Give me Placebo! Give me Johnny Rotten! Give me metal and punk until my ears explode! I want army pants! I want fur coats and steel toed boots! I want to own heavy artillery! I want to wear a mohawk and spikes! Now, my pop thinks this is crazy, he thinks it's ugly. And, personally, I am far too lazy and far too poor to go around dressing like that. I need to have a job and I haven't bought clothes in over six months. Nor have I bought any music. But, now, when I think about it, he sort of has a point in a one sided way.
The hippy era had something very specific they were fighting for. They were fighting the war in Vietnam. They were about promoting beauty and harmony to show the world how pointless war really was, and ultimately, they did stop the war by ending the shipment of supplies. But, what is the youth today fighting for?
I thought it was downright rude when they tried to recreate Woodstock in 1999. How do you recreate something like that without robbing it of it's soul and memorialty? You can't! Thus, it was a dilluted festival of drugs and booze. Granted, it was probably a good time, but comparing it to Woodstock depresses me. I mean, if you missed Woodstock too bad. There's just no way of creating it. Why don't we create our own Woodstock? Because Woodstock was about fighting for peace and right now there's no war in Vietnam and there's just nothing to fight for. Then they tried to recreate it again in 2000 and it exploded in riots and rage. My point?: Young people who have nothing to fight for tend to fight amongst themselves. You give a bunch of young people booze and drugs and two million of them smooshed together half naked with all the hormones flying and they have nowhere to focus their energy? And they were actually surprised that they began to riot. What idiots! Thank you Viacom! You morons.
Why am I pin-pointing Punk culture? I'm pin-pointing them because I believe they share the most similarities to the hippies. In fact, to me, they look like inside out hippies.
I have always found hippies to be the angriest people I've ever met, believe it or not. They embrace this go-with-the-flow-even-if-it's-taking-you-right-into-the-gutter attitude; and I find the reason to be that they all share extremely passionate feelings, but to keep the peace they abandon all those feeling by holding on to nothing. That way they never have to get attached or really care about anything very much. It's a very safe way to live. Punks on the other hand embrace their anger with society and government and ecetera. They are trying to make a point. The problem with Punks, though, is that they don't have any clear cut point. They don't have any specific thing that they are fighting for, like ending the war in Vietnam. They're just fighting because society sucks and government is corrupt and the world can be such a bleak place.
I've been doing research on Anarchy.: A topic I've always been pretty closed to. But, now that I read up I see how it could work and personally, I find that that sounds the most reasonable of all. I'm all for Anarchy now. The only problem is that I think it gives a little too much credit to people. I mean, there really does have to be someone in charge, and the point of Anarchy is that there are people in charge, but that they are in charge of given groups that vote them in and isn't that just really a bunch of little democracies living in the same country? And what if someone tried to take our country? Could we organize all those little democracies fast enough to thrive?
Anyways, I think what we (not just Punks, now, but all people with nothing to fight for) need to find something to fight for and we need to decide which way we're going to go to make our world better instead of just being angry about it.
Cheers,
Lost
