It's One Thing to Start It With a Positive Jam, It's Another Thing to See It All Through
In reading Jerry z. Muller’s The Mind and The Market, I was struck by the following passage about the ideological context from which one of Germany’s proto-Nazi intellectuals emerged:
[Fascist theorist and future anti-Hitler conspirator Hans] Freyer’s main reference group during his university years was the youth movement, one of the most extraordinary phenomena of early-twentieth-century Germany. The Jugendbewegung, as its name implies, was a loose federation composed mostly of children of the educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum). The members of the youth movement were disaffected by what they saw as the ascendancy of materialistic values and the prestige accorded to wealth in the culture of Wilhemine Germany. They were critical of rote patriotism, swore off the hedonism and anti-intellectualism of the fraternities, and tried abstinence from tobacco, alcohol, and meat. Through nascent counterinstitutions they sought to minimize contact with the fraternity student, the bourgeoise, and the bureaucrat. …Freyer shared their yearning for an intense emotional commitment to a community of purpose that they found lacking in contemporary Germany.
If the description above included something about “hating hippies,” it would describe in spooky exactitude the hardcore punk scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. That scene served as a sort of ideological Galapagos, in which “communities of purpose” evolved into a baffling array of sub-subcultures, marked by increasingly subtle differences in music and politics.
For good and ill, the romantic Jugendbewegung left its fingerprints all over German culture for generations hence. Hardcore certainly hasn’t had the same impact, but its communitarian intuitions might die hard among its alumni, who are old enough to be in the business of shaping opinions today. Are there any examples of hardcore’s suburban tribalist 12-step program evolving into a more sophisticated social critique? Any writers or critics on the right or left whose perspectives bear the hardcore punk pedigree? Just wondering.
(Gorilla Biscuits photo courtesy of Flickr user IMAGORA Editions and a Creative Commons license)
I was never a fan or part of the hardcore straight-edge scene (and certainly not the interwar German bohemian right-wing scene!), but I have to say, posts like this are what make me come back to read The American Scene.
The whole world of right-wing bohemianism in the interwar period in Germany is a fascinating one. I’ve only read a little about it and its thinkers (Tom Reiss’s “The Orientalist” is a good read, or anything by or about Ernst Junger), but it really is something worth looking at.
— Mark in Houston · Sep 10, 03:38 AM · #
Are you talking about a pedigree that’s exclusively hardcore-influenced? I’m not sure that that’s possible — I had about ten months of that in 1996 or so and somewhere along the way realized that listening to hardcore exclusively was maybe not the best idea in the world.
In terms of political writers I read, Spencer Ackerman references punk and hardcore a fair amount: http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/
I’m also going to throw in some self-promotion and link the paper I gave at last year’s Experience Music Project Pop Conference on the topic of basement shows: http://www.yourbestguess.com/scowl/from-a-basement-show-on-a-hill/
And I’d say a fair amount of critics I read have a hardcore or punk background — though a lot depends on where you’re looking.
To be honest, I don’t know as much about hardcore’s influence (if any) on right-leaning political writers. Periodically, I’ll read something about the ‘conservative punk’ movement (which I believe Dave Smalley of Dag Nasty/All/Down by Law was affiliated with), but besides that… I’d definitely think that it does exist, but I don’t entirely know where to look.
Part of that may be that a lot of my interest in politics stems from the more political side of the hardcore I grew up with — essentially, a kind of deepening of the more liberal/progressive/contrarian ideas I was exposed to. To the extent that there was a quasi-conservative side to it….I’m thinking mostly of hardline* here, and I don’t entirely know where exactly that could evolve.
*-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardline_(syncretic_movement)
— Tobias · Sep 10, 03:51 AM · #
Hell, it sounds like the hardcore scene I grew up around in the 00’s, too.
— keh · Sep 10, 04:24 AM · #
Yeah, but Spackerman’s annoying as hell with it. ‘Hey guys! I listen to hardcore, punk and coke rap! Isn’t that cool?!’
— val · Sep 10, 01:25 PM · #
The one person I think of from the hardcore scene from the ’80s that seems to have carried it through to the end is Ian Mackaye from Minor Threat/Fugazi and he has a more liberal political bend. He was prominently featured in the documentary “American Hardcore” that covered the early years of the scene. I grew up listening to post-Minor Threat straightedge in the ’90s (Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, Dag Nasty, BOLD, etc.) and it definitely led me in a more conservative political direction. I think most people in that scene that took the lyrical content of the music seriously went further left or right than the typical person based on the tendencies of idealism & defensiveness inherent in counterculteral scenes that is also present in political ideologies. Although I don’t know much about the German scene you mentioned, the violence that developed in some of the more militant “youth crews” in the ’90s US hardcore scene had tinges of fascism and even racism in certain areas. Thanks for bringing back some mostly good memories with this post and especially the GB picture. I’ve added “Start Today” to my MP3 player a few months ago in a fit of hardcore nostalgia and I might have to find my headphones and listen it over lunch.
— MikeD · Sep 10, 03:21 PM · #
To take a stab at characterizing the basic similarity between the prewar Jugendbewegung—which involved an awful lot of hippie-type activities like hiking, singing folk songs, denouncing authoriarianism, and eating whole grains—and any number of youth subcultures of recent times, hippie-ish and hippie-hating alike: the bourgeois participants see the larger bourgeois society around them as bad and conceive of this badness in abstract terms. The youth of the Jugendbewegung saw themselves as representing “spirit,” whereas their elders, the philistines they railed against, were “spiritlessness“—not exactly the stuff of trenchent political critique. The conspiratorial concept of “corporate power” that punks used to rail against was, arguably, every bit as abstract as the youth movement’s idea of “spiritlessness.” Cut off from meaningful political action by the abstractness of their own diagnoses of the badness of bourgeois society, the rebellious youth of Wilhelmine Germany and late Reagan America alike ended up instead marking their rebellion by personally abstaining from bad things (tobacco, alcohol, meat), retreating into a purism that in turn calls for—and reinforces—a proliferation of tiny “communities” dedicated to upholding the chosen taboos in their many possible permutations.
It is strikingly spooky.
— Annie · Sep 10, 03:24 PM · #
I know it’s not a perfect fit, but I think Henry Rollins overlaps enough to be worth mentioning
— colin · Sep 11, 03:52 PM · #