, made me consider my life and my choices and myself and, instead of becoming someone else, I became me.
I suppose that I should point out that I'm not really (or indeed, _really_ _not_) talking about the punk that made it onto Top of the Pops, but rather the politicised and radical punk that eluded most of the world. The bands I listened to told me that, it was probable that, everything I thought was wrong and that I needed to 'think for myself'. They shouted at me about the unavoidable complexity and imperfection of relationships. They told me that the limits I imposed on my own behaviours were more important that those that society sought to impose on me. They often told me that the limits I imposed on my own behaviours should be stricter than those that society sought to impose on me. I was encouraged to abhor, and oppose, prejudice. The songs often addressed the complexities arising from rejection of... welll, everything and the difficulties of our internal struggles. I was encouraged to find a life that meant something to me - and I was granted the freedom to build this life by the collective rejection of the society that existed and the rejection of the opportunities that 'the system' offered to me and my scruffy chums.
I'm getting close to my point.
I'll have to accept that I occasionally thought that 'the system' should be 'smashed'. I was happy to advocate that my scruffy chums and I should dismantle the apparatus of the state and allow a new society to evolve where we _would_ enjoy freedom, peace and our meaningful and creative lives.
So...
Even at the time, you could probably have backed me into a rhetorical corner and forced me to concede some ideological ground. I'd have happily admitted to being a Utopian - I'm still not sure that it's such a bad thing. I might even have admitted that I knew that this paradise of peace, love and freedom, that I pretended to want, was unattainable. I'd have happily admitted that, in the meantime, I would be pragmatic and try and find my own meaningful life. Astonishingly, I think that is what happened. I spent my youth actually being young. I was 'full of youth'. I acted out the fantasies I had harboured, since reading Jack Kerouac at an impressionable age, of bumming around reading books about Buddhism on top of mountains. I worked when I needed to. When I did not need to, I did not.
Even then I was slightly 'out of step' with some of my scruffy chums, but that was OK, individuality was encouraged and there were enough strands of the punk thing to be able to find fellow travellers. After considering the merits of the shirtless, sweaty and tormented, muscular nihilist ubermensch, I hooked up with the mountain loving wing of the earnest, emotionally expressive/eloquent, sober and non-violent do-gooders.
I got married. I wore a suit that I had bought for three pounds when I was sixteen and I thought that that was 'punk as fuck'. We had children and I stayed at home to look after them until it was time for them to start at school - again, 'punk as fuck'.
Actually, I just carried on being the person that punk had allowed me to become - I made my own choices, carefully and deliberately.
So... the point.
I've been to some punk gigs recently, and I intend to go to more soon. I've been happy to find that I feel no more out of place in a room full of sweaty, scruffy ragamuffins, who are half my age, than I did when I actually was half my current age. I can happily report that humanity's radical youth wing still wants to smash the system and I can happily report than I am comfortable with the fact that I don't. I think that it's OK; making your own decisions about your life and how you deal with the world is actually 'punk as fuck'.
I've bought some fanzines and I've read the views of earnest young people who want to build the barricades and destroy the machinery of the state and, whilst I'm not sure that I do anymore, I think I'm glad that they do.
However...
I could bang on about my life and the complications of recent months and my appreciation of some bits of the state machinery... I think that it is probably as effective if I let you know what originally prompted my recent musings on being the sort of punk that I consider myself to be. Recently, the morning after watching some splendid hardcore bands put on by some earnest young people in a small room in a pub in Harrogate, I telephoned the council and asked them if they could send someone out to collect a dead hedgehog from outside my house.
That's the sort of punk I am.
"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."
Oscar Wilde - The Soul of Man Under Socialism