Where are the punks? Joey is dead...dead as vinyl and my olde Ramones album deep in a large metropolitan landfill. I've been waiting for the Second Coming and it keeps failing to appear, and now I am about to lose the faith. Oh, I'm not referring to Keanu Reeves making a new film, heck no. What I'm looking for is the second coming of the punk movement. But, unfortunately, economic growth and stability being what it is today, the best I can hope for is some retro poseurs making quite the Mohawk 'do. But that's not punk. We are stuck in this retro seventies thingie that is producing the lightning strike insulated platform shoes and hideous hairstyles. People should know that the seventies were a desolate and sickening era, best left in the decaying neurons of boomers such as Bill Clinton, David Bowie and many other geriatric performers. The punk movement rose spontaneously, like a sociopathic Phoenix, out of the flaming destruction of the seventies disco, big hair, putrid language (e.g., saying the word "groovy" should be a capital offence...in the movie To Live and Die in LA, one of the seventies throwback characters is indeed executed for such an utterance and also for stealing lots of money from his counterfeiting co-conspirator played by Willem Dafoe), and "recreational drugs". Punk music had purity in its complete lack of talent and training. Raw emotional states were to be instantly translated into the maw of the musical instrument that was being tortured and thrown out to the primal ears of the animalistic punkers. The main emotional state of the punk was as a cornered rabid wolverine. Distrustful, aggressive without motive and full of unpredictability that bordered on chaos. Unfortunately, as soon as punk appeared, it disappeared into the poseur fashion schlock as it was institutionalized by the recording industry and the unfortunate birth of music video [late seventies to early eighties].This is truly a tragic tale, but looking into the cup half full universe, I was fortunate enough to chance upon a movie that chronicles some aspects of this wonderful culture. The film is called:
SLC Punk
The SLC stands for Salt Lake City, a terrible little rat hole somewhere in the US of A where Mormons are the ruling class and human beings are treated like second class citizens. The film looks at the life of one punk and his friend as they try to survive within fascist confines of theocratic dictatorship. One of the central ideas in SLC Punk is the question: Are you hardcore or a poseur? Obviously, if you can answer the question with words and a sentence you are a poseur, but if you grunt and salivate like a wolf, and then jump at the interlocutor of this query and scream at him till his tympanic membrane bleeds, then you are almost hardcore. We're in a rut...Cultural funk -bring on punk….please...
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