Why South Africans Need to Be Punk Rockers

Life lessons from the rebels of the 1970s.

In the mid ‘70s, a group of musicians around the world began to revolt against the hippie and cocaine-addled rock ‘n roll scene which had come to dominate after the end of the ‘60s.

Bands like The Ramones in the US and The Clash in the UK stripped down music to its bare bones and inspired people all around the world to start their own bands in their garage.

The tempo was fast, the songs were short, and the music was full of anger and love.

But the main idea was that it didn’t matter if you were not that good at music – you could pick up an instrument and play. Music was for everyone.

The Ramones in New York had certain rules too: jeans and leather jackets, you never turned to play to your band-mates – you always faced the audience, and every song had to be short and simple.

Now a lot of punk was ugly and anarchistic – but the best of it was also intensely traditional and geared towards popular tastes. Lead guitarist Johnny Ramone was famously conservative and believed he was saving rock ‘n roll, the kind he heard in the ‘50s, not killing music.

The point was big record label music had grown tired, and here were people reinventing pop music from the ground up.

There are some lessons for us today, particularly in South Africa.

Our nation is tired and stuck. Our economy needs reinvention and that reinvention is going to – has to – start in your garage. Where else would it?

To a large degree, in our mass, globalised world, people need a DIY approach to their careers and lives, to their education, and even to their family life. This is not the American ‘50s, where you get a job at the local firm, watch TV with your kids, and eat your wife’s apple pie. It’s a jungle out there. You need to carve your own niche and intentionally choose the life that is best, the good life.

There is no big government or big society or big corporation that is going to bail you out. We can complain about this – or we can celebrate being ‘punks’, who, like Johnny Ramone, can hearken back to older traditions and thus start something new.

So here are my four lessons to be learnt from the punks:

1. Build a DIY life. Read good books. Learn a trade or a craft. Write. Start a business. Start a website. That’s the future. Nobody can ever take a skill away from you.

2. In a globalised world, people are interested in craftsmanship. Cheap junk from China is depressing. Be a craftsman. The punk rockers rejected guitar effects, and drug-addled electronic music and commercial disco. Think of micro-breweries, the resurgence of printed books, antique furniture, and real, non-abstract art. To succeed, we are going to need to offer the world a genuine service, skill, or product.

3. Start with the grassroots. In a hyper-connected, alienating world, people want to know their neighbours. Hipsters want to live in the city. Grocery shoppers want to go to farmers’ markets. Play the local gigs. Small is beautiful.

4. Any rebellion worth its salt is intensely traditional. Otherwise you are just an angry poser. The best of punk rock simply considered itself rock ‘n roll, part of a thread that went all the way back to the Blues. Whatever your endeavour, go to the roots of it. There is no innovation without tradition. As TS Eliot put it, you cannot know your place in your craft unless you know its tradition, “unless [you are] conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

In short, I am not recommending life lessons from the punk rockers because they had a cool aesthetic – but because their DIY approach to music is becoming essential to business and life in our modern world.

It is only the Big Banks who get bail outs –not the little people. This is not a rehearsal. This is your life – and you need to live it yourself.

And beneath the DIY nature of punk lay a philosophy of authenticity. In a mass, consumer world, authenticity is something you have to fight for – you have to be a kind of punk, in other words.

But this dispensing of advice would be remiss if I did not mention that punk died in the ‘90s. Ultimately it failed. Now kids think computer music is the coolest.

But maybe there is a lesson in there too. Failure is part of life. But failure can be glorious and everlasting too. Like the Ramones, who never had a number one hit but became symbolic of an entire era, you can become too tough to die.