here's a conversation that i'm bound to be having more and more often: what's to do about being an old punk. i had a nice chat with the British sociologist Andy Bennett at IASPM in February about his new research about greying punks and their imagined selves. He does a lot of work on the changing theory of youth culture and somehow ended up doing interviews with aging punks.
Which I was reminded of because of this funny piece about aging punks in the UK, which had me humming the melody to "Part Time Punks" for the next half hour. These '77 folks age better thanthe grups written about in NY Magazine. Adam Sternbergh's take on greying indie fandom is so materialistic and shallow and Manhattan-centric as so render his more subtle points about the shift in concept of generational divide at least partially moot. I mean, why did I have to wade through 2,000 words of white middle class guilt for owning nice clothes to get one mention of "passion"? The cynicism inherent in the text is made only more obvious by the lead dad who becomes foil for all things shallow about this generation.
2 comments:
I'm waiting for someone to say, "My grandpa was into the Clash." It could happen sooner than we think.
In the early '90s, I played a few times with a touring local Seattle punk rock drummer who was a in a band with a record deal with a fairly prominent indie. He had never heard of Patti Smith or Television. Nice guy, good drummer, but needless to say I felt old!
re: angryrobot, it's funny. last week i had the monument that my friend from high school had a baby (the first of our cohort to have one, i am proud to say that everyone got their lives in place first) and when we were talking about it this weekend he said, without prompting. "We are no longer cool, at all." I wonder if that's the anxiety in the NYM piece, that all the hetero-norm/pastel pacifer/no swearing around the kids thing makes people into hypocrites or, as my old roommate would say, "normies." Babies can unlock the inner normie, as can getting older.
Also, I am so excited to have someone say my grandpa was into the Clash. I think a lot of us pop lovers are anxious to see how it all 'holds up' how this culture becomes history, and we want to be active agents of it instead of letting VH1 turn it into a formula.
Also on the MGWI (My grandpa was into) front: My grandpa was into Art Tatum and the composer John Adams, which makes him more coolly modern than I could ever be.
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