Also: Noun - A
catamite; a young person; a petty
hoodlum; any person considered to be
inferior. Adj. - inferior, poor, or bad. Verb - to
sodomize through anal sex.
Many define punk in terms of loud, fast, angry music, and leave it at that. But this only works up to a point. Back in the day - I'm talking mid-1970s to early 1980s - the wonderful, exhilarating, scary thing about punk was that you could put on a punk record and have absolutely no idea what you were going to hear.
It could be the standard guitar/drum/bass/vocals combination. It could be bass and synthesizer with a nine-year-old girl singing lead, as in the case of Unit 3 with Venus. It could be saxophone, organ and washboard like in the anti-jock song "Sport", by a band whose name I no longer remember (at least I thought it was a washboard; at other times it sounded like a xylophone, and other times like someone blowing bubbles through a straw in a glass of water). The lead singer might even be backed by a full orchestra. The song could be insanely fast, fifteen seconds of screaming rage like "Ground Zero" by Zero DFX; or it could plod along like a funeral dirge.
And this is because, I think, that in those days punk was defined less by a sound and more by a feeling. It was a feeling that the world was hopelessly corrupt, fucked up beyond hope of repair. That we were living in the decadent last days of Western civilization, surrounded by ignorant masses who were frantically holding on to a past that no longer existed. (The very worst insult a punk could hurl, it seemed then, was "You're living in the past". That was the ultimate sin, that and being a consumer.) The past was dead and so you had to smash all the rules about what "real music" sounded like, and what instruments went with which, and create your own sound.
Because in a few years it would all blow up for good. Our movie cowboy President would press the button and this fucked-up world would be a smoking cinder; all we could do in the meantime was laugh at it or spit on it. (Flipper did in their single "Ha Ha Ha", a deadpan sendup of the American dream as realized via cheap consumer goods and casual sex, sung with a chorus of mirthless laughter that still sends shivers up my spine.)
So that's why a punk tape a friend made for me in Junior High School had not only the usual suspects like the Circle Jerks and Fear on it, but also the bleak cabaret song "Is That All There Is?" and the pop hit "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats, and it all still sounded like it fit.
As the 1980s wore on and the world edged closer to the brink, many punks ditched their apolitical stance and turned activist - the so-called "peace punk" movement, if movement it was. While this was a good thing (God knows someone had to take a stand against the Beast), it also bled out some of the spontaneity and freedom from punk. Keeping the "scene" aesthetically and ideologically pure and free from poseurs became such a priority that much bickering ensued about who really was or wasn't punk. So punk, already underground, gradually imploded until the 1990s when Nirvana flung it all back up into the light in a very different form...