If there’s one thing that really bugs me, it’s the still-prevalent imagery you see in mainstream media like movies and books about how rock music (punk rock) is a realm for mostly troubled and clichéd youth. It’s hard to read through young adult fiction without coming across this standardized character that smokes, listens to loud music, and has a lousy home life but acts as a great foil for the more “balanced” main protagonist. While the protagonist might dabble into such nefarious realms of “hanging out”, ultimately draw back in what is portrayed as a compromise between self-realization and their old life. In actuality, it is in fact a rejection of full acceptance of alternative lifestyles and a watering-down of imagery for mass consumption.
You’ve seen them on TV, they’re the troubled kids with piercings and black clothes who ultimately “clean up” at the end of the episode. Why is it that, even these days when alternative cultures have risen up from the underground to some degree for greater visibility and understanding we still get this highly misunderstood and, for someone like me, somewhat offensive, imagery? It is precisely because of that, because of the commercialization of the Warped Tour, the X-Games, and Nirvana’s post-mortem legendary status in rock music (just to name a few examples) that this “iconic image” of the troubled youth is so often used, leading to general beliefs about youth culture thanks to the images misrepresented in such media outlets.
Even reading books “for punks by punks” (for lack of a better phrase) you get the idea that that’s the image being portrayed here. In the apparent classic literature of punk rock like Please Kill Me, American Hardcore, and We Got The Neutron Bomb, the testimonials provided give an insight not so much into the minds of kids trying to grow up amongst chaos, but about violence and rage and troubled lives.
While I understand that that’s sort of the fucking point of punk music and one of the things that drew me to it, it’s done to death enough in lyrics. Why do I need to read page after page of the same story basically being told in a way that’s just reaffirming what the TV and my parents have always thought? What happened to telling your real story about the friends and sounds that made you who you were, not just the fights and how much of a fucking badass you were? There’s an apparently iconic episode of the late 70’s/early 80’s TV show CHiPs where the main characters encounter a group of “punkers” and by the end, show hero Eric Estrada has apparently converted them all away from the rage of punk (and all the implications of squalor, lack of potential, and violence that are seemingly attached) to the wonders of disco.
Fucking disco. I know, I’m just as mind-boggled as you are. Apparently no one ever told CHiPs about Dischord House’s political activism, versus the coke-n-sex binge that was Studio 54. And yes, I know that the DC scene was in the 1980’s. That’s not my point.
In her Dangerous Angels books, author and poet Francesca Lia Block explored the world that our heroine Weetzie Bat lived in, an LA filled with poetry and beautifully descriptive imagery, as well as being immersed in West Coast punk rock and all that those alternative cultured stood for. The character of Duck, whose background is explored in Baby Be-Bop, is a gay punk rocker whose tumultuous life is set against love, sex, music, as well as development toward acceptance of self and of the memories of loved ones. He’s not described as a hardass, a “bad kid”. He’s just a person, finding himself and coming to terms with what that means in a world where sometimes that isn’t so easy to do.
Author Joe Meno’s book Hairstyles of the Damned deals with similar themes. A first-person narrative the draws heavily from Meno’s own youth growing up on punk rock in suburban Chicago, our narrator Brian lives life hanging out with his friends, listening to the Misfits, doing drugs, and trying to simply cope with living in a world where his parents’ marriage is falling apart, he’s in love with his best friend Gretchen, and rednecks and white jocks clash with black students semi-regularly. He’s not a foil for anyone, and not just because he’s the main character. Brian could be the star of any teen movie or TV series or young adult novel. Just because he eventually eschews Van Halen for Minor Threat, the Lemonheads, and 7 Seconds doesn’t mean he’s somehow any different from any teenager. It doesn’t make him worth less to a reader, relegated to being a supporting character that somehow helps in the “redeeming” of the ultimately wholesome main character.
Too often I see this and I wonder why there aren’t more authors out there like Block and Meno. There’s Frank Portman and King Dork, which garnered a lot of praise and attention as well. Still, finding authors like Block and Meno, who work with alternative underground cultures and rather than indulge in clichés, craft such painfully beautiful and honest work that you can’t help but see yourself reflected in the pages before you is hard. Hard enough that for the most part it seems that there are no real authors who cater to punks. While teens will always fall into a single market category, it’s hard when your favorite bands have names like Fucked Up or The Unseen to find books that really appeal and cater to you. Not to the stereotype you get put into, but the real you.
Tags: Francesa Lia Block, Joe Meno, essay by Matthew
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