The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit Page B
Authors: Rebecca Solnit
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hair, eyeliner, spike heels (in contrast to the platform shoes that were everywhere then)—and went for an aesthetic of the lean, the sharp, the spare, the straight, the antithesis of all the fuzzy floral flowing abundance around us, as though we wanted to go back twenty years and then take the other fork in the road, the one that didn’t lead to hippies and long drum solos and stadium rock and all the fuzzy, fake, feel-good sentiment of the1970s. We wore a lot of black back when no one else did, unless you were an old Catholic widow or a Swedish film director. Death was everywhere: in high art, like Linda Montano’s 1977 piece, Mitchell’s Death , for her late husband; in pop culture, like Bruce Conner’s photographs of De Detroit of UXA wrapped up like a mummy at the Mab, mourning the drug-overdose death of her boyfriend; and in the news of assassinations, murders, and massacres.
It was an era when cities themselves were dying (a famous New York Post headline of 1975 read, “Ford to NY: Drop Dead”), or rather, the old industrial cities and their blue-collar jobs were vanishing, crime was spiking, and a new kind of bland white-collar metropolis was being born in the ruins. Deindustrialization and the ruinous, partly abandoned cities were the landscape of punk.
Punks tried out wearing trash bags tailored with safety pins. And the hair—the aesthetic was with Huysmans and against nature. It was amusing in later years to see young punks try hard to be nonchalant while sporting twelve-inch-high mohawks in five different colors. They had dyed, shaved, and put powerful fixatives in their hair—some used actual glue—and then pretended they couldn’t be bothered with their appearance. Against nature—nature had become the moral standard of the previous generation, which went back to the earth, went braless, went for all that Indian cotton and faded embroidered organic-looking stuff. We liked plastic. Or rather, plastic expressed us, and we didn’t necessarily like it or ourselves. If the hippies had had insincere naturalness—all those neck rubs and ethnic appropriations—we had earnest artifice. Think of it as clippers shearing away all the luxuriant fringes and foliage, the occluding moss and dangling tendrils of the post-hippie aesthetic. Style was a statement of ideology as well as aesthetics; punk was profoundly reactive, and the failures and excesses of the post-hippie era gave us plenty to react against.
If the 1960s and early 1970s had been about the removal of barriers—around segregated institutions, around activities like sex, and around emotions—the late 1970s were the reckoning. What had been let loose was not all peace, love, and happiness (which, incidentally, became the charming name of a 1980s Bay Area punk band, better known as PLH).A cascade of angst, fury, and violence had been let loose. “Ask not what you can do for your country,” shouted Penelope Houston of the Avengers, one of San Francisco’s first punk bands, “but what your country’s been doing to you.” Looking back thirty years later, I see how much punk was of its time as well as against it. After all, violence and negativity were all around us, and the task was to name it and then maybe tame it. And it did get tamed, one way and another. Some punk turned into hardcore; some punks turned into the activists that made the overlooked 1980s a radical decade to rival the 1960s (and improve upon it, a lot, when it came to internal politics).
DEVOLUTION
Punk rock was born in the ruins, the ruins of industrial America, but also the ruins of the utopian hubris of the 1960s, which was self-destructing pretty spectacularly then. Synanon, for example, had started in Southern California in the late 1950s as a drug rehabilitation program. Rather than cycle people through, however, it acquired members and kept them. Members played “the game,” in which people confronted each other about their weaknesses and told each other harsh
It was an era when cities themselves were dying (a famous New York Post headline of 1975 read, “Ford to NY: Drop Dead”), or rather, the old industrial cities and their blue-collar jobs were vanishing, crime was spiking, and a new kind of bland white-collar metropolis was being born in the ruins. Deindustrialization and the ruinous, partly abandoned cities were the landscape of punk.
Punks tried out wearing trash bags tailored with safety pins. And the hair—the aesthetic was with Huysmans and against nature. It was amusing in later years to see young punks try hard to be nonchalant while sporting twelve-inch-high mohawks in five different colors. They had dyed, shaved, and put powerful fixatives in their hair—some used actual glue—and then pretended they couldn’t be bothered with their appearance. Against nature—nature had become the moral standard of the previous generation, which went back to the earth, went braless, went for all that Indian cotton and faded embroidered organic-looking stuff. We liked plastic. Or rather, plastic expressed us, and we didn’t necessarily like it or ourselves. If the hippies had had insincere naturalness—all those neck rubs and ethnic appropriations—we had earnest artifice. Think of it as clippers shearing away all the luxuriant fringes and foliage, the occluding moss and dangling tendrils of the post-hippie aesthetic. Style was a statement of ideology as well as aesthetics; punk was profoundly reactive, and the failures and excesses of the post-hippie era gave us plenty to react against.
If the 1960s and early 1970s had been about the removal of barriers—around segregated institutions, around activities like sex, and around emotions—the late 1970s were the reckoning. What had been let loose was not all peace, love, and happiness (which, incidentally, became the charming name of a 1980s Bay Area punk band, better known as PLH).A cascade of angst, fury, and violence had been let loose. “Ask not what you can do for your country,” shouted Penelope Houston of the Avengers, one of San Francisco’s first punk bands, “but what your country’s been doing to you.” Looking back thirty years later, I see how much punk was of its time as well as against it. After all, violence and negativity were all around us, and the task was to name it and then maybe tame it. And it did get tamed, one way and another. Some punk turned into hardcore; some punks turned into the activists that made the overlooked 1980s a radical decade to rival the 1960s (and improve upon it, a lot, when it came to internal politics).
DEVOLUTION
Punk rock was born in the ruins, the ruins of industrial America, but also the ruins of the utopian hubris of the 1960s, which was self-destructing pretty spectacularly then. Synanon, for example, had started in Southern California in the late 1950s as a drug rehabilitation program. Rather than cycle people through, however, it acquired members and kept them. Members played “the game,” in which people confronted each other about their weaknesses and told each other harsh
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