Quick Sketch: Why Are Punks Wet Farts and Metalheads Mensches?

 Full disclosure. I don't know why fans of Metal are so nice. The best I can offer being that they aren't punk fans. But in my experience they are nicer than like, the Indy crowd who are hanging around whatever the "scene" is right now. 

Go to a metal gig, and you'll see fat bearded dude in faded black shirts that list a bunch of tour dates on their backs for a band you aren't currently seeing, and between the bandroom, the bar and the bathroom you'll see these fat dudes running into eachother and being all "Hey Steve! Good to see you. How are the kids?" and so forth. Like you are at an Xmas bbq and not The Tote.

Bringing me to the stimulus for this post:

Literally the laziest cash-grab example I could find. I initially saw a hand embroided patch for sale on etsy. I picked this one, because if my post inadvertantly draws some poor individual that never asked for my opinion, better it be someone who spent all of 12 seconds typing a slogan into a Photoshop text box to sell on a kids t-shirt.

I've been to a few punk gigs, very few, because broadly speaking, the Blink-182 lead punk revival was for me the harbinger of the death of the 90s and the beginning of the truly terrible 2000s period. I don't like the genre of music, but the closest thing I ever got to a girl making me a mixtape was just a cassette tape of the Dead Kennedy's. 

Musically, I find Punk uninteresting, I can recognise it's contribution to the history of music, and how it gave birth to a bunch of genres I do find interesting. 

Fundamentally though, punk is ushered in by The Sex Pistols, and there anti-meritocratic protest against prog-rock. I can understand that, thanks to eras of "conspicuous intellectualism" I have lived through, like when everyone was into reading during the Obama presidency. There must have been insufferable prog rock fans all over the place in the 70s. 

But it was a fundamentally stupid question like "why should only the people who are good at playing instruments and singing get to perform music?"

Giving us music that is interesting, kind of like The Shagg's "Philosophy of the World" album is interesting, and subjectively good, to people who want it to be good, but in many senses objectively bad.

Flash forward 20 years, and scales begin to lift from my eyes. I notice that friends I would have called ********** to their faces in the mid-90s, are fans of punk. My feeling that punk music is generally not that great isn't what makes me uneager to see punk gigs in Melbourne. It's how awful the people at punk gigs are. 

Once I laughed at this fat ugly girl wearing the punk uniform who picked up a dead pigeon off swanston street and threw it into a gathering of private school girls in their uniform. That was pretty amusing, that imposition of one world upon another, it was even admirable that one girl had overcome the emotion of disgust to exacerbate another group of girls oversensitivity to disgust in a very public and spontaneous performance art piece.

Outside of that though, I've never seen anything to suggest that the punk crowd isn't human excrement. Just the worst people to try and share any space with. Just anti-social dicks.

That's why it was surprising to learn that that cohort of my friends who identify as "having anxiety" and did things like not eat animals, nor eggs, cheese and honey, they were really into punk.

I know the ethical arguments for veganism, very well, even made well by characters like Alex O'Conner. Arguments are one thing, in practice generally I observe veganism to manifest more as an eating disorder that is fundamentally about control - a way of tackling life's uncertainties and placating personal anxieties by controlling what goes in one's mouth. 

I'm not saying veganism is a mental illness, I'm saying it pairs well with poor mental health.

So my initial conclusion was that punk is like jazz. It has the image of being risqué but in fact it is not. it protects its enthusiasts from risk by remaining largely inaccessible. It's about rejecting the effort to be appealing, manifest in the hairstyles, the fashion, the dancing and fundamentally the music. Greenday's "Good riddance (Time of Your Life)" in being accessible, sentimental even is far riskier than Bad Brains "I Against I" and that is why the former made a whole bunch more money than the latter. 

Sex Pistols "Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols" was a risk at the time, it wouldn't be in 2024 because that statement had been made. Just like we don't need a whole genre worth of comedians doing Andy Kaufman's schtick.

I was fairly satisfied with that hypothesis until I saw on pinterest the "Punks Respect Pronouns" patch. 

When I see a meme like this, my instant reaction is to be like "What if Johnny Rotten doesn't respect pronouns?" like, this is a gatekeeper statement, a definitional retreat, a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.

It seems entirely plausible to me, that you would get punks, as in punk music enthusiasts, that feel quite ambivalent about pronouns, certainly don't feel a need to respect them, and would possibly find the formal etiquette of pronouns tedious. 

This is an aspect of culture synonymous with HR guidelines and policy. It doesn't strike me as punk per se.

Then it clicked, a better model for understanding why the punk crowd is so awful and unpleasant to share a space with, so obnoxious, anti-social, snobbish, chauvinistic and puritanical in my experience, where metal crowds are so inclusive, inviting, friendly and non-judgemental in my experience.

Punk is a music of rebellion, it is characterized generally as the music of revolutionaries, people who reject the society we live in because they know better. It is an act of resistance against a society that oppresses them.

Metal is more a Hobbesian-leviathan, a Jungian-integration, a Rogerian-congruity. Metal is a radical act of acceptance that we are imperfect people living in an imperfect world that nevertheless can find moments of happiness, like running into Steve at a gig between the bar, bandroom and bathrooms. 

Punk is acting out, Metal is acting in. Not acting in as in buying into a societal narrative, but acting in as in accepting things as they truly are, darker than we'd hope or want them to be. Simply accepting what is. Accepting our past follies, accepting our present follies and predicting our future follies.

Punk isn't just a bunch of people with bad fashion who listen to bad music. Those are arts students. Punk is a movement that wants to change the world but is very unsuccessful at it. Of course such a persistently unsuccessful movement is going to sit squarely inside the Dunning-Krueger effect, yet occasionally produce real musical talent like Josh Freese of The Vandels and I'm sure there's more I can't be bothered thinking of them.

Of course it's going to be synonymous with "Road for the child" strategies for changing the world, like veganism and pronouns that basically require everybody to voluntarily do the right thing to work, and other doomed to fail strategies. Of course, it goes without saying, it is going to be affiliated with Marxist thinking.

Punk is revolutionary in outlook, ideological, incongruent, in denial. It no doubt can be a stepping stone to greatness to look at all the musical icons, and genres that Punk has given us but are not themselves Punk anylonger. We wouldn't have the 90s if not for Punk. It practically mirrors the wealth of intellectuals society has enjoyed that identify as former-Marxists, and yet, it's almost impossible to find an intellectual that was formally-non-Marxist and has become a Marxist late in life.

Just to be clear, my or anyone's position on pronouns is not the point, it's the seeming incongruity of punk having rules. Like when people laugh at their local Anarchists having a secretary and treasurer. Just as I as an atheist can appreciate that the global society I live in is what an anarchy naturally produces, I guess I can understand that a highly regimented, discriminatory gatekept music genre is the natural product of Punk's core rejectionist ethos, even if I'd stumbled across a patch that said "Punks brush twice daily".