My lame attempt to talk about Punk

The real innovation of punk was its authenticity. It was hard, angry, badass working class rock and roll, written and performed by hardened angry, badass working class rockers. Was there rock with a similar sound and purpose behind it? Yes, the Rolling Stones being the prime example. But the Rolling Stones were not angry working class youths. They were middle class art students who liked Blues music. I don't mean to diss the Stones, but they were basically dilettantes. They were like today's suburban rich kid who loves Fifty Cent and decides to imitate what he hears. They sing about the excitement and the freedom and the fun of being a poor working class youth, without the part of not knowing where your next meal is coming from. Yes, the Stones were great. But they weren't real. Mick Jagger has never been in a street fight, no matter how well he sings “street fightin man”. “Satisfaction” may be a great song, but Keith Richards probably has no real reason to complain. And for years, this is what music was, people singing about experiences they have never had, from Elvis Presley singing blues, to John Lennon singing about giving up all your posessions and being a working class hero while sitting in his penthouse, to Led Zeppelin singing about demons and medieval battles, to the Who singing about being deaf, blind, dumb, and good at pinball. Punk completely blows this out of the water (not that there aren't flashes of authenticity during this time, like John Lennon's “Cold Turkey” and Eric Clapton's “Layla” two songs about situations those artists were actually going through, heroin addiction and unrequited love respectively) . It first starts with the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed did not actually write his songs about himself, as far as we know. But Reed is no dilettante. Reed is not a rich kid who just wants to sing about whats great about being poor. Reed is a writer, who wants to write about things he knows nothing about, but not to romanticize them, He wants to show them in all their dirty, gritty realistic glory. Take the song “Heroin”. If there is a more brilliantly written song in the history of popular music, I have yet to hear it. In 6 and a half minutes of slow agonizing chords alternated with fast manic screaming and screeching guitars, Reed describes the life of a heroin addict in with a gritty realism that simply compels you to brave the fingernail on chalkboard guitars, and keep on listening. In a way, Reed is a journalist. He brilliantly writes about all the subtleties and motives behind this addiction, putting all the disparate details into a coherent work. But its so much more than that. In that 7 minutes Lou Reed has ceased to exist. Like a man possessed by a demon, Reed is channeling another being altogether, this character that he's created (come to think of it, this is probably why him and David Bowie got along). Reed's there in person, but his voice is just another instrument, that song is being spoken by the heroin addict. Not only do you believe him, but you start to feel it too, your heartbeat goes up and down with the song, and you feel a sort of sick desperation when the addict (with Reed as his mouthpiece) screams “Thank your god that I'm not aware!/ and thank your god that I just dont care!” and you fully understand what drives a man to heroin, even if you can't put it into words. Reed, as a writer/performer has done his job. He has conveyed reality to you, in all its dirty and unglamorous glory, in a way that makes you seem like it's happening to you. This is something the Rolling Stones never could have done. The next step however, was taken by the Punk Movement. Lou Reed had suceeded in writing about a fictitious world in an ultra realistic way. What Punk did was take Lou Reed's sense of realism and use it to convey reality. And because their lives were bad, the music they produced was intentionally gritty and amateurish, full of anger, resentment, and desperation. Case in point, the Sex Pistols. They actually fired their competent bassist, Glen Matlock, because he just looked like he hadnt skipped a meal in his life. He was too close to being a Rolling Stone, a rich kid who wanted to pretend to be poor (Ironically, Matlock would go on to play in a band called “The Rich Kids”). They replaced him with a messed up, mentally disturbed druggie who could not play the bass if his life depended on it. Why? Because their music needed to be grittily realistic, not the romanticization of the poor life that had been the norm until then. That authenticity is palpable in any of their songs. The ferocity and seething anger just beats you over the head, Johnny Rotten's hate and anger seethes right through your speakers, and the loud buzzsaw guitar just dares you to just try to turn down the volume, but you wouldn't dare because the cacophony of noise goes straight to your gut and refuses to leave. You're struck by the fact that this music is absolutely real, they mean every word they say. And they say so. The most important single lyric in all of the Punk canon is Johnny Rotten snarling “we mean it, maaaaan”. That is punk, in a sentence. We mean it. However, this kind of pure authenticity usually doesn't last long. . Punk's biggest strength, that it was simple enough that any kid could start playing and form a band quickly, was simultaneously what caused its ruin. Soon enough, you had rich people who romanticized the life of the working class picking up a guitar and learning three chords and pretending they were angry and desperate, in the same way the Rolling Stones pretended to be poor youths by playing dirty grimy blues. And then once you have 50$ gold safety pins being sold on 5^th avenue, you know that the authenticity is gone, and you get the feeling you've been cheated. That's not to say that authenticity has been completely absent from rock music for the past 20 years. Every so often, an artist who is authentic and real shows up and takes the music world by storm, until they flame out quickly among a barrage of imitators. Nirvana, for one, blew up the previous 10 years of music when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” took the world by storm, and a big part of that was the sense that Kurt Cobain really meant every mumbled and growled word. Here was a man who had issues, who decided to do the world a favor by pouring his troubled soul into his music. Nirvana in turn, inspired a spate of imitators who had Nirvana's sound but not its troubled soul. Grunge then quickly burns out, and dies with Cobain in his garage from a self inflicted gunshot wound. These “mini revolutions” have occurred periodically since the fall of punk, and I figure they'll keep happening until whites finally adapt rap as the new blues, a Beatles for a new generation come out, and the whole process starts over again. But that's a post for a different time.

Idiocy 101

Rickey Henderson. All time stolen base leader. All time Runs leader. The Best Leadoff Man Of All Time. Over 3,000 Hits. Playoff Success. Clutchy Goodness. Is this man a hall of famer, by any standard you want to set? Seemingly, yes. Bill James has been quoted as saying, "If you'd split him in two, you'd have two hall of famers". But not according to this BBWAA member. In his column written for a senior citizen community paper, Corky Simpson, a man who combines the name "Corky" with the last name of a cartoon character known for being an idiot, published his ballot for this year's Hall Of Fame class, which included some borderline deserving candidates (Bert Blyleven, Alan Trammel, Tim Raines), some understandable but not deserving candidates (Jim Rice, Andre Dawson, Don Mattingly) and some "wtf?" candidates (Tommy John? Matt Frickin Williams?). But the most "wtf?" aspect of this list is the glaring omission of the aforementioned Rickey. There is no possible explanation for this. Even old time baseball men types, who think Bill James ruined baseball and that VORP is something you eat on a hike would appreciate Rickey's stolen base skills and general clutchiness. It's not that he can't appreciate Rickey's particular skill set, because he voted for Tim Raines, who's like Rickey Lite. And he can't be he just had a senior moment and just forgot about Rickey, because he puts him in a list of candidates"honored with nomination this year and who may well be voted into the Hall of Fame" a list Rickey shares with luminaries like Dan Plesac and Greg Vaughn, (Rickey is located between Mark Grace, a personal favorite who's a borderline Hall Of Famer, and Jack Morris, who gets a lot of old baseball man votes). It might be because Corky seems to be an unabashed D-Bax fan who wanted desperately wanted Matt Williams to get in. But that can't be, because a) Mark Grace? and b) the HOF vote is no time to be a partisan idiot. Some people have said that Simpson is old and out of touch and the BBWAA should have an age limit. However, I don't believe in insulting the elderly by associating them with Corky Simpson.
Having exhausted all that, it's time to come to our final conclusion. Corky Simpson is simply an idiot. I have no better explanation for why somebody believes Matt Williams is a Hall Of Famer, and Rickey Henderson is not. He does quite a bit to prove my assumption, saying that he didn't vote for Mark McGwire because McGwire took steroids, when Williams was busted by the Mitchell Report for guess what, taking steroids.
What can we do about this? Well, the dude's like 80, and married with children I think, which unfortunately means he has already passed his toxic idiot genes to the next generation. However, I think a stripping of his BBWAA membership is an order, as is a personal apology to Rickey Henderson. I think we should also make him do something immoral and demeaning, but I leave that to people with better imaginations than I.