There’s A Metalhead In The Parking Lot
Dan Brooks, wherever he is.
The last punk rock show I went to was Five for Fighting at Tomkins Square Park. The Groovie Ghoulies played the Continental a few weeks later and I didn’t go. I’d taken a quick look around me at the FFF show (any more thorough reconnaissance would have caught me an elbow in the ear) and realized I was the oldest person there who was not Way Too Old. I was twenty-three.
The best punk rock is about the transience of youth. Witness Slapstick, a punk band of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds (how many masters degrees in English must I earn before I figure out how to properly hyphenate that phrase?) who lived in a school bus and wrote all their songs about how old and crappy they felt, and how they used to be so happy and free—presumably back when they were six. Punk rock is a young man’s game. Its great subject, necessarily, is wasted time. Who are the career punks? Tim Armstrong, Fat Mike, and Ian MacKaye*: that’s three guys in thirty years, and one of them is a vampire. Everybody else didn’t get rich, didn’t move on to anything better and doesn’t provide a model for any sort of sustainable future. Once you’re old enough to drink at the bar inside the punk club rather than in the alley out back, you walk to every show with the lingering certainty that it should be your last one. Thank God that’s what they sing about while you’re there.
Punk rock will actively prevent you from having a girlfriend. There is no job on earth paying more than ten dollars an hour that you can do with a mohawk. Slam dancing ceases to be fun the third time you do it. (Okay, the thirtieth time, but seriously, eventually you burn out.) My sophomore year in college, the two most important things in my life were punk rock and Mandi Lee, and I knew that eventually both of those things would break my nose and force me to leave them. This is why punk rock is better than rock and roll: because rock and roll is forever. This country is full of rock and roll moms and everything sucks. We’ve seen the Hummer commercial with the Who song in it; we’ve seen what happened to Rod Stewart and the unholy clutch of deathless lich-kings that is the Rolling Stones. The big, hateful lie of our parents’ generation is that you can be young and cool your whole life. You can’t. You can be old and honest or you can be old and hip. Choose one.
Punk rock has honesty built in. The first time you heard the Ramones in somebody’s car your sophomore year in high school, you knew that it would never be that good again. Cigarettes will become something you feel guilty about. The cymbals will destroy your ability to hear the cymbals right. Knocking a stranger down and picking him up again will eventually start to feel pointless. You’ll let your hair grow long, then cut if short again, then be right back where you started. Welcome to the straight world.
The only difference between you and somebody who never got into punk rock is that you will understand what you have lost.
Now dance.
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thechurning
1. Great fucking post. Fantastic.
2. Your list of career punk icons includes three of the biggest. But what about Glenn Danzig and Henry Rollins? I’d argue they both qualify.
3. You’re right - Slam dancing is a young man’s game. I recently wrote about my final attempt at moshing. I was just a couple of years past my prime (I was 21 I think). It ended in complete disaster.
4. I’ve completely given up on being old and hip, at least outwardly. I’m 32 now. I’m still in a band and I still listen to cool music. But I don’t wear punk rock tshirts and dye my hair.
November 7th, 2008 at 10:32 am