First impressions are not always accurate. The first time I encountered the word punk, for example, was at a friend's house. She had a copy of this:
This is the sort of early-80s artifact that now seems incredible merely for existing. The track list included Blondie's "Call Me," and that was as close as it ever came to punk. Other songs included "What a Fool Believes" (which six-year-old Liz loved) and "Still Rock and Roll to Me." It was so wide of the mark that, remembering it in adulthood, I was convinced I had to have conflated it with something else, some overheard top 40 or something, but no: those songs were on there. Along with a version of the Pink Panther theme with a really souped-up syncopated sax solo, because, you know, what's more punk than that?
Whoever assembled this thing felt about punk the same way Clouseau feels up there. There's nothing like dismissive contempt to really help you get an artistic movement.
By the time this thing came out, in 1981, my parents had already abandoned pop radio, and they were trying to raise us without much TV (a feat at which they largely succeeded, so well that I missed many of the defining experiences of Gen X). When friends had anything that hinted at pop culture—music, non-literary writing, Little Debbies—I grabbed for it frantically, sensing the pornographic allure of the forbidden. This is why I still love comic books and graphic novels, and it probably has something to do with why I'm an artist, too: pop culture was transgressive at the most elemental level.
So I didn't know I liked punk until college, when the sounds of grunge waning into nü-metal and alt-rock convinced me that I too needed to take a break from pop radio. And then it turned out that I didn't just like punk: I needed it. It spoke to something visceral and messy, some part of me whose existence the world tried to deny or prettify.
Not every Baguettes song is, or ever will be, punk. But I hope we always cleave to the honesty of it. At least a bit more than the Pink Panther did.
By the time this thing came out, in 1981, my parents had already abandoned pop radio, and they were trying to raise us without much TV (a feat at which they largely succeeded, so well that I missed many of the defining experiences of Gen X). When friends had anything that hinted at pop culture—music, non-literary writing, Little Debbies—I grabbed for it frantically, sensing the pornographic allure of the forbidden. This is why I still love comic books and graphic novels, and it probably has something to do with why I'm an artist, too: pop culture was transgressive at the most elemental level.
So I didn't know I liked punk until college, when the sounds of grunge waning into nü-metal and alt-rock convinced me that I too needed to take a break from pop radio. And then it turned out that I didn't just like punk: I needed it. It spoke to something visceral and messy, some part of me whose existence the world tried to deny or prettify.
Not every Baguettes song is, or ever will be, punk. But I hope we always cleave to the honesty of it. At least a bit more than the Pink Panther did.
RSS Feed