As noted in this week’s podcast on rap, determining the lifespan of any art form is a ludicrous proposition. And yet we do it all the time—with respect to punk, the novel, hamburgers, mini-skirts, the design of baseball fields, and hats on men. Most forms persist long after the blabbermouths have called “Game over!” For example, plenty of punk rock has been released in 2009, even though the genre has allegedly been dying since 1976. Mark Perry’s famous assertion that “punk died the day The Clash signed to CBS” didn’t even allow the genre a toddler-hood.

For anybody who wants to go deeper into the ontology of an idea that animates a kind of music, or is illuminated by that music, read Greil Marcus’s “Lipstick Traces,” just reissued in an expanded edition for the book’s twentieth anniversary. I often say that “Traces” is the best book ever written about music, even though it’s not actually about music: it is about the life of an idea. Marcus follows the spirit of punk through a Dutch heretic, Dada, the Situationists, and the Sex Pistols. The book shaped my critical thinking by giving me questions that are part of my everyday filtering process. What is a piece of work trying to do? What if that outcome is also achieved by something else entirely? More straightforwardly: once you’ve defined something like “punk,” you may find that the most punk thing in town is not any kind of music but the guy who fixes cars for free and writes “Bubble Chimp” on the sidewalk every four feet. Or maybe it’s the iPhone app that changes one digit in all of your Address Book phone numbers.

In everyday conversation, I use the idea of a floating particle—a firefly, an isotope, even Tinkerbell. This particle theory suggests that you don’t follow a particular form but instead track the intense quality (the particle) that drew you to the form. That particle will eventually migrate and settle into another form (or ritual) once the original form has run its course. One example is New York street art. After graffiti had been co-opted by galleries and rendered logistically impossible by the redesign of MTA train surfaces, graffiti became a niche form, just as my column proposes metal, jazz, and hip-hop might be now. These forms are still full of life, but are no longer in the business of ripping up the playbook. The startling quality of early graffiti might now be found in the wild abuses of HTML and Flash art on the web, or any other instance of a public surface being transformed without permission.

Back to the music. What kind of changes prompt people to jump up and say things like “There’s no more real country!” and stomp out of the room? A cloud of factors circled me as I wrote the rap column, though these factors don’t apply equally well to every genre. For punk, negation is such a central quality that popularity is almost too problematic to consider. Can punk be popular? Can a negation be recorded without that recording somehow negating the negation? (It gets tricky up here in imaginary music baseball.) So here are the bundles of inquiry I returned to:

  1. What makes a genre something and not another thing? Why are we calling it by one name and not another? Is the genre still entirely itself, or has it become something else?
  2. Does the genre have widespread appeal and recognition? Is it dominating the popular discussion and pushing other genres forward?
  3. Is the music still confounding our expectations and startling us, or is it simply carrying on and punching the clock? Is punching the clock possibly enough for now?

You will have your own questions and variables.


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