The NYT styles section has a intriguing piece on what it says is a "new trend" of punk rock fans going conservative, with groups like GOPunk posting pro-Bush rhetoric online. Says one punk conservative:
"It turns out there are a lot of people who like a certain music and like to dress a certain way, but who want to think for themselves politically," he said. "They were being told by their favorite bands they couldn't think this way, but they did, and they still liked the music."
My first thought was that "conservative punks" represent just another hoodwinking of the Times style section by clever young media manipulators. It seems just too convenient, and too ironic not to be an upside-down media play.
The background that made me suspicious was a 1994 article in the NYT Styles section, which claimed that young grunge fans in Seattle had invented a whole lexicon of strange and compelling slang, with phrases like "harsh realm" (meaning "too bad") and "wack slacks" (meaning pants). Turns out the whole slang lexicon was fake, a sneaky postmodern hoax job engineered by a crew of close friends in the grunge scene. The Baffler ran a piece on the trickery, entitled "Harsh Realm, Mr. Sulzberger!", and rightly got much exposure for it. (The piece is anthologized in the Baffler's amazing Commodify Your Dissent.)
But Fugazi member Ian MacKaye places the conservative punk "phenomenon" in exactly the place where it belongs -- the free-for-all space of infinite consumer choice under capitalism:
Mr. MacKaye likened the punk aesthetic to furniture. "Once it's built you can put it into any house," he said. "You can be a lefty and go to Ikea or you can be a right-winger and go to Ikea." Punk, he said, "is a free space where anything can go — a series of actions and reactions, and people rebelling and then rebelling against rebelling."
MacKaye is almost quoting his own lyrics from "And the Same" here:
and the same could be said for all the people lying dead
for them to die was a distraction and what they found a bit too late
got covered up with all that hate
and now it's nothing but reaction action. reaction. action. reaction.
So the "GOPunk" phenomenon is a weird echo of the "Harsh Realm" case: an example of corporate culture's tone-deaf adoption of subcultural values, which is then picked up and transmitted into the subculture itself. The Baffler notes that after the NYT piece ran, some grungesters began to use the terms described therein -- a classic case of the reportage creating the reality, sure, but also a case of the corporate virus's self-injection into an unfriendly host. This very issue has been a contested space throughout the history of punk, as exemplified by the Clash song "Lost in the Supermarket":
I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality
There could be no one less friendly to capitalism than Ian MacKaye, but notice how he uses the vocabulary -- "you can be a lefty and go to Ikea" -- to show how punk gives the individual an infinite range of political choices. You can have whatever politics you like, but as long as you buy the right stuff, you're still a punk.