Punk Blogging

My pal Fester has a great post over at Comments From Left Field today. Basically he is suggesting that the days of the underground are coming to an end in the field of blogging - the feeling of being rebels on the edge is fading fast as the establishment has successfully co-opted the biggest names in the field and now will come the days of the "hair metal" bloggers. It's an interesting analogy even if it doesn't work perfectly and certainly food for thought.

Stranger at Blah3 also thought so and has his own take on the idea, citing a post I wrote back before Christmas - that the days of the "punk" lefty blogosphere have already been and gone some time ago.

It's long been a game of a few people at the top, linking back and forth to each other and creating a elite class of bloggers that has become impossible to crack. That's not a complaint - it's just the way it is, and the way it's been for a pretty long time.

...The real punks are the ones who are showing up on the doorstep of the A-Listers and making noise. There used to be an unwritten rule in punk rock - if you called yourself a punk, there would always be someone there who would call you a poser.

Which, I have to say, is exactly how I remember it.

But the real punks were always the ones with a mission, too. It wasn't about the money and it wasn't always about the love of music. It was about a third option that Glenn Reynolds, as he riffs on a similiar theme, fails to contemplate. The best of the punk movement (at least in Britain, and I admit it may have been more hedonistic in the U.S.) was about the politics and the protest. Bands like the Cramps and the Clash, events like the Rock Against Racism concerts, protest movements giving rise to cross-fertilizations like the punk alliances with the likes of acid-bands Hawkwind and Gong which gave rise to the heady free festivals like Stonehenge and Glastonbury and eventually to the whole "techno" rave movement. Back then, we were faced in the UK by a regime every bit as authoritarian, as fat-cat and as fascist as the current Bush regime and the feelings ran similiarly high. Punk began as a backlash against the musak that said nothing that was in our hearts as that regime ruined our young lives and almost immediately became the voice and direction of our outrage.

True punk reached out, was grassroots active and eclectic in it's alliances and influences. You didn't have to be a punk to be a friend of Punk - just have that protest singing loud in you.

So it should be with the Left of the current blogosphere. Friends are where the outrage and the protest is. Our solidarity should not be about the A List or about the establishment "opposition" who do so little to relieve the pressure on the nation. Our solidarity is where we find it, where we create it.

Solidarinosc.