Anarchy in the USA: Are Bloggers the New Punks?

My friend Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake says that "the blog world has the feel right now that the punk rock scene of the late 70's had, and for much the same reasons." I remember those days, too, and I see the parallels - the energy, the immediacy, the DIY ethos. But punk isn't the only sensibility in the blog world, even for liberal blogs. Some bloggers may be Joe Strummers, but hey - you've got your Billy Joels and Emerson, Lake, & Palmer types, too.

Complete Control

"Do it yourself" was big in punk - "seizing the means of (stereophonic re-)production," as I used to call it. (The illustration above, from Mark Perry's UK punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue, nails it.) Rock music before punk had become bloated, over-corporate, hyper-professional, with relatively exacting technical standards and not much in the way of emotion. Punk reversed all of that.

And the leading lights of punk sure seemed a lot more alive than their AOR counterparts. They were having, as it says in Fight Club, a "near-life experience." If Nietzsche was right when he said that "being human is the art of becoming more fully that which you already are," they seemed to be ahead of most people on the Nietzschian fast track.

So, even though the out-of-tune sound at the live gigs grated on me, I got it. Music was democratic again, and things were being said that needed to be said. Strummer (Cusack was right about him), Lydon, et al. - they were singers, too, in their own way. Emotion is power, after all .... and energy equaled mass times the speed of light squared - with the rhythm section as the mass, and the guitar licks, vocals, and attitude as the velocity. All this - plus lyrics of social revolt!

And we had thought rock musicians would never matter again.

"Press badges? We don't need no stinkin' press badges!"

So are bloggers the new punks? Mainstream journalists certainly look at them the same way lounge singers once looked at bloodstained guitar-smashers in bondage gear. That's a good start. And it's definitely a DIY world, with its own loopy Darwinist principles but no rules for entry. It's not about credentials.

Jane makes clear that her observation applies only to lefty bloggers, and she's right. But do bloglibs (as I call 'em) have that spark, that aliveness, that the punk avatars did? Well ... some do. Jane does. Tbogg does. John does. Norbizness does. But quite a few liberal bloggers either have, or want, jobs in the Democratic/liberal political apparatus - either on campaigns, in think tanks, or in government. That's fine. I tried it myself. But the careerism does tend to stay the blogger's hand when it comes to being too (not that I want to go all Camille Paglia on you) transgressive. So - they ain't exactly punks.

Pushing too hard

The calculation really shows through when a blogger tries to pump up some flaccid Democratic leader, as if he were an inflatable sex toy with a slow leak. Or when bloglibs all too easily buy into hack arguments from some corporate somebody-or-other. Or when they urge Democrats toward timidity and accommodation (as with the Alito nomination), rather than toward having guts. If blogging is 70's music, think of these guys as the Eagles.

And theirs is a conservatism of style as well as substance, tending toward the longer, essayistic post. (Like ... er, uh, well ... kind of like this one, I guess ...)

On the other hand there's Atrios, who laid out the ground rules for writing a megahit blog - post multiple times a day, be brief, be punchy. It's like writing 3-chord songs with catchy hooks. Bloggers like that are the real hitmeisters - Tom Paine meets Tommy Tutone.

Personality Crisis

Then there are the self-important ones, the ones who fall in love with their own words. You'll find them in the lower ranks of bloglibs, writing dense and profound-sounding prose with very little actual meaning. Prolix and ponderous to the end, you can think of them as ... Iron Butterfly.

And there are the cheerleaders, the ones who get excited about policy wish lists from politicos who dodge the big issues. They're the ones who say things like, "We're all Democrats, aren't we?" Musically? I'm thinking ... mmm ... Air Supply. If you think I'm too hard on the Dems, I'm sorry - but I'm not one for "making love out of nothing at all."

Vertical integration ...

I think the real punks these days - besides the bleeding-edge bloggers - are the "guerilla hackers," outlaw communicators like the Freeway Blogger, "culture jammers" (look closely at the posters) and "commerce jammers" like the HuffPo's own Jonah Peretti (I love his Nike emails - read 'em to the end!), and the much-loved (by me) Barbie Liberation Organization. The "BLO" switched voice units between "Teenaged Barbies" and GI Joes so that the girl-doll said things like "Vengeance is mine!" while the burly, unshaven soldier said "Let's plan our dream wedding!" I call it "sociopunk." More, please ...

Guys with video cameras are pretty punk, too. Even this cop on the beat, who revealed his own sins and those of his fellows, might have been doing something sociopunk. (Instead, it turns out he's a jerk whose brain is waterlogged with reality TV.) Blogging, websites, camcorders ... soon everybody will be a pundit or an auteur - the fire chief, your accountant, you name it. And there's your evidence - Officer Krupke goes self-referential.

Teenage depression, teenaged kicks

Back in the "pre-punk" days - 1970-74, let's say - I was a teenaged kid who would travel down to Greenwich Village to play my lurid grunge/country songs, morbid tunes with titles like "Most Likely to Succeed" and "Make Mine Murder." The next thing I knew I was down at the Factory getting hit on by drag queens. I thought I'd hit the big time.

Then came New Wave, and I lost my touch. I was thrown off by the lure of the big money - which was all over town thanks to the Talking Heads and Blondie (we had the same manager). If you want to hear some bad demos for Atlantic Records and Elektra/Asylum - of yet another guy trying to be Elvis Costello - stop by the house sometime.

And now the end is near, and so I face the final curtain

But I'm not going to make the same mistake with blogging that I did with music. I have an outlet for my writing, and I'm grateful for that. I don't want to live off my blogging - I just want to run my business, play my music, and write. So I'll just say what I have to say and see if anybody listens. If, as Jane says, these are the salad days of blogging, I'll bring a fork. I've never been a real three-chord blogger anyway - and I'm not looking for a campaign job with the Democrats.

And besides, as Joe Jackson sang once long ago, "the world would be a better place if some of us stayed amateurs."

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I've provided an accompanying playlist for this post (not only punk) - RJ's Dirty 13: Songs to Disturb and Inflame. You can probably come up with a better one. Please do.

A Night Light