The Punk Period
After the first band, Guti, Carlos and I wandered into separate musical branches. Guti went further into the darkening forests of hardcore metal, Carlos chilled on the bobbing boughs of the nineties East Coast hip hop scene, and I swung through the addreline-filled tree lines of pop-punk.
Pop-punk was fast and fun. The irreverent melodic screams of the below-average singers were tinged with the appropriate amount of melancholy. The singers whined, but their bitterness was masked by exuberant energy and a “I don’t give a fuck” pose, like broken beer bottles under a mosh-pit.
The central punk band of my early punk phase was a skate-punk group from Sweden named Millencolin (a misspelling of “melancholy,” and also, supposedly, the name of a skate trick). Life on a Plate, their second album, was their best. The album opened with “Bullion,” a song about a bored, lost, and indolent twenty-one year old, which pretty much sums up the punk scene at the time. The greatest pop-punk album of the era was Green Day’s Dookie. The themes being boredom, insecurity, frustration, and the emptiness inherent in a world filled with meaningless, superficial satisfaction.
My older brother got me into punk. I even tried my hand at skateboarding for a bit, until I realized how much falling hurt. My brother took me to my first real concert: NOFX at the Crystal Ballroom. He hung out with me near the back of the crowd, away from the mosh-pit and the flying beer cans. Then after a few songs, he handed me his sweater and moved up to the front. The show was good, but not as transcendental as I expected; watching a band live had been so hyped up, that I felt guilty that all I could think about near the end of the show was how much my legs ached. They finished playing, and as the crowd left the building I found my brother, who was soaked head to toe in sweat, and was telling me how he had lost his shoe in the pit, and had had to take a beating from the flying elbows and knees in order to retrieve it.
My punk phase was a time when music became a serious hobby. When songs would run through my head as I would daydream, when I would spend my free time browsing through music at record stores, sampling songs, buying albums, discovering new bands. Then Napster arrived, and I didn’t need to walk to the record store, I could do it all from home. It was a time when I started joining the message boards of my favorite bands. Started interacting with other fans.
Much of the discussion on the message boards revolved around “selling out.” The record label a band signed to became a litmus test for judging how “punk” they really were. The “sell out” theory claimed that any band that switched from a smaller, punk-centric record company to a major label would have to sacrifice its creative autonomy, and would end up caving to the evil corporate executives who would demand a generic pop sound with broader public appeal. In practice, it was hard to judge the validity of the theory, since it required the listener to objectively determine whether a group’s sound had become “poppier” and more generic after signing to a major label; the reality (and this was something I could never admit to myself at the time) was that the pop-punk bands I was listening to were already pretty “poppy” and generic, and so the difference in sound between those in big and small labels was minimal, if at all existent. The worst offender at the time in the punk scene was Blink 182, they were the ultimate “sell outs;” while NOFX, who released their albums on their own label (Fat Wreck Chords, named after NOFX’s lead singer, Fat Mike), were the purest practitioners of punk. Looking back, they don’t sound that different, although I still prefer NOFX; and Blink 182 is probably a little catchier (but that might still be my younger self talking).
My relationship to punk music lasted several years, and my interests expanded beyond the generally upbeat skate-punk scene, into the cheesier romantic music produced by The Ataris. It also led me to more politically oriented protest bands, like Bad Religion, Good Riddance, and Propagandhi. Punk music, more so than any parent, sibling, teacher, or friend, made me a radical leftist. Entire albums were devoted to the harmful effects of religion, globalization, and the United States’ imperialistic tendencies. At Propagandhi concerts, in between songs the crowd enjoyed (or had to suffer through) half-hour long political sermons by the lead singer; NOFX released an album with a cartoon of George W. Bush, his face painted as a sad clown; Bad Religion’s famous Suffer album, features a kid standing on a street, fists clenched, his body in flames. Through Propagandhi I learned who Noam Chomsky was, and started reading his books (or trying to read them); Good Riddance named one of their albums Operation: Phoenix and that is how I learned about the covert CIA program in Vietnam.
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