Nov 30 2007
“If you will dare, I will dare.”
I’m still musing over the relation, if any, of punk rock and writing fiction. I know my previous discussion of The Replacements’ may have seemed strange in this context, so here are some more thoughts.
Writing and music are very different art forms. Music has a live performance angle, it has a group dynamic, it has abstraction in the use of sound that is very different then words on a page. As noted earlier, you can’t be too punk rock in writing because, as they say, writing has to make sense (does John Zorn? The Fall?). Can you, as punk rock does, break the rules of grammar and syntax and expect to have anyone accept you? Hey, Ho, Hell No! At least not in the final draft.
So where does a punk rock spirit exist in the writing world? Attitude and subject matter for sure (Bukowski and Crews come to mind), but I think the heart of a punk rock ethos in writing is in how you approach drafting stories. Not the final draft. Think of that as they demo tape, where you cleaned up the vocals a bit and doubled up the guitar tracks to make things thicker than your dime-store imitation Les Paul and five watt shitkicker amp could handle. (I miss my shitkicker amp, not very loud but it had the kind of distortion that would have made Link Wray and Husker Du proud).
That first draft can be very punk rock. Just gun it. Try something new. Who gives a rat’s ass, no one is watching you anyway, so go for the throat and kick out the jams. Brainstorming can be punk rock: cranking out different ideas than you normally would, stranger stuff than your normal meat and potatoes. Experimenting in form, content and genre can be really punk rock: give a western a whirl, a crime tale a shot, a horror story a stab, a fantasy a chance, a space opera a crack. This really reminds of the ‘Mats, who would occasionally do an all rockabilly set or do covers of Black Sabbath endlessly or switch instruments to create some fresh danger (and their version of Hey Good-lookin’ is a bona-fide classic with one of the WORST guitar solos of all time, yet it makes me smile every time I hear it).
Risking something different in the face of the status quo (including your own) is very punk rock. I tried some of that this week. I did free-writing to an acoustic CD my lady bought me. Just wrote whatever came into my head as the song filled the space. The results weren’t stories, but little vignettes that could be stories. The coolest thing about it was that while the content of the these sketches and images were 100% my voice, the form they took was miles away from any of the stories that I was planning on writing. These vignettes were coming from somewhere else, as if I’d found a trapdoor to new material that was strange yet familiar at the same time.
Some of them were bad. Others really neat. Others average. Some feel like flash fiction, others snippets from novels, and some short stories. Others are just vignettes. But in an hour I generated fourteen possibilities that would have never, ever crossed my brain unless I got out of my skin and tried a new approach, took a risk going somewhere new instead of pounding the same old pavement. And yet, they still feel like my kinda stories.
Now that, boyos, is punk rock.
JSR
One response so far
While, as you point out, you need more than three chords and an attitude to produce great or even good fiction, I definitely agree with you than there’s an ethos that can cross the line from music to literature. I’d add to your example the idea that the Replacements et al didn’t sit around worrying about what the market wanted at any particular moment but just grabbed their instruments and did their thing as only they could do it. (Of course the Sex Pistols were as packaged and marketed as the Spice Girls or any boy band, so maybe that’s the punk rock exception that proves the rule?)
Anyway (switching gears a bit since I quickly start to sound like an idiot discussing music with people who are actually knowledgeable), there’s also the DIY-feel of outfits like Small Beer Press (and other small presses, too, but SBP always seemed more like it arose from zine culture than other small presses, so I always think of it first).
Down with the status quo!