Old Punks and Agitation

Punk is a big chunk of my life and I am more than happy to write anything about it, as I have always had a lot to say about it. Especially its history and the punks I've met.

[The establishment] may also entice members of the agitation to join the establishment by offering them positions within the institution, or they may co-opt the agitator's ideas or rhetoric. Singer James Taylor illustrated how the establishment can adjust when he described what happened to many of the counterculture's ideas and values: "All the things we considered to be revolutionary were co-opted by the big corporations — our music, our radio, the record companies, our dress." — Bowers, Chapter 1.

I have a good friend that I made working at my cafe named Tim. Tim is an aged punk, one that is lost when you mention any music past 1989, but can talk to you for hours about a punk record twenty people bought in 1978. There is yet to be any boring conversation with him. Only recently have I learned of his very conservative family, that in trying to protect their values, pushed their own family members away.

An interesting story is that of Tim's conservative older brother, who happily changed his hippie ways in the 1980s, in favor of Reagan and his "smaller government" policies. This same man had the police called on him by his own father for smoking pot in the garage when he was 17. There were many baby boomers who voted for the conservative Reagan in their later adult years, contrasting a lot of their liberal policies they helped to make in their 20s in the 1960s.

Tim's story made it seem as if Reagan's double-edged smile drew nostalgic pictures in their minds of happier times, when their friends weren't being sent to Vietnam by the big scary government to die. The conservatives managed to have a generation that had many outspoken liberals and groovy music turn into big-government hating robots, all based on their experiences with the government.

My least favorite punk bassist, Sid Vicious, once tastelessly wore a shirt with a swastika. There could be many reasons why he wore this and one on the street might even label him a nazi. It wasn't necessarily the next big fashion trend, but its most basic statement is the old punk adage, "I don't care what you think." The reason Sid Vicious came up is because of the next topic Tim and I discussed, and that is how punk is seen in the modern eye.

For Tim, punk was a different sound and attitude; a photo-negative of the grandiose leather-pants wearing arena rock of the early 1970s. Old punk fashion has now become mainstream. Punk fashion is now something that looks good to the average person in the industry, and not something that is made out of the need to be resourceful and be defiant against societal fashion norms. Old punk music has also become mainstream.

The Ramones, who released their first album in 1977, did not have a single certified Gold album until a compilation called RamonesMANIA was released in 1988. Nowadays, you will hear the Ramones on the classic rock radio, but in the past, they never got airtime. Modern day classic radio would paint a different picture, inserting the Ramones into the radio in a time that they actually never were aired.

I am very glad that the Ramones are finally getting air time, it's just that these people are lying to themselves if they ever listened to the Ramones on the radio before the year 2000.

Punk is now mainstream, the same way the hippie culture became mainstream. They are both a comforting and nostalgic memory of what it once was to those that were there when it happened, and a "retro" fashion and music repository to those that came later. These were also counter-culture movements and they are now just pieces of clothing for someone's retro party, and I think the establishment wouldn't want it any other way.