Punk Rock For Young Avengers Fandom

Hello, Young Avengers fandom.

Perhaps you are interested in punk rock. Maybe you read that excellent Freaky Trigger piece about punk rock and Young Avengers and thought, "huh." Maybe you've heard a little before but Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie are getting you more interested. In that case, let me introduce you.

Please.

I'll dispense with the backstory: Nubile white men with guitars a good half century ago figured out you didn't need talent to play music, you just needed anger and momentum.

Punk rock's major contribution to music's history (aside from a reminder to get out before you start to suck) is the idea that an aspiring artist does not require someone else's imprimatur to make music. If someone isn't making the music you want to hear, you are now deputized to make it yourself.

Seriously. If you've got a song in your heart: Write it. Now. This very minute. Stop reading. Go. Do it. Now. Do it.

There's connective tissue between punk rock and comics, if you know where to look. Most obviously, Patrick Kindlon and Matthew Rosenberg, to name two, have released some of my favorite music ever. Mike Cavallaro, known to the Eastern Seaboard as Johnny X from Sticks And Stones, Becky Cloonan, Rick Remender, Jen Van Meter and ad infinitum. Gillen and McKelvie's history with music and a member of punk's extended family, Britpop, is suggested by the above image. It's called Phonogram, there's two volumes and Volume Two, The Singles Club, forced me to confront my fear of dancing. It presented better arguments for dancing than my reasons not to dance.

This is not a history, but a survey. Five songs, cast widely to get a taste in your mouth. If you like it, come back next week. If not, you're only out the time you took to listen to five songs. These aren't my five favorite punk rock songs in the world, but these are five songs which all suggest many of the cardinal directions punk rock moves in. You may hopefully find something you like.

The songs hopefully suggest the focus, the lens, the catalyst and the fuel. There's a Romanticism to punk that I find still useful as I age. There's other parts to punk, the branded nihilism, the clear-eyed hopelessness, but those are doors to go through later on. I still need to get you through this one first.

Like all surveys, it's necessarily incomplete. Emo is a longer story than I have time for and oh God I'm rambling. Five songs. Play loud.






Until I figure out how to embed playlists into Blogger, just go here.

If You're Looking For a Patsy...

There's a comment at the end of chapter...5 of A Theory of Justice, which I think...well. Here's the best and worst part about utilitarianism: Utilitarianism does not take seriously the difference between persons. That, for Nietzsche, is kind of important.

In glib terms the difference is basically, between a single human being and dudes, generally. Or, in even more glibly: What I'm calling the inverse ninja theory. One ninja is a terrifying, unseen menace that can kill and destroy without sound at terrifying speeds. One hundred ninjas are chumps.

I can't put it any clearer: the difference between people returning passports and stealing from mom and pop stores, the difference between Toshiro Mifune and, uhhhhh, me. En masse, people are really goddamn stupid. 100 million Bon Jovi fans can't be wrong, quoth one ad campaign. On their own, people can be shockingly prescient and fun to spend time with. The difference between people in aggregate and people as persons. The difference between people, anonymously, and persons, individually.

(Note now that Anonymous is a whole other breed and could easily be its own philosophical post. Hrm. Can I do that? I mean, I can, but, if I stop doing Theory of Justice explicitly now...what was it? Breaking a rule is only hard the first time. Yeah. Not 'till I'm done.)

Of course, the difference between people could be terribly little. But it's unknown or, at least, not easily converted into math. The math is what utilitarianism is based on, the idea that good and bad can be boiled down and added up, according not just to number of people but sheer volume of good or bad to all parties.

Nietzsche, of course, would have a heart attack. That individual spark, he believes is the last hope for human beings caught up in the gigantic, globe spanning system.

Today, the best example of people trying to get out of a globe spanning system, or at least one that leaps to mind quickly, is the Tea Party. Their philosophy boils down to less government means more freedom. Everything else spins out of that. They're scared, basically, of the idea that citizens need government to protect them from forces beyond the control of the citizens and believe that by returning to the practices of a time when the world was less connected, it will better insulate the United States. It won't, of course.

But together, they're reduced to pathetic caricatures with lots to talk about, but nothing to say in crazy costumes. Maybe they'd be better when taken individually, I think Niezstche would hope. Utilitarians would throw it out and seeing as one of their primary politicians is not clear on where the American Constitution talks about the separation of Church and State, I think the joke might finally be on Nietzsche.


Bad Religion's Better Off Dead is a song that's almost certainly about a failed relationship now becoming poisonous, but it's applicability here is in one line: If you're looking for a patsy, why not try the entire human race? Otherwise, it's a fantastic punk song, with a chorus that centers around the bitter lyric "the next time I create the universe...". It's under three minutes. It rips. Press play already.