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[ i remember how you told me that if you look hard enough at the sky you could see all the millions of molecules bouncing around. i looked so hard and maybe i did see it.....]

[ i remember you covering yourself with dirt. you said its the purest thing on earth.]

sitting here in a state of complete tension.

ive lost my words i forgot to mention.

this site is still really messed up and under construction. sorry if its hard to find what you are looking for but i cant imagine what you could look for on a fucked up site like this...

none of the links are labelled and lots of them just go to the same place. sometimes i just dont care about this site nearly enough to put any effort into it.

im trying to write down poetry shit but its not working cause im really tense...im too preoccupied with other things...too much to think about. angelfire is really difficult so maybe ill just make a new website...hee.....

january 30 2003

this is something i posted a little while ago in a punk messageboard . it is buried in the archives now... but i think i actually was getting somewhere when i wrote this.

"oh no, disaster! wrote: for the last two years, i've tried to push good music upon her and i've accomplished nothing!"

"the [establishment] scours proletarian history for symbols of revolt, drains them of all meaning, and then sells them back to us as wholesome food."

dear sir.

hellsempty asked "what is punk?". this is an excellent question. other excellent questions would be "what is good music?" "what is the counterculture?" "what is the Establishment?". what is "goth?"??

musically, the only "rule" in punk rock is that you typically condense and simplify your songs, using just three or four chords. but this is not a set rule ..and not one that really restricts you if you know youre chords. kurt described nirvana as "hard rock with punk overtones". clearly, he refused to be boxed into any musical rules, because many of his songs used a lot more than 4 chords. on "jesus dont want me for a sunbeam" david grohl plays an accordian. so theres more to punk than simple chord rotations. but musically...its pretty simple. its just good ol rock and roll.

sometimes punk is angry. but not always. most punk is rooted in frustration. this includes: frustration with the world, frustration with our culture, frustration with the media, frustration with the corporate exploitation of the third world...frustration with ones family. however, the Pixies are one of the greatest punk bands ever, and theyre not incredibly frustrated; in fact theyre quite happy. but on the other hand...they often use simple chord rotations. so are they punk? of course.

personally i avoid overusing labels such as "goth" "hippie" "punk" "emo kid" "indie boy" "riot grrrl" . all these labels are simply an unsuccesful attempt to put into tiny neat little boxes that which cannot be boxed up. the term "punk" doesnt really work. what people are trying to box up is something intangible. it is the frustration of my whole generation...our frustrated desperate attempts to find an identities for ourselves...among other things... i agree that you cant "force" people to listen to good music. however, i believe that you are missing the point. punk rock is not a nice singsong little trend that one can just pick up and drop whenever he likes. like the goth and hippie movements, it was originally part of the counterculture; its purpose was and still is social change. we wouldnt have a counterculture if this society was perfect; its not supposed to be a fancy dress party where everybody does their best to act angry for no reason.

"The long history of colonialism in the Americas, currently manifested in the Andean Region as "Plan Colombia", is a strong metaphor of the multi-faceted destructive influences of U.S. foreign policy and corporate monoculture on a global scale. This graphic attempts to expose the lie of the drug war as a smokescreen for multinational corporation's interests in extraction of the rich biodiversity and natural resources of the Amazon and her peoples. It is an anti-war poster that speaks in the mythology of our times… the cancerous monomyth of corporate globalization, and its antibodies of grassroots resistance. " -Beehive Collective

this system is fucked up. the counterculture seeks to rememedy that. a few examples:

1. **corporations are perpetually exploiting the untable politics of third world countries, espescially columbia, as mentioned in the quote above
2. **the union carbide massacre in india, which killed thousands of ppl. union carbide is an american corporation based in ohio.
3. **the fact that teens younger than 18 have no legal rights; if your parents dont want you around...they can easily hire armed escorts who will handcuff you and drag you off to some boarding school in the middle of nowhere to be brainwashed. behavior modification schools ( in missouri arent even regulated by the state.
4. **war with iraq...which will result in the deaths of hundreds of american soldiers and thousands of iraqis.
5. **the fact that supreme court justices have lifelone terms, and they are not elected by the american people.

its not as bad for this girl to be influenced by her brother (as opposed to being influenced by the media) because the "punk" trash on TRL is tainting everything that the counterculture stands for. when blink 182 showed up, people decided that punk is about writing whiny cookiecutter three chord songs about how you didnt get enough presents for christmas and you hate everybody. when avril lavigne showed up, people decided that punk rock is all about getting your face on the cover of seventeen so that you can chat with hipster journalists about hot guys. ever since hot topic showed up, people decided that punk rock is all about making a "subversive" fashion statement. gwen stefanis drummer has a mowhawk. ooo scary. maybe if i try to look like him ill be rebellious.

((this sisterposer person said "at least my music doesnt sound like it was recorded in someones bedroom". well the whole point of lo-fi...low quality recording is that its so accessible. you dont have to be a billionare rock star like Jon Davis or Bon Jovi to put out a good record. money takes away the purity of the music anyway. ))

does anyone remember the video for Smells liike Teen Spirit? do you remember what nirvana did in that video? they went into a mall with baseball bats. they went into a jewelry shop and smashed it to pieces. they took all their money and threw it away and it blew away like leaves. they destroyed the mall.

kurt cobain was technically a millionare, but 99 percent of the time he gave all his money away to charity. when he didnt, it just sat in the bank cause he didnt know what to do with it. he and courtney had completely separate houses. she lived in a mansion and he lived in a little cabin out back. he turned down a contract for the lallapallooza tour that would have given him millions. he didnt care about money, and he didnt want us to either.

ppl can make fun of "political punks" all they want, but politics is punk. anti-consumerism is punk. anti-materialism is punk. it doesnt matter whether youre a socialist or an anarchist or a capitalist. it doesnt matter what you wear. thats what kurt was trying to tell us thru the whole grunge movement. it doesnt fucking matter what you wear. Come As You Are. as he wanted you to be. Gap sucks, Abercrombie sucks, but it does not define who you are. i used to be a preppie. i was miserable until i discovered the counterculture. and its on that point that i agree with vanessa. i too am bothered by the "punker than thou" stuff. i have many friends who are preppies. theyre very nice kids....theyre...preppies. so its very important to not look down on them and shut them out. if my friends calvin and farty had never introduced me to alternative cultures...i would still be shopping at the mall today.

fashion is not the purpose of punk rock. fashion is superficial. vivian westwoods famous fetish shop was one of the greatest things about the 70s scene, but it was not at the core of it all.

further, rebellion is not an inherent evil, nor is it an inherent good. rebellion for its own sake is meaningless. i mean, clearly, what is it that avril lavigne is rebelling against? the media keeps calling her "edgy" and "rebellious" and such, but i have seen nothing subversive about her. they say that shes rebelling against the pop establishment by writing her own songs. ...but the seventeen article said she "co-wrote" them. this means that she only wrote half the songs on her album at the very most. the rest were put together by some corporate focus group in an attempt to nail down just what it is that "cutting edge" kids today want to hear.

i read two articles about avril, one in seventeen and one in Nylon. in the Nylon article she calls herself a "skater punk". what does that mean? does that make her rebellious? like hellsempty said, what IS punk? if we asked her, what would she say?

they say shes alienated because shes in a "male rock world". people seem to think that shes fighting some sort of oppressive patriarchy that wants to stifle her musical womanhood. but shes doing the exact opposite. heres the irony:

the hipsters have become the patriarchy. it ties into the whole riot grrrl thing. i saw this cartoon in this trendy hipster magazine (spin or esquire)..."generation x...what was wrong with us?". it was all about how stupid and whiny the riot grrls were. there was a stereotypical cartoon of this angry punk girl with clothes that came out of a dumpster.

girl rockers that actually rock (pj harvey, soixiee, kittie, otep, Bikini Kill, etc) have been labelled as whiney man-hating riot grrrls. angry girlrock is out of style. ive read some of these hipster editorials. one in newsweek, for example, said "Angy Girl Rockers? Sooo last year". below the headline was some pictures of some nice happy girls playing happy folk music.

now dont get me wrong, i respect tori amos, fiona apple, natalie ambrooglia etc....and if thats the kind of music they like to play thats their right. but happy folk doesnt work for everybody. some people had hard childhoods. some people just have hurt and anger that needs to be expressed, and theres nothing wrong with that either. i guarantee that if avril lavigne actually started writing subversive political lyrics...if she started screaming and using fucked up guitar tunings...everyone would turn on her and tell her to stop whining. and the underground wouldnt want her either because of her past as a pop star.

i will write more later. have a nice day.

ziggy

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