People Ruin Everything
I just saw this video from Loudwire, and I am old enough to remember when this crap was on TV and not just clipped for YouTube. I remember some of the punk shows, but most of what I remember is from the 90s: shows with Marilyn Manson and GG Allin. I even know a few people who have been on these shows. Nowadays, we treat these things as comedic relics of the past. In some ways, that’s true.
But people don’t change.
To preface, let me just say that the TV shows in question were looking for drama. If you have any doubts about this, watch the excellent short series on Netflix about The Jerry Springer Show. Most shows didn’t want the conversation they had on Indianapolis’ Night Talk in 1984 where Bill Levin is hilarious and Paul Mahern looks more like Johnny Marr than Johnny Rotten. Being a Hoosier, I can tell you, that in 1984, this is reality television. They didn’t need to script this or ply anyone with booze. My point being, while there were some intelligent punks/metalheads on these shows at times, the majority of them were buffoons by design.
People love a trainwreck.
The parents and audience members were mostly obnoxious. Worried about trivial things like hair color and clothing. They were often looked at as the “bad guy” and, usually, rightfully so. Especially in light of the challenges parents today face, clothing and hair color seem like big nothing burgers. But a lot of the kids were dumbasses. Two things can be true at once. When asked what they were rebelling against, their answers would be something to the effect of Marlon Brando’s famous line in The Wild One, “What have you got?”
At times it seems the script has been flipped. Parents are passive and kids are judgmental assholes. Both, as members of the American culture at-large, are mostly ill-informed.
The reality is our culture preaches individualism while at the same time it does everything it can to crush it.
Your individuality is made up of a lot of things. There are your immutable traits: race, ethnicity, gender, eye color, height, etc. There are the roles you play: child, sibling, parent, friend, employee, boss, neighbor, coach, etc. There are your personality traits, your interests, the way you style your hair, the way you dress, etc. Having a mohawk, Doc Marten’s and a leather jacket might make you look punk, but it doesn’t make you unique. That’s not to say group identity is good or bad, simply that group identity in and of itself isn’t who you are. Who you are is largely a Venn diagram of group identities. The place where all of the circles overlap is your unique identity.
I say all of this not just for social commentary, but this misunderstanding of identity and group is one of the things, in my honest opinion, that is ruining art. This is largely affected by politics unfortunately, that artists are saying they don’t want certain people at their shows and using their loud megaphones to disparage large groups of people different from them. Art is about coloring on the canvas, not coloring between the lines. It’s not about conforming to “nonconformity”. It’s about Nick Cave saying, paraphrasing, I largely agree with what Morrissey is saying, but I don’t agree that music is the place to say it. It’s about Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin making some of the most soulful music of all time with a bunch of white good ol’ boys in Northern Alabama.
Art exists in the gray areas of life to challenge ideas, not to force you into either the black or the white.
To summarize, don’t be those idiots on those talk shows. Don’t be against something “just because” or “just because I don’t get it”. Don’t be so foolish as to think you can’t learn something from someone different than you, or that it’s not okay to change your mind. It’ll ruin your mood, your relationships and your art.
If you ruin your relationships and are in a bad mood, you’re gonna need great art.