What the hell is going on with music these days? I don’t know if it’s because this is a generation of whiny little emo bitches or if the fact that live studio recordings are completely extinct but music today fucking sucks. Songs are just a collection of a thousand sound-bites, probably unable to be played as they are recorded by the very bands that release the songs.  Audio tracks are compressed, equalized, and squeezed into a limited range to be all one volume and finally shit out into the mp3 format.  Digital recordings for digital playback.  Fast-food music for a fast-food nation.

Bands themselves have record contracts, music videos, and clothing lines without the ability to even tune their goddamn guitars. They pick an image then let the music industry computers create their substance. A friend asked me the other day what music I like and I immediately got balls deep into a drawn out explanation of how all the music I liked came out during the decade between 1975 and 1985. I told him how even though through the ages people have probably been saying that ‘music nowadays sucks’ that I felt that there was a categorical difference between the types of changes that had occurred in the past and what transpired to push music from being art to product. Music is now all made by machines for machines. It’s the death of originality. The death of birth.  Music is no longer release or expression of the artists, but product – like shoes – that the consumer purchases to express the associated values embodied by the product (and it’s marketing campaign). I’ve never been a class warrior, and don’t generally give a shit what people like or don’t like unless they shove it in my face or try and convert me – force me to join. The genres I generally ascribe to; Punk and Metal. Music with edge, attitude, lack of ‘give a shit’. Underground music. Fringe music. The art of rebels and revolutionaries. Music with innovation, emotion, heart, and the brutal honesty of life in its stripped down degeneracy. I’m sure there are a million people out there that would completely agree with everything I am saying, and yet somehow I have become part of the musical minority. I use the same words, have the same defined values, but nobody is speaking my same language – I exist, alone with my ’77 punk bands, ‘fuck you’ sensabilities, and Hi-Fi stereo in a musical vacuum of isolation.

Example:

I hate Green Day.

I fucking hate EVERYTHING about this band. Their music, their look, their politics, even – fuck, especially – the braindead cutesy stereotypical pop-punk facial expressions they spent half of their youths perfecting in their bathroom mirrors.

Now why on earth would anyone hate a band. They are like inanimate objects. It’s tantamount to saying that you hate paperweights or coral or paperweights with coral in them. Who really fucking cares, right!? Well wrong motherfucker. Green Day is not only garbage but they are representative of this whole garbage paradigm shift taking place in America right now where badass is being replaced with faggotry (all in the name of badass).

Now I know that there is a fairly substantial bandwagon of people who already ‘hate’ Green Day. Some idiots simply don’t like the band because they are played too damn much on the radio. Well that is a good reason to hate the band, I’ll agree, but I think that is more symptomatic of the gayness taking over America where bullshit braindead overproduced music is being unwillingly pumped into culture like a giant syringe full of shit. I can’t hardly tell which is a legitimate song and what’s a goddamn commercial jingle these days. With the culture of self expression and identity started taking over it seems like both the song and the jingle are the same thing, both an excuse to define oneself an infinitesimal degree further – customize their avatar, which is who they play as in everyday life. Another sickly expression of the ‘everyone gets a trophy’ syndrome that is emasculating the US of A. Belonging to the group of people who like Green Day brings with it certain social assumptions and rewards that at one time were rooted in the core of punk culture, a culture that is long dead.

Other bandwagoneers say that Green Day sold out, and those people would also be correct. The band changed its music to be more accessible to the widest market, thereby selling more records. This is classic “sellout” activity. I can understand when over time a band’s music changes. If those changes are driven through life and experiences and an evolving ethos I will support them (as long as the music doesn’t suck) but if those changes are founded in making more money, or marketability, or business shit in any way – well you can now just go fuck off. The truest fact is that according to punk history the existence and prevalence of the band itself expresses the deepest and most insulting ‘selling out’ against the values of all that is punk. All the hard fought territory gained by nihilistic 70’s and 80’s degenerates in the name of social and political freedom being completely desecrated by the mere existence of a Green Day, the grave pissed on over and over again.
I suppose the least bandwagonesque people say that Green Day’s music is no good. These people I agree with most. The music being bleated out by Green Day is mediocre…

Uninteresting…

Political for the sake of being political – do I really think that world events or national politics affect these guys, fuck no. If they had a true sense of politics then their message wouldn’t be so goddamn simplistic. It’s like political rebellion for people with downs. Sorry, got sidetracked there…

Boring…

Formulaic…

Safe – and what worse could be said about any “punk” band.. but they are not a punk band and because of their safeness they get heavy rotation on every radio station trying express the ‘punkness’ of their avatar.

On top of all this shit I have to say that I fucking hate Green Day fans. Again you may decry my hatred as unreasonable. You don’t hate dogshit for being dogshit, even when you step in it, right!? Wrong again bitch! Green Day fans are the musical equivalent of Creationists. They have a ridiculous and fundamentally flawed point of view regarding their band and under no circumstances will they give even an inch for fear that their whole bullshit avatar ‘punk rock’ image will crumble.

Green Day Fan, “Dude, Green Day are so rebellious that they say ‘americans are idiots’!”

Me, “Get over yourself you fuck-tard. This is just a blatent pandering toward the mindless Bush-hating youth of America.”

Oh yeah, by the fucking way, who is the extra mystery member that was surreptitiously added to the band!? Green Day is Mike Dirnt, Billie Joe Armstrong and Tre Cool. Next time you want to make your brain hurt a little bit go ahead and watch the video to ‘Wake me up when September Ends’ and you too will notice something – there is a fourth goddamn dude out there with the band. Who the fuck is this!? The funny thing is that this mystery guitarist apparently materialized out of the void just to rock out in ‘Wake me up when September Ends’. No one in the video seems to take any notice of this guy. Where the hell did he come from?

The logical explanation is that Green Day (like many bands) required an extra guitarist for this particular song, so they just had someone play an extra guitar. For example Mars Volta use Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play on some of their songs because they don’t have enough guitarists. However Mars Volta don’t reflect this in their videos. Neither do countless other bands. So why Green Day?

The only possibility is that Billie Joe wanted to act more as front man and less as band member. The band, in its continual evolution towards becoming the most hungered for pop-music candy in modern history, needed “BJ” to be more in the cameras with the facial expressions and the mindless political rallying and less on his instrument as an actual musician.

These tactics have been used before, in Societ Russia, except in reverse. After Lenin died there was a sort of power struggle. Stalin on one side, Trotsky on the other. Stalin was in charge, but Trotsky was troublesome. Stalin needed to institute himself as Lenin’s former best friend and Trotsky as nothing. As time went on he doctored countless photos. Trotsky would move further away from Lenin, whereas Stalin would move closer. Eventually Trotsky ended up disappearing completely whereas Stalin would end up standing next to Lenin. Trotsky would later become a figure of hate in the USSR, and Stalin, always a pleasant fellow, had him exiled and then killed by having an assassin drive an ice pick through Trotsky’s eye in Mexico City.

Green Day is doing something similar. Except without all the evil. Well, not as much evil. And in reverse. Instead of getting rid of a guy, they’re bringing one in. Soon you’ll find that listings have this mysterious fellow as being in all Green Day’s albums and songs. He’ll appear on Green Day’s official website, he’ll be rocking in all the concerts, and when Green Day’s asked about it the answer will be as that he’s always been there.

See, the core of this issue for me isn’t really Green Day so much, even though it’s like drinking formaldehyde every time I hear some asshole call them ‘punk’, it’s something much bigger. Somehow in modern times we have subtly taken the same words and replaced the meanings with their diametric opposites. The same words, but opposite meanings. It’s not so blatant and tyrannical as 1984 where words are being systematically destroyed, but it’s something just as sinister and a million times more subtle.
“PUNK” could be a metaphor for American culture. I’m not so braindead to not see it when it’s happening, but every time I ignore it or am forced to adapt its like the world is taking another wafer thin slice of my soul.

Maybe I’m not being completely clear – a quick lesson in the history of punk.

Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock. They created fast, hard-edged music, typically with short songs, stripped-down instrumentation, and often political, anti-establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY (do it yourself) ethic, with many bands self-producing their recordings and distributing them through informal channels.
By late 1976, bands such as the Ramones, in New York City, and the Sex Pistols and The Clash, in London, were recognized as the vanguard of a new musical movement. The following year saw punk rock spreading around the world. Punk quickly, though briefly, became a major cultural phenomenon in the United Kingdom. For the most part, punk took root in local scenes that tended to reject association with the mainstream. An associated punk subculture emerged, expressing youthful rebellion and characterized by distinctive clothing styles and a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies.

By the beginning of the 1980s, faster, more aggressive styles such as hardcore and Oi! had become the predominant mode of punk rock. Musicians identifying with or inspired by punk also pursued a broad range of other variations, giving rise to post-punk and the alternative rock movement.

The first wave of punk rock aimed to be aggressively modern, distancing itself from the bombast and sentimentality of early 1970s rock. According to Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone, “In its initial form, a lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting. Unfortunately, what happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the likes of Hendrix started noodling away. Soon you had endless solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock ‘n’ roll.” John Holmstrom, founding editor of Punk magazine, recalls feeling “punk rock had to come along because the rock scene had become so tame that [acts] like Billy Joel and Simon and Garfunkel were being called rock and roll, when to me and other fans, rock and roll meant this wild and rebellious music.” In critic Robert Christgau’s description, “It was also a subculture that scornfully rejected the political idealism and Californian flower-power silliness of hippie myth.”

Throughout punk rock history, technical accessibility and a DIY spirit have been prized. In the early days of punk rock, this ethic stood in marked contrast to what those in the scene regarded as the ostentatious musical effects and technological demands of many mainstream rock bands. Musical virtuosity was often looked on with suspicion. According to Holmstrom, punk rock was “rock and roll by people who didn’t have very much skills as musicians but still felt the need to express themselves through music.

Some of British punk rock’s leading figures made a show of rejecting not only contemporary mainstream rock and the broader culture it was associated with, but their own most celebrated predecessors: “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977″, declared The Clash song “1977″. The previous year, when the punk rock revolution began in Great Britain, was to be both a musical and a cultural “Year Zero”. Even as nostalgia was discarded, many in the scene adopted a nihilistic attitude summed up by the Sex Pistols slogan “No Future”; in the later words of one observer, amid the unemployment and social unrest in 1977, “punk’s nihilistic swagger was the most thrilling thing in England.” While “self-imposed alienation” was common among “drunk punks” and “gutter punks”, there was always a tension between their nihilistic outlook and the “radical leftist utopianism” of bands such as Crass, who found positive, liberating meaning in the movement. As a Clash associate describes singer Joe Strummer’s outlook, “Punk rock is meant to be our freedom. We’re meant to be able to do what we want to do.”

By the turn of the century, pop punk had been adopted by the mainstream, with bands such as Green Day, The Offspring, and Blink 182 bringing the genre widespread popularity.

Modern ‘punk’ bands are just a pandering bunch of post-punk, pop, “please love me”,  pussies. It’s like the biggest problem with music now is how desperate they are to be liked, to be loved, to find an audience, to be on the newest fucking car commercial. It’s all pose and fashion and style. It’s all manufactured. These fags probably have a team of fucking stylists working for them . It’s all so cynically put together to evoke 70’s, New York, danger. It’s all ‘la-de-dah’, happy-go-lucky, spoiled little brats from the suburbs, coming together to start a band because they’re bored and not getting enough attention. And they tell you absolutely nothing, show you nothing new, it is not visionary, and by it’s very nature and attitude redundant. It’s very fucking sad that these bands are referencing something that happened 30 fucking years ago. It’s not as if there is a revival of the intellectual concepts, or the values, or the diversity, or the extremity of that music. It’s a homogenization, it’s a gentrification, and it’s a softening. It feels soft and mushy and weak. There is no substance, no spine, no teeth. There is nothing important that these new bands are doing. It’s a commodification and sterilization of the three same fucking instruments – bass, guitar, and drums. And don’t try and sell my memories back to me. Fuck nostalgia. Show me something new, sell me something new, scare me, shock me, rape my fucking mind. There is no time for old shit, don’t repackage my first love as commerce, it’s time to move forward and that’s fucking it. Adopting nostalgia as the base from which to create from is intellectual bankruptcy. I want something that blows me away and I’m not sure whether it’s “cool” or not. It’s time for a new nihilism. It’s time for the whole post-modern deconstruction of everything to strip it of meaning to end. Is the control that pervasive? Is the industry so powerful that peoples’ views and desires are implanted by corporate capitalism and people are just so fucking confused that they don’t even know what to rebel against any more? Maybe it’s simply that a new and different mode of control requires a new and different mode of rebellion. Maybe that’s just my own pathetic romantic prayer for the death of the things that I hate.

Regardless and in conclusion; punk does is not equal to punk. So fuck you!

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