let them be punks

Sometimes when our heads are too far up our own asses, even when we are right we are just right in our own situations.  Despite the much-talked-about global-ness of punk, and despite all the politics, it’s still a scene with so many fucked up assumptions—but for a lot of us in other parts of the world, they’re not the one’s you may think.

One of my old bands once got a review that praised us but also said he expected something worse because of our nationality. I didn’t get it racist cause we Europeans are like this. Al Burian wrote about one of my other bands that we could be huge in Europe if we were Americans. Look, your location matters. Saying otherwise is a lie. If you live in the Northwestern part of Europe you can reach four-to-six different countries within few hours that get ‘big coverage’ in the punk press. You play a decent show in Germany and the message boards will be all over you. Then you’ll be able to tour the whole of Germany. Later some label will want to release your records, you’ll have cool live shots of your gigs all over the place, some youtube videos and that’s it. You made it. This sounds so cut-and-dry professional but it’s true. We are somehow this professional.

But it’s not just punk rock marketing—your location matters in how all of us do our punk as well—and on every level: as fans and as participants; how we consume and produce our music; our perspectives and our ethics.

What I will talk about now is the arrogance in punk rock—or more specifically, arrogance in ‘first world’ punk rock, because there is a difference. And when it’s on it’s blind as fuck. An easy example is how nowadays with gourmet food being all the rage, these gastro nazis could make you feel bad if you are not eating food that is in the best quality or prepared as it’s done in a top restaurant. But you have to eat, otherwise you die. And if you are punk you have to be punk, you have to put out, you have to get, you have to go. But for some of the most die-hard ‘punks’ I run into, animal rights is important as long as they can consume the same exact taste that is made out of something without a nervous system. Watch them try to teach a poor person (or poor punks for that matter!) in my country how to eat healthier or more ethical—it’s totally embarrassing!

Sometimes it’s really just more important what we do than how we get it done. There were bands on the road way before emails, not just before Facebook, but it also wasn’t usual that your friends could go out on tour with only a demo or an EP and sleep around squats and eat overcooked pasta with ketchup. It’s cool if I type in Sex Vid into google and the only thing I will encounter is making me wash my hands 5 minutes later, but who needs internet when the biggest fanzine in the world is your devoted fan? It’s easy to play the ‘I don’t care’ card when the world cares about you. There’s a whole made up genre of bands who are hard to trace but got the hype. It’s easy not to say a word when everyone is just waiting for you to speak.

But if you never were on the map then you’ve been born invisible. I have booked three tours by myself through long months, a million e-mails and bending over maps with a gas calculator and many of the shows went through friends whose bands I’ve booked here in my town. But without social network sites we couldn’t have ever kicked off. Without Myspace or Facebook I couldn’t have booked bands that helped me later, and whose members have become my good friends. And yet this a total first-world luxury to be able to eschew these things and say “fuck Facebook” and try to exist “under the radar” and still be able to tour, put out music, etc. 

The fixation with the format of our music is another example of this ‘let them eat cake’ mentality. Look, I get it. Vinyl is punk and tapes are coming back as well. CD is crap, MP3 is slacking. And it’s true. As an owner of some vinyls I agree—they are great and they are the best. They are magic. And to be honest it was a painful job when I spent three days cutting worn out mix tapes to the same exact length or to dub our demo over days-worth dubs of MTV’s 120 Minutes, but they looked awesome and I was proud of my work. I always looked on our CDs as crap but that was our only chance!

Because you know what? Here where I live there’s no vinyl making. Because the industry—like everything else in the communist-era—was owned by the state, so after the collapse the record plants got shut down and never reopened. And it’s actually illegal here to make and sell materialized records if you don’t register your songs. So even old farts who are somehow equipped to make you 12” plastic discs in their basements for a ridiculously high price are scared cause you have to ‘own’ your songs first. But who wants to do that? The closest place to get records pressed otherwise is the Czech Republic where if I order 500 copies of 7” (which I will never sell cause I’m in an unknown band from eastern Europe) I have to pay like 4 dollars each!  That’s a lot of money here! And we didn’t even start talking about the cost of the cover and packaging! Then consider I also live far from bigger (read: richer) cites and have to work a lot so touring beyond 1 or 2 weeks means loosing my job or I just simply wont eat for the rest of the month. We don’t have a label cause we can’t tour that much so no one knows about us, or really would care because, again, we’re from an unfashionable place in the eyes of the tastemakers...  I could go on and on, but I don’t want to make this a sob story about me…

So when someone says they don’t listen to CDs cause it’s way too easy to make, I get fucking angry. Yeah, burning a CD is an easy job, but writing the songs that are on that shinny fucking plastic maybe took fucking months you idiot. You are fixating on the dumb format and covering your ears to a band who rot at their rehearsal room, spent many long months to make songs you shrug away just because it’s on a CD? Yeah, it feels better to be put out on vinyl cause that means someone with money cares enough about your music to put it out. But you can dub a tape at home, you can burn a CD at home, and from our perspective, doing these things at home gives us the feeling of we’ve gained something already.

It’s like getting published in MRR: Would it change what I’m saying if this was just another post on my blog? So this is arrogance as well. My friends were kinda proud and happy when they made it into the pages of MRR in a scene report. But (like almost all the scene reports) I wrote it on my own, not as some ‘beat reporter’ for MRR. Nobody asked me to write it. So what was significant about it? They already knew what I thought about them. Again, being validated matters, but the look doesn’t change what what’s being said, or the content that’s being covered.

It’s the same thing for me with owning records. I like to own them. I like the covers, the smell, the stories, the feel I had when I bought them. It was a religious moment when I first heard “Where is my Mind” by the Pixies on vinyl. Something in my chest started levitating. And it was amazing to be 80% blind from booze at a record-listening house party but finding the right record and putting it on. Singing Nerves songs drunk with a guy who looked like a bad guy from a French cartoon, showing him the lyric sheet with lines about my love life; the next morning watching my host put all his LPs back in order and stare at record covers for long hours…

These things are cool but owning things is also a cultural headhunt—putting things on the shelves like trophies. We feel like they represent us like the shirts we wear. Not just to other people but to me as well. I’m being reminded how awesome I am constantly. I look at my shirt and I feel great cause I own a shirt like this, I like a band like this, I listen to a band like this so I’m something like this. I look good, my room looks good, I feel great cause my thoughts look great. But buying records is not easy! When I mailorder records from where I am the postage price doubles the price of my record! And many places don’t even ship here! There’s not a single good shop or distro in here either. So while I love distros—browsing through them drunk and just finding something I have to have, driven by pure and delirious instincts—I still listen to most of my music in mp3 anyway. So why is it different or any worse?

Sometimes when I speak about records I feel like cheating when I say I have them cause I only really have them in digital format. But I still have feelings for them. They made me happy, angry, or sad. I know these records, I like them, I listen to them. And they sound the same. I mean, not really, but who cares about ‘bit rate’ when you are listening to Perdition or Lebenden Toten! I think actually the shittiness of crappy mp3s might even make them more evil, fragile, bedroom-ish and punk. Or maybe not. I don’t know! I wanna know though. Cause after all I hear them from a source but I hear them in my head too, and that’s where it matters most.

I remember being a kid thinking that if they translated all the comic books I would buy them all, but wondering at the same time, where would I keep them? There is not enough space in my room. But now I love music. I’m a music nerd but I can’t be a record geek cause if I wanna buy punk records I would have to stop being a punk and be someone instead who earns lots of money—so basically is a fucking asshole—just to be able to house all these records! Some people say they only listen to their LPs, meaning they stopped caring for new music. So they stopped being a punk and instead they just like to listen to punk bands they used to like, and by limiting their curiosity they can buy all presses and colors of the beloved totems of their youth, while I know that I will never own all the records I like.

Another thing: maybe what we do is secret but sometimes we just practice this line way too serious and we create more secrets than necessary.  90% of the bands say they are here for getting their message out. Sharing their stories, their frustration, making other people think or feel less alienated. But yet while most bands have their own presence or coverage on the internet, barely anyone is sharing their lyrics there. It has become yet another privilege of the record buyers to go through the lyrics sheets – and you know what?  I don’t think most of them even do! And this is the essence of first-world punk privilege and arrogance—not even really taking advantage of it!

But it’s true, even when I have the mp3s of a record I love, I still I miss the damn thing. Not the chance to see the matrix message, or put it on the shelf and feel great that I ‘own’ it, no—it’s the lyric sheet. The message that I know I don’t know. Even born speakers of English have doubts about specific lines and why would it hurt to share your own lyrics on your own platform on the internet? We are part of a message and thinking-based subculture but the main message of the music is hidden or relies on our pockets’ credibility? Sounds pretty fucked up to me.

All of us who these typed-in thoughts concern—we wanna read the lyrics, hold the records—ours and others’—we want go on tour without dealing with lame corporate internet band profiles. Some people out there are able to have all these things and even more. But they should never forget that they are lucky to be like this.  Yeah, your location matters, but how you deal with it matters even more.