A personal history of the world after punk: 1. Prologue
“You’re not punk, and I’m telling everyone.
Save your breath, I never was one.”
For a playlist of the songs and artists I reference in this short piece, here you go.
I’m not punk, and I never was one. From my first memory of listening to a punk song (Punk Rock Song by Bad Religion) to today, I’ve never spent a single moment being anything even resembling a punk. I got good grades in school, went to a good college, made a career in tech, you know, things you wouldn’t associate with punk (although, there’s a large number of well-educated punk musicians, including Greg Graffin, the lead singer of the aforementioned Bad Religion, who has a Ph.D. in Zoology). At the same time, punk rock and (more so) its offshoots are among the most important music in my life. Their influence is clear in the sort of music I make, the sort of stuff I write, and the sort of life I live.
Truth is, since its inception, punk has had a lot of influence on the mainstream. The album cover of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures is one of the most reproduced images in the world. Green Day is, and has been for a couple of decades, one of the biggest acts in the world. Arctic Monkeys for over a decade. Punk has in some way or the other touched almost every music genre the world has seen since 1975, be it the alternative rock of Third Eye Blind or Queens of the Stone Age or indie acts like Pixies or Modest Mouse, or EDM DJs like Skrillex.
A lockdown like this is the best time to talk about the things that matter most to us. And after the people I love (quite a distance after the people I love), the thing that matters most to me is music. Punk (and its offshoots), hip-hop, hindustani classical music, Rahman, jazz. These are the things that have kept me going day in and day out, not only during this quarantine, but through most of my life since I was a teenager. At a time like this, talking about the things we love is proof that for those of us who are lucky, there’s always things to lean on. For example, for those of us who are lucky, there’s always music.
So in that spirit, let’s talk about punk. This isn’t a history of the artform. There are several better places to get that (for instance, this one for the music before punk that inspired it — called proto-punk by some critics) . This is more like the scene from High Fidelity, in which Rob, the protagonist, after a breakup caused by his inability to grow up (as evidenced by his overt music nerddom) and his unwillingness to become less self-centred (as evidenced by his total focus on making lists of songs and records), decides to arrange his massive record collection, not chronologically, or alphabetically, but autobiographically. The scene is intended to show Rob as being self-indulgent, in worship of himself and his musical tastes.
I hope I avoid that trap. I hope to simply pay tribute to works of art that have changed my life in a meaningful way. Also, I’m getting older, and I’m worried that at some point, either I’ll start forgetting, or the world around me will start to collapse, and I won’t care anymore. So here goes.
This is part 1 of a series on my love of this music, arranged autobiographically.
