COLUMN: Punks Not Dead

From Mark Tonsetic's "Java Daze," Fall '94 Not all too surprising, perhaps, considering that the highest rated mini-series of the spring opened with the death of ninety-nine percent of the population. Still, one can always dismiss what happens on a screen as mere story -- for all his pained effort, Jean-Claude Van Damme is not catharsizing our unconscious urge to kick ass at various waypoints in the timestream. No, to look at what we're really telling ourselves about life in 1994, music offers a wider and more direct message. For a disciple of punk, `94 was the Summer of Love, Beethoven's 9th, and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan all in the mosh pit together: witness or at least listen to Green Day, the Offspring, L7, and a pack of riot girls tear through radioland. Even once-shiny, twice-happy R.E.M. plans to go with a few distorted chords and growls, claims Michael Stipe in Newsweek. Somewhere, Sid Vicious and Joe Strummer are kicking themselves for not waiting twenty years. If culture reflects anything of the social psyche, then Billboard's Top Ten is a frightening signpost pointing the national soul towards the darklands. In the worst of America's ghettos, the evolution of violent, misogynistic "gangsta" rap a few years ago was a wake-up call to the country that had forgotten -- drugs, crime, chronic unemployment, and despair had ripped these neighborhoods of every option save self-destruction. Now, in suburbia, punk -- great music but nihilistic as a philosophy -- has again reared its spiky head. The message isn't that of the "gangsta," but the end influence is the same. Generation X, all whined out and no place to go, has turned to suicide as the end of all angst. On some of the top-selling albums of the last few years, Eddie Vedder saw everything turn to black, the Cure and Nine Inch Nails watched it all burn, and Soundgarden fell on black days. The clarion call to the rest of us is surrender. Kurt Cobain lunched on a shotgun, and thousands of mall rats wore his death certificate within a month. It is wise to be suspect about a generation that whined about problems that were never all that problematic for it, and wiser still to question whether the return of the punk influence signals a turn to self-destruction paralleling that of America's inner cities. After all, another Wharton class will graduate in eight months, raid and plunder the high seas of American commerce, and live happy, 2.4 kids-and-a-dog lives. Seriously. For the lion's share of Penn diploma-grabbers, angst will remain limited to the commute and 1040 form. Still, it is hard not to believe that society has not undergone enough dislocations in the past few years to warrant a tear-it-down streak in our psyche. Alcohol and drug abuse have returned with a bullet after a just-say-no rut. Computer technology has increased the isolation of entertainment, such that e-mail can become the most popular form of communication among people living a block apart. The government and media have blurred in their influence on society, and each prime-time brings forth a new account of the dark side to our once-trusted institutions. Sex and love themselves have twisted out of the hands of Byron, Miller, and Lawrence into something artificial, animalistic, and deadly. On 47th and Pine teenagers kill for thrills and pocket change. The favorite aphorism of a former co-worker comes to mind: "Surprise! Another fucked-up week on Planet Earth!" True. The world may be no worse than it was a hundred years ago, but it is a damned sight more frightening than it was five years ago. That is the message punk is screaming at us as 1994 withdraws into winter. If one sticks to the belief that culture has a feedback effect on society, then one has to wonder what effect Generation X's flirting with destruction will have on the generation nipping at its heels. Listening to the happy go-lucky sounds of Wham! will have you eating another man's liver after a while, but a suicide note accompanied by power chords is not going to produce the reverse. Will the next generation, pulled into adolescence by our blues, stare into the pit of all the world's ills and never look back? Will they give up as easily as we might have? Will they, for want of a road to take, blaze their own or follow us on the Prozac offramp into the afterlife? I look at a picture of my brother, half-in and half-a-foot behind the X'ers. I see a glint of our punk reflection in him. The look that says not to trust anyone over thirty. There is something else, though. A look that says that he doesn't even want to trust us. They say this thinking prevails at the turn of every century. I'm not sure. Mark Tonsetic is a senior International Relations and Economics major from Winter Springs, Florida. Java Daze appears alternate Wednesdays.