The Tris McCall Report

Your Friends And Neighbors, May 23, 2002

>>The big over-arching assignment/question at hand: How has the punk scene/community in New York made New York New York?

TM: Punk and other D.I.Y. forms of cultural production continue to drive the R&D arm of the NYC real estate industry.

NYC punk was born at around the time that the city was in its most serious financial crisis -- - right after the indecision of the Beame administration and the weirdness of the Lindsay years. At that time, nobody really knew what the future of city industry was going to be, or whether there was going to be a future at all. Koch came to office as a reformer, but almost immediately his administration was dominated by financiers like Felix Rohatyn. The plan to rescue the city from near-bankruptcy, therefore, went something like this: forget about manufacturing altogether, New York will put all of its fiscal eggs in the basket of the f.i.r.e. industries (finance, insurance, and real estate). And if you look at NYC today, you see that not much has changed since that policy decision was made in the late Seventies. Not much manufacturing, not much of a diversified economy, but huge, white-collar companies and accompanying commercial and retail construction to serve the educated workers at those companies.

How does punk fit into this? After NYC gave up on its struggling manufacturing industries, you had all of these abandoned warehouses in the seediest districts in town. Formerly industrial areas like the Bowery, Soho, the Lower West Side around the Holland Tunnel had cheap property values and not much demand for occupancy. The real estate companies had building stock on their hands that didn't fit in with NYC's new priorities. But remember -- - the city government had made a conscious decision to support the real estate industry. So the city stopped enforcing the regulation restricting residents from living in areas that were zoned for industrial development. And white artist-types were encouraged -- - through hype, mostly -- to move into warehouse studios in these low-rent districts.

Why white artists? Well, white artists are notorious libertarians, and they don't mind taking risks -- in this case, the risk was moving into undervauled property in seedy neighborhoods. The presence of white artists gives a neighborhood caché, and it encourages the type of trendy (boutique and café) commercial development that raises all property values and makes an area of the city a marketable commodity. Punks and the punk D.I.Y. spirit were particularly useful for this effort, since real punks didn't mind living in awful conditions, and never minded taking old, crappy buildings and putting them to use as clubs, galleries, the kind of enterprise that really raises the old hipness quotient. And so began in earnest a cycle we all know well -- D.I.Y. artists colonize an area of the city, the real estate industry cranks up the hype machine, property values go up, and the artists move elsewhere and begin all over again. On the one hand, the artists move elsewhere because they're priced out, but on the other, what self-respecting artist wants to stay in the neighborhood once the Pottery Barn is opening across the street?

It might sound like I'm cynical and down on all this. I'm not at all. In the Seventies, areas of the city were ridiculously undervalued, and there was an ambient discourse about how we may as well just abandon some "dangerous" neighborhoods to the fates. Remember "Escape From New York"? There were plenty of New Yorkers who had that ridiculous image of the city. Areas like Houston Street, the Bowery, the Lower East Side were considered too risky to walk around in. So you had a whole crucial part of the infrastructure that wasn't really serving anybody, and all of these neighborhoods that had become ghettoized for no good reason. Look at Houston Street, Stanton Street, and the Lower East Side today. We did that -- the punk D.I.Y. subculture in a partnership with the real estate industry, with a big helping hand from the Rubin treasury and the Clinton Administration.

<<What is punk, how do you define it, and can it be defined?>>

TM: The good thing about punk is that it's democratic-populist, do-it-yourself, and open to anybody who wants to take a bunch of garbage and make something out of it. So it's an ideal ethos for an underground subculture, and maybe even a counterculture. The bad thing about punk is that it involves negating, saying no to all kinds of choices, and a true punk will say "no" way too much, usually to the detriment of her own art.

The best way to define punk is by looking at its opposite: Yes. If you don't remember Yes, they were a rock group who had their heyday right after the Beatles broke up. Yes are best remembered for taking the kind of grandiose musical choices featured on side two of Abbey Road to their logical conclusion, but they're better understood as relentlessly affirming hippies -- - it's right there in their name. Yes made music based around the principle of "yes"; i.e., "Can I take a five minute organ solo here?" "Yes." "Can we throw an electrified version of this Bach cantata in the middle of this blues number?" "Yes." "Can we do four-part harmonies about mystical wolf-dogs over computer noises?" "Yes," "Yes," and "Yes." For Yes, the answer was always "yes," and their records sound like it.

Aesthetically, punk was a reaction against Yes and music like theirs. Anything that sounded excessive was considered uncool. Like most leveling, this aesthetic move was cloaked in an ideology of true democracy and respect for access -- - if everybody had to play like Yes in order to be part of a music-making subculture, that would severely limit participation in that subculture to those few people who had the necessary virtuosity. So punks rejected any displays of virtuosity at all. Three chords and out; short, simple rock explosions became mandatory. Anybody doing anything else was considered counterrevolutionary. Art rockers like Wire or Talking Heads working in the punk medium were forced to become weird minimalists, and hippies were given the boot altogether. The Sex Pistols remain the quintessential punk band -- - vitriol, a handful of major chords, limited instrumental capacity, disdain for musicianship, a lyrical sensibility firmly grounded in topicality and meat-and-potatoes reality, and little regard for sound fidelity.

These values have been great for subcultural development, but not so great for aesthetic development. Punk pushes rockers toward choices that are profoundly un-musical, since entire basic categories (like major-seventh chords, for instance) are anathema. Punk musicians choose to sacrifice a tremendous amount of latitude of musical expression, and will often attempt to compensate, as Joey Ramone did, through lyrical expression, theatricality, and attitude. But even there, the relentless "no" gets them every time they turn around -- anything that looks educated, or striving above-station, is suspect. And so we now have a twenty-five year body of straightforward punk records, most of which I would characterize as extremely conservative.

Again, it sounds like I'm more down on it than I actually am. On balance I am glad that the current indie rock subculture is organized around punk principles rather than Yes principles. If the Yes principles had won out, we would no doubt have better and more interesting music, but access would be limited to those who possessed (or could fake) virtuosity, and you wouldn't have that democratic, vital feel that you only get in subcultures where there's a sense that everybody could be a star if only they were framed correctly. Where force of musicianship is valorized, force of personality becomes less important, and I think I prefer force of personality. By sticking to the least common denominator, punk also insures that an accreditation system can't take hold. One of the great things about independent rock is that it's one of the last forms of cultural production that you can't get a college degree in. It stands as far outside of institutional authority as you can get here in the U.S.

<<What are the ethical and political philosophies operating within the punk community in New York and how are they articulated?>>

TM: Stated political philosophies run the gamut from radical veganism to arch-libertarianism to garden-variety nihilism, but since most punk music is so formally conservative, I don't think that the New York indie rock or punk scene has a coherent ideology. Other than classic rock conservatism, I mean.

Again punk is hemmed in by its self-imposed structural limitations. It's virtually impossible to articulate anything like a coherent political philosophy in a punk song. That's why God invented hip-hop. I recognize that the political philosophy in the community itself can differ in complexity from what's coming from the stage, but really, if your spokespeople are forced by the brevity and directness of the form to be obvious and simplistic, what chance have you of communicating anything complex? Punk is much better at quick social commentary (usually satire) and personal narrative than it is at political philosophy.

<<How has New York helped to shape/create punk as we know it?>>

TM: Punk became part of mainstream British culture much quicker than American culture, and over in Britain it became stained with a very ancient desolation and nihilism that no American, no matter how pissed off or disenfranchised, can really understand. When it bounced back over to NYC, it was only natural that we would reshape it in our image. Punk became warped -- for the better, without a doubt -- by two huge cultural forces and traditions that affect and alter every form of cultural production that passes through NYC.

New York City is the seat of big production musical theatre. All music that comes from NYC bears that indelible theatrical imprint in some way or another. Right now, Broadway theatre is virtually dead, and evacuated of most of its good ideas, and it's conceivable that in the not-so-distant future, some of that emphasis on theatricality might wash out of NYC. But i doubt it. In 1977, Richard Rodgers had only stopped writing for ten years, and guys like Stephen Sondheim and Prince-Webber were throwing up huge shows like Sweeney Todd and Jesus Christ Superstar that had made astonishing cultural reverberations. Grease, Hair, Annie, 1776 -- this was the NYC that shaped punk rock. Big costume productions, big melodies, large scope, a kind of optimism and sunniness in the face of desperate times in the city.

New York City was also the home of most of the television studios and t.v. comics that championed a style of satire that did not differ appreciably from what we now know as "Borscht Belt" humor. Steve Allen, Woody Allen, Sid Caesar, etc. helped establish Jewish humor and Jewish irony as the principal comic idiom for white urban cultural production (and most nonwhite production, too, I think). This has held for years, and I am sure it will continue to hold -- just about everything that comes from NYC bears the hallmark.

The Ramones are often credited with back-to-basics, unsophisticated, stoopid sincerity, and that's probably the most absurd mischaracterization in rock conventional wisdom. The Ramones applied the dress-up-and-assume-a-character staginess of NYC musical theatre to their punk stage show and the irony and ambiguity of Jewish humor to their lyrics, and in so doing, they repeatedly rescued punk rock from the nihilistic dead end that the Sex Pistols were driving it into (and misguided purists continue to pursue with increasingly limited results.) There was nothing revolutionary about this coupling -- the New York Dolls had dressed up and been ironic for years, and hell, you could argue that the Velvet Underground was itself nothing more than a pairing of sick musical theatre sensibility ("I-I'm waiting for my man") with Lou Reed's twisted sense of humour. But in the late sixties, V.U. was allowed to stretch out, and play "Sister Ray" for three hours. Because of the restrictions on punk song construction, The Ramones weren't able to do that. Joey Ramone was forced to adopt and master a tight, economic, epigrammatic lyrical form that continues to be the guidestar for everybody working in the genre. The form is a filtering of wry ideas from largely Jewish NYC voices -- "Positively 4th Street" Dylan, Paul Simon, Reed, a very healthy dose of Woody Allen, comedians, ironists, personalities all.

In so doing, the ramones set parameters for the NYC punk subculture that continue to hold up pretty well today. You don't need to know more than four chords, but you do need to have personality, presentation ideas, a kind of cleverness, sophistication, irony. If you try to be straightforward and sincere in this city, you will be directed down to the Jersey Shore, or maybe Long Island, or Iowa. Certainly there is a tradition of poker-faced hardcore in Manhattan, and some of it is even decent, but those are usually the same groups who return from tour and complain how "jaded" New Yorkers are. We're not jaded. We just have Cole Porter applying pressure on one side, Mel Brooks and Neil Simon applying pressure on another (not to mention an entire urban black tradition with its own traditions of ironic humor and big presentation) and acts that choose not to contend with those ghosts are often made unwelcome here.

Because we're suspicious that those who deny our traditions are trying to make us more like the rest of America.

<<Is punk a reflection of New York or vice-versa?>>

TM: New York punk is a reflection of New York. Plenty of punk music from the rest of the U.S.. shares some of that NYC sensibility, but as always, you can usually tell the out-of-towners from the locals: they are the ones who over-indicate their irony. Weezer and certain strains of emo come to mind. People from New York don't need to call attention to their irony; it's just there, all the time. Writers who over-indicate their irony are like tourists who gawk at the Empire State Building.

<<Is New York the center/heart of punk or merely one community in a larger whole?>>

TM: Just one community out of many. I do think that NYC saved punk and the punk sensibility, and prevented it from becoming all humorless, poker-faced nihilism all the time (as it is in many other cities). The twin influences of Jewish humor and Broadway musical theatre saved the genre and gave it some color and necessary latitude of expression.

<<If punk is a resistance to mainstream culture, politics, and economics and New York can be said to be the capitol of the mainstream, what implications does this have for the relationship which the punk community has to the city?>>

TM: I see very little evidence to suggest that the punk rock subculture is a resistance culture.

There are four zillion subcultures in America, from indiepop to medieval festivals to people who follow Tiger Woods around the country, and left-leaning members of each will tend to wildly overemphasize the countercultural elements of their chosen subculture. There are definitely things about the punk subculture (particularly its high valuation of chaos and giving the finger to authority) that would lead the uninitiated to think that it's fertile ground for a resistance movement. And maybe it is. But right now, in 2002, punk is about sex, drugs, rock and roll, money and merchandise, living fast and hard, and not about resisting cultural or political imperatives. Valuing chaos and giving the finger to authority does not constitute resistance. It constitutes first grade.

I liked first grade, which is part of why I like the punk subculture. New York City allows people to give expression to those first grade impulses. I completely reject the premise that NYC is the capital of the mainstream, but I do know where you're coming from: many global companies have their headquarters here, there's a huge municipal government, and there's an extremely complex and often mutually supportive relationship between those institutions and the residents of the city. Punk rock and the punk subculture is accepted and welcomed by the city's cultural establishment. it isn't the cultural establishment -- that's pseudo-high culture stuff like Lincoln Center, and to an increasing degree, trendy soho art pieces like Blue Men Group -- but for the real estate reasons I talked about before, and for the sake of New Yorkers' "edgy" self-concept, you will never see any of the big institutions around here attempt to shut down punk rock. The most you get out of conservative administrations like Giuliani's is pain in the ass window dressing, cops harassing kids on the sidewalk outside ABC No Rio. and that isn't really about punk.

<<Where do you see the punk community headed in the future?>>

TM: That's a good question. Right now, because of heightened music industry interest in New York City, there's a very interesting hybrid of cutthroat competition and camaraderie circulating around music scenes in the city. So far, most of the musicians that I know -- on both sides of the divide -- have handled with real grace the increased disparity between those with connections and those without. The indie rock subculture in New York City has no real political conscience, but it does have a social conscience. There is nowhere near as much bad behavior in this subculture than you'd think there'd be.

Much will depend on whether that heightened industry interest and access to capital is sustained. if it isn't -- if the bottom falls out of this particular market -- the independent and punk rock scenes might be in for one hell of a hangover from a party that never really started in earnest. I don't think that this market is currently inflated, because I believe that most of the punk and postpunk in New York City (particularly in Brooklyn) is very good, and could find an audience outside the subculture if it was positioned properly. But there's the rub for the community-building enterprise: inherent in the objectives of almost everybody who participates in the indie music subculture is a desire to transcend that very subculture by getting industry attention (or just a whole lot of money from some outside source) that can allow them to "live their dreams" and pursue some kind of rock and roll fantasy. Ironists all, we can laugh at that desire, but without that carrot to chase, I wonder if this subculture would hang together? And in any case, isn't it troubling that a foundational element in everybody's participation in the indie rock subculture is an unreconstructed desire to leave it behind?

<<What goals does/should the punk community have future?>>

TM: It may be a mischaracterization to call the punk subculture progressive, but it is no mischaracterization to call punk music conservative. Punk musicians have been plowing the same formula into the ground for twenty-five years. If the punk community means to remain fresh and vital, the music needs to open up, and open up quite a bit. Musicians need to expand their chord vocabularies. Songs need to get longer and structures need to get freer. Punk needs to incorporate elements from other musical genres, and do so sincerely and without arch condescension to those genres. Punk musicians need to get the big, frequency-spectrum saturating rhythm guitar out of the center of their mixes -- it's idiotic, and it contributes to the music's conservatism by hammering on obvious notes that could better be left implied by other instruments.

If punk is unable to make these changes, it will ultimately go the way of jazz -- not lost or forgotten, but subsumed into the quasi-high culture tapestry of the city. CBGB will become a historical landmark (god forbid!) and the genre will succumb completely to the respectability of the inevitable and the unthreatening. If you asked me to lay money today on what will happen to punk, I think in ten years it's going to be more or less irrelevant as a form, and there'll be a new subculture based around electronic music and new kinds of access to it. I don't want that to happen, because I like NYC-punk's emphasis on lyricism and topicality, and European electronic music has none of that.

Punk needs more musicians who are willing to kick hard against the musical limitations of the genre. The recent resurgence of garage rock already sounds tired to me. We need some fresh ideas; the eighty thousanth iteration of Iggy Pop is getting us nowhere fast. As for sociopolitical goals, I hope the punk subculture continues to be a refuge for freaks and geeks of all kinds, and I hope it continues to give them reason to feel cool, like champs, comfortable with their idiosyncracies and celebrated for their differences. If it does that much, it'll have done a hell of a lot more than any allegedly leftist organization in this city.

Beat on the brat, beat on the brat, beat on the brat with a baseball bat. Oh yeah.