The fifth installment in the series about curiosities and rare finds from four decades of media history

Punk is dead, so Punk lives. That’s a quick sketch of a phenomenon that has preoccupied music history for a good quarter century. There has hardly ever been another genre so concerned with issues of selling out and its own death. Hardly another style so obsessed with negation and eradication – something inscribed deeply in its own founding myth. The amazing longevity of this nihilistic revolt, instigated by a frustrated generation caught somewhere between the art academy and the unemployment line is evidenced by the hardcore style that came to the fore in the early eighties and is still producing the strangest offshoots even today. The other metamorphoses that punk has gone through to date without losing its ideological impact also underline its staying power: from diverse Post-Punk genres to grandiose fusions (mainly with Funk and Reggae) to the constant reinvention of the raw, making it even harder, even more intransigent. The fact that Punk has at the same time deteriorated into a postcard motif and tourist attraction is no contradiction. On the contrary: this aspect continues ex negativo to parade the uncapturable ideal core of the movement beyond the three-cord composition, safety pin, and spiky hairstyle.

By now Punk has been historicized or revisited as a retro highlight so often that you would almost think that this ideal core had been neutralized once and for all, if not lost entirely. Punk as a musical blueprint to be updated again anytime, anywhere – anyone can do that (and that’s not exactly a thrill). But Punk as a fundamentally negativist attitude, into which always can be read a kind of social crisis of meaning – this facet continues to preoccupy those on the cultural scene between the Near West and the Far East. This is what inspired the organizers of the »Punk! Kongress« conference, which took place in late September 2004 in Kassel in an effort to test the topicality of the movement beyond the narrow confines of music history. After all, Punk was always a cross-media impulse, which spread through film and literature as well as the fine arts and graphic design – which is why the subject matter at the conference was consequently also distributed among all these fields. As might be expected, the term »Do-it-yourself« (DIY) was much bandied about, a concept that was thought up at some point as cultural self-defense and today has become a virtually insurmountable curse. It is no wonder then that DIY was intoned again and again by the Kassel panelists as a discursive mantra, while yet contributing little to the clarification of the question of topicality.

More helpful on that front were seldom-screened Super 8 films from the late seventies. Films like Harry Rag’s and Wolfgang Hogenkamp’s »Innenstadtfront« (1978) or Captain Zip’s »Death is their Destiny« (1978) document the slow emergence of the movement – a process of becoming public that necessarily also sought confrontation on the street (as Malcolm McLaren expressed it). The fact that this is not automatically equivalent to »containment« or »comprehensibility« is made amply evident by the films themselves. What is »Punk« about them is already the self-empowering way in which they form images, which nevertheless never flouts or overrides its material. And whenever the energy of the moment seems to overflow, such as in the filmed performances of Wire, Mittagspause, or The Specials in »Innenstadtfront,« then the resonance is still palpable even 25 years later – irrespective of any nostalgia. This is evidence of how important it once seemed not to simply be a product, let alone a consumer one.

Ultimately, though, it was still up to the music to stand up (or not) to the test of time. For the Buzzcocks – some of the best songwriters of their generation – it was clearly difficult to reconstruct the apodictic attitude of the old days one-to-one. The result was a quite forced »we-want-to-be-teenagers-again« set. It was different with the German Kraut-Punk pioneers S.Y.P.H.: they have changed styles and music modes effortlessly and in a deliberately anti-fashionable way (in appearance as well as music) – the same as they always did. Strictly speaking, S.Y.P.H. never really ceased to exist – as can be heard on their recently released 25-year retrospective album »Ungehörsam« – which meant there was no need to get back together again. The upshot was an amazingly loose but nonetheless refractory performance, which was still capable of holding up a mirror to Germany in the year 04. In other words, they are still just as »ungehörsam« (a play on the word »disobedient« meaning »hard to listen to« – trans.), or as they put it back then (on their first single in 1979): »Viel Feind, viel Ehr« (The more enemies, the greater the glory).

The live highlight was, as might be expected, the group Rocket From The Tombs (RFTT). Founded in 1974 in Cleveland, but never getting around to making a record before dissolving six months later, the band recently finally recorded its handful of proto-Punk classics. One might say this was work invested in something repressed for too long, or never really realized in the first place. The music AND the accompanying attitude were brought up to date - not as a feel-good show, but rather in the spirit of a still lingering and even renewed sense of frustration. Thus Kassel got its thunderstorm of musical negation without much effort, without RFTT having to prove anything or work hard to reproduce old emotions. After all, it’s all still true today: »Never Gonna Kill Myself Again« and »Life Stinks«. And Punk already had that funny smell even back then.

http://www.punk2004.de

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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