Punk

I think a lot has been written about punk. What does it mean? Why is it a movement? I’m not a good anthropologist, but punk is obviously something that I identify with. The punk movement became fashionable in Britain, and some parts of the USA in the late 70s, which was coincidently the time when I was born.

The fact that it exists means that the potential for it has always been there. There are always young people around, and some of them will always be rebellious. But probably it would not have been a worldwide movement until the 60s. That was the time when a privileged generation, the baby boomers was growing up in the West, and for the first time a large enough group of people actually had time on their hands to express rebellious attitudes towards society without being thrown into prison.

In 1968 there was a spontaneous wave of student rebellions all over the world. Many unis in the states had riots or had buildings taken over by students, including the one I went to. There were student protests in Mexico, and it ended up with the students getting fired upon. In Paris, where it ended up with Charles De Gaulle being forced out of power. In Prague, and the Russians ended up having to send in the tanks.

It was bizarre. I don’t really know what they were fighting about, but they were probably like young people everywhere, they thought that the older generation were corrupt and too conservative. They were going to build a better and more idealistic world. Sounds familiar isn’t it? They were protesting the Vietnam War. There were a lot of communist sympathisers. Ho Chih Minh, Mao, Castro and Che Guevara were their heroes.

I supposed that was one of the high points of radical leftist politics, because from the 1970s onwards, America slowly became a more and more conservative place, until you had the age of the Reagans and the Bushes.

Anyway, the way I knew about the punk movement was through music. In the beginning there were a few bands who wrote the blueprint of what punk was about. There was the Velvet Underground, who took a lot of minimalist ideas from modern classical music, and fused it with rock music. They used to be more influential than popular. Now they’re influential and popular. There were bands like the MC5 and the Stooges. They played a very abrasive and loud form of rock music, but it was stripped down and simplified. Iggy Pop is still alive and kicking today, even though Dave Alexander and Ron Asheton are not. He is as indestructible as a cartoon character. A heroin habit did not kill him. The propensity to slash himself over and over on stage did not kill him. Rolling around on broken glass in performances did not kill him. You probably wouldn’t know it by looking at him but he topped his high school.

Thereafter, there was a scene in New York, where bands like Blondie, Television, the Talking Heads (David Byrne performed in Singapore recently), the Ramones and the Patti Smith group developed a more arty form of punk. Punk music briefly became popular in 1977, through the music of the bands Sex Pistols and the Clash. Wire. There was a band in Australia called the Saints. Suddenly everybody was forming a band.

Inevitably (because punks are by nature very self destructive) the punk movement burned out. But even though it faded away from the scene, there were a lot of bands that carried on the tradition. There were Sonic Youth, REM and Husker Du, who were very heavily influenced by punk, and would very heavily influence generations of bands that followed them. There were Black Flag, Minor Threat and the Germs, who would be more faithful to the bare, stark angry ravings of the Sex Pistols.

More crucially, punk mutated into New Wave. The simplicity of punk music inspired many to do likewise: you had Duran Duran, Joy Division and U2. It wasn’t around anymore but it had a huge influence on 80s pop.

Suddenly, in the 90s, it took over the world. Around the time I started following music in a big way, a band called Nirvana took over the number 1 spot on the albums chart from Michael Jackson. For a few years after that, many bands which had toiled in the underground movement start putting out albums on major labels. Thus, you had Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Screaming Trees following in its wake. The Smashing Pumpkins. Radiohead. Stuff like that.

After that, numbernine grew up and switched to listening to Jazz, and has not concerned himself with matters of the punk world anymore.

Anyway, what characterises punk music? What’s it all about? In 1977, the first time it became popular, it was a rebellion against the idea of a rock star. The rock stars had become fat and lazy. They were too rich and flaunted their wealth too ostentatiously. Their music went down in quality, and their concerts dragged on for too long. So when punk music came along, it was a rude blast of fresh air.

Punk is anger and rebellion. It is simplicity. It is about revolution, railing against whatever happens to be the current system. Punks like to think of themselves as straightforward and true to their ideas, although sometimes I think they’re just confused. They despise folks who carry themselves in a courtly and aristocratic manner. Those people sometimes have to say things they don’t really mean in order to avoid giving offence. Punks dispense with such formalities. Punks are like guerillas, and they live in an austere environment. Punk is the confused teenage years. Punk is about sex, not love, although one punk love song that comes to mind is “Ever Fallen In Love With Someone You Shouldn’t Have” by the Buzzcocks. Even then it is important to note: punks seldom get the girl.

On the good side, they are energetic, and they signal change. When you hear one of the greatest punk bands, the Clash, you will be amazed at how simple and effective their early music is. They can write simple songs like the Beatles, although the Beatles never took their music to such extremes. Later on, Clash would throw all sorts of influences into their music, even though the main thrust was still punk.

I always thought that good punk music is very methodical and disciplined. You are forced to finish saying everything under 3 minutes, and you are only allowed to use 3 chords. (If you are Wire, then you are only allowed to use 1 chord, and your songs are shorter than 1 minute.) And if, in spite of all these self imposed constraints, you can still come up with something worthy, good for you.

On the bad side, they are lazy, good for nothing, irresponsible and blame “society” for the plight they are in. It is no surprise that they came up in a bad economic environment, as the UK found itself in the last few years before Thatcher took over. Bad punk music is repetitive, uninspired and mediocre. They get drunk and take drugs. Punk is about being defeated by the system. Note that the Clash chose to cover “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”.

Bart and Lisa Simpson are a little too different to be siblings, but in a way they represent two faces of youth culture. Bart is a punk, simple as that. Lisa is the idealistic activist. But there are similarities between the two. Deep within the spirit of punk, under that rebelliousness and love of freedom is an idealism that you can shape the world into your own image. After all, the other face of the coin of cynicism is idealism - in order to be that disappointed with the world, you probably had to have pretty high expectations of it in the first place. And lying deep under the idealism, is the realisation that left on its own, the world does not make itself a better place. Part of wanting to shake things up or turn a bad situation around is to stand and rebel against the status quo.

Punk is not for everybody. I have a cousin who’s fairly open minded about music, but he did not understand punk music. I suppose you need to have it in you to identify with the chaos and rage.

I have something of the punk in me, obviously. People are what they are - you can’t change them. If you put them in a school which is very obsessed with its own image and how it presents itself in public, people like me would spend hours plotting how to rebel against that. I spent 10 years being educated in classical music, but it never feels natural to me. Because classical music is the music of the aristocratic class, which I have no affinity for. I appreciate its intricacy and complexity, but I could not appreciate Mozart or Tchaikovsky or Haydn. Beethoven - he’s the nearest to a punk in those days. And I like modern classical music better because they were starting to do all that edgy, shrill, dissonant stuff.

For me to identify myself with many (not all) of these values, I think I have an innate predilection towards being rebellious. It’s OK, I guess. I have 2 halves sharing a tense co-existence with each other: one of them the rigorous geek. The other the punk rebel. Somebody has to be the bad egg. Somebody must have the chip on his shoulder to be critical. Somebody has to be the poison pen. We can’t all be sheep. A good scientist is also a rebel. Think about Noam Chomsky. Albert Einstein. Charles Darwin. OK, Chomsky is a nutcase when he’s not talking about Linguistics, but I still think his heart is in the right place. Everybody must have something to contribute to society. I contribute my middle finger.

I don’t really know why have these personality characteristics. So very unChinese of me. A lot of the more interesting fellars in all those old Chinese stories were the rebels, because if you were brought up in that kind of environment, and still ended up as a rebel, you really had to be crazy.

I’ve always seen my father as a boring accountant. But in the last 10 years he has gotten himself into a fair bit of activism, that has seen him get up the noses of some fairly important people. So I suppose I have had a lot more respect for him.

But it is not straight forward hero worship. He told me he just didn’t have it in him to be a brown noser. He couldn’t be a yes man for a long time. That would be true for me as well. There’s something to clarify - it’s not completely true that I have made the choice to be a rebel. Some things we do well, others we don’t do so well. To a large extent the role that you play in society is not yours to choose, it’s fate. Fate gives you a hand of cards and you just play them the best that you will. In a way, I have a very perverse respect for people who can control their gag reflex and suck up to people. In a way I almost think that they deserve their exalted place in society because it is their reward in a society which rewards that peculiar talent. Just as people think that it is unfair that great talent for being able to control a ball with your feet is so lucrative, it is inevitable that other useless talents are so well rewarded.