von_geisterhand

Here we have a book collecting accounts of various blokes' first sex:


Does that not speak of silent sexuality blooming? Tender touches and the moment when a boy becomes a man? Does it not? Well, at least it speaks of sex about to be initiated. Houston, we are getting naked! It may not reflect my personal experience but it sure is a good cover for a book about sex.

Now here we have the cover of a book about the same subject by the same author, only this time dealing with accounts by women.



Excuse me, what the fuck is this? It looks like a bloody ad for sanitary towels, maybe even medication against nervous bowels. This does not scream sex or even sensuality, except of course if you see women as mainly tender emotional creatures frozen with fear in the headlights of their first erection. What is the thinking behind this? How is this to be representative?

If you ever felt discontent with what is nowadays advertised as, claimed to be and/or sold as punk, if you ever thought "What happened to those ideals and grand ideas that some of these older folk sometimes talk about?" or if you are just in any way interested in some of the "deeper" aspects of punk (or of those genres that punk gave birth to), you can really do a lot worse than picking up (and reading!) "The Philosophy of Punk" by Craig O'Hara.
It's good to read, not to heavy to carry and it makes some fantastic points about what the original idea of punk was/is (like, for example totally liberal, anti-sexist and anti-racist. Years later we suddenly had Limp Bizkit. How did that happen?) and what the fuck happened for it to nowadays quite ofteb simply reflect the good old traditional bigoted values punk was supposed to gob at. Not to mention fuckheads proper that really seem driving by nothing but wanting to be even holier than the last holier-than-thou-guy and don't mind breaking a few skulls on the way. (Seriously, how can you unironically call your band "Vegan Reich"?)

Some of the stuff O'Hara suggests seems simple but turns all elusive on you once you try to work out what it actually means or even try to incorporate it into your day-to-day life. What I really enjoyed about the book, though, is that it is totally subjective. O'Hara, true to the DIY-Think-for-yourself ethic, makes some very good points to start examining the "scene" with but in the end, there are enough vague spots to force you to figure it out for yourself. That's the wonder of it. What it certainly does is make you want to actually get up and do something about the issues/points that you feel discontent about, not just mope about how things used to be so much better "back in the day".
And it doesn't just work for punk or related genres. Personally, I know little about rap culture* and even less about the original revolutionary energy of Techno that I keep on reading about, but I suspect that a lot of the points raised in this book also apply to these genres.

The book comes highly recommended.


*but always think of some lines from Dälek's Distorted Prose when thinking about modern mainstream rap:
"Bleak circumstance led masses to only want to dance
A bastard child of Reaganomics posed in a B-Boy stance"