“About when we were writing Hidden World, we made a pretty conscious decision that we didn’t want to be a big fish in a mostly small and stagnant hardcore world. We knew that almost every person who had ever done something important in indie rock (ie “the mainstream”) used to either be in a shitty punk band, or grew up going to punk shows in the 80s, which meant we knew we’d hit the soft spot for a lot of people in useful places, but also that all those people had made their successes after giving up punk and moving on to more palatable projects, and that we couldn’t really think of any hardcore punk band that had broken into the mainstream/indie world while they actually existed as a band. Punk has always been something that people love to name check, but also like to keep at a distance. A punk band can pretty much only be important if they’ve been broken up for 15 years. Either that, or they have to be punk in secret, like Husker Du. A broad faced punk band can only really expect a life of quarantine. Think about the defining tragedy of The Ramones, one of the most iconic and influencial American bands ever to exist. Even while a million people were wearing Ramones tshirts in every country on the planet, they existed under this constant sense of under achievement, because they just wanted to be legitimate rockstars, and all they were ever allowed to be was a popular punk band. This sense of failure of the Ramones project permeates like every interview they did. They were footnotes at their own last show, the bulk of the story about what famous guests they were able to conjure up, like Eddie Vedder or whatever. Can you imagine how frustrating that must have been? These guys that had watched on the sidelines for 20 years as their cultural output, that influenced everything that would become even remotely popular in music, was relegated and marginalized?”—
Mike Haliechuk of Fucked Up. The research and mental preparation I’m doing for writing about David Comes To Life sometimes feels like it’s only making it harder to ever get anything down on paper that explains how I actually feel. But this quote fascinates me, and I’m sure the sentiment behind it is bound up in what I have to say, somewhere.
More to come.
Isn’t this just a version of internalized oppression, though? The next paragraph in this interview is a long, idiosyncratic account of punk history, which does make some good points in a lamentable way, followed by the statement “The entire history of post modern youth culture has been one long turn against punk, and people wonder why we have to try so hard to be popular.” I have some sympathy for his viewpoint, and agree about the reactionary turn, but isn’t the lesson of the Ramones - and “lame-punk like Green Day (who were actually good)” - that popular success is a flawed goal? Not that obscurity is a necessity, that punk bands can’t gain some recognition for themselves - but this is tantamount to seeking co-option. I have a theory that Fucked Up can be best described - just kidding, kinda - as “kitsch-punk” because they appeal to the kind of interest in punk and hardcore sounds that doesn’t really see them as inherently valuable, rooted in either an organic tradition or a coherent attitude, taking them off the shelf when necessary: with the result that they become awkward appendages bearing little relation to the original wholly-formed aesthetics. Where it does seem at home, however, is in a genre largely based on separation and distance from, and even contempt for, punk - indie.
