Frank Kogan

Well, if you read the full piece (pp 3-4 in my book), what I was angling at was the idea that real punk criticizes, savages, undercuts itself and its audience, whereas the new stuff (new in the early '80s) doesn't. But anyway, putting aside whether I was right, there's no reason that such an argument couldn't be right.

Also, your mention of mascara and emo and hot topic is irrelevant here, since I wasn't associating the idea of cliché with any of those: you associated what I was saying with "fashion": there's nothing I wrote that says that real punk, whatever that is, can't also be a fashion; what I'm saying is that current punk (c. 1985) substituted the symbols for the real thing. But I'm saying nothing about whether the real thing in its time had been more or less fashionable than hardcore was now (and in fact, given that I was basically counting Stones and Dylan as ur-punk, one could say that hardcore was less fashionable than punk once had been). Anyway, you projected "fashion" onto the idea of "musical/clothing signs" - an understandable projection, but certainly older punk had also used musical/clothing signs, and anyway it had been a musical fashion - and then you projected mascara etc. onto the idea of fashion (did mascara symbolize punk in 1985? maybe to Motley Crue and Hanoi Rocks, but not to the hardcore punks I was taking aim at, and I don't think I'd even heard Crue or Hanoi Rocks). But anyway, to repeat what I wrote, which I haven't repudiated:

So now [1985] so many musicians conform to the idea of truth that says that truth is raw, ugly, and primitive that this primitiveness is a cliché, it's a new brand of deodorant, punk-hardcore deodorant; ultimately, it's nothing. Punk isn't punk anymore, it's a bunch of musical/clothing signs that symbolize punk. It's closer to literature or advertising than to music.

And the nub of the issue is: you're saying that I'm rockist if I'm wrong but that I'm not rockist if I'm right. Whereas I think I'm coming pretty close to rockism either way. So I'm challenging the idea that this particular form of the "rockist" argument - something was vital but got reduced to a cliché, and the symbol now stands in for the event - is necessarily wrong.

And then the next point would be, can't someone present such an argument not because he's a rockist but because the argument is right in that particular circumstance?