In a world of Crass ringtones nothing is sacred

Our friend Toby wrote a pretty entertaining post about sub-cultures today. Unless I'm wrong, he's saying that some kids just buy the punky look and some parts of the lifestyle while missing the point. He even threatens us with a return of the Reagan Era.

But starting to define punk, or any sub-culture, is sloppy territory. It's like trying to define community because, really, it is about community. It's about what you do, where you do it, and who you do it with.

A regular at my coffee shop has been going to DIY shows for something like forever. I was talking to him about this. He blames the internet for making it so easy for a look or cultural identity to be commodified. It's true, no doubt.

But there is the fact that we were all young and stupid once. I liked Chain of Strength in the early 90s. Now we might have better taste, but we're probably just old and stupid. I suspect I might be anyway. If we were raised in the internet age mightn't we find ourselves with the same problem?

That excuse works for the young crimethINC-y generation who want everything for free, but not for actual real-life Uptown hipsters. The answer: Uptown hipsters either don't know we exist (as in the well-intentioned but dangerously loose-tongued piece by the City Pages music editor) or they don't care. Either way, they'll soon move on to wearing phat pants and glitter again.

Then again, maybe those aren't the people he's referring to; his description of hipsters with "bandana and bike bag" sounds suspiciously like me.

Even if we wanted to, how do we even start judging people's authenticity? Few of us were born into any underground culture. From a lack of satisfying options; we join it, or mold it, or we create it.

It's this process of having to create or seek out a cultural home, along with the political experience it brings, that Toby rightly points to as a distinguishing characteristic of our world of weird peoples:

"The flip side is they never have to deal with not having a place and with being a reject. They consequently never develop the sort of angst-y, critical view of things that predisposes one such that when s/he gets a glance of the world beyond his/her own immediate problems of social adequacy s/he thinks, "wow, people are getting fucked all over the world and there's something fundamentally wrong."

It's about more than a look, it's about the lack of real commitment people show to the music, the spaces, and the people. They didn't have to get things the harder way, instead they ordered it from intraweb, so they didn't get a political understanding of what it takes to maintain the community infrastructure. But, then again, there's always been art students. No one's perfect and everyone wants a nice flannel shirt.

Maybe a mandatory history lesson would help. Maybe dunk them in water to see if they float. In the end though, most of those people will drift away to jobs better than ours and houses better than ours. They might be irritating to look at but, as Bob would say with his characteristic candor, "they'll be dead soon."

I reiterated all Toby's points in my long-winded way just so I could repeat what my coffee shop regular said about it:

"What can you do? Just gotta keep doing what you do."