I live sweat...

“If you didn’t want to scoop ice cream for a living, you got in the van.” - Kate Tyler Wall examines the role punk has played over decades of economic shifts.

(Photo by Roland J. Wall)

It occurred to me this morning that it really wouldn’t have made a rat’s ass of difference if I’d spent the last three years seriously trying to develop marketable skills, and looking for real jobs, instead of listening to music, going to shows, and writing three punk novels. If last night’s Republican presidential candidates debate is any sign (I can’t watch such things because they depress me too much, but people from all sides were tweeting about it all night), anything I might have tried to learn or do will be nonexistent, or irrelevant, soon anyway. We’ll all be back in the Middle Ages, fighting for rat meat in the street, and gazing at the lighted mansions on the hill. With no health care in America, we can go back to dying en masse. Hey, more rat meat for me!

And on the cycle goes. I’m a born-late/’58 baby boomer, and any relationship that has to those born in 1948 is a marketing demographer’s fantasy. My group has endured some kind of economic recession, depression, or dislocation every decade of our adult lives. And it’s no coincidence that we were among the first to experience what came to be called punk music, and it’s reverberations, and revivals, each decade have come in tandem with each economic kick in the ass.

Take the ’70s, my high school and university years. Energy crises, gas lines, inflation, family disintegration. And the UK punks and the LA Kids of the Black Hole picked it all up and ran with it. I graduated into what I learned a few years ago were the worst economic conditions in the U.S. since the Great Depression. Except for the lucky ones who got in on the corporate/finance rape-and-pillage bandwagon, or went to law school, most of us just struggled along. My first job, the Monday after university graduation, paid minimum wage. That was the ’80s, and the California hardcore scene and those kids from Washington, DC were talking about it, directly and indirectly. If you didn’t want to scoop ice cream for a living, you got in the van.

They’ve done studies about this: My age cohort not only started out badly, but even during the boom years we never quite caught up. Things still pretty much sucked in the early ’90s, and when Kurt Cobain and grunge kicked open the front door they kindly left the back one open for the punks who had influenced them. Nostalgia tends to move in 20-year cycles. During the ’90s, ’70s reflections tended to focus on disco and superficial fashion, but “That 70s Show” really nailed one thing: The father character never held on to a steady job, and each one he got was more humiliating and dead-end than the last. Now everyone I know who was a teen in the ’90s is convinced that all the movies, comics, TV shows, and music (especially punk) were so much better then. We remember the recovery, but not its shaky foundations.

Huge sectors of the economy are gone forever. If you’re in school, or trying to figure out what you want to do, how can you plan? What fields are even going to exist in a year (let alone four)? And the punks have their work cut out for them this time: No selling handmade cassettes and zines to get by like in the ’70s, no gas money to get in the van like in the ’80s, no ’90s slacker subculture in which to take refuge. Everybody’s an involuntary slacker at the moment.

Still, I’m waiting for the punk scene to come to the fore again and get in the world’s face about it. Pat Graham of Spraynard (whom I’m going to see open for Kid Dynamite this weekend) said in recent interview that he’s worried punk audiences are too focused on just having a good time at shows, but that “punk is more than just singing your favorite songs with your friends.” Punk songs don’t have to be overtly political to capture the essence of a time and place. TV Party summed up the ’80s just as well as any Dead Kennedys diatribe. Too much earnestness reminds me of what passed for ’70s and ’80s political resistance in the university town where I lived (what Frank Turner aptly describes as “idiot fucking hippies” in “60s battle reenactments”).

But I’d still like to think that everybody I heard singing along to “Fuck Armageddon, This Is Hell” at the Bad Religion show last spring wasn’t hearing it as “Fuck Armageddon, Let’s Party.” I collect quotes about punk, and the best, like Pat’s and Frank’s, make two points: Punk is an expression for how we feel, and it can also be an outlet for challenging what makes us feel that way.

Kate Tyler Wall is an editor and writer from Delaware whose previous job experience might as well have been in blacksmithing for all the good it’s doing now, and who worries too much about how musicians, artists, and writers will be able to survive. She can be found complaining on Twitter as @KateBegins2Rock.