93. PUNK FETISH - The Unpunk Dismissal of Digital Downloads
The thing that really got me into philosophy, before I even knew what the word “philosophy” meant, was music. Specifically punk music. Green Day was the gateway drug and then, ironically, given that they wrote a song called “MTV Get Off The Air”, I was introduced to Dead Kennedys on an MTV Alternative Nation punk special. Green Day had given voice to my teenage anger at the stupid world I was finding myself being raised in, and Dead Kennedys set me off asking questions about the political systems and structures which made the world so stupid in the first place. Punk, like philosophy, asked questions. Big questions. Punk spat in the face of the unexamined life and stuck its middle finger up and those who unreflectingly accepted the status quo. As I began listening to more and more punk, I soon began asking questions of my own. When the teachers at school gave these questions that kept getting us in trouble a name - philosophy - my friends and I went to a place where we could study the subject without getting told off. The rest, as they say, is history. Today, I am still asking those annoying questions and still doing philosophy. And I am still listening to punk.
A little more punk history for the uninitiated. Whatever you may know, or think, about punk as a musical genre, what is important here is understanding the ethos of punk behind the music you may or may not like. Punk’s origins as a social and political movement as much as a distinct musical sound come from a rejection of mainstream entertainment. Not only aesthetically, producing raw and potentially ugly music instead of polished studio perfection, but politically and ethically too: the entire structure of ownership, guardianship and gatekeeping that told society one had to be a certain sort of special person to be an entertainer or artist. Punk, instead, promoted the idea of Do It Yourself, or DIY. You didn’t have to wait for a record company to sign you, you could just put out your own records. You didn’t need to wait for the journalist to discover you, make a case to their editor, and interview you for their big magazine (or pay an expensive PR company to promote your music), you could make your own independent network of fanzines and alternative media and promote yourself. You didn’t need to bribe a promoter to put you on a stage, you could just put on your own shows wherever you liked. Punk, at its heart, is about letting people follow their own artistic lead and creating work unfettered by someone else’s commercial concerns. (An important caveat - that does not mean all punks eschew commercial success, some, like the aforementioned Green Day, may even court it and be accused by punk purists of “selling out”. That endless debate is not for now, but my feeling is that it is not inconsistent for someone to seek success on their own terms and, as part of that, choose at times to make commercial considerations about their own artistic output. If part of the creative work is intended for an audience, then the work is relational. Collaborative, even. It has never felt inconsistent to me, therefore, that a punk may be just as interested in sharing their work with a larger audience as anyone else sometimes and, at times, that they might try to tailor their music to that audience’s tastes. For me the big distinction is whether this is an autonomous choice from the artist themselves, or an external choice forced upon them by management, labels, accountants, etc. After all - any music an artist chooses to release for public consumption brings with it a level of ego and commercialism that is incompatible with the purist idea that the music should just be played for its own sake. If that were so, the band could perform in secret, behind locked doors, and never commit a single note to tape. But I digress…)
What this brief history is meant to show, is that punk’s rebellious spirit - punk’s philosophy - is one of questioning norms and facilitating creative expression of new modes of thought and alternative ways of living. Which brings me to my concern - punk, or at least punks of my generation or older, seem to have gotten stuck on a knee-jerk fetishisation of physical music which is blinding them to some of the merits of modern technology and digital expression.
In the few physical ‘zines which still exist, for example, frequently the review sections for new music demand that a release be physically posted to them. “No MP3s or Bandcamp links” is a common refrain. A few years ago, when one of my own bands recorded our first new songs in over a decade, a friend of mine who runs one told me after listening “let me know when this comes out properly and I’ll review it”. Other punks I know frequently fill their social media feeds with rants about the latest “band who think a download is a proper release” whose emails they will be deleting, or long rants about the importance of vinyl (often poking fun of people who use the word “vinyl” instead of calling them “records”), etc.
But is there anything less punk than such dogmatic clinging to old fashioned conservative nonsense like that?
A true DIY spirit of resistance to corporate domination would surely recognise the liberation of modern music production where bands and artists can easily record high quality digital audio output in their own home on a laptop computer without forking out for an expensive, over-priced music studio. It would acknowledge the environmental destruction wrought by the record, cassette and compact discs that have for so long been mass-produced and seek to limit that carbon footprint by finding alternative ways to capture and listen to music. It would note the further freedom digital music offers to allow people to self-release their art without having to negotiate with pressing plants and distributors. A song could be written in the morning, recorded in the afternoon, and blasting into our ears by evening. And while there is no doubt a downside in that the sonic fidelity of an audio file is nowhere near as high as the music that might be played from a proper stereo, let’s face it: possessing a high quality stereo these days is a privilege and luxury that most do not have. The vast majority of people are listening to music through earphones, streamed from a computer or phone. My own extensive CD and vinyl collection mostly sits taking up space in my house. Despite my fondness for the music it hold, it is really nothing more now than a bloated and ungainly external hard-drive that burdensomely backs up the files on my computer that I actually listen to. I can’t remember the last time I listened to a CD. I no longer even own a player. And while I love to sit down and listen to a record still occasionally, it is no greater experience than when I sit in the same chair and plug my phone into those same speakers to play the exact same songs digitally. The format of the music really does not matter - if the song is good, the song is good.
But, say the punks I have this argument with, it’s not just about the music, it’s about the whole package: the album art, they cry, what about the album art?
They’re not wrong - album art can be great. I still wear album art on t-shirts today that I grew up staring at in my childhood bedroom. And those inlays! Not just lyric sheets, but one of Jello Biafra’s collage posters, or the Propagandhi resources section that turned me onto thinkers like Peter Singer and Noam Chomsky. Or that lengthy story about Screeching Weasel sleeping in a studio to make an album that made my best friend insist our band spend the night locked into our basement studio when we recorded our last full length album at the turn of the century. There is no denying that all of that stuff is brilliant. But there is also no denying that all of it can be digitally replicated. A download that comes with the music. A PDF. You can even print it out if you want an analogue version to pore over.
A DIY punk band today can record music quickly and cheaply at home, put together their album artwork, lyrics and inlay information, and release the whole thing worldwide, all without having to compromise their artistic vision to anyone. Why wouldn’t a punk love that?
I have called this post “punk fetish” because that’s all this obsession with physical music is: a fetish. “An inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.” We older punks - and I speak from experience - were all changed forever by a record, a cassette or a CD. Those physical gateways to new and exciting ways of thinking and seeing the world were talismans which protected us from darkness and delivered us into who we are today. We pick up a record sleeve and we remember what it was to be fifteen, holding it for the very first time, the smell of the record shop, the shine of the plastic wrapping, the intrigue of the images on the cover. We remember taking it home and solemnly placing the needle down onto its spinning form, not yet knowing if our financial gamble would pay off. After all, in those days, we often hadn’t heard the music we were buying in advance. Often the new purchase would be a disappointment, but other times - those magical times - it would sound like our very hearts and souls were being shown back to us through the record’s mystical grooves.
What we forget, when we fetishise that experience into something profound, is that the teenage punk today probably feels exactly the same way scrolling through some website and hitting upon the music that will change their life. Instead of holding a CD in their hand and watching the light glint from its reflective surface they will get the same thrill from clicking a link; instead of poring over a lyric sheet maybe they check out the band’s Instagram and watch some of their videos on TikTok? It may not be the way we did it, but magic is magic, however it may be discovered. For us, it was a physical ritual. Inserting a disc, dropping a needle, pressing play. For them the ritual may have changed but the spell is the same. Punks, those once radical rebels, have mistaken fetish for fact. True punk transcends formats. And if older punks continue to reject younger punks Doing It Themselves digitally (that includes punks making podcasts, videos and blogs instead of ‘zines), then the beauty of punk is that DIY means they will ultimately reject themselves into irrelevance. Punks don’t need permission to produce digital art. Punks will continue to do what they have always done: raise a middle finger to the dinosaurs of convention and find creative and empowering forms of self-expression that trample over gatekeepers and smash down obsolete gates.
The only question that remains for older punks like me is to look in the mirror and ask yourself if you still get to count as one of the punks, or if you have, instead, become one of the new gatekeepers.
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE and from all good booksellers.