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Nate Patrin has things to say, apparently

24 Feb 10

Minutemen, “Viet Nam” (live 6/15/84)

Calling my relationship with punk rock “love-hate” is an understatement — suffice it to say that I discovered the Ramones’ debut album and Maximumrockandroll at their most fundamentalist at roughly the same time (the mid ’90s), and trying to listen to music that I instantly loved at its core still while realizing that it was supposed to be diametrically opposed to a lot of stuff I still liked jostled my teenage brain until I was dizzy. (You were just not supposed to like Singles Going Steady and The Dark Side of the Moon, as 24 Hour Party People gleefully reminded me some eight years after this conundrum first presented itself to me.) Maybe the breaking point that lead to my view of the born-in-the-fifties/sixties punk generation as a bunch of joyless oldsters was the book Generation Ecch, which set about whining that us dumb kids made overnight megastars out of Nirvana while it took forever for Never Mind the Bollocks to go gold in the States. That ties into the general suspicion in the air during the peak of ’90s alt-culture that the the Xers were irreparably damaged by delusions of postmodernism and self-infatuated irony, the kind of charges typically leveled by people who canonized Black Flag and CBGB’s to the same extent that the boomers they despised did to Woodstock. Basically I read way too much shit that amounted to “how dare you buy into an aesthetic that’s just a lamer version of the real revolution we had,” your classic cultural poison that tends to make kids think, unhealthily, that they were born 20 years too late. (“No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977,” went the Clash song — no me, either, until September.) It got to the point where, when one of my friends described one of her friends with the phrase “you’d like him, he’s totally punk rock,” I felt obliged to retort “that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s cool.” (Turns out he was, but anyways.) So by and large I view punk — unfairly, I suppose — as a movement of (often) great music made by (sometimes) righteous people that has long since lost its monopoly on the aspects that made it necessary (DIY culture, independent publishing, agitprop, antifashion) and is mostly left with an aesthetic that, while still frequently exciting, lives and dies on the principles of some other era’s excitement.

I had to say all that mostly to prove how much it actually means when I say that the Minutemen never fail to inspire complete awe in me. That is all.

myjamrighthere the right field of French Indo-China

  1. hardcorefornerds reblogged this from natepatrin and added:
    didn’t care any more about punk vs. post-punk (been listening...[my emphasis]. The...
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