Author: admin

The Limit of politicalness in mainstreamed punk always had been reached

Punk should be its own cliché. If something goes beyond that, in terms of … yes, on what points actually? Let’s say in terms of the claim of “political questioning of the systemic” and the like … then it’s something new.

Punk was the thing that tried to swallow all these things out of a revolutionary claim, and which also confined all these things within a framework that today has clearly become visible as promoting stagnation.

Punk will no longer promote many things that need to be promoted. It is therefore nonsensical – as important as punk may have been at a certain time, apart from the shortcomings in the time and in the movement itself, which people may now try to play down; and as important as approaches that were and can be included in it are – to present this movement as the ultimate and thus to push the still pressing issues of our time into the background, in front of the facades of a superficial gestural revolt. As a rule, the representatives of the movement themselves have not managed to do more than this.

As already mentioned, there are approaches in the movement that each had different explosive qualities at the time, but the evolution of punk effectively ends at all the branches that are more than just branches in terms of content – as can be seen particularly in the case of animal rights punk – if the message(s) were ever meant seriously at all.

Demanding animal rights without consequence or “with consequence after arbitrariness” is perhaps punk for most punk-informed people today, but it is just the limit that could be reached in terms of explosive force in the matter, nothing more.

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The preservation of punk as an idea raises the question of a.) what are the agreements about the idea and what are the ideas that are being subordinated to those agreements and b.) what is the point of halting a process in order to uphold an idea, vague enough to mutate > into a cliché and a way of cloaking consernative basics like a whole array of obvious normalized -isms, and vague enough that the idea tells itself to be an apex in revolutionariness, in spite of all of today’s problems that won’t get adressed out of the self-delusion of that having been enough of an human effort to revolt.

Punk
doesn’t account for today’s hardcore
contentwise

And hardcore and hardcore
are all lose ends
and can only be sensibly sorted
by content and politicalness or lack of THAT.

Socially uncritical punk, like […]
Can’t be tied to political hardcore,

Hence punk means a crossroads too.

It’s one of these past/present reactions,
like we observe them these days too with many being frustrated about this unstoppable flexibility of history in that sense.

Can’t be tied to political hardcore

Eventually dispersing frictions

In many youth cultures in the 1980ies the more ‘typically contemporary european’ you were … the more integrating entitlement you received from your peers. If you weren’t you were either “out of the game” or you simply submitted to the “social game”.

The idea and the proclaimed interactive goals weren’t necessarily so – yet the social dynamics were driven by a narrow consciousness of what was felt to be the proper ‘Zeitgeist’.

It was good to stay out of this and watch feminist, animal rights and other political aspects, like a complementary color matching – a self-prescribed background of ‘categoric outsiderism’, neighboring other gestics of outcastsism.

The bunch of people alienated by the strong, ‘mutual-back-slapping group-solidarity’ didn’t even know if there were more of them – that existed in a half-witted promising frame which was but a cultural illusion.

The possibilities in political, social and ecosocial themes brought forth an array of possibilities for open friction.

Many did not use these options and probably underestimated those aspects.