guilty of being punk

Speaking of whispering kaddish, good night and good luck to my brief bedazzlement by the lights of the punk rock mythmaking machine. I watched "American Hardcore" two days ago, after the DVD had collected three months of dust on its wrinkled Tyvek sleeve, because I needed something to distract myself with while I peeled and gutted eleven soft apples for applesauce.


It's a documentary about the beginnings of the hardcore punk scene in D.C. and SoCal, 1980-1985, and how it went from being angry white fifteen year-olds playing awfully and awfully loud to angry twenty year-olds playing slightly better, and the culture of violence, the DIY ethos, and the teenage wastrelism that grew up alongside it. It's comprised of interviews with punks from yore, like Ian McKaye (pictured above before he got sick of all the kicking and screaming), Henry Rollins, H.R. from Bad Brains, etc. Actually, these three turn out to be the most articulate of the bunch but are still fumblingly stupid. Most of the interviews are with people who are now in their late 40s, who mist over with sentimentality when talking about how much they hated the suburbs when they were kids, but now work as CPAs (for example) and say that kids these days are doing it all wrong. But every batch of late 40 year-olds think that every batch of kids these days are doing things the wrong way! Are sellouts, phonies, derivatives! Vehicles for product placement!

I'm over it. I dropped my MP3 player in a glass of wine this summer, not really by accident - just as it dropped in the words "Hey baby, look! My MP3 player sits perfectly against the top of this wineglass!" were about to leave my mouth - which means it plays MP3s terribly but plays the FM dial pretty good. So all I can listen to now when I walk Boo is Top 40, hip hop, R&B (and the constant shuffle through "What's the Story (Morning Glory)?" and the UB40 oeuvre that comprises the playlist for Fresh 102.7 FM). What have I learned from this month of radio? I like the processed noise. I like craft. I like singers who can sing with their mouths open. I like songs that last over 55 seconds. I like Alicia Keys. There's nothing pure about hardcore punks syncopating white noise and calling it the real deal. And whether you pay $5 to see a punk show in someone's basement or $55 to see Justin Timberlake's nose broadcast fifty feet high on megavision, you are paying for performance. You pay to be entertained, which might mean, for one, having one's political views sung in simplified form back to you in an audience full of the converted, or, for another, watching people who can sing and dance do that with speakerboxes, mercenary dancers, and against millions of light-emitting diodes. One profits Pepsi, and the other profits all these angry young white kids who grow up and profit from Pepsi. I don't really see the difference.

What the fuck am I saying? Oh, right: I think Ian MacKaye is full of shit. Also because in this documentary he says, "How was I supposed to know when I wrote that song that some Polish neo-Nazi was going to be coming up to me fifteen years later and being like, 'Thanks for sticking up for the white man'?" That song in question is called "Guilty of Being White." Here are its lyrics:

I'm sorry
For something I didn't do
Lynched somebody
But I don't know who
You blame me for slavery
A hundred years before I was born

GUILTY OF BEING WHITE [x4]

I'm a convict
Of a racist crime
I've only served
19 years of my time

GUILTY OF BEING WHITE [x4]

This is a man people get their hand-sown [correction: sEwn] DIY panties in a sop about because he's so anti-racist? Break me a fucking give. I'll take Alicia Keys (what the hell, even UB40) any day. The love affair with punks, anarchists, straightedgers, etc., is officially dead. Time to buy some pantiliners to replace this motherfucking glad rag. RIP, DIY.