The Paper They Wouldn't Publish

FUNNILY ENOUGH, as a philosophy professor I was recently sent a certain “Call for Papers”. Some people were putting together a book on the topic of punk and philosophy. And the people who sent this to me thought: “Well, this guy seems like he might have something to say about it!” Yeah I guess, hey?

So I put my proposal together, and the rejection letter was swift: “We are sorry, but we cannot consider your paper for inclusion in our edited volume.”

But hey, GUESS WHAT, my most-read academic paper might have been read 200 times in 8 years, whereas several thousand people read this substack every month. So if you’re an intellectual/academic type who likes fancy words and wants to read a treatise on punk and philosophy and social criticism, today is your lucky day. Maybe it’s all bullshit and false, I dunno, who cares, I’m happy to say that I’m wrong about any of it. What I do know is that it’s 3000 words, so don’t scroll down unless you have some time on your hands, eh. You were warned.

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Punk and Academic Criticism

Abstract: What does it mean to understand punk rock?  In this paper, I argue that a certain bias can systematically distort the academic or critic’s attempts to capture the meaning and significance of punk.  This is the bias towards the symbolic, or the drive to analyze cultural products as signs for interpretation.

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There is a well-worn philosophical distinction between things that represent and things that do not: signs and symbols represent something outside of themselves, whereas some objects or events simply exist without representing anything. The stone on the beach represents nothing and carries no information, the collection of stones arranged into the word “HELP” expresses information.  It represents something.

The academic or the cultural critic, trained in the arcane art of interpretation (Felski 2015), looks at punk rock and immediately begins to search for signs, for elements of the genre that can be said to mean something: the curled lips, the nose rings, the mohawks, the typography, the lyrics.  Certainly, these elements of the genre are worthy of comment, and the art of interpretation is (sometimes) practiced responsibly with respect to them.

But this emphasis becomes a bias when it causes us to forget about the non-symbolic elements of punk, things that don’t need to be interpreted, things that have self-standing or intrinsic significance for participants in the genre.  Those elements are most obviously present at a punk show.  They include, for example, noisy guitars, aggressive modes of dance, and the highly distinctive sense of community that all of this produces.  Understanding punk doesn’t involve interpreting these elements, it involves experiencing them.

In other words, a mosh pit is fun, but it doesn’t represent fun, and so there is not much there for the cultural critic or academic to interpret.  This bias, I will argue, manifests itself in several arenas.  It distorts attempts to define punk, resulting in definitions that leave out those crucial elements.  It distorts our view of punk fans and musicians, tempting us to read their appearance and behaviour as a complex display of symbols rather than as simple fun. And it distorts moral criticism of punk rock, missing the obvious and real lived ethical problems and substituting entirely fake “issues” (such as the predominant whiteness and maleness of the fans or the “violence” of the mosh pit itself). 

My diagnosis is perhaps unkind but I think entirely warranted in various cases: you only miss these things when you don’t go to the shows, or when your attendance at the shows is a distant enough memory that these non-symbolic elements have faded from view.  For once attendance at actual concerts is missing, all that remains is the symbolic: the album covers in the record collection, the photo books, the music videos and songs played at acceptable volumes, perhaps so as not to wake the baby.

The overall lesson is : in attempting to understand punk, or indeed any musical genre, academics simply cannot adopt the posture of the anthropologist hiding in the tree.  They must show understanding of the nonrepresentational experiences characteristic of punk rock, or they cannot hope to grasp what it is really all about.

The Definition of Punk

In one of the most thorough scholarly treatments of the subject, Francis Stewart defines punk as

a music-based oppositional subculture characterised by expressions of estrangement, frustration and disenchantment, as a form of resistance that has evoked a sense of identity, authenticity and community for its followers and adherents. (Stewart 2017, 19)

Note here the emphasis on interpretation, on punk as expression of culturally laden ideals and values.  Again, it’s not that the interpretations are mistaken, it’s that the definition rather remarkably leaves out anything that might evoke the particular feeling of being at a punk show.  Moreover, this lack of particularity renders the definition unusable, since it would have us classify hip-hop, heavy metal, and even a great deal of 1960s-era protest folk music as ‘punk’.  Obviously, once “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” falls under the category of ‘punk’, something has gone wrong.  And this, I say again, derives from the overemphasis on what punk means, on its symbolic value. Undoubtedly, the genre evokes a sense of identity and community, just as it often expresses resistance.

But, you know, maybe also loud guitars?  Categories shift and lines blur, but you’d be hard pressed to find a punk festival or lineup that doesn’t feature almost exclusively bands with very loud guitars.  But unless you’re a Freudian with way too much time on their hands, the guitars don’t symbolize anything, they just make the noise.  The noise doesn’t symbolize anything.  Its ‘meaning’ is purely physical and cannot be adequately captured by a series of words.  You have to just feel the waves coming off those Marshall cabs.  The only way to embrace a definition such as Stewart’s—which, I should stress, is embedded in an otherwise excellent and fascinating book—is to lose touch with the embodied experience of live punk music.

It is important to see that even apparent symbols can actually fail to represent anything and can just exist as sounds or noises without much meaning.  Song lyrics, while providing enormous fodder for interpretation, have this two-faced quality, particularly in genres like punk that focus heavily on rhythm (funk is another example).  Stewart goes on to describe the Ramones as “providing commentary and insight into the stultifying life of growing up in a very deprived area of New York City (Queens) and not being able to see a future beyond that which social conventions and barriers dictate for such socio-economic backgrounds.” (23). With all due respect, I do not know which band Stewart is listening to.  This, remember, is the band famous for such lyrically rich phrases as “gabba gabba hey” and “hey, ho, let’s go”, phrases which were quite obviously chosen for their sheer rhythmic power and not because they say anything.  “ The Ramones were, above all, a band that took to heart James Brown’s famous idea: every instrument is a rhythm instrument, even the larynx.  Rhythms don’t represent, they just are, and “slave to the backbeat, Bliztzkrieg Bop” belongs to the same lyrical tradition as “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”.

Punk and Left-Wing Morality

Punk has always been left-wing, always progressive, always looking to be more inclusive. That is fantastic and should always continue. But there is an interesting paradox that increasingly confronts left-wing punks.

1. A punk band is typically dangerous, not in the sense that they will necessarily threaten the wellbeing of any person, but in the sense that they will challenge dominant social mores or expectations, either through lyrics, performance or appearance.  In particular, these will be the mores of (1) governments, (2) corporations, and (3) wealthy and privileged persons.

2. In many parts of the world, some progressive social mores (PSM) have been enthusiastically co-opted, both by large portions of the relatively affluent, population, by corporate entities and by governmental power structures. (The best recent book on this is Olufemi Taiwo’s Elite Capture)

3. With respect to these mores in particular, and in those parts of the world, a band who affirms these same progressive mores in the same spirit cannot, in this respect, count as ‘punk’, because those messages are no longer dangerous to those in power.

There is, I take it, something intuitive about this: if a certain noisy band sang in favor of marriage equality, they would be ‘punk’ in Iran but not so ‘punk’ in Canada.  This is not because literally all Canadians support marriage equality.  But it is because enough do that a critical social mass has formed, and the value of marriage equality is a default in many institutions and conversational contexts.  With respect to the values, ideals or principles PSM, there is something decidedly not very punk about forcefully delivering them in song in certain countries or contexts. 

Of course, in contexts where those PSM values are not nearly so popular or socially effective, such acts could indeed count as ‘punk’.  Pussy Riot provides the archetypal example; to sing “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Become a feminist, we pray thee” in modern Russia is to risk real social and institutional censure; as a provocative lyric in North America, it almost sounds quaint.

So, none of this means that progressive punk is impossible, rather, it simply means that it has to affirm genuinely challenging moral ideas: at present writing, race-based reparations and the return of unceded aboriginal lands are not programs that have achieved any kind of institutional hegemony or widespread popularity.  So the loud, rhythmic, guitar-based bands calling for these things are definitely dangerous and disruptive. 

It is in this context that an aging Johnny Rotten’s public display of the famous “MAGA” logo should be understood.  Rotten is, somewhat unimaginatively, taking the only path to rebellion that he currently perceives.  He understands something that is true, which is that in certain circles of power, the noisy imposition of certain PSMs creates a social hierarchy all on its own, and that it is therefore possible to be perceived as genuinely dangerous by acting the provocateur with respect to these hierarchies.  Rotten is a troll, and has always been a troll, if an unusually inspirational one.  But when trolling challenges actual power structures it can form part of a punk rock ethos, and that’s what he was attempting, clownishly, to do.

Yet, is there something more revealing about Rotten’s political stunt?  Some recent critics, representatives of a certain radical brand of PSM morality, seem to think so.  The problem, they will insist, is with the demographics of punk

Punk and Moral Criticism

To begin, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that most punk musicians and fans are men, as statistically men are more likely to express aggression, and as I will shortly emphasize, the experience of punk is intimately tied to aggression.  You don’t have to think that it’s the testosterone to recognize this simple fact.  Similarly, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they are mostly white, as punk is the genre which is the designated outlet for white aggression in music; just as gangsta rap or dancehall reggae are often the outlets for male aggression for black youth.  Moreover, these demographic facts are mostly morally uninteresting, not something that should be the locus of criticism.  Yet, we sometimes hear just this sort of criticism directed at the genre:

To be sure, punk has a lot to answer for: its flirtation with Nazi symbols, the ritualized violence of the mosh pit, and the overwhelmingly white male demographic of its artists and fans. Punk has long been considered the musical language of outsiders, though not necessarily issuing from the perspectives of actual outsiders to the white patriarchal power structure. (Periano, "The Politics of Punk in the Era of Trump," OUPblog, October 24, 2020.)

I am absolutely sure what most dyed-in-the-wool punk kids would say about a paragraph like this, written by a Cornell professor of music: she’s never been in a mosh pit in her life.  Perhaps their guess would be wrong.  But the ad hominem itself is not an inappropriate response to moralism directed at youth subcultures by comparatively privileged academics.  If we are to worry about the “perspectives” of punk kids and whether they appropriately represent our preferred “outsider” demographic, then we will definitely have to worry about the perspectives of moral critics inhabiting external, detached modes and passing judgment on the genre.  Especially when that judgment is this crude and inaccurate.

Moreover, Periano does not seem to notice that she is performatively enacting the very dynamic within which a MAGA shirt starts to look like an expression of a certain punk ethos.  Punk is, as analysts have long noted, inherently reactive, tied to a shared conception of a currently dominant and stifling social morality.  What counts as dangerous and rebellious is inherently relative to this morality, as I’ve already said. So when people within established power structures (be they corporate, academic or governmental) start to wag fingers at mosh pits and complain about the demographics therein, the stage is perfectly set for the reactive MAGA shirt.  It’s all just a perfect little self-supporting ecosystem of silliness.

To be clear: moral criticism of punk culture and punk performance is definitely needed.  To take what should be the most obvious problem: women are routinely excluded from full participation in shows by mosh-pit groping, for example.  The fact that this point goes unnoticed by Peraino speaks volumes about her detached perspective, as this complaint routinely arises from within punk circles, and as movements designed to combat it have arisen organically in recent years.[1]  In my view, the phenomenon is absolutely the worst thing about punk shows, and is arguably responsible for most of the gender-based exclusion dynamic one sees in the mosh pit (believe it or not, most woman punk fans can take an elbow to the stomach.  The threat of sexual assault is what many seem to fear, though I of course would defer to them on this question).

But to return to the point: the fact that there is a genre that is gendered and raced is only a problem if the overwhelmingly white and female audiences at Tori Amos or Billie Eilish concerts are also a problem.  But they are not a problem, because part of what it means to have a gender or a race is to identify with certain distinctive norms and activities, and so a world where art has no demographic skew is just a world without gender or race.  Distinctive experiences and ways of life inevitably lead to distinctive modes of presentation and performance, so in order to erase those modes, you have to erase those distinctive ways of life. I’m not into that idea. Obviously if this leads to active exclusion and marginalization we have to do something about that, but the demographics themselves are not the problem, the exclusion is.

Moreover, as I will stress, it is almost constitutive of punk performance that it involves a collective expression of some kind of aggression. The idea that the audience ought not to respond by displaying (controlled) aggression is laughably moralistic.

Again, the academic’s deeper error here lies in the addiction to interpretation, to standing back and observing a spectacle and speculating about what it means.  The academic sees the arms and legs flailing in the mosh pit, sees the color of the skin and the shape of the bodies, and reads something into it all, making a lazy connection to the white patriarchal power structure.  By contrast, every kid who’s thrown themselves into a mosh pit knows that the experience has a self-standing, intrinsic significance that goes well beyond anything that can be interpreted by an outsider.  There is probably no set of words or arguments which can communicate this significance.  You just have to be there.

Punk as More than a Signifier

So the problem is that we are speaking only of punk as a cultural signifier, as a label that gets applied to persons, products and behaviours. Undoubtedly, signifiers matter and the conditions that determine their significance matter.  But sometimes we can become too attached to signifiers, such that we lose sight of other crucial parts of social lives and social forms.  For example, we can lose sight of the importance of experience.

For punk is not just a signifier, a label to be applied and argued over in semi-parodical “is this thing punk?” conversations.  Punk is an experience.  For musicians and fans alike, it is a powerful, cathartic and sometimes even physically dangerous experience, a kind of mass hysteria that glorifies destruction, chaos, and the Dionysian more generally. 

This, unfortunately, means that attempts to understand punk from outside this mode of experience must always fail, and I have just catalogued some of those failures above.  It is all too easy to lampoon the “I was there, man”, spoken by the haughty or pretentious person looking to score social status.  But this sentence actually means something vitally important.  It is the invocation of a vital principle that applies across all domains, politics, morality, art and elsewhere.  Just as comfortable suburban whites are missing something about racial oppression, the detached academic—comfortable in their tenure-track position and at a vast remove from the social realities of punk music—is a generally unreliable guide to what punk as an experience is all about.

Ours is a lampoon culture, a culture drowning in irony, where real shared experiences are too easily turned into memes for public ridicule: the silly goth kids, the rebellious teenager’s mohawk, the early tattoos, the pink hair, the nose rings, all are turned into signifiers for our consumption, our judgment.  Stewart discusses punk attire thusly:

Men and women alike utilised their bodies as a means to shock, to gain attention and to make a (sometimes profound) statement about and to society. Tattoos, piercings, ripped clothes, messy and colourful hair, bondage straps, chains, safety pins and underwear were all utilised in the bricolage that was punk fashion. This included elements typically hidden from view such as underwear –usually a bra – worn over clothes or unused tampons worn as jewellery….thus the body was both the site of discourse and the text. (27)

So bodies are “texts” for the knowing interpreter to “read”.  And once we external critics have adopted this stance, it is all too easy to say that we know what’s going on with those kids, we get it, they don’t get it and they will be so embarrassed when they see these pics online in ten years.

We take these kids, their lives and their loves and their dreams, and we undermine them before they even get started, because so much of our elite culture is incapable of direct and unmediated sympathetic appreciation.  We interpret and thereby debunk these displays without needing to inhabit the perspective from which they are launched.  Pink hair can’t just be fun, it has to say something, and oh how embarrassing that will be in ten years, right?  Uh… wrong.  It can just be fun.

That young punk’s perspective is often wild, alive, free, tentative, scared, enchanted, energized, full of life and fear and pain and a powerful yearning to belong.  And all of the detached elite irony in the world can’t change one simple fact: the mosh pit brings out all of these experiences in spades.  To chug that beer, toss the can in the air and get caught up in the whirlwind of violent abandon while the band smashes out a powerful, screaming, fist-pumping anthem is to experience something that most comfortable adults will simply have forgotten about if they’ve ever experienced it at all.  It is pure madness, a sort of social letting go that is memorably described in mythology and literature since forever.

This is the sense of punk that is unassailable, untouchable by criticism or irony or analysis. It belongs to the people in the pit, and people who use it merely as a signifier for analysis are quite literally engaging in cultural appropriation, the co-opting of a real lived experience for the purposes of the merely symbolic. 

So in conclusion: GET IN THE PIT!!!

(Sorry I can't join you, my back has really been acting up 😉)

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[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/girls-against-teenagers-launch-campaign-eliminate-mosh-pit-groping-a6753641.html