A few days before I left Sweden for South Africa a friend of mine told me that some people are "concerned" with me having changed appearance. What the fuck?! Yes I have changed appearance, I don't have spikes or a mohawk(s) in a thousand colours anymore, nor do I wear my studded leather jacket and vegetarian steel capped boots. Why not? First off: Imagine yourself travelling with all that gear, and i'm gonna be on the road for a pretty long time. These past years my has appearance evolved not only resemble my new way of life, but also because it became more comfortable(for an example) wearing sneakers, black loose clothing etc. Makes travelling a hell of a lot easier. I still repair my own clothes, still D.I.Y. as fuck. But the thing is, just because my appearance and my lifestyle has evolved doesn't have to mean that i've become "normal" and have decided that i'm gonna get myself a house, two dogs, a car and a wife in a friendly crime-free neighbourhood(i'm actually doing quite the opposite, getting rid of everything in order to live MY life the way I want to live it, now that's punkrock if anything!). If you, the idiots who are seemingly assuming things behind my back would've come up to me and asked me not only what I was doing, why I went off to the forests for several months, and how I was doing, things would've been so much better, wouldn't it?
That's the problem with the scene today. As soon as someone sticks out or changes a wee bit, we assume and turn to gossip behind that person's back, or even spit at her/him. I did that myself when I was younger, always hated when people changed, since I thought punkrock was leather, studs, spikes, steel capped boots and a huge record collection. But it isn't. It's way more than that.
I find it quite funny that in a scene where we all claim to be free individuals, different in our own world, we are actually clones of one and another. We dress the same as thousands of others in our little "free" world. We think the same, we talk the same, we even fucking walk the same. And as for the rest of society, we're still the same as everything else, only that we're something of a "tribe", our own "secret" society or more precisely, a subculture. We gossip, we lie, we bullshit one another, we spend our time creating drama, we instigate, we drink, we hunt the pussy/the dick, we do drugs, we use money, some of us pay rent, some of us work or live on welfare, we're like some fucking big brother-show, but with thousands of participants. The worst part is, if you do not dress in a certain way, listen to certain bands, wear the right patches etc you have a problem being accepted, and everyone knows about this bullshit, but in the same time we refuse to acknowledge it. We apply the same group pressure we claim to be free of. And then we have the rockstar behaviour: If you play in the right band, or know the right people, everyone will, without question, kiss your ass.
Anyone who are familiar with The Restarts can look up the song "Static", there you have what I feel, and have felt for years. After years of mental decay, depression, friends fading or dying off I've simply decided to take matters into my own hands.
Don't take me wrong here, I love punkrock and the spirit of punk. Punk has kept me alive since I was 12-13 years old. Giving me hope and strength when the world was crashing down all at once around me, several times throughout the years. It has given me reason to go on. It was(and still is) a world for me where I could find other fucked up individuals coming from shattered homes with no hope of a bright future. It was something I could call home. But as the years went by I started seeing all the hypocrisy, the hidden hierarchy which is, unfortunately, a huge part of the scene today. To be honest, I hate it. But I love punkrock and the spirit of punk, always have, always will. I'm not leaving the scene, I am, as I mentioned above, evolving into something more. Instead of spending day in and day out complaining about the world, the society and the system, spending my weekends on punkrock gigs getting drunk or fucked up on drugs i'm off to do something. I react to my situation, to my dreams, my fear and my hate towards this society. I'm taking action and that is punk if anything. A slap in the face. I've been slapped in the face by life for 27 years, now i'm slapping back and reclaiming what is rightfully mine: my right to live my life on my terms.
Do I claim to know what punk is? Can I describe it? We all know what punk is, but at the same time we don't. Punk is something similar to Zen(quite an off comparison I know); it's a contradiction. Punk is taking back control of your own life. Punk is purely individual. Punk is life. Punk is hate, love, activism, politics, chaos, rage, tenderness, gutters, trees, squats, open spaces, cities, forests and mountains, it is our planet, the essence of all life. Punk is human. Now that is my interpretation of Punk, each and everyone of us has their own(hopefully) version of what punk really is. It's all up to you. Punk for me is not having the biggest record collection ever, not mohawks or spikes nor studded jackets or steel capped boots. For me that is a label. Although a really neat looking label, but it doesn't really make us free, does it?
Another piece of honesty: About a year ago, a wee bit more, I tried to fuck off from the scene, I was so sick of all the bullshit and the hypocrisy(and the booze and the drugs) that I wanted to say "fuck it" and disappear into the mist. But that didn't work very well, did it? I can't change who I have become, what this world has turned me into, my roots. I am a punk and I can't change that, nor do I want to. A while I even tried to adapt to some aspects of the scene because I felt lonely, imagine that, to feel lonely in a scene which claims to stand together. But I did, people died off or faded away and so did the world around me several times, and I tried to adapt and evolve in order not to feel lonely. But it didn't quite work, just made me feel more and more like an outsider in a world which I saw as my home, and still is. So here I am, saying fuck off to everything except myself. Fuck off to all you hypocrites, all you liars, backstabbers and two-faced cunts. Fuck all you so called rockstars and you fucks who claim themselves to be the perfect punkrocker/squatter/anarchist/activist/hobo. Fuck off to all you fucks who didn't support me when I had my mental breakdown and I didn't want to drink alcohol, you fucks who instead wanted to offer me beer in order to make me feel better(which you didn't, you only wanted a drinking companion and thought you were doing something good since you paid for the beer), fuck all of you who didn't fucking bother to ask how I was doing, why I was doing what i've been doing in order to do what i'm doing right now. Fuck all of you who were just interested in having me to come to shows so I could swag a few beers with you.
And my deepest respect to those of you who have been there, supporting me, understanding me and talked to me and listened to my ramblings about life throughout these past years. Much love to you, you know who you are. Wherever I go, you are there as well.
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