Feeling Ranty

[sen_no_ongaku]

I was thinking today about why mohawks -- and the punk dress code in general -- annoy me, and I think I've figured it out.

Because the punk aesthetic is an incredibly vain one. For example, imagine the effort it takes to wear a mohawk.[FN 1] Having to arrange it just right every morning, keeping the hair around it trimmed. Choosing what color to dye it and maintaining the color job.

Now that's not to say it's an inherently bad thing to care about your appearance. I am certainly aware of how I look, dress, and carry myself, and the impression that makes on family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Even choosing not to say something about yourself by how you present yourself...well, says something about yourself. The masks we wear can reveal as much as they hide.

No, what bothers me about the punk aesthetic is that it strikes me as hypocritical.

My understanding[FN 1] is that the punk attitude is one of rebellion, a rejection of the mainstream attitude towards, well, everything. Punk music was a rejection of craft and polish, of the bloated pretention of prog rock. Punk dress was intended to be a reflection of that; torn, graffiti-laced, metal-studded clothing -- intentionally ugly and abrasive. A big middle finger to the demands of society to look, behave, and act a certain way.

And despite all that, consider how much appearance means to punk. For all of its claims to anarchy and individualism, punk has its uniform and its codes of behavior just like any other tribe.

It never fails to amuse me that the Sex Pistols, the poster boys for late-'70s British anti-establishment sentiment, were managed and dressed by a fashion guru, Malcolm McLaren -- that their look was as much processed, polished, and marketed as the society they hated.

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(1)This is, of course, speculative, as I've never gone down that path.

(2) Which is perhaps more my understanding of late '70s-early '80s punk and may not be relevant to modern-day punk.

Comments

[2h2o.livejournal.com]

In Rotten, John Lydon gets into this a bit. McLaren owned a boutique called Sex, where he sold lots of edgy clothing, including the rubber shirts that show up in a few amusing anecdotes. He sold image, no question.

Lydon tells the story of watching the English punk fans carefully shaping their hair, then going to Sweden and hearing the kids their say "See how horribly I hacked off my hair!" In Lydon's words, the Swedes got it.

Outsiders becoming just as exclusionary as the society they reject is a pattern repeated endlessly.

[squirrelhaven.livejournal.com]

I went to grad school at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the writing students were the only ones who weren't technically in "art school." In order to get to my classes, I had to pass through a throng of identically black-clad, hair-dyed, multiply-pierced, chain-smoking, self-designated rebels. They never seemed to notice that they were all rebelling in the exact same ways. Meanwhile, I and my fellow writing students found ourselves dressing a bit more preppily than we used to, just to differentiate ourselves. At this school, wearing khakis became a transgressive statement. It was fascinating.