On Why Punk Rock Is So Boring

I don’t hate Punk Rock.

I don’t even actively dislike most of it.

I’m sometimes momentarily amused by Ramones’ songs like “Sheena is a Punk Rocker,” “I wanna be sedated,” or even “The KKK took my baby away.”

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I was quite amused by Agent Orange’s deconstruction of surf rock (I didn’t actually think of it in terms of “deconstruction” though I think I thought of it in terms not incongruent with deconstructionism).

Mostly I’m terribly bored by most examples of punk rock. The one band that’s sometimes lumped in with the punk label that I’ve consistently liked over the years is The Clash, a band not really fitting the genre, and certainly not confined to it. The other main icons of punk, The Sex Pistols, have always struck me as a snot-nosed, put-together boy band that didn’t even have the virtue of cuteness – and they’ve struck me that way because that’s what they were.

Earlier today I was having a nice conversation about music with my good friend Jonathan Means. We began talking about historic concerts. I decided that if I could have been at one concert ever, I would have liked to have been there for the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.

I remembered having watched a documentary in honor of the 40th anniversary of the festival last year on VH1. Some of the most interesting footage was of the audience reactions to The Who and to The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

There had been some buzz about both groups among rock insiders in the U.S., but aside from those who had seen them in London, no one in the U.S. had yet seen or heard these two bands when they came on stage in Monterey.

As The Who’s set came toward an end, and guitars began to be smashed and drum kit demolished (ridiculously cliché now, but totally new then), many in the audience appear in a state of shock and fear, unsure whether they’re seeing an act or whether the high-energy band they’ve just seen and heard has gone bonkers. (The only filmed reactions I’ve seen that are similar can be found in the anthropological documentary First Contact, specifically footage of interior Papuans encountering a landing airplane up close for the first time in the 1930s. The degree of apparent shock and fear is more extreme in the First Contact footage, but not dissimilar in appearance.)

The Who were the ultimate manifestation of the Chuck Berry vein of rock and roll. Musically, they rehashed and developed anything left to develop in the Johnny B. Goode variety of hopped-up blues progression based rock and roll, and so were “ultimate” partly in the sense of the end of a line of development. Visually, The Who were the apotheosis of the raucous or “raw” energy so often associated with rock and roll.

Then Jimi Hendrix strode on stage with something completely different, a different rock sound (and if The Who were one of the last to play older style rock and roll, Jimi Hendrix was one of the first to play a musically different rock, largely referred to without the “and roll”). He was, of course, visually stunning as well, playing guitar behind his back, with his teeth, symbolically ejaculating on his guitar with lighter fluid and lighting it, and all the while sounding good. The audience reactions are again telling – a different reaction, not so much shock or fear as looks of wonder or bafflement.

Then the Mamas and Papas came onstage for one of the stranger denouements ever.

In any case, after Hendrix came along, rock was different. Not that he single-handedly changed everything, though he was a major influence on a variety of rock musicians and even Mile Davis in his creation of fusion, but he did present one new way of playing for a musical genre in need of new ideas.

What tends to bore me most about most punk is its intrinsically conservative quality – not that those who played it or who like it are conservative people, but that it’s musically conservative. Musically, most punk songs are a rehash of The Who’s rehashing of Chuck Berry, just sloppily played. In visual style, most punk is again a rehash of The Who and similar bands who acted out aggression and “raw energy.” Mostly punk trafficked in tropes of rebelliousness (with the fact that many punks self-consciously parodied this about themselves not making it any less true), though I would give punk credit for the introduction of at least two new tropes of rebelliousness, Mohawk haircuts and safety pins used as piercings.

Punk Rock was a genre of reduction, subversion, and negation. Those are fine tools, but as tropes or ends in themselves, they’re meaningless. If punk did help subvert prog rock to bring its over-seriousness and pomposity down a notch in the mid-1970s, that was a good thing, but mostly it seemed to consist of reducing rock to its minimal elements, badly played at that, something actually pretty old hat by then. For many, punk simply provided the tropes of rebellion or subversion, while not really doing anything new – musically much less politically.

What music isn’t boring? Music that works positively, not in the sense of “Shiny, Happy People,” but in the sense of producing something new, even if on a modest scale.

From the early 20th century Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, engaging in new rhythmic uses for the full orchestra, or the 1920s recordings of Louis Armstrong on songs like “West End Blues,” “Potato Head Blues,” or “Heebie Jeebies,” staking out both a new way to improvise within small band ensembles and a new form of popular singing are prime examples of positively-working non-boring music.

More contemporary with punk, and within the broad purview or rock, there’s Hendrix whom I already mentioned, or a bit later, the guitar style of Eddie Van Halen, which like it or not, produced a new sound and new way of playing the electric guitar (put to best use, in my opinion, on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” where Van Halen’s more restrained than normal playing is impressive enough while hinting at a sort of pent up but boundless energy). The speed metal of groups like Metallica and Slayer beginning in the early 1980s, like it or not, represented a new way of playing rock, that was if anything more akin to Stravinsky’s Rite than other ways of playing rock in using the entire band to focus nearly exclusively on the exploration of rhythm.

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the Experience of Art (Musical and Visual)

I had the wonderful experience this past weekend of watching and hearing Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony perform Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. I have listened to recordings of this piece many, many times, but hearing and seeing it performed live for the first time, I began to understand some of the extreme reactions (including negative reactions) some have to the work, both at its premier in 1913 and subsequently. (I’m also aware that part of the initial reaction at the premier in 1913 was to the “scandalous” visual aspects of the ballet which the music accompanied – but I also suspect then and later, that the seemingly unusual qualities of the music had a lot to do with the violently negative reaction.) I’d like here to address two topics having to do with the experience of art musical and visual: (1) the differences in experience of live musical performance or original works of art versus the experience of reproductions (whether recordings of music or prints or photographs of visual art); and (2) a greater conservatism apparent with regard to audiences for music compared to audiences for visual art.

“Live” vs. Facsimile

There is a difference between the experience of music performed live and the experience of recorded music. (There is also music that blurs the difference, such as live performance which incorporates taped material – and there are both “high” and “low” art versions of this.) While it doesn’t seem quite right to refer to the experience of an original painting or sculpture as a “live” experience (though that description would certainly apply to visual performance art), there is a difference between seeing an original work and a reproduction (though here too, there is art that blurs the distinction, e.g. Warhol’s camouflage screen prints, or mass produced casts of Rodin’s sculptures).

In the case of both music and visual art, there are differences between individual pieces in the degree to which the experience of the live performance or original work is different from the experience of a facsimile. Large scale paintings or sculpture feel far different in person than in photographic reproduction in even the best art books, as do highly textured paintings, where the texture is not reproducible in the flat two dimensional page. On the program with The Rite of Spring were also Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto for chamber orchestra and Mozart’s piano concerto no. 17, with piano soloist Garrick Ohlsson. While I enjoyed the performance of these two pieces, the main difference in experiencing them live was in seeing what the musicians were physically doing at any moment, while my physical experience of The Rite of Spring was completely different from that I have ever experienced while listening to it on CD.

This brings me to a major difference in the experience of visual art and music. The difference between seeing an original painting and a reproduction is not the same as the difference between a live performance of music and a recording.

The difference between the visual experience of an original visual work and a facsimile is primarily a quantitative one. One sees more of the texture, the size, the other details indicating the skill of a painter or sculptor. The experience of live music also involves such quantitative differences, but a qualitative difference in experience as well. Looking at a painting and looking at a reproduction of it, while producing different specific sensations, are the same sorts of experiences. Listening to live and recorded music provide similar sorts of auditory experiences, but live music can also provide a distinct bodily experience rarely provided by recorded music played over speakers. This is especially so with high volume live music, or live performance involving especially deep, resonant pitches that are experienced in a literally visceral way, experienced bodily in the gut as much as in the ear.

Conservatism in Musical Experience

A few years ago, my local symphony orchestra, the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra, also performed The Rite of Spring. I’m ashamed to admit I missed the performance – I don’t even remember why any longer, but afterwards, according to one member of the orchestra I spoke with, the Pensacola symphony received several letters of complaint about the choice to program this piece of "cacophonous non-music." I was aghast at the time that anyone would have reacted this way – The Rite of Spring has been standard repertory for almost a century now. While tempting to pass this off as the backward taste of provincial rubes, I’ve also encountered similar musical conservatism in other places (for example, I’ve encountered numerous writings attempting to dismiss Schoenberg or Berg as “cacophonous” or “snarling dissonance” – a reaction I find both wrongheaded and simply inaccurate [dissonance sure, as in any interesting music, but no snarling or cacophony]), and as I said above, after hearing the piece live, while I find it even more than before one of the most profound pieces of 20th century music, I can begin to understand others’ visceral reactions against the piece (in part because it is a literally visceral reaction).

The experience of visual art or of music is different from the experience of literature. Literature also presents a unique object to be experienced (with this being especially a goal of poetry). But the experience of literature requires active participation of the reader in a way that visual art and music do not. One cannot simply pass by a book and experience anything of it the way one could with a painting or a musical performance. Instead it has to be intentionally picked up and read, and the experience of it is a distinctly interior one. Paintings, sculpture, and music are experienced as things more clearly exterior than literature, with the experience occurring somewhat more passively (one can actively look or listen, but one can’t easily not see something that passes through one’s field of vision and one can’t easily not hear something within auditory range), with the object impinging upon one’s senses from outside.

At the same time, there is a difference in this exterior, passive experience of visual art and music. Visual art is more exterior, and not at all visceral in any literal way. It is only seen, where live music is heard and felt, experienced as something distinctly exterior while also something distinctly resonating in one’s physical being. One can also more easily stop experiencing painting or sculpture – by closing one’s eyes or looking in another direction, while music cannot be tuned out so simply. It impinges on one’s ears and body, and it cannot be ignored. It can force itself upon a person in a way that visual art (much less literature) cannot. As a result, music can be physically delightful – or a physical shock and violation if the music is not to one’s liking.

Many were once shocked by modernist experiments in sculpture and painting. Some perhaps still are, but really only very few can still honestly profess to be shocked or disturbed by Duchamp, or Picasso, or Pollock (much less the impressionists). But The Rite of Spring remains physically exhilarating or frightening or both at once.