Why the Internet is Punk

Guest Post by Elmo Keep August 02

The leap between the original punk movement of the 1970s and Star Wars fandom on the internet today is not as big as you might think.

When you enter ‘Avatar make up tutorial’ into Google, it returns over 2500 video results. Coming in at the top is this:

which you may recognize, and as you can see, has been viewed over two million times. The girl in this video, whose name is Gloria, became a minor internet celebrity after her excitable paean to James Cameron’s Na’vi did the rounds of the web; being posted at Boing Boing, after which it quickly became a meme, was picked up by dozens of highly trafficked blogs, and had several parody videos made in its honour. As is sometimes the nature of the web, Gloria also fell briefly into the internet hate machine, with hundreds of derogatory comments left on her video, mostly by people who missed the fact she was joking (this is further fuel for my theory that the best and worst of humanity can be found in the comments on YouTube.) The Jonas Brothers poster behind her probably didn’t help. Yet, far from letting this get to her, in true punk rock style, Gloria capitalized on her micro fame and started her own YouTube channel. There, she now provides dozens of other how-to videos – all of which are sitting on nearly one million hits or more. She gives us the Emo Gothic Make up Tutorial, in which she takes a swipe at woe-is-me emo attitudes, lets us know her ‘slave name is Emma’ warning ‘If you don’t look dead, you aren’t wearing enough eyeliner’, boasts of killing her parents at age thirteen, and tells us about feeding a truancy letter to her pet dragon.

She also provides a walkthrough for something called Ganguro:

Having no idea what Ganguro was, I looked it up and found that it is a kind of Japanese blackface. It was ‘an alternative fashion trend of blonde or orange hair and tanned skin among young Japanese women that peaked in popularity around the year 2000.’

Further: ‘Ganguro falls into the larger subculture of gyaru, a slang term used for various groups of young women. Ganguro is a form of revenge against traditional Japanese society, built on a resentment of neglect, isolation, and the constraint of Japanese life. This is their attempt at individuality, self-expression, and freedom, in open defiance of school standards and regulations.’

Which sounds a lot like the original UK punks: ‘open defiance, a form of revenge against traditional society’. Still earlier than that, going back to the 1950s and the post second world war popularisation of the teenager; James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, that phrase applies perfectly.

Ganguro, like punk or any number of other subcultures, is also associated with a pop music genre: ‘The ganguro culture is often linked with para para, a Japanese dance style. However, most para para dancers are not ganguro, and most ganguro are not para para dancers, though there are many who are ganguro or gal and dance para para.’ So ganguro – as so adroitly illustrated by that tortured sentence — also has a bunch of complicated rules attached to it, like most subcultures do, which is the second most ironic part of aligning yourself with something which you feel will allow you to express your individuality. Along with the hundreds, or thousands, or sometimes hundreds of thousands of other people who also identify with it, and share this feeling of rebellion.

So any subculture, whether it’s punks, mods, rockers, metal heads, skin heads, emos, Goths, skaters, surfers, Norwegian death metal:

will allow you to rebel, so long as you observe the right protocols: wear the right clothes and make up, go to the right clubs, listen to the right records, avoid the right people, disown the right cultural norms, and otherwise spend a lot of money on showing everyone how different you are. In the case of Norwegian black metal, some of the rites of passage are so extreme, like killing people and burning Churches, that perhaps I shouldn’t treat it so flippantly (SORRY ALL BLACK METAL FANS AMONG US).

These rules are all so tiring! So not punk rock! I am weary with irony! What is there left to do for the modern music fan who wants to show, in this age of a million micro sub-genres, just how achingly unique they are? Well, you could get this shirt and hope you never run into another person also wearing it.

How does this all lead back to the internet and contemporary expressions of sub cultural fandom? If you strip away all the ironies of punk and its many rules and conventions that have to be properly observed and adhered to in order for you to be a punk (which was much more so in the case of London in the late seventies and less so the US West Coast punk scene of the early 1980s, where rules were looser, and often non-existent), what’s left as the lasting cultural impact of the punk movement is the idea of doing it yourself: DIY culture. You can be a musician, you can be in a band even if you aren’t a great player — it doesn’t matter. You just need, as someone once said ‘a red guitar, three chords and the truth.’ No high production values required, be your own distributor, just take a cut through message, a good idea, and the drive to follow it through. Punk said, you can defiantly make something happen.

And nowhere else is DIY more prominently on display than on the internet, everywhere in the world, every day. We have seen this democratisation of technology adopt the ethos of punk and apply them to new forms of expression; everything from writing your novel on Twitter, to seed funding a feature film, to releasing a self-produced record on MySpace — all were possible and freed from the overarching corporate structures of mass production which were previously required to produce these works.

From Avatar make up tutorials, to Comic Con, a huge mash-up pop cultural gathering in San Diego which more recently has become a mainstream media-covered event. At Comic Con, fans dress as their favourite sci-fi and comic characters, and meet up to do… whatever, which is where this kind of subcultural fandom crosses over with another: Cosplay. Cosplay, a truncation of ‘costume play’ is again a movement with its roots in Japanese youth culture, where fans of anime, comic book and gaming culture make hand created replica costumes, often of incredible detail.

Cosplay has for some time been co-opted by Western fandom, and the term now refers to ‘any costumed role play in venues apart from the stage, regardless of the cultural context.’ And here are some cosplay Star Wars fans keeping it real:

What does punk have to do with Star Wars? Mixing elements of subcultural fandom, creation and DIY ethos, Star Wars fans all over the world have adopted the ultimate DIY project with which to express their love of the film, by contributing to a crowd-sourced recreation of it, where anyone can choose a 15 second clip and add it to the hundreds and hundreds of others which all form part of the ongoing project. Some are hilariously low budget, others lovingly created with amazing attention to details like this animated sequence.

Why this is to me a particularly punk rock endeavour, is not just the ‘anyone can do it’ nature of the project, but that it is being done for no reason other than because it can be. It’s not masquerading as some viral marketing campaign for Star Wars, nor does the site support advertising or have a sponsor of any kind: it is made purely out of love, and its participants engage with the idea to be part of a larger community.

The other dominant legacy gleaned from punk is the expression of cultural subversion: performing transgressive acts often of a political nature in a public arena. Whether that was Sinead O’Connor tearing a photo pf the Pope up on Letterman, Malcolm McLaren orchestrating a Sex Pistols performance on a boat on the River Thames, mocking the Queen’s Jubilee while blasting God Save The Queen across the water and into the houses of Parliament (for this, they were all arrested, but the single did go to number one).

Or, these guys at Comic Con, mocking the Westboro Baptist Church.

The Westboro Baptist Church, a hateful, supposedly Calvinist almost-cult bunch of fundamentalists (talk about subgenres!) who like to picket events with their infamous, neon painted ‘God Hates Fags’ placards. Events like soldiers’ funerals and for some reason, Comic Con in the hope of bringing media attention upon themselves so they might spread their gospel of the on-coming end of the world. This year, Comic Con attendees knew that the Church was planning a picket of their event, and using the web to spread their intentions among their community, media-jammed the picket with geek speak placards, staging a playful, effective piece of political performance art. International news coverage ensued, and as the fanboys and girls would say, Westboro was PWND.

Nerds are the true punks of today, and the internet is their CBGBs.

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