[thechat] spin magazine: punk

[Erika Meyer]

>"techno" was invented when somebody wanted to start recording disco music
>again;

I get the point about labels, but what I'd call "techno" or 
"electronic" music I think goes way beyond dance music.

When the Beatles added some feedback to to "I feel Fine" that was 
kind of techno, wasn't it?

>"indie" was invented when bands who weren't necessarily "punk" but
>definitely weren't mainstream wanted to market themselves beyond the
>"college rock" label.

I'd been wondering what the hell "indie" was supposed to mean.

>"Rap"

Rap is kind of 80's huh.  Do they call it "hip hop" now?  Or is there 
a difference?

>THE thing that made punk rock what it was in its heyday was community.

I'll buy, but how long did it take for that to fall apart?  I figured 
it was dead by 1986.  Like the hippie thing, commercialization or 
whatever brought in the bozos and killed it...

but in the early 90's I taught writing to Upward Bound students (low 
income students with academic potential who come from families where 
no one has graduated from college) and had a student writing essays 
about going to punk shows & writing so vividly that it brought back 
everything to me again.  And I was nearly 30 and he was 17.

That's when I started thinking about punk again and thinking, "hey, 
it never really died, did it?"  I mean, I KNEW what this guy was 
writing about... and I'm like "yeah!" and he was thrilled because 
here I was this "old" person, and I knew what he meant, I didn't 
write him off.

>To be sure, there were many other elements,
>including musical experimentation. But none of them would have happened
>without a genuine counter-cultural community. That community came to exist
>for its own purpose. We were punks because we were part of the community, we
>were part of the community because we were punks.

Yeah, and because we were misfits in the community at large.

  Especially the girls, I think.  I think punk girls usually had a lot 
of issues.   We were supposed to be sexually attractive, pretty & all 
that...with soft fluffy hair & cute sweaters... and so we chopped off 
our hair, colored it green, & put on old t-shirts, army jackets, 
ripped jeans... boy did that piss people off.

>Along with musical
>assimilation, rebellion has been commoditized.

enter the Internet.

>Some punks grew up and broadened their scope:
>
>http://www.badreligion.com/researchfund/index.html

I like the "Punk Manifesto" linked to the above page.  & it is cool 
when people go beyond making music and work towards change in other 
ways.  (I always liked Bad Religion)

>The real  revolution on the Internet is still probably a couple of 
>years away, and it will be at the hands of people who were born into 
>it.

I started to get into the web because it was a way to publish my 
writing without having to sell out to a publisher (or crawl & beg at 
publisher's doors).  The music biz is even worse than publishing.

I think that if making it big is not your primary goal, if making 
money is secondary to making great art, the Internet is where it's 
at, especially for musicians.

Finally there's an option other than record labels (or just keeping 
local forever).

Erika