I finally figured out exactly what it is about the Occupy movement that’s proven so inspirational to me. It’s filling a space in my soul that has been empty since, oh, 1981 or ’82–the space formally occupied (appropriately enough) by punk rock.
(By happy coincidence, calaverasgrande just published this elsewhere on the Occupy Oakland website.)
I’m not an anarchist (never was, never will be), but the language of anarchism was an important and inspirational part of punk, especially when grafted to the raucous, distorted sounds of groups like Sweden’s The Leather Nun, whose song ‘No Rule’ supplied this blog post’s title. That song’s chorus– ‘no more silly rules, and no more law and order’–strikes me as bearing more than a passing resemblance to the OWS chant, ‘we are unstoppable, another world is possible.’
With punk, you never knew what was coming next, but you knew that it would be interesting, challenging, and exciting. As a teenager and a young adult, it offered a path to a place that existed outside the confines of ‘regular’ society: a place where all things were indeed possible and where anything could be imagined and put into practice.
It’s been thirty years, but that path has once again been revealed to me.
(Cross-posted at Pickled Bologna)
The early hardcore/punk rock of America deeply influenced me at a very young age. It was the only music I found that actually resonated, that felt real, all the music on the radio (I grew up in the 90s and 00s) seemed completely sterile comparatively. Those bands and what they did as far as creating an independent touring network outside the mainstream was proof to me that you could make cool stuff happen if your work ethic was strong and your heart was set on it. Black Flag, the Minutemen, Fugazi these we’re my teachers about DIY and thinking outside the status quo. I also loved that music for it’s outsourcing of knowledge of injustice which I didn’t find much of in my school texts. It is powerful music that shouted for people to open there eyes.
So what happened? Why does the punk music today seem so boring, cliche and non-potent?
My personal feelings are that instead of taking this empowering sense of community, collective use of ideas and freedom from the mainstream, it was co-opted by the establishment and sold back to us with continually less feeling until it has become literally meaningless. Still there are bands that sing about these injustices and do it with heart and I thank them for it. But are we ever going to get past singing about the injustices?
So what now? What will have that same energy? The occupy movement is one of the best things to happen in years. I was really disappointed when the encampment was broken up but the damage to the establishment had been done so to speak. The people have been united, we can reach out to each other like in no other way in recorded history, had the Wobblies had the internet who knows where we would be. Now here’s where it gets interesting. What do we as a collective have the power to do? I don’t think the outcry of injustice is enough, I hate to say it, but it’s been done. I know about the injustice around the world as I am sure most everyone who visits this website knows it. Many a good movement has been done in by focusing on the problem instead of creating a solution.
It is our time to create a society that renders the current system useless. Just as the punks created their own record labels and booked their own tours and created their own venues, we must create a better world within. Look what happened to major record labels since the 1980s? Let them sink, send them to their death bed, we no longer need a “label” to distribute music, we can find our own music. The independent music community killed the record label with help from the internet. If we create our own infrastructure that makes more sense than the current one (I don’t think it is that hard) the old will fall away.
It is our time, we have the power to create whatever we want. We have access to any knowledge, (I’ll admit I have a dream of seeing some war-torn country melting down their weapons and creating free-energy machines built with instruction from the internet.) If we continue to feel indebted and powerless against the establishment, then we will be slaves to that system. We know that anything that we thought was impossible through the vibrations of time was proved possible. There is nothing more powerful than people working together. No one single person will ever be as productive as two working together.