I used to be a punk rocker. I don't know what I am now. But here are some thoughts on who, and what, I used to be.
When I was about 12, a friend of mine gave me a dubbed tape of several songs, one of which was Black Flag's "TV Party." It probably wasn't the most auspicious start to life as a young punker; the song was basically a joke. Certainly, it lacked the rage of Black Flag's other stuff. But that other stuff wasn't far in the future.
Like a lot of kids who got into punk rock in the 80s, my first real punk album was Black Flag's Damaged. If you've seen the cover, you probably remember it. A bald young man is pictured smashing his fist into a mirror. Along the top of the cover were the words Black Flag and the band's four-bar logo. If you looked carefully, you could see blood dripping from the man's fist. The picture is not faked. Someone (I believe it was Henry Rollins) smashed his fist into a mirror to get that shot.
The music was just as brutal as the album cover. The album opened with "Rise Above." Greg Ginn, the band's guitarist, was able to capture in a few bars the hurt, anger, and defiance-always and forever defiance- that I felt so strongly at that age. The lyrics were the sort of thing I wanted to scream in the face of any authority figure I could find. Parents, teachers, whoever-none were to be trusted, and all were part of a system dedicated to extinguishing whatever sparks of creativity, free thought, or individualism might arise in their arid world. "We are tired/ of your abuse/ try to stop us!/ It's no use!" To my furiously Manichian pre-adolescent mind, that said it all.
In retrospect, I'm not sure where all that anger came from. My parents were anything but stifling or abusive. They were quite the opposite. Both my mother and father encouraged creativity and intellectual independence. My father could be authoritarian at home (as fathers sometimes must be), but his attitude towards power and authority in general was highly skeptical, and he never hid that from me. During one conference with some school authority figure I'd managed to offend, I demanded, "Don't I have the right to ask why?" The authority figure hemmed and hawed for a moment, obviously searching for a way to tell me that I ought to just shut up and obey. My father, who had been silently sitting to the side spoke up, using the fullness of his courtroom voice. "Always. You always have the right to ask why." When I was older, it was my father who introduced me to libertarian politics.
My mother was a graphic artist and tended to be more creative and free spirited than my strictly intellectual and hyper-rational father, but she too encouraged me to think for myself.
So, it wasn't my parents who were the source of the anger I felt towards a society I was convinced was trying to crush me. Of course, that didn't stop them from becoming targets of my anger.
My school no doubt had something to do with the early onset of adolescent rage and rebellion. There are plenty of stories to be told there, but none of them are really within the scope of this narrative. Suffice it to say that my it was a private k-8 school run by the Episcopal church. It was and is a good school, but I suspect that as a young person, I was not tempermentally suited to the classroom environment. I did and do live almost entirely inside my head, and had little interest in 'socializing' with my classmates. By the time I did develop that interest, I was already well established as an outsider.
Most of it, though, had to do with me. I was congenitally rebellious and suspicious. I remember resenting being told to sing, "I am calm/ I am still/I am doing God's will." Although I probably didn't have the vocabulary to put a name to my feelings, I was quite sure that the song was just a way to get us to do the teacher's will. I was probably seven or eight at the time.
A less flattering, and more honest account would probably be that I have always been a bit of an asshole.
Enough navel gazing. Back to punk rock. Damaged was only the start. I couldn't get enough punk rock. Within less than a year, I had acquired close to a hundred punk albums, and I listened to them obsessively. I wasn't enough to have the music playing while I did something else. I would spend hours laying in front of my stereo with the volume cranked up, listening to the songs and reading the lyric sheets or contemplating the album art. If the album was on one of the dubbed tapes I had, I would read through the catalogs that now came to the house: Alternative Tentacles, SST, and whatever else I could get my hands on. I was unaware of zines, but had I known about them, I would have acquired all I could find.
Some kids get religion around that age, and in a way, so did I. The lyric sheets of Black Flag or Dead Kennedys albums were my scripture, and I studied them as closely, and uncritically, as some read the Bible or Quoran. What I learned was what I already believed: society was another word for a conglomeration of powerful people who valued conformity and the status quo above all and the less powerful people subject to their rule. Our 'leaders' were power-hungry madmen whose machinations threatened the very existence of the human race. The best we could hope for was a few decades of drudgery, followed by a long wait for death. There were a few who saw the truth, and who tried to resist. They were almost always crushed by the system, which had a mechanistically efficient system of enforcing its rules. Kids who stood up or stood out were fed into a system that started in the schools and ended either in jails or in psychiatric institutions. A few years later, I found this idea expressed much more elegantly in Ken Kessey's discussion of the Combine in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The kids were big, but the machine made them small.
I knew the system was out there, and evil. And I saw it everywhere I looked. I picked a fights with it every chance I could. And I invariably lost. This isn't meant to be a detailed memoir (and surely those of you who have made it this far are bored enough already), so I won't recount any details here. I will say that things eventually came to a head, as they had to, and I lost, as I had to.
What followed was a long period of confusion. While I never really quit believing in the punk ethos, I had had enough of the fight. Listening to those albums began to feel dangerous, like feeding air to the embers left in a half-burned building. I gave away most of my collection. And I tried to keep my mind right.
Of course, it didn't work. Although I was certainly passionate, especially after discovering libertarianism, I never felt the sort of constant fury that I did at twelve, and that was probably a saving grace. The kind of anger I felt at that age was not controllable, and would have burned me out.
Leap forward a few decades. My passions and my politics have moderated. This story ends like almost every other one about youthful rebellion. I still like to blast Black Flag, Minor Threat, and a few newer punk bands. I still tell myself that I am a rebel at heart, and that the angry punk kid that was willing to go to war against perceived injustice is still a part of me. And maybe that's true.
Or maybe I'm just a middling guy hurtling towards middle age mediocrity and clinging to memories of a younger, better self.
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