Childhood
“[At
it's best] punk represents a
fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the
license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion
they can dream up, they'll be creative about it, and do something
good”
Pat "the Bunny" Schneeweis, creative mind, voice, guitar, and occasionally the only man, behind Johnny Hobo and the Freight trains, Wingnut Dishwasher's Union, and Ramshackle Glory, wrote "Maybe you don't choose punk rock, because punk rock chooses you." But to
say one is chosen by punk rock or born into it sounds way to
pretentious for me to say with a straight face, and it would be very
difficult to reconcile with the punk beliefs, such as well, freedom,
if punk was some sort of exclusive club reminiscent of nobility. No
instead I would argue that punks all come from a similar mold; we are
of the same kind of disenchanted youth. Lester Bangs, a music journalist who wrote about punk when it was just MC5 and Iggy Pop and The Stooges, wrote that punk music was loud, aggressive,
minimalist, and amateur. This is not only the sound, but the
personality of a punk rock. While loud and aggressive are pretty
obvious in the classic image of the leather and stud clad punk with a tall mohawk perched on top of head and middle finger raised screaming“Oi!” at a cop, the last two traits seem to be oddly applied
here. However, punks are undoubtedly both minimalist and amateur, it
just takes a little explaining (re:bullshitting). Punks are
minimalist in their philosophies and lifestyles. Small government?
Fuck that, no government! Anarchy! The D.I.Y. Lifestyle which
started picking up with 80's further endorsed minimalism proclaiming
that you should stop using the system to attain things and start
making them yourself. Record your own songs, make your own merch, and
distribute your own album. The amateur angle, on the other hand,
lies in the root of the word. From the Latin amātur, meaning:
lover,
devoted friend, devotee, enthusiastic pursuer of an objective,
amateur originally meant to do something out of a love or devotion
for it rather than material gain. Punks are nothing else but devoted
to anything they believe in, and the second it starts becoming about
the money you've sold out, but more on that later. Lester Bangs is
describing punk rock, and there is one thing that is omnipresent and
crucial in punks . Punks are outcasts. We grew up as nerd, dorks,
spazzes, and countless other grade school pariah, but became punks.
My
earliest memory is a single moment of my early childhood. It's like
a photograph, an instant, a single frame, stuck in stasis, with no
knowledge of what's happening, what has just happened, or why I
remember it at all. But still in the back of my mind, as if burned
in, there is this image of me at three years old in my pajamas and
with my blanket, standing at the top of the basement stairs talking
to my mom who sits in the kitchen. Ready for the weird part? I
remember this from outside myself, like out of my body. When I see
this memory in my mind's eye, my perspective is facing myself, as if
I was standing on the basement steps looking at my younger self. I
see the small brown child I once was complete with bowl cut. I see
myself wearing some white pajamas with green splotches on them which
I can't make out. I'm holding my Lammie- a lamb skin blanket my
grandmother gave to me- over my left shoulder, clenched in my right
hand about an inch below my heart, and sucking on a pacifier. What's
always bothered me, is the expression on my face. It's not the
carefree continence of a childhood filled with fun, as I remember it,
but rather a searching look of confused sadness. My eyes are wide,
slightly too big for my head still, and bordering on tears. For a
while I thought that this was really just a picture in some dusty
photo album that I had latched on to as a memory, but when I couldn't
sleep, more on that later, I started looking through the photo
albums, and it became obvious that there was no picture even similar
to this. Maybe it's a manifestation of the mind, an undigested bit
of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of
underdone potato, more mayonnaise then memory forming a convenient
image of a Dickensian childhood, sad and authorly, deep from the
beginning. Or maybe, and this is a long aside so sit back and relax,
maybe it's something much more sinister.
I've
never met my “real father”: father is the wrong word, but “the
jackass that impregnated my real mother, and the ran off” seems a
little crass. I was adopted at birth, and have always had a
relationship with my birth-mother, but my birth-father was never
there, and never will be as he died when he was twenty-one. “My father's dead, well I don't know, we'll never fucking meet.”
Now as numerically uninclined as I am, I can still do some simple
math, and twenty-one, the age when he died, minus eighteen, his age
when I was born, would equal three which would be my age at the time
he died. Three is also the age of my earliest memory. So what if
this memory is when I find out my real father is dead? I don't
remember any specific moment when this was told to me, I just always
knew that he was dead. Also, part of my memory is that I am talking
to my mom, but in the image of my memory she is no where to be found;
I just somehow know I am talking to her. Is she telling me that my
real father is dead? How fucked up would that shit be? There is no
way of really discerning if that really happened however, and as I
said it very well could be complete bullshit. It's just conjecture
really, and looking back, it really seems pretty conspiracy
theory-ish. (If you look very closely at the pyramid on the back of
the dollar bill, you will see a crying child, coincide?
Or....aliens?) What's important, however, is that this memory is
either an out of body experience, or a complete fabrication, and the
very fact that I can't tell the difference, points to one conclusion.
My grasp on reality has always been a bit off, to say the least.
There's
this movie called Fat Kid Rules the World, which is apparently based
on a book my girlfriend read as a kid. Upon hearing the quick
summery of “a fat kid gets saved by a punk rocker who becomes his
mentor,” I decided that I absolutely needed to both watch the movie
and read the book. The break down is this: an overweight high school
guy, specified as 6'1” and around three-hundred pounds, named Trent
is tired of his unpopular existence as an outsider decides to kill
himself by stepping out in front of a bus, but is saved by resident
punk and social misfit, Marcus. Marcus then cons Trent into starting
a punk band with him in an attempt to take advantage of him, but, in
the end, learns about himself. The movie focuses on Trent coming to
terms with world and finding excitement and self-worth through punk
rock, as well as Marcus's own self-inflicted exile through his drug
addiction and anti-social behavior. It illustrates, very well, the
connection between outcast and punk. Most punks I've met, including
myself, were total weirdos in grade school. The reason, myself, my
friends and even fictional Trent from Fat Kid Rules the World were
drawn and captured by punk was the sheer excitement and interest with
the different. The different is celebrated among punks, the weird
championed. Look at the style of punk, the polychromatic hair, the
painful-looking piercings, the disheveled and often times written on
or patched clothes. It's all about being different, being original,
being yourself. The extreme political radicalism, particularly
anarchism, are a focused attack on a monoculture. It is a stance
against the status-quo, a hatred for authority. "I don't know what's right, I just know that you're wrong." The weirder you are,
the more welcome you are. For the oddball of the elementary, middle
or even high school classroom, it is an easy escape from plain-old
freak status to some higher social level of freak, a cool freak if
you will. This most certainly does not happen to all social
outcasts, and even those with a scene in close proximity. This is
because those who become punk are the kids that already have the
traits of aggression and speed within them. I was a spazzy, ADHD,
hot head who started listening to music that was fast and angry which
turned out to be punk rock. A punk, usually as there are a few
counter examples like Sid Vicious, becomes punk through the music
band by band. When you first listen to punk, it becomes an
addiction. I snatched up every punk album I could get. When I was
twelve, I got my hands on Black Flag's Damaged and listened to it on
repeat almost constantly for three weeks. When I got Choking
Victim's No Gods No Masters, I listen to it for two weeks without
interruption. When I got Against Me! Is Reinventing Axle Rose, I
listened to it for a month, and then learned the greatest sin in
punk.
When
I was younger I couldn't sleep without a nightlight. Like most
little kids, I was afraid of the dark. Well it wasn't so much the
dark as what I saw in the dark. I used to get there terrible waking
nightmares. Sometimes they would just be arms reaching out from
under the shadows, but other times they were much more extreme. I
once saw a skull engulfed in flames bounce around my room from in
front of my eyes. Chalk it up to an overactive imagination, or
whatever, it just made going to sleep terrifying. I dreaded being
dragged to bed and placed in a room filled with all the horrors my
mind would create. If at any time I had to leave bed, to pee, drink,
etc; it became a mad sprint to where ever I was going, running from
the untold horrors that may be lurking in my peripheral vision.
After a while, though, I started to find a way to escape my
imagination through it. When I would lay in the dark, I started to
imagine things, to create worlds in my head. I would create
histories of fictional lands, and place myself within them, fighting
dragons, flying through space, robbing stage coaches. With my eyes
tightly shut I would imagine civilizations, and enter them for my
nights. Hidden away within my own mind, the darkness no longer
scared me, but it had its consequences.
Over-night
I had become a day dreamer, head in the clouds constantly. At
school, with only my eyes, I would escape through a window, and out
into a world of magic and mystery, and stare into my own imagination.
The other kids noticed. They noticed me talking to myself in the
back of class, or my friends and I skipping out on a kick ball game
to play pretend, or how I would ramble on and on about pirates.
Through the same mechanism that I killed my nightmares, I killed my
social life before it even had begun. I was the freak that no one
wanted to be friends with, too weird, too different. “I remember grade school and starting to notice, that I was the only kid sitting alone.” I
never really got bullied too much, luckily, but when I was I
responded with violence. Once a fat kid named Andy made fun of my
glasses, and I tackled him and called him fatty. Another time a kid
stole my toy firetruck during indoor recess, and I picked up a wooden
block and smacked him in the back of the head with it. In my world
of imagination I was a swashbuckling space cowboy, and I would not
back down from the occasional playground insult. I realized I was
weird and chubby, but I was damn sure was not going to be made fun of
for it. Try it asshole, I'll kick your teeth in.
Against
Me! is a punk band from Florida, and in the early two-thousands they
seemed as punk's last glimmering hope after grunge had pretty much
killed it in the 90's. Tom Gable's pipes were just the right mix of
raw and melodic and the band had the rare ability to shift seamlessly
from calm and thoughtful to rapid and angry. However, in 2007, they
signed to Sire Records, owned by Warner Brother's, and released the
abortion of a record, New Wave. Punks responded with hatred,
slashing their tires when they showed up in town, and otherwise
defacing the former heroes of punk, with good reason. They were the
chosen ones. They supposed to destroy corporate rock, not join it.
Balance the scene not leave it in darkness. They went from Unprotected Sex with Multiple Partners to former Teenage Anarchists.
“Is there something wrong with these songs? Maybe there's something wrong with the audience. Manipulation in rock music. Fucking Nausea. I'm losing touch.” Against
Me! serves as a perfect example of selling out, but why is selling
out such a bad thing? Well, it goes back to the original formation
of punk rock, where small loud bar acts would never be accepted by
the major labels of the 70's which put out hit after hit of Arena
Rock (all of which sounded exactly the same, like Led Zeppelin, but worse), and instead
formed their own labels and distribution networks. To sell out is to
turn your back on the very foundations of punk rock. This coincides
with the previously mentioned outcast culture of punk. To sell out
is to join “them” the normal people who never wanted you around
when you were a nobody. It is to leave behind your abnormality, and
often requires “adjusting to a wider audience,” ie changing your
sound in an generic direction. It is a loss of freedom, originality,
and strangeness in favor of cash and popularity. The fans feel
abandoned, and in classic punk fashion lash out. These days, selling
out is looming me. As graduation from the sophisticated day-care for
adults we call higher education draws nearer and nearer, I realize
that soon I will have to look for a career. I will no longer be able
to scrape by spanging and depending on the kindness of others. My
father suggests, with my interest in politics and all, I go into law.
Which is just what I wanted, to live the rest of my life in a suit
working for the system. I want to be a novelist, but that's about as
practical as piracy in the modern world. I could maybe be a oil rig
worker, but lawyer certainly not.
From
age six until about twelve, all I wanted was to be a pirate. I had
countless books on the subject, a small arsenal of plastic swords,
and once went to first grade dressed as a buccaneer complete with eye
patch and hook, like I said I wasn't a popular kid in grade school.
For me pirates represented the ultimate fantasy of action and
adventure. Pirates were free to roam where ever they wished,
engaging in sword fights and treasure hunts, and most importantly
they didn't follow the rules. Pirates were outlaws and misfits,
rouge sailors with nothing but their crew and their booty. When I
fled to my imagination, most often I entered to a world of pirates
and swashbucklers. They represented an even deeper desire of mine,
escape. I could close my eyes and feel the salty breeze of the sea.
Laying in my bed I could venture to the four corners of the earth
fighting everything from British bounty hunters to carnivorous
kraken. I was no longer in the boring suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio,
but rather in the Caribbean of the Sixteenth Century. My anger could
also be released through elaborate sword fighting fantasies rather
than clocking some kid that called me four eyes, and I wouldn't even
get in trouble for it. Piracy was what I always needed, an escape,
an outlet, and a freedom, and for a while, I lived in this world of
imagined buccaneering.
Although
I grew out of my pirate obsession, for the sake appearances by ten,
I carried it internally until I was twelve when I was introduced to
punk. I no longer need to escape the suburbs through an imagined
rebellion, but instead could be really rebellious and outside of
suburban culture. Music became the outlet for anger, slam dancing
and screaming along were much greater sources of relief then fencing
scenarios. And punk was all about personal freedom and freedom in
expression. Plus if I went to school dressed as a punk people
wouldn't laugh, but instead, gasp, think I'm cool. Truly I saw punk
as just a modern form of pirate, eccentrically dressed drunken
misfits who oppose authority. And like pirates, punks were
criminals, well, according to movies and TV at least. Punks broke
unjust laws, or stupid ones, to make a point or just for the fun of
it all. Popular culture taught me that punks vandalize, shop lift,
fight, and do drugs. Punks were the new and real pirates, and I was
going to be one.
I
wish I was a Pirate, I'd sail the open seas. Beneath a big black
flag we'd go any where we pleased, and I wouldn't have to shower,
but once or twice a year. When the gold ran low we'd loot on British
Privateers. And the Alcohol would flow, every day the whole day
through, and if we weren't passed out at sunset, yeah, we'd the whole
night too. We'd all have pirate names, and we'd all wear pirate
clothes, following the warm winds where ever they may blow. I told
my old man my plans, but my pops disagrees. My father says he's
gonna make another lawyer outta me.
By
Tom Frampton
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