Punk for a Day
Isn’t there a little bit of the bad child in all of us? The kid who doesn’t want to use their “inside voice” and doesn’t want to play nice and doesn’t want to share with the rest of the class? That’s the kid who punk rockers spoke to. The Sex Pistols and the Ramones and The Clash—just wanted to let loose the id that they knew lay beneath the surface of British, and American, middle- and upper-class propriety. The folk music of the 1960s might have had some powerful tunes and righteous antiestablishment lyrics, but punk blasted through it all, wanting only to be the antichrist, tear it all down, and who cared what came after. Anarchy and oblivion were the object of the game.
And notably, many of the key players of the game did not last long. Punk, although perhaps seductive in the short term, was never a long-term design for living. The poster children for the movement, Sex Pistols front man Sid Vicious died at the age of 21 and his girlfriend Nancy Spungeon was murdered, supposedly by Sid Vicious, when she was 20. Others lived longer which allowed them to morph into something more creative than let’s-trash-everything rockers.
And it should be noted that the movement became a phenomenon largely because of the clever marketing of Malcolm Maclaren and Vivien Westwood, who capitalized on the desire for anarchy and mayhem among the young. It was a profitable genre for the music business, despite what the punks themselves claimed to be about.
Punk is a movement that lives on, though, in music and in other artistic fields in one form or another, which maybe is a testament to the strength of the id, the unruly innate impulses we all have, some of us under more control than others.