We Owe You Nothing Punk Planet : the Collected Interviews

My teenage heroes, some of them teenaged at the time. Uniquely in punk, PP showed the muddiness of the ideology in things; the genuinely thoughtful people here interviewed share a tendency to blur party lines. There are radicals talking radically in the usual manner (Chomsky, Biafra) but also practitioners of social good (the Central Ohio Abortion Access Fund and the remarkable Voices in the Wilderness), iconoclasts of iconoclasm (Hanna, Mackaye) and even a few apolitical ethical-egoist libertines (Albini, Frank Kozik) who are common in punk, but rare in its commentary. Sinker’s super-earnest intro text inserts all the right misgivings about Chumbawumba’s entryism or Kozik’s blithe first-generation patriotism; he somehow retains his beautiful faith in ‘Punk’ (as empowering civil-disobedient grass-roots social justice) in the face of vast variation in actual punks. My own attempt at the social meaning of punk gave up on seeing it as one thing (or even as generally good things) entirely. What are we to judge a social phenomenon by? Its majority expression? Its noblest exemplars? Its effects? (Which in punk’s case, let’s not flatter ourselves, were aesthetic rather than straightforwardly political: there is now slight freedom in clothing and hair colour in the workplaces of the land; there is now a standard pretence to deviance in all youth movements (e.g. pop music)...) Sinker’s judgment is strong (cf. writing the oral history of Black Flag, with each member contradicting each other!), but his prose is wearing. This is the real thing though: one type of inspirational, anti-inspirational person, in their own words.

Curated by someone I used to know, this anthology cuts a broad swath through a defunct magazine's myriad interview subjects. Some are more interesting than others, some are disappointing and a few are revelations. Ian McKaye, Sleater-Kinney, Noam Chomsky and Steve Albini all do more than enough to hold up their ends, and the deconstructions of Black Flag and Jawbreaker are particularly interesting. Some of the political stuff (Punk Voter 2004 anyone?) is painfully dated, but the interviews that call out the bombing campaign against Iraq that began in 1998 are a powerful reminder of a chunk of recent history that has largely been overwritten by subsequent events.