aging punks

"I'm tellin' ya, these Green Day and Offspring guys don't hold a candle to the Dead Kennedys or the Circle Jerks, and Rancid is just The Clash Lite. All they do is whine, anyway. Where's the politics? Where's the commitment? Back in the day, you'd get beat up for being a punk -- now you can buy Crass t-shirts in the mall, for Christ's sake! Geez...kids these days..."

"Punk is a state of mind, not a genre! When I was a kid, it encompassed all kinds of shit, from Talking Heads to The Ruts to The Stooges and Ramones. If you reduce it to a stale genre, it just becomes another subsidiary of The Man. At least The Clash and Wire had the sense to outgrow it and move on!"

I was 20 (with a couple of grey hairs) when I said that. Whenever I've seen some punk-nouveau vid on MTV over the subsequent years, I'm reminded of my long-ago rant.