On a frigid Saturday evening, five dozen or so folks convened at the alligator-marked Open Space in Remington, Baltimore for what was sure to be a delving panel discussion “On Punk”.
Moderator Amy Peterson introduced Alec MacKaye (of Washington, D.C. bands Untouchables, The Faith, Ignition, and The Warmers), Matt Papich (of Baltimore-based Ecstatic Sunshine and record label WildfireWildfire) and Peter Quinn (of Baltimore-based Lo Moda and Creative Capitalism). As a primer, Peterson asked the panel to define the word/term/thing/force/archetype “Punk” as it existed in their formative artistic years and in the contemporary.
Quinn half-interrupted the initial question by describing the humor in Punk, the decisive/diviciveness of Punk that as a proactive medium is, in its humor, something more than reactionary. Papich saw Punk from a slightly different angle, as a thing of excessive time-consuming pleasure; a pleasure that is, contrary to other luxury commodities with superior price tags, free for the making and taking. MacKaye, the only DC/non-Baltimore resident on the panel, grabbed onto Papich's idea of Punk as a time-waster, recalling back to going from public place to public place with a skateboard until he and his friends got forcefully relocated to yet another public place. To MacKaye though, Punk essentially was and ostensibly still remains an antiestablishment, anti-corporate form of life and music.
The Q&A's went on to discussing Punk's marketability that created something of an antithetical Punk ideology, what happens when people as Punks opt to nihilism and if this leap is necessarily always good or bad, the changes in accessibility over the years that granted Punk new social and media outlets but in doing so may have dampened its ethos, and so forth.
The panel seemed to have finally settled in on the access-angle of addressing Punk by comparing the Punk of generation X to that of Y when an audience member interrupted: “But what are we fighting for?” Quinn and MacKaye rhetorically spat back the same question, alluding to the need for self-determination for a generation to have an effect on social change.
But the questioner wasn't phased; he demanded an answer from the panel—what exactly are we supposed to revolt against?
Papich described how his revolt is that of a spiritual, internal revolution. Quinn argued though that this wasn't enough, explaining that the contemporary is not the '60s, insofar as generation Y is not doing something that it should or could be.
Following this dumbfounding intergenerational parley, the panel constructed a seemingly stark binary of collector versus experiencer in the bounds of what may qualify as punk in the current. Papich saw the collector as akin to librarian, albeit an essential social role. MacKaye elected the experiencer as primary Punk figure, harking on a collector as not participatory; as merely along for the ride in a less than innovative or resisting fashion. To Quinn, the whole premise of this qualification by either stretch seemed antithetical to Punk.
Then the inevitable came to topical fruition: social networking. Questions flew from the crowd at the panel from a mixed bag of positivist and cynical slants. The panel attempted to reconcile this raving tangent in terms of Punk. MacKaye confessed that he saw very little benefit in the various proper nouns of social networking as modes of communication more substantial than back-and-forth pastime commentary. Quinn confessed to using social networking as a means to an end, seeming conflicted on whether it's usage en masse as the property of a handful of mammoth corporate entities was more practical or debilitating. Papich was of the opinion that social networking is great, that folks shouldn't stray away from social tools out of opposition to their ease or affection for, as was the case with regional Punk communities pre-internet, how it used to be.
Access was the mainstay of “On Punk”. It was collectively established amongst the panelists that Punk is contextually different now, and by the end of the talk the rectifying of this evolving social phenomena known as Punk remained momentous yet tentative.
All indication aside, there was a tone of categorical impotence to the whole affair. Was this discussion not an ironic microcosm of Punk's purported demise, an implosive meta-critique that served the purpose of historicizing a thing whose crux demanded nothing of the sort? Even if the audience leaned towards the experiencer role, were we not all collectors that eve?
When all was said and done, the event was as informative as it was indicative.
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