Ian Mackaye sits on the stage in what was once a classroom at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre. Former member of punk powerhouses Minor Threat and Fugazi, founder of DisChord Records, namer of harDCore, and instigator of the Straight Edge movement Mackaye is more than a musician – as much as can be the case, given prevailing definitions, he is a punk icon. Antiauthoritarian, mover, ideologue, he is the embodiment of everything positive, creative, and productive about punk rock.
“So, we’re gonna have a punk show here tonight” he says: “not just us on the stage”, he is there playing with his partner Amy in a unit called The Evens, “but you too. We’re gonna work together to make this happen. Punk’s not a sound – it’s something that we build together.” Something that we build together…
To say that ‘punk’ is a thing – say, a fashion, a kind of music, a political stance – is like saying that Buddhism or capitalism are singular things. Varieties of experience, as well as the practices of individuals and the media make simple categorization nearly impossible in terms of human being. Rejecting the Platonic belief that all things have a Form from which the everyday things incarnate themselves, and instead accepting that any thing’s existence is dependent upon how we make it a reality in all of our diverse ways, punk is a system of thought, an action, and something that we do – neither a noun nor an adjective, but a verb. We punk out our language, pushing it beyond its dictionary imperatives and definitions; we punk our politics and make them answerable to diversity; we enter a classroom and punk rock the cannon by eliciting responses from students and affirming their perspectives.
Ian Mackaye is also known as someone who announces rules to the crowd. “If you slam dance, we stop. We leave the stage and the show’s over. If anyone’s drunk and gets disorderly, hurting others, the show’s over. If we smell weed in the crowd, we ALL go home.” But aren’t rules decidedly anti-punk rock? Isn’t the whole ideology, the system of belief, stringently individualistic though? Don’t we get to be whoever we want, how ever we want?
I will remind you again that punk is not a set of rules, and so Mackaye, like everyone, gets to say what he wants – “we’re all in this together” – and if you don’t like it, well, there’s the door. Complications arise in any form of politics that attempts to assert control; however, this is not an ideological forum, this is action and Mackaye attempts in his shows to embody his own politics. Punk, for him, is the openness to express ourselves in a non-threatening environment – and alcohol, drugs, and the machismo act of slam dancing do not fall into that ethos. In fact, they are emphatically part of the establishment, part of a system of belief that does hurt others, does encourage us to hurt ourselves, and enculturates, through language, aggressive behaviour as not onlt only acceptable, but necessary – even in academia, a supposed bastion of pacifism and intellectual freedom, we found much of what we do on attack, interrogation, negative criticism.
The message in his music, his poetry is, in fact, the same; that is, if we are cruising to hurt someone else, we will only succeed in harming ourselves. Much better then to say what needs to be said with the hopes of helping both; regardless of who you are, where you come from, or what you’re wearing, we’re in this game of societal transformation together.
These themes – openness to alterity, non-violence, and striving to positively reinterpret our place in the world together – are the cornerstones of much deep thinking and applied theories surrounding the educational experience. In ways both semiotically robust (Mackaye sitting on the stage at the front of what was a classroom) and linguistically telling (the laying out of specific ground rules), he established himself from the outset as teacher, participant, facilitator, and sage. None of these, I guarantee, were lost on the crowd. More important than this, perhaps, was the subtle manner in which we were all being schooled in the ways of a progressive pedagogy that sought, on the one hand, to introduce us to the basic themes of punk rock as ideology – again, openness, non-violence, and community – and, on the other, to exactly how this ideology could be put into practice, how a noun becomes a verb.
In direct reaction to the civil disobedience of the 1960’s, with the youth actions of protest and sit-ins, the movement (verb) of punk rock positioned itself as a forceful revolution of practice. Seeing their older brothers and sisters wait outside the emblems of the establishment, shouting their slogans and demanding that the powers that be do something about society’s woes, the punk rockers of the late 1970’s made conscious and concerted efforts to bypass the powers of authority and change society themselves. Employing the basic tactics of what we might call semiotic guerrilla warfare, they took the physical manifestations of the establishment (short hair, suits, military garb, 12 bar blues) and claimed them for their own while simultaneously transforming their very public messages. They dawned brush cuts and combat boots, not because they wanted to join the army, but because they were waging war on the inequalities of society; they dyed their hair, not because they wished to maintain the status quo of being young forever, but because they sought to transform themselves into visible minorities and so bring the discourse of discrimination into the mainstream (which was, and is, more often than not their own middle class livingrooms); and they harnessed the structure of standard rock and roll and accelerated it, not because they wanted a hit on top 40 radio, but because they wanted to tear down the accepted semiotics of music which had begun a revolution but had been usurped and corrupted by the corporate interests of Western capitalism. Punk rock moved meaning, it reinterpreted accepted modes of belief and attempted to force the status quo of society to reevaluate where it was going, what it really believed in, and, most importantly, what it was doing to make the world a more egalitarian and compassionate place. Punk was far more mass pedagogy than ideology, and to see it otherwise is to give in, yet again, to the drive of a mercantile morality to make what is radical marketable.
In the late 1700’s, William Blake created The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In it, he strove to dismantle the systems of belief that he saw stifling the human spirit. In support of both the French and American Revolutions – two acts of social and political defiance based on upsetting oppressive monolithic regimes – and in direct objection to the Industrial Revolution – an ideological push to ensure the increased privilege of factory owners at the expense (or, on the backs of) the greater populace – William Blake harshly criticized the philosophical and moral tenants of what had allowed the power, beauty, and importance of the individual to be systematically destroyed: the double pronged purveyors of the status quo – the organized aspects of Christianity and science of the day.
For Blake, the suppositions that the body is inferior to the soul and passion destructive to reason, supplied the powers that be (in this case priests, governments, scientists, and the emerging industrial capitalists) to persecute not just individuals, but the very thoughts, beliefs, and actions that make us individuals. To sip le say this though – that people were being made into machines, that language itself was being transformed to support an emergent dominant ideology, and that Christianity, government and capitalism were in cahoots – didn’t make senses to Blake. Knowledgeable in the ways that power is made manifest primarily through art and only secondarily through policy (you have to convince people that something is right before it can be made law by invading their sensibilities), he chose painting and poetry, story and anecdote and proverb to drive his point home in a most radical manner.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, perhaps the most multi-genred text in the English language, seeks to undo conventions, shock and intimidate its readers, and challenge authority (even the very idea of authority) on both the level of form and of content. In its inclusiveness of forms, which is as much to say in its drive to include as many diverse voices and perspectives as possible, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a work that teaches its readers the value of questioning the moral, philosophical, and political narratives that all forms of establishment seek to impose on all people. “In opposition is true friendship” writes Blake, and then “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”
Perhaps in hearing this we might recall the famous sculpture of Apollo and Dionysus in combat. In this physical rendering of the enduring struggle between these brothers – also understood as passion and reason – we see how one has lifted the other off their feet by grappling him about the waste. The other is pushing down on his brother’s head with his right hand while the left remains free to strike. Clearly neither has the upper hand, but then again neither did one eventually kill the other. And so here, as on Keats’ urn, the two are frozen in eternal battle, just as they would have wanted it.
Remember as well Nietzsche’s work The Birth of Tragedy in which the young philosopher extols the virtues of ancient Greece; how in their term conflict was seen as necessary to a culture’s survival, how unquestioned suppositions breed a kind of sickness (malaise) of the human spirit, and how true wisdom and strength of character and society come from a lack of settling, a desire to become, an urge to always change and grow. Nietzsche says: “The two creative tendencies develop alongside each other, usually in fierce opposition, each by its taunts forcing the other to more energetic production, both perpetuating in a discordant concord that agon which the term art but feeble denominates…” How punk rock is that?
Mackaye sits on the stage of this old classroom with his drummer partner Amy and, quite literally, rocks through the evening, telling stories, singing quiet aggressive songs of dissent and engaging the crowd to talk. Completely unlike Zack de la Roche of Rage Against the Machine who would ironically leads the masses in fuelled and fiery choruses of ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”, Mackaye asks us to “cluck or twitter or whistle or whatever” during one of his pieces about taunting the police in riot gear. At the end of the show, he thanks us for helping him punk out, puts down his baritone guitar, sits on the edge of the stage and invites us to come up and talk to him.
Sheepishly, I walk up. Mackaye is a legend, and I am intimidated by his presence and his stature – at nearly 6 ½ feet he towers over us all and his intense gaze meets every set of eyes as you speak to him. He chuckles and smiles, but does not laugh. I approach him and say ‘I went to my first punk show when I was 14 in 1984. I’ve seen a thousand bands, but I’ve never experienced anything like this.’ I sputter out something else about Blake and cut myself short, unsure. His eyes penetrate into mine as he takes my hand and says ‘I saw you punk rockin over there. Don’t you ever stop.’ Perhaps he has said this hundreds of times, perhaps not – I don’t really care, in that moment he said it to me, sincerely and while looking me straight on. In an act of friendship, Mackaye challenged me to never stop, to never give up hope for change, to never stop taunting to force “the other to more energetic production”, to always punk rock.
Words of a true teacher stick with us – they resonate, make a difference, ask hard questions, uncomfortable questions, strip down unquestioned assumptions, speak to you like a language that only you understand. This is the heart of Romanticism, the body of punk rock, and the spirit of all that is excellent in higher education.
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