MY MY, HEY HEY

I kind of like punk rock, sometimes. What I hate are people who love punk rock. There has never been a genre of anything that has made more people confused about what art is capable of doing, and they all refuse to shut up about it.
-Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs

This essay shall lose me some friends.

I remember the day I stopped reading Pitchfork. It was the same day I bought my first Pearl Jam album. These facts are entirely related, and come down to this review, from 17 November, 2004.

What drove me over the edge was one quote in particular:

Pearl Jam was always a classic rock band, the one alt-nation superstar that completely ignored both punk and its aftermath...they even cuddled up to the "right" rock 'n' roll architects (Pete Townshend, Bob Dylan, Neil Young). To claim Pearl Jam as the greatest rock band of our time-- as many listeners and critics do-- is virtually a negation of the past 30 years of guitar-based music, a relieved sigh that the values of the 70s aren't completely lost.

To begin with, the scare quotes: why? Leave aside Townshend and Young; any person who feels the need to call into question Bob Dylan's status as one of the preeminent songwriters of the last fifty years has absolutely no business in music criticism.

But ignore that, as tangential to the point the author was making. Which was, essentially, that any artist who looks to the Who for inspiration instead of the Ramones is necessarily irrelevant. Because new styles are necessarily better than old styles, because...they're newer, apparently. It was just an article of faith for the review that, empirically, post-punk supersedes not-post-punk.

I bring this up because of a review that was brought to my eyes by one Phillip Wiese, published yesterday. In it, the author says of the Ramones, "they tapped the essence of rock music in its purest form." It's not even a claim. It's more like the assumed background knowledge that everyone knows, but that the writer has to state, just because it makes his essay more formally cogent.

I don't know a hell of a lot about 20th century music, compared to most people; but I know with a certainty that the purest form of rock music is not going to be produced by white New Yorkers.

What really, really pissed me off was in the second paragraph: "The Ramones were the anti-Beatles: they resisted musical growth and maturation, and we're all the better for it."

Are we, then.

This has always been exactly what I find distasteful about punk rock. It is music in a state of arrested development. It is music about saying "fuck you!" to art. The rawness of early punk is one thing - there's undeniable energy - but where do you go from there? I own two Ramones albums, but it's really one more than I need; there is effectively no difference between them, or between them and any of the other Ramones I am familiar with. It's brutal, direct, simple, and utterly redundant. They found a successful sound, but did nothing with it. I have never found a reason to explore the Ramones or any of their contemporaries, because there is nothing to reward deep familiarity with the music: no subtlety, no hidden meanings that slowly work their way out of repeated listenings. It is angry music, every time you listen to it. I have never had the experience of my fifth, or tenth, or twentieth listen to a punk song give me some sudden flash of meaning that I'd never heard before. It is simple and reductive.

I understand that this is part of the appeal: punk was the antidote to the supposedly-bloated excesses of progressive rock and disco. And I'll happily admit that as prog-rock aged, it became a bit stuffy. But punk is only a solution if you believe that energy and simplicity are good in and of themselves. The problem with late progressive isn't that it's heavily orchestrated; it's that a lot of it is all flourish with nowhere to go. The answer doesn't have to be stripping music down to bare wood. It could be as simple as writing songs where the flourish has meaning (I would use as an example Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" from 1979, the year that the First Age of Punk began to flame out; I know there are people who dislike it, but they have a fundamentally incompatible worldview to mine).

Punk and its acolytes deny this. To people who like punk - and I mean like, like - punk is the only music that matters. It is not possible to like punk and even the very best progressive music. Progressive music is over-intellectual and gassy; punk is honest.

I am told by those who love punk that it speaks to their emotions. Which seems odd to me, because that is absolutely not an experience I have ever had with punk music or any of its descendants. I've had that experience with lots of music. Sometimes, I can be moved to tears by a lyric that has not the remotest connection to my life, past, present or future:

I know a woman, became a wife,
These are the very words she uses to describe her life.
She said, "A good day ain't got no rain."
She said, "A bad day's when I lie in bed
And think of things that might have been."
-Paul Simon, "Slip Slidin' Away"

I don't know what punk speaks to - it doesn't for me. But I think that those for whom it has strong emotional resonance, must be very shallow people. Punk mostly does not feel regret, joy, sympathy or sorrow: it mostly feels angry. And it feels without analyzing what it feels, why, or how valid that feeling is.

(An aside, that otherwise I'll never get to: I've heard the argument that the core of punk isn't it's rawness and anger, but its DIY ethos. If that were true, Brian Wilson, of Pet Sounds and Smile, would be the ultimate punk rocker. Brian Wilson is the ultimate punk rocker. Think about that sentence for a bit. And shut the fuck up about DIY).

I think - I know - this is why punk is the music of choice for people who idealize high school and their teenage years. Because (and here is where I'll get the death threats) being a teenager is essentially about being a solipsist. It is about being convinced that your problems are very important. It is about wallowing in your feelings, rather than abstracting them into an intellectual state.

It is bullshit. BullFuckingShit.

Teenagers are stupid people. I'm sorry, people who used to be teens. I used to be a teen, although it gives me shame to admit it, and I'm intractably convinced of my opinion, that teenage culture marginalizes everything that matters. There is a push in my generation, and the generation above mine, to romanticise adolescence; to legitimise teenage obsessions. Teens are people, too. Except they aren't. They just, really, aren't. I was much more of a person at 12 than at 16. Everything that is interesting about my character was either in place before high school, or developed since my 21st birthday. Whatever I was concerned about as a teen now seems hideously unimportant (and yes, I know that teens exist who care about Art, Politics, Society, etc. I know of such people as I know of kangaroos or Indian elephants, as something fascinating and wonderful that cannot be found anywhere near me). I should be clear: I'm happy to let teens be teens. Let them fuck, let them smoke, let them drink (just let them do these things safely). But I expect more from a 25 year-old.

Punk is the soundtrack to being a teen. It's the music of believing that sex and having your own place and getting wasted on the weekend are the most important things in life. To some people, they are. I will let those people listen to all the punk they like.

But I will not let them tell me I have bad taste because I like The Wall.

Now, everyone dogpile on me and tell me why I'm wrong.

Edited for clarification @ 2:19, 9 August: it may appear that this post says, in effect that there is a "right" way and "wrong" way to feel emotion, and I'm saying that mine is the "right" way. That is correct. That is exactly what this post is saying. If you think punk is the emotionally truest form of music, then you are shallow.