Is Punk Rock Too Popular?

Is punk rock too popular? I don't think so. 

As a 51-year old man cutting up blackberry bushes today and hoping their alternative tentacles did not carve me up in the process, I heard Police Truck by the Dead Kennedys--one of the oldest punk bands and perhaps the one with the most staying power when an epiphany hit me across the ears. This is great music no matter how popular it is at this juncture or how unpopular it was with mainstream music audiences in its heyday. I loved Police Truck then and I love it now. The delivery mechanism (vinyl in 1983 vs. Pandora today) does not matter to me.

I got into punk rock when I was 15 in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and started going to shows in 1983. I once saw the Dead Kennedys in my hometown of Waltham for $7.00 with three other awesome bands and today people pay much more to see a modern version of DK sans its most critical component--the vocals of Jello Biafra. They pay more for way less as they are clamoring for a taste of the past. If the original DK could reform, they could pack arenas like The Misfits did and the same could be said for any possible reunion of Henry Rollins and Greg Ginn. You put Greg and Henry together with any of the past bassists and drummers and people would come. People would surely come. But that's probably never going to happen so we can instead, cling to and enjoy the memories.

I saw Black Flag, Saccharine Trust, the Meat Puppets, and others (the famous SST Records Tour) at the Living Room in Providence for about six bucks in 1983. I'd go back in a second if someone could fire up a time machine. I'd go back and see all of those shows of youth again through twenty-first-century ears and eyes but maybe I'd be disappointed because it might not be as I remembered. Has anything ever been as you remembered when you went back to check it out? My childhood house and neighborhood look tiny now but I remembered them as vast boundless. 

When I was a kid, punk and hardcore were not even remotely popular. The music was pretty much unknown to anyone outside the small fanbases (i.e., scenes) from coast to coast. I didn't want it to ever become popular back then and I never imagined it could due to how much I was ridiculed for listening to that "garbage" as my mainstream music friends called out. Now that punk rock is popular and the waters have been tested, some of those same friends who ridiculed me way back when now admit to liking punk rock. Does this lessen how great the music was and is? Not at all.

I don't care how popular punk rock is or who listens to it because the music itself, at its core, remains great. Police Truck was great the first time I heard it and it still sounds great today, even if a few more (or a lot more) people are familiar with it. To me, it can never be popular enough because that is how good it is. 

Let's look at it another way. Do stylized dive bars (Yes, I abhor the concept and its attack on authenticity as much as you and were I ever unknowingly enjoying myself in an establishment that was "stylized" and informed as such, I'd run for the hills) lessen the greatness of a true dive bar? I don't think so. They may even cause someone to look for an authentic one.

And stylized punk bands--the ones that look and sound like they were created in boardrooms instead of garages--may cause listeners to seek the authentic punk bands. Just look at the comments in any YouTube video of an old-school punk band like the Circle Jerks and you'll see the attacks on Green Day (the stylized punk band poster children) and the like as thieves and charlatans who stole the "secret sauce" and then watered it down and sanitized it for mass consumption. Maybe those listening to stylized punk bands like Green Day and Blink 182 will research the bands' source material and in the process pick up some authentic punk rock. 

And maybe somewhere someplace, someone is listening to athentic punk rock in a real dive bar and is miles away, both figuratively and literally, from anything stylized. 

Now it might have sounded cooler if I had heard Police Truck at a cool dive bar in Seattle, perhaps the Georgetown area, which is a short drive from our house, in an old brick space. I have heard punk rock via Spotify in many of the bars there and love to stop in for a burger and a brew, most often in the reverse order, and hear the Fugazi station they play at my favorite bar there, 9 lb. Hammer--even the name is cool but alas, the truth was that I heard it while doing something as rudimentary and as non-punk rock as yard rock.

I found several punk rock stations and streams last night on Pandora and enjoyed them at the gym last night while trying to lose some of those 9 lb. Hammer burger calories on the treadmill and sped up my pace as the iconic Rise Above by Black Flag came on. I don't care if the song has been used in video game ads and I don't care if Black Flag t-shirts are now featured in movies such as Halloween II (the remake), I still love their music, always have, and always will.

Hearing Rise Above last night took me back to the first time I heard it. It was 1982 and I was with my cousin John Davis in Newport, RI and we had just picked up the album from Doo Wop Records on Broadway. I remember the baby blue label of Unicorn Records and wondered why every song was written by someone named G. Ginn. There was something about the song's intro and the drumming and then a guitar sound (that G. Ginn guy) like I had never heard and I was immediately hooked. We did not realize we were listening to an original pressing that might someday be worth a lot of money or something that would eventually be viewed as a punk rock classic and heralded by mainstream publications like Rolling Stone. No, we did not realize any of that; we just realized that we loved the music.