Sounds like a t.v. doc that would definitely touch some nerves on this board. Missed the first airing, but as it's on IFC, I'm sure it will be on multiple times.
July 9, 2005
Look Back in Anger: A Punk History for the Pious
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Punk rock is one thing. Think what you like about it. Go to small shows at clubs in Louisville, Ottawa, VFW halls. Blast the Buzzocks and Suicide. Watch "Sid and Nancy" over and over.
But punk piety is another thing. That's the sermonizing, the endless yammering, the drawing of distinctions. Leave that to the experts. X is new wave and Y is punk, and punk did or did not grow out of Elvis or Chuck Berry or hippie music and did or did not start in New York. Punk was quiet in the 1980's till Nirvana came along. Or, no, punk was thriving in underground clubs but needed Nirvana to break it back into mainstream consciousness.
See, why would you want that kind of talk in your life?
And thus we have Henry Rollins. With just enough credibility not to condemn a project to loserville and just enough literacy to deliver smart-sounding lines, he shows up in documentaries like "PUNK: attitude," which appears tonight on IFC, and explains it all to us. Yes, there's something foolishabout him, the way he thinks he's a wise old man now but is also pumped up and rebellious. Still he tries, at least, not to take himself too seriously.
Mr. Rollins starts the show with an account of how punk is born and reborn in every generation. All you need, he says, is one person to stand up and shout a rejection - Mr. Rollins used strong language here - and people will agree, in Mr. Rollins's words: "Voice of a generation. Thank you. I've been thinking that, but I never had the guts to say it."
This would be an intelligent and self-effacing account of how minimal and adolescent, finally, punk defiance is. Mr. Rollins is arguing that with nothing more than a shout rejecting "this" - where "this" is anything - a person can arouse punk sympathies. But Mr. Rollins doesn't quite have the courage of his statement, and he soon gets into how real the anger of punk was, and how bastardized the California kind was and how much if he were young today he'd be torching the music business rather than pandering to it.
And that's the problem with punk piety: anyone who is into it, including Henry Rollins, still has something to prove.
Others join in here. Jim Jarmusch and Legs McNeil, Chrissie Hynde and Tommy Ramone. They give a fairly straightforward account of punk from the New York Dolls to Green Day, but along the way you get to see the nerds in all of them. One of the show's talking heads rhapsodizes, for instance, about DNA and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks - about how they were like nothing else the world has ever heard. The problem is, the world never heard them. They exist for people like these guys to get nostalgic about.
"PUNK: attitude" gives a serviceable chronology of the music and fashion, but in the end what's best about it is that it showcases the ways punk rockers age. Some have died, of course, like Sid Vicious and Joe Strummer (to whom the film is dedicated). But the ones who live on either went straight or had the biological stamina to pull through. Both varieties of survivor are worth looking at. Their faces and their clothes - like the heavily lined eyes and the safety-pinned cheeks of the punk era - tell the story better than any account of an ideology or aesthetic retroactively grafted onto the whole makeshift scene.
Take David Johansen of the New York Dolls. With polished nails and a daintily held cigarette and deep grooves in his face, he looks as if he never went to rehab, just fortified himself with poison and punk. But his one-time bandmates, Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur Kane, who died in 2004, are another story. Mr. Kane looks like a real estate agent, in his gray sport jacket and pink shirt. And Mr. Sylvain looks like a beloved art teacher in his kooky denim floppy hat.
Just a glance at those three gives a better history of punk than any all the pious pundits can provide.
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/07/09/arts/Dolls450.jpg" alt=" - " />
Henry Rollins, on the television documentary "PUNK: attitude," gives an account of punk from the New York Dolls, above, to Green Day and theorizes that punk is born and reborn in every generation.
Additional airings:
Punk Attitude(2005)
Sunday, Jul 24 2005 10:00 PM
Punk Attitude(2005)
Sunday, Jul 24 2005 3:45 AM
