Elementary school is mostly a vague blur, but we’ll never forget that day in fourth grade when we learned about post-punk.
The week leading up to that day was pretty uneventful. We had been - of course - learning about mid- to late-1970s cultures, countercultures, and subcultures. Our teacher, the affable Mr. Beefheart, was doing, as far as we can tell, a pretty unremarkable job.
We colored in pictures of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, graphed out the 1973-1975 recession, did some creative writing about neoliberalism. The usual fourth grade stuff. After covering all the major Western political and economic events, Mr. Beefheart turned our attention to literature and cinema quickly, then focused in on the music of the era. We listened to some prog and soft rock, assorted R&B and disco tracks, then we turned to punk which (apparently) held a special place in Mr. Beefheart’s heart.
We listened to MC5 and The Stooges, talked about the importance of late-60s garage rock, and read old Creem articles aloud. We listened to The Ramones and Sex Pistols, discussed the differences between punk in the US and the UK. We watched old film footage to see instances of punk style and fashion. Mr. Beefheart quickly went over socialism and anarchism as practical attitudes, but nothing too elaborate or sustained was said (which is maybe excusable given that we’d cover those things eventually in fifth and sixth grade). Anyways, everyone seemed to be having a pretty OK time - until we were given a particular homework assignment.
The assignment wasn’t, on the face of it, objectionable. “Just define ‘punk’ in a little two-minute speech,” Mr. Beefheart explained, “I cannot go back to your Frownland, so try to have fun with this!” He didn’t, though, seem particularly enthusiastic about the assignment. Something about his demeanor was visibly off or odd. You could see he was almost mournful as he handed out a worksheet with “Punk is…” written at the top and a bunch of blank lines to fill in ourselves. He said we could write whatever we wanted. We could use some of the material we covered in class or bring up things that we hadn’t gone over. We had free reign to define punk in whatever way we thought best. It was pretty straightforward as far as fourth grade homework goes.
The bell rang, we all loaded up onto our respective school buses, and went home to define punk. If we remember rightly, the assignment was kind of fun. We listened to some songs and thought some thoughts. We wrote some stuff and crossed it out and wrote some different stuff. It took at least a full thirty minutes to write our two minute speech. We thought about telephoning a friend to see what they’d written, but decided that we’d just wait to find out.
The next day had a weird vibe. The manic chaos of the schoolyard was even more manic and still more chaotic than usual. Some kids had gotten dressed up for the occasion. A few were sporting mohawks of various colors and others had replaced their earrings with safety pins. The majority of us donned leather jackets freshly adorned with various patches. We all surveyed and complimented each other’s looks, but refrained for unknown reasons from talking about our speeches.
When the bell rang, we scrambled over each other to get to the classroom. We were greeted by Mr. Beefheart (as always), but he appeared more solemn and stern than usual. He seemed neither surprised nor impressed by the lengths we had all gone to perform or embody punk as we understood it.
We filed into the classroom - our collective mood slightly dampened by this greeting - and quietly took our seats.
“Children,” Mr. Beefheart said, “As you know, you’re each going to be giving a speech about the definition of punk today. I can tell you’re very excited to just get on with it and share your speeches, but we have to establish some ground rules first. It’s very important that we respect each other as we present our definitions. You’ll each get a turn, so please just sit quietly and attentively while others are presenting. Please don’t interrupt your classmates. Please refrain from getting up out of your seats. Please. It’s very simple. You come to the front of the room, define punk, and then sit back down. We’ll go in alphabetical order. How does that sound?”
We agreed by nodding or saying quiet yeses. At this point, it occurred to us that Mr. Beefheart wasn’t more solemn or stern than usual. He was nervous, scared even. You could see a visible tremble in his hand as he held the roll and called the first of us to the front of the classroom. He took a deep breath, sighed, and called Abigail Aaaaaa to the front of the room.
Abigail dutifully rose from her seat. She’d shaved her head the night before and her dad had evidently helped her with her (very elaborate) eye makeup. She clomped loudly up to the front of the room in her unlaced Doc Martens, cleared her throat, spat, and began:
“Punk is an ideological…”
She hadn’t even finished the sentence when someone from the back of the room hucked a textbook in her general direction and screamed something like “punk was just a genre of music” which then lead someone at the front of the room to yell “punk’s not dead” and someone from seemingly outside of the room hollered “punk is an ethos, a strategy for living” and the boy who always sat silently in the front row just started weeping and muttering “dada” repeatedly and a girl named Zorro pulled a can of black spraypaint out of her napsack and frantically scrawled “punx jus another corprate ploy” on the wall.
In less than thirty seconds, chaos ruled.
Just before the verbal arguments turned to outright physical altercations, Mr. Beefheart raised his heavy wooden lectern above his head and threw it directly through the large window. Defenestration is, as you know, always attention-grabbing. We stopped dead and the room was suddenly silent. Mr. Beefheart, then, walked calmly over to the record player (next to the enormous stand-up abacus we used for math), picked out a record, and put it on at a low volume.
“Children, I’m sorry to say that I expected this to happen. It happens every year. The schoolboard insists that the fourth grade mid- to late-1970s cultures, countercultures, and subcultures curriculum unfold in a certain way. We’ve been forbidden from telling you the whole story which, as you can see, results in divisive and fractious disagreement. You see “punk” is a thick concept. It is both evaluative and descriptive. We’re not going to get into all that now - you’ll cover thin/thick concepts in middle school - but let’s just say that there can be no neutral positive characterization of “punk” or any other thick concept.”
Todd, a peculiarly lanky boy in our class, interrupted Mr. Beefheart at this point.
“But Mr. Beefheart surely we could agree on what “punk” is if we just sit down and talked it through. We could come to some kind of consensus regarding its aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions.”
“Todd,” Mr. Beefheart said, “kindly shut up. You are out of your element. You see, children, the only reason you think ‘punk’ has some kind of resolute or identifiable positive sense is because you don’t yet know about post-punk.”
Stunned at this new term, we all shuffled back to our desks and sat.
“Doesn’t post- just mean after,” Todd (apparently unable to please kindly shut up) asked.
“It absolutely does, Todd. Post- tends to mean after. Post-punk, then, must mean after punk, right?”
Todd nodded stupidly.
“No! No, Todd! You see, post-punk developed at the same time as punk! Yes! Yes! Despite what the curriculum would have you believe, post-punk isn’t historically post-punk at all. It happens in tandem! In the same years as punk is developing, post-punk is developing. The Slits, Television, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine, Swell Maps, The Pop Group! They are all post-punk bands, but they are punk contemporaries! Some people even call them punk bands! In the case of Swell Maps, people refer to them as proto-punk, punk, AND post-punk at once! It’s madness! It makes no sense. And punk! Punk isn’t even the origin of punk! Los Seicos and Death were making punk songs long before anyone called anything punk! The whole thing is insane!!”
“Even if the term is wrongheaded, there’s got to be a reason people talk about punk and post-punk, Mr. Beefheart!,” Abigail Aaaaaa interjected. “It can’t just be arbitrary word fuckery! There’s got to be a difference in the sound or the attitude or something!,”
“The definition of post-punk is even more divisive than the definition of punk! Post-punk is loosely organized around a DIY ethos akin to punk, but even then it’s entirely unclear what DIY means in the context of the music industry of 1970s. We’d probably want to say that Soundcloud hip-hop of the 2010s is far more DIY than punk ever was, but if we allow ourselves retrospective, anachronistic comparisons then literally everything falls apart. Historical categories are themselves subject to the contingencies of the moment in which they are made! Just as everything and nothing is punk! Everything and nothing is post-punk!”
Mr. Beefheart had worked himself up into quite a frenzy. He took a moment, collected himself, then sat criss-cross applesauce on the floor. The record he was playing sounded good in the still moment between all the talking.
“Didn’t Mark Fisher put a tremendous amount of cultural importance on post-punk?,” some kid breathlessly asked, “Even going so far to say that post-punk was ‘a means of channeling, externalizing and propopagating disquiet and discrepancy. It provided a crack in the way the social represented itself; or rather, exposed that crack’ and also somewhere else Mark Fisher said that post-punk made ‘a demand [...] that music be more than consolation, convalescence or divertissement.’ It seems that Mark Fisher really…” The kid, noticing that Mr. Beefheart was just quietly shaking his head, trailed off into silence.
Mr. Beefheart looked up and surveyed the classroom. “Why on earth would a single genre of music that knows no clear definition and contains no set group of bands and belongs to no specific moment in time be exclusively capable of all that? Why can’t we just say that music sounds good and sometimes does more than just sound good? Why, really, would we want to get caught up in all this nasty business of talking when we could instead be listening and thinking?”
Anyways, that was a memorable elementary school day. Hard to forget really.
We went to see WORKS (formerly known as Girl Arm) play at L’Escogriffe last night. They were really great.
Their new (?) lead singer is great and giving strong Iggy Pop / Lydia Lunch / Julian Casablancas / Patti Smith vibes. Vocals were mostly incomprehensible, but it worked totally. The band, altogether, sound tight and controlled while also having fun and very evidently working off and with each other. You know, moreover, that the set was legit because at a certain point three of the five members of the band hunkered down to twist the knobs of various effects pedals to modulate the frequencies and pitches of the harsh and melodious sound washing over us.
If we didn’t know any better, we’d say something about how WORKS blends elements of various genres - from post-punk to noise to math rock - together to create something that sounds like the present. It is noise you can dance to. It’s fun without being frivolous, complicated without being a chore. There’s a sense of irony or reflexivity cutting across some parts of some tracks, but it feels purposive and positive rather than self-conscious or defensive. They’re working within certain noise-y and punk-y traditions, but also moving beyond or even to the side of those traditions. We’d say more, but we’re just going to go listen to their albums instead. Maybe when they release their (rumored) new record, we’ll write about it.
Or maybe we’ll just kindly shut up and listen to that too.
I knew it was coming but it was still a thrill when the chaos arrived THE SHAPE OF PUNK TO COME!
WHAT!? All this shit about Punk but not a single word about "cyberpunk" or "steampunk"! You outta be ashamed!