Things that are oppositional for the sake of being oppositional annoy me!

I’ve been reading some journal articles and whatnot for my major assignment – not just on hardcore, but other stuff too – and have reached the conclusion that things that are oppositional generally annoy the hell out of me. This isn’t to say that I think there’s no value in sub-cultural activity or the music people make ‘underground’, or that ‘mainstream’ stuff is particularly great (there’s a lot shoved in my face that inspires violent thoughts, if not actions). Dismissing something because it’s a part of the dominant culture and you’ve definitively rejected following the cultural pied piper to your squirmy, festering death, means you could be missing out on some good stuff (in my opinion).

Watching the film American Hardcore, my idea about being oppositional because it makes you feel different and special being really quite juvenile was crystallised. Keith Morris (vocalist for Black Flag pre-Henry Rollins, vocalist for the Circle Jerks) was describing what being involved in the Hardcore scene meant for him:

“I’m working Monday through Friday and here come Friday night and I’m just going to go off. I hate my boss, I hate the people that I work with, I hate my parents, I hate all these authorative figures. I hate politicians, the people in government. I hate the police. You know, everybody’s kinda pointing the finger at me, everybody’s poking at me. And now I have a chance to be with a bunch of my own type of people, and I have a chance to go off. And that’s basically what it was. (Makes bomb dropping noise and gesture)”

EVERYBODY pisses this guy off. But it seems to me that there’s no willingness to change anything about the social and political structures that are making him so angry. The point is to rage, rage against anything that is restricting you. I think it becomes so that you need things to disagree with to cement your sense of personal identity. By solidifying opposition, you necessarily end up solidifying the dominant culture and its ideologies. The cultural paradigm remains un-shifted.

Henry Rollins has said that Hardcore is as American as “fake wars, apple pie and baseball” (in the film Punk: Attitude). Maybe initially this quote seems a little strange, given that Hardcore (and punk in general) prides itself on its sub-cultural status. Some academics interested in Hardcore scenes agree with what Rollins is saying. For example:

“Still, the most evident source for punk’s definition of individualism is classical liberalism’s defense of the sovereign individual: no person or institution has the right to determine what you can say, feel, or do as long as you do not inhibit another person’s freedom. This idea is one of the most prevalent threads running through American literature and culture” (Treber 39).

Even people (the clever ones, anyway) who are involved in Hardcore scenes can recognise that Hardcore directly relates to the dominant culture, rather than exists parallel to it. Hardcore “repeats the ideological patterns of the dominant culture by privileging the importance of the self and self-interest” (Treber 40). Not only are liberal ideologies reinforced, but the punk glorification of poverty, drug use, violence and sex reaffirms negative stereotypes that the ‘mainstream’ culture holds as a means of differentiating from it (Treber 31).

I’m getting the feeling that I’m looking way too far into what amounts to simply a good way to get messy, noisy and loose for a lot of people. That’s the cultural studies bag, I guess. Personally, I find it really interesting that people can ‘find themselves’ within a culture that seems, from the outside, to be obnoxiously simplistic and aggressive (yeah, Fuck Authority!). What I’m trying to get at with all this ideological/oppositional/paradigm talk is that punk or Hardcore doesn’t exist without the rest of us squares and our normal little lives.

Therefore, attempts at subversion are futile! Wake up – you are nothing but a product of your dominant culture!

American Hardcore. Dir. Paul Rachman. 2006. YouTube. Web. 15 April 2009.

Punk: Attitude. Dir. Don Letts. 200. YouTube. Web. 15 April 2009.

Traber, Daniel S. “LA’s “White Minority”: Punk and the Contradictions of Self-Marginalization.” Cultural Critique 48 (2001): 30-64. JSTOR. Web. 30 April 2009.