This band should be your life

I don't smoke, never have smoked, and even so, inside a dark concert venue -- distortion pedals, sticky floors, chuck taylors and black shoelaces -- peripheral cigarette habits become a passageway. I am the counterculture, the resistance. 

I spent my formative years in those places until, like everyone else, a j.o.b. got in the way of my d.i.y. I wear polo shirts to work now, I jog, I send kids to the principal's office. (Son, you can shirk your obligations, and try to be different from your peers...)

So when I stepped back into one of those venues this weekend, sure, I thought, I could blow off some steam, relive a bit of the old glory days, but still keep things under control. (...but the responsibility of the future is gonna find you!)

You, reader, can probably already guess I was wrong. 

The very first power chord disturbed a state of inertia or something: Oh, right, this is a place and a sound I was once deeply obsessed with. The rage, the machine, all of it. You don’t actually know if you believe in something until there’s a cost to that belief. Give me the lung cancer and the hearing loss, I will scream your lyrics and drink your overpriced beer, just take me for a moment back to that time before normal took hold for good. 

Like every other reasonable person, I hated the "school" part of high school. I watched a bombing start a war on television while sitting at a kitchen table working on homework, and we went to school the next day and hardly mentioned it. Kids around me were cheating on tests, in order to apply to colleges, in order to someday prove on resumes that they care about learning (or something). "Math is important," a teacher would say, and then a bell would ring, and math was no longer important, and we'd close our books and move to a new room, and then for the next 55 minutes, biology was important.

Then a high school girlfriend took me to see a band one weekend. It pains me to write much about it, because every punk rock story is the same (here's the cynical view, from ultra-cynic music journalist Chuck Klosterman, recounting a conversation: "this guy kept saying, ‘Punk rock saved my life.’ He said it like four times in ten minutes. .... I have heard those exact words said thousands of times by hundreds of people, and none of them are ever joking"), so it’s probably enough just to know that I went to approximately one thousand ear-shattering shows after being introduced to that first one. The girlfriend would later share that taking me to that concert became a great regret of hers. ("Well, I'd love to hang out this weekend, but this band from Florida is in town...") 

I get the cliche. So here's Fugazi's Ian Mackaye, on skateboarding, as a sort of back door into understanding the music: "Skateboarding is not a hobby. And it is not a sport. Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you. For most people, when they saw a swimming pool, they thought, ‘Let's take a swim.' But I thought, ‘Let's ride it.' When they saw the curb or a street, they would think about driving on it. I would think about the texture. I slowly developed the ability to look at the world through totally different means."

Punk rock didn't save my life, but it did become the empty pool and the curb. And what Klosterman glosses over, because he couldn't actually miss it, is that belonging matters, even in a subculture in which not belonging is the whole point. Basically, it sucks to feel alone. 

You could not count the hours I spent scrolling through chat rooms to keep up with a band's setlist, or on AOL Instant Messenger talking to strangers (fair, a little sketchy) about an obscure artist. The girl I didn't talk to in my journalism class had a LiveJournal into which she'd pour her own concert musings, relationship updates, and other insecurities. I didn't like the bands she liked, but I identified with her fascination with them. Without any way to distribute our thoughts, we were all sort of just building our own little bulletin boards in the wilderness. To find them, you'd have to know where to look, which meant we were pretty safe doing our thinking in public, oversharing emotions, confessing guilty pleasures. 

You couldn't reliably just stumble across info about a hyper-local music scene. To learn about a band, we had to dive deep into old articles from alt-weeklies, carefully trying to sort fact from rumor. We’d listen to the same couple of free songs on MySpace, and then try to download a terrible pirated version off Napster. It took effort and too much time, but the reward was a sense of private ownership and command of the information. 

Reflecting on all this after losing my mind at that recent punk show, what strikes me about the nostalgia is not the counterculture mentality or the music, but that period of obsession. 

In conversations in high school and even now, introduce us to someone with a demonstrated and measurable fascination with something (anything!) and we are immediately engaged. It doesn't matter if it's ice hockey or hardcore rap out of LA or the collected works of Charlotte Bronte. If a person has invested something of themselves into a subculture, has really taken the time to understand a corner of the world beneath the veneer that's visible to others, they emerge with an altered and unique sense of self. They become interesting. 

Punk rock is especially primed for obsession. For one thing, its accessibility for the bands: "Melody meant almost nothing," Michael Azerrad writes in Our Band Could Be Your Life. "Aggression, rhythm, and texture were all." And all the usual teenage stuff: politics are explicit, differentness is a virtue not a vice, and the venues manage to feel exclusive and inclusive at the same time: You don't need to be beautiful or athletic to belong, but you do need to dig into the scene; in essence, if you are reading the liner notes to a Rancid album, you are part of the club. If not, you’re a poser.  

If you, reader, did not grow up listening to punk rock, I believe it would shock you to discover the number of interesting people of a certain age for whom, like, The Bouncing Souls were an important part of their younger years. 

The irony of a significant personal investment into a subculture that, statistically, made you an outcast at a traditionally American high school, is that that the resultant individualism made you more aligned with the kids who’d congregate at SOMA (in San Diego) or Reggies (in Chicago) or any other dive in any other city. Obsession begat belonging and vice versa. 

But you can't stay young and angry forever. (All these bands and / all these people / all these friends and / we were equals but / what you gonna do / when everybody goes on without you?)  

I'm no longer one of the good guys. I’m no longer part of the full-time resistance. Class ends, and I shuffle my students off to their next assigned room, no matter how engaged in our subject they may have been. It pays the bills, it's way better than an office job, but the damn bells still ruin the whole thing. 

The problem with obsession is that it represents the authentic expression of individual interest, but it runs against the rest of the world’s sharp corners. One of the reasons being a teenager lends itself to obsessive pursuits is because there are (or used to be) many long stretches of unfilled time into which one’s unique curiosity could spill. Much of my MySpace-searching escapades happened at ungodly hours of late nights, for example. I don’t know how to make friends as an adult, and I also know that’s a common complaint, and further, I know that obsession doesn’t exactly lend itself to parenting hours.  

It's becoming harder for me to find people who genuinely inhaled a subculture the way I did punk rock. Another cliche I apologize for having to write is that scrolling has ruined pretty much everything. Addiction is not the same as obsession, and obsession is impossible without space to breathe. The algorithm is tireless; it does not allow you to find authentic boredom that leads to exploration. It is frantic, and relentless, and I imagine our processing power is diminished along with our attention spans. We feel busy and we jump from topic to topic as quickly as possible, and we learn nothing new and get nothing done. 

The cost might well be as high as the loss of community, and belonging to a community is the best way I know to feel happy. There is no way out, no way to grapple with all this without looking like you’re yelling at the clouds. The bells aren’t going away and the algorithm isn’t slowing down.  

“People ask me: ‘What is punk? How do you define punk?'” (Mackaye again.) “Here's how I define punk: It's a free space. It could be called jazz. It could be called hip-hop. It could be called blues, or rock, or beat. It could be called techno. It's just a new idea. For me, it was punk rock. That was my entrance to this idea of the new ideas being able to be presented in an environment that wasn't being dictated by a profit motive.”

On the side of the big bureaucracy now, I almost can’t believe the degree to which we make obsession impossible. I can’t believe the tight schedules and the tacit approval of the scrolling addiction and the destruction of the alt-weeklies and, well, maybe the assault on deep reading in general. I can’t believe the degree to which so many are so docile. I will probably do nothing about it.

Recently a kid showed up late to my class. Her eyes were red and she was not entirely apologetic. She said she was up too late at a punk rock show to make it to school on time.

It was feeble and childish of me, reader, I know, but I couldn’t bring myself to mark her late. She is part of the culture I once loved, and … from a distance … even still, so am I. 

(Give me fire or give me death / Light that fuckin' cigarette)