Many years ago, I attended a music show in which my youngest brother’s arthouse metal band was the headliner for a show at a very small local venue. (In a previous blog post, I mentioned that I come from a big family, and there’s close to two decades between my youngest brother and me.) Anyway, the opening act was a “conservative punk” band made of a bunch of cop wannabes and rich kids. The very concept of conservative punk is ignorant and insulting on so many levels, and clearly getting under the skin of a libtard like me wasn’t the point because I was the only person in the audience who wasn’t a fan of theirs. Also, the conservatives hadn’t yet adopted the “libtard” epithet, but back then the conservative agenda was more about keeping taxes and spending low; it hadn’t yet devolved into “just trolling the progressives.” Their daddies and mommies were all in attendance. If you want, imagine soccer moms and lawyer dads co-opting the punk vibe, but with clothes from Eddie Bauer, Ralph Lauren, and (of course) Hot Topic. I don’t remember the titles of any of their insipid songs, but it was mostly shit like “This Is My Country” and “Red Laces”. These kids’ music was hateful crap, and just to get through it, I drank two or three beers. But, because they had money connections, that awful fake punk band had a manager, who cornered me on the way to the men’s room and said, “Aren’t they great?”
“You mean the Nazi punks?” I asked. “No, that was the worst crap I’ve heard in my life. Now get out of my way, or I’ll piss on your shoes.” I even missed the opening of my brother’s performance, because I had a hard time concentrating at the urinal.
I have told that story very few times (meager as it is), mostly because it wasn’t a particularly proud moment for me. I hated attending that show, because I don’t like being angry—and their neo-Nazi bullshit pissed me off so much. I was only there to watch my brother, and the crowd had thinned to just a few other people and me during my brother’s performance. I was angry about the conservative punk band, I was angry about their manager cornering me on the way to the restroom, and I was angry at all those Republican idiots leaving during my brother’s amazing performance. His metal band did a bunch of songs from a wide selection of artists, including Jimi Hendrix, Steve Vai, and Black Sabbath; at one point, my brother (who’s a bit of virtuoso) even played a riff on the trumpet for a few measures before going back to his guitar. My brother did a twelve-minute medley of Hendrix tunes, with a solo that could’ve fried eggs. I tried so hard to ignore all those shitty conservative parents, while adoring every minute of my baby brother’s performance. It was heartfelt and impassioned, and my brother deserved better. I don’t remember the last time my brother played a live show, but I think my brother might still be a professional musician if he had a few more positive experiences in those early days.
This blog post isn’t about my brother though, and it’s not even about those awful fake punks. Not really. Punk was the definitive counter-culture musical movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Counterculture is about rebellion, and what’s the point of rebelling against the counterculture, like those Republican morons? It’s like Trey Parker telling a reporter that only way to be punk rock in Los Angeles is to vote Republican. Well, fuck you, Trey Parker, and fuck all those nihilistic South Park Republicans. Trump wouldn’t have been elected without the capitulatory regression of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who created so much cultural apathy that a whole subsection of conservative millennials actually think militant centrism is an ideal. Trump is just a symptom of the American cancer. The real culprit is late-stage capitalism.
Karl Marx often used vampires as a metaphor to describe capitalists, but at this stage, the capitalists have begun showing the traits of cannibals, even turning on their own young as a means of survival. What else should we call this global crisis of climate change denial coupled with police brutality and ultranationalism? The most developed nations are having population growth issues that need infusions with huge immigrant populations, yet fascist politicians are turning voters against those much needed immigrants (because all racists are mutually corruptive idiots). There’s a 1982 punk rock song called “Capitalism Is Cannibalism” by a British anarcho-punk band called Anthrax (not to be confused with the American metal band called Anthrax), about the insanity of modern capitalism. As I was listening to the song on my iPhone assembled by child/slave labor using the app on Google Music, I realized that I was a part of the problem. I, too, had capitulated, and I realized that punk music really is dead.
One of the first CDs I had ever bought was a Sex Pistols special import album that normally wasn’t available in the United States. When I bought it, many of my friends made fun of me for buying a Sex Pistols album on CD. They said that I was a sellout, and that the only way to listen to the Sex Pistols was on cassette or vinyl. Another friend said, “No way! It’s not punk rock if it’s not at a live show!”
To which, I said, “But, Sid Vicious is dead, and Johnny Rotten doesn’t even perform with the Pistols anymore.”
“Yeah, punk is dead anyway,” another friend said, and that essentially ended the conversation. Fast forward to today, if punk was just about rebellion, what was the point? It was quickly co-opted by the establishment. The Queen of England even tried to bestow a knighthood on John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), which would have been a kick in the teeth if he had accepted. I mean, his best friend John Ritchie (aka Sid Vicious) died of a heroin overdose because he never discovered a better method of enduring class oppression than drug abuse. That’s what capitalism does; it uses people like cattle, and it discards those for whom it cannot find a use.
Punk bands either found record deals and became millionaires—or they didn’t and died—all in accordance with the neo-liberal capitalist system. Rebellion isn’t enough. It wasn’t enough then, and it isn’t enough now. We need a completely new system. If you imagine the world ending when you imagine the death of capitalism, you’re a cog in the machine, a slave of the system. Anarchists have long known that the only way to have true equality is by ending capitalism—no more private property, no more state currency, no more paid armies, no more exploitation. All resources should be shared or bartered, and all goods should be traded through cooperative economics. Only with the secular end of all ruling classes in every nation will all people everywhere know justice and peace. There can be no peace without justice, and there can be no justice as long as one group of people holds power over another group of people. We live in a fascist country, led by a wicked cabal of authoritarian oligarchs and incompetent plutocrats, and the message of rebellion will always be co-opted by the ruling class as one of their methods of division and control.
Rebellion is not enough. There must be a revolution, but not a right-wing revolution that will just result in more of the same or worse (and Trump is happy to remind us that it can always get worse). The people have to decide for themselves that they want to end the system—to let it all burn—so that a new and better system can rise from the ashes of the old. As long as we continue to allow the wealthy to divide us, there will always be racism and class oppression. If I’m lucky, I will have a few more decades on this earth, but the young people must want more for themselves and for their own children, assuming the future hasn’t been robbed of them already.
Thank you for reading, friends. Please don’t leave your homes if you don’t have to do so. Be healthy, be safe. If you have to go outside, please wear a mask. The life you save could be your own. One Love, y’all.
Rosliw Tor Raekül 