The Death Of Punk

I have a confession to make. I don’t hate Australian Idol, at least not as much as I think I should. Up until now, Idol has been fairly harmless, given that all it does is peddle shiny-looking pop to a vast, surprisingly bitchy constituency of thirteen-year-olds. And anything that helps young artists trying to make it in a tough and unforgiving industry should probably be supported, however dismal and bland the results.

But when Idol commits crimes against musical decency, it’s time to speak up. We all need to face the facts: as of 2005, Punk is finally dead, and while the likes of Good Charlotte and Avril Levigne remain the key culprits, Lee Harding is the biggest vulture feeding off its carcass.

Harding seemed unobjectionable enough when he appeared on Idol as a bouncy, punk-lite crowd pleaser doing the same goddamn thing each week (oh, wait, I forgot his rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Ben.” Oh look, I just forgot it again). His remorselessly cheery demeanour and oh-so-outrageously colourful hair came across as more Willy Wonka than Henry Rollins, but the audiences and the judges lapped it up. Except of course for the time he covered a song directly criticising George W. Bush and then immediately disavowed the song’s politics, giving me the horrible, horrible feeling of agreeing with Mark Holden as he paid out on him for singing a political song he didn’t himself agree (or disagree) with. Holden is clearly insane, but he’s absolutely right about this. You can’t sing something overtly political just because you like the music. Can you imagine, say, Joan Baez finishing a gig with “of course I don’t believe any of what I just said folks- now, bomb Vietnam! Bomb it I say! Goodnight Woodstock!”.

And now, predictably, Lee Harding has become the latest Idol stablemate to release an album (“What’s Wrong With This Picture”, an album title that invites a long and detailed answer). You’ll be pleased to know that the LP format really gives him a chance to flex his muscle and display his range, which spans the huge gap between “shameless Blink-182 knock-off” to “vaguely creepy Blink-182 knock-off.” His first single, the artlessly Seussian “Wasabi” supposedly charted strongly even though it demonstrates a complete failure to understand lyric writing, women or Japanese condiments:

She's just like wasabi
Looks like a barbie
Yeah she's too hot for me
She's like a tsunami
Can wipe out an army
With a blink of an eye, she can part the red sea

Yeah, Lee, every woman longs to be compared to a natural disaster. Gentlemen, write this down: liken a girl to a wall of water carving a swathe of destruction through the armed forces and she’ll be like putty in your hands. Oh and implying she’s at least as powerful as Moses is a winner to, apparently.

Harding goes on to describe his love interest as a jet-setting, champagne-sipping, bacon-eschewing vegan, who only ever wants “to do it with me.” Why he chose to make this character rich is unclear until you realise that Harding’s rhyming dictionary evidently started to run out around “Ferrari” and “Armani.” And by the time he starts alluding to her friendship with the Governor of California (“hangs out with Arnie”) and rhymes “Niagra” and “Viagra,” we are well and truly past the point of heeding Lee’s gasping, rattly pleas for mercy as we take turns standing on his throat.

Maybe it’s none of my clean-cut, not-even-remotely-punk business, but this is what passes for punk nowdays? We’re a long way from the Sex Pistols or Dead Kennedys when punk has become about trying to impress some girl using perky forced rhymes and frequent costume changes. Even when Harding tries to be explicit about his hardcore, gloriously self-destructive lifestyle it doesn’t work:

Let's not go to work
Let's just tell the boss he's a jerk
One day off won't hurt
Everybody needs to shirk
Let's just stay in bed
Eatin' Cheerios, getting stoned instead
Why get so upset?
Why don't we just stay in bed?

There’s various bong references through the song and even- heavens!- the f-word. Sure, it’s frightfully un-Idol to sing about drugs, but “lets sleep in and pull cones and eat Cheerios” is light years away from “Hey Nancy, let’s shoot up enough smack to kill a donkey and then cut ourselves up for a bit.” Lyrics about staying up until 4am to watch re-runs? The Carpenters rocked harder than that, dude. And “It’s twelve o’clock and I haven’t had my coffee yet” is hardly a searing evocation of angst-ridden alienation at the margins of society. Of course I’m not saying you have to live a life of aimless debauchery or terrible deprivation to be taken seriously; plenty of bands don’t. But did, say, Fugazi write songs about taking tea and scones in the rotunda? Not as far as I recall, no.

Sadly, “crossover toy” seems to be our biggest musical export these days. There seems to be some arcane formula being finessed by record company A&R folks: “Take a pop base but chuck in maybe 24% hard rock? Hmmm… needs to rock out by maybe another 2.5 points- no, wait, a bit less or we’ll scare the tweens. No, now it’s too dance, just pull it back 1.3% or we’ll lose the skaters. And… got it! Somebody book a slot on Sunrise!” The result is bands like Rogue Traders who seem earnest but sound like they were crapped out by a focus group. Getting excited by their songs is like trying to rock out to a Fanta commercial. My fiance summed up Rogue Traders best: “this is what someone thinks a rock band sounds like”.

You might think none of this stuff matters. If this is what The Kids want to listen to these days, what of it? If Lee Harding can sell records without having any recognisable street cred, more power to him, right? After all, cynically mass-produced musical garbage is nothing new: look at the seemingly endless parade of non-threatening, cardigan-wearing male vocal groups in the 50s. But when the apparatuses of the music industry co-opt the very notion of rebellion against mass-produced schlock, it’s gone too far. The whole point of punk was that it was supposed to be fearlessly anti-commercial and anti-conformist, and yet here we have non-conformity crafted by Sony BMG executives and served up in as demographic-conscious way imaginable. And when that happens, we- and by ‘we’ here I mean anyone who cares about music with a bit of grunt and integrity to it, not necessarily punk (I’m actually not really into punk myself)- have lost something important. When music that bucks the system itself gets taken up into the system, what’s left?

And this matters because the music industry sometimes reaches a point of stasis where it needs a short, sharp shock from outside that system to kick start it. I still remember the first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” [Cue Wonder Years flashback]. The year was 1991, I was a gawky, uncoordinated thirteen-year-old with a terrible haircut, and FM radio was dominated by soulless hair-metal (Anyone remember Extreme? Scorpions? Def Leppard?) and such immortal dance acts as Kris Kross, Technotronic, KLF and Guru Josh (full marks for chutzpah, Mr. Josh, but boldly declaring “Nineteen Nineties: time for the Guru” turned out to be a bit premature). Oh and I think that band Sophie Lee was in was around then too. It should tell you everything you need to know about that awful musical epoch that the only piece of music to survive it in popular consciousness was Snap’s “I’ve Got The Power” and that’s only because advertisers won’t let it die.

Then suddenly I was watching TV and there was this… this thing. It was raw and uncompromising and I was utterly terrified. Here was a guy in a tatty jumper and completely non-permed hair screetching that “with the lights out it’s less dangerous,” while a high school gym full of people flung themselves around in front of tattooed cheerleaders. This was a sound that hadn’t been processed to sterile, lifeless perfection in a studio in LA; in fact it sounded as if it hadn’t been processed at all. This was the resentful growl of a fuzz-boxed Fender Mustang being punished in a suburban garage. There was no noodley show-off guitar solo deploying rapid trills for the sake of speed rather than music, just a tortured, whining melody line that you could play on one finger. Someone was doing this in their garage, and you could do it too. It was frightening and captivating and nothing could ever- EVER- be the same again. It’s easy to exaggerate from this distance but there is no question that Nirvana changed music irrevocably, rescuing it from the slick, pointless cul de sac in which it had found itself.

I guess my point here is that rock has always been a music of rebellion. At its heart has always been a deep antipathy to the corporate structures that inevitably come to control and overwhelm it. If its power and honesty is to survive its own success it needs people who are going to challenge us, to shock us, to scare us. And that ain’t you, Lee.