rock = shit
What is rock? What is punk? In the early days, rock was like someone building a huge monument of shit and placing it in the middle of a square in front of their town hall. Everyone ran away in horror, except for those who appreciated its provocative intent and felt represented by it. Then everyone started thinking that, in the context of so many shit statues, a culture could be built, a museum, a festival where enlightened minds could waste time and make money talking about how important the shit statues had been for the culture of their time. And this allegory makes me think about what rock would be if it were an ideology, and what it actually was in 20th-century history.
In the 1950s, it was dangerous swaying to simulate intimate pelvic movements... In the 60s, it was drugs, disinhibition, rebellion against the Vietnam War, which we Italians aped without bearing any of its weight. The struggles here were different: the Years of Lead. If someone got pissed off, they didn't put flowers in gun barrels: they put bombs under cars or bodies in trunks. People lost all sense of right and wrong; everything was used as a weapon to terrorize.
But then, musically, rock was appreciated, pop was appreciated, light music was appreciated. Prog flourished, which diluted and perfumed that charge of irreverence so that no one gave a damn anymore about intruding on the lives of the respectable. Sure, there was research, experimentation. But true rock wasn't about compositional skill or virtuosity. Punk was born as a response, borrowing from garage rock's ignorance its rage and freshness, and in the 70s it represented rebellion. Post-punk, post-rock: other ideas, other history, sure. The 80s with thrash metal and hardcore punk? The 90s of grunge, lo-fi, garage rock revival, and all the scenes derived from house and techno?
And what about television and cinema? Television evolved alongside recorded music, both became something everyone could consume, for better or worse, starting with the radio. Free radio died. Free television survived in a coma, hooked to the advertising drip just to keep its heart beating, stagnant, brainless, enslaved to successful formats because formats sell, prostituting itself to an audience that wants the dirtiest, cheapest whore on the block. Are we supposed to be grateful to Netflix because it produces something worth watching every few years and "saves" TV? Or should we resent the streaming platforms for flooding what was once an artistic space with series we'll watch and forget, series that quietly relativize the worth of anything made with actual love and intention? Should we go back to the cinema to watch auteur films, which are now either bland superhero movies, or porn with a fifty percent dramatic storyline and a grotesque filter slapped on top?
Maybe it's because whoever presents a medium always acts as the "older brother," the "guide," the "teacher," and is always one or two generations ahead, has success because it takes on the last enemies of previous generations or its own. Provocations are like fads that last five years, then fade or merge with what they attacked.
But I can't help but think that rock never lost its power, its aggression, or its bite. If anything, the opposite: the audience is the one that adapted. You're provoking me? What happens if, instead of being outraged, I laugh at myself and at you? It's not that punks are tolerated: it's that the upstanding citizens dress like punks with tattoos, joints, LGBT rights, and festivals. Now, simply, instead of wanting to destroy the shit statues, they embrace them.
So what is punk today? The minimalist who quits everything and lives with four objects? The digital minimalist, or the Luddite who has a YouTube channel and teaches minimalism and posts on Reddit? The public antifascist with a car boot covered in stickers: antifascism, social centres, anti-mafia associations, unions, all there to signal which side he's on, safe in the knowledge he probably won't be the first one hunted down when the next witch hunt comes? The proud racist fascist, more fascist than the Duce himself, who votes Vannacci and calls Meloni a sellout but loses his mind over street kids being too loud?
Maybe the game is rigged to lose no matter what. We lose ourselves chasing factions and labels, surrendering every real belonging: to our community, our family, our small and actual life, even when we leave home by choice, looking for an identity we'll never find in other people's ideas. We don't think. We scroll. And then we wonder why we feel like reeds in the wind, like swallows caught in a tornado, homesick for a place we chose to leave.
Maybe being punk today means staying. Maybe being rock today means thinking with your own head while actually listening to others. Maybe it means accepting that one day you'll have to wipe your elderly parents' ass, if you're still around to do it, and not flinching. There's nothing that truly means being rock, except building on rock: riding your own wave of rebellion without losing sight of the shore, dodging the reefs, holding onto whatever it is that keeps you from going under.
