Eric Lewin Smashes the State
RRRRRRRRRRRIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!
When I first saw footage of Johnny Rotten throating out that first line of “Anarchy in the UK,” raising his fist and pulsating with passion manufactured by Malcolm McLaren, I was hooked on punk. It was everything I thought rock should be: obnoxious, filthy and impolite. While it would take nearly three years to realize that Mr. Rotten and company were more shtick than substance, it was too late; I was on the bus.
“First things first,” I said to myself. “Better get rid of all these non-punk albums. In Utero? Take it. Led Zeppelin IV? It’s yours. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness? The Smashing Pumpkins were NEVER punk! Get it out of my sight!” By my own estimation, I gave away over $200 worth of CDs to my friends in an effort to purge my collection of everything “not punk.” Classic stuff, too. Classic stuff I later had to re-buy. It’s pretty embarrassing taking the Doors’ first record up to the counter at your local record store at 17. The damn thing should be played into the ground at that point.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was in the midst of a transformation. I immersed myself in the culture. I patched up my clothes with bands I had never heard of. I pretended to hate bands I liked and pretended to like bands I hated. I pledged allegiance to causes I cared nothing about.
And of course, I had to hang out with other punks. I had to associate myself with other, mostly upper middle-class, teenagers who hated the government (but didn’t really know why), hung out at coffee shops (even though they didn’t really drink coffee), and had enough hatred of racism and fascism to put a sticker in their locker. Yeah dude, we were smashing the system.
And boy, did my parents hate it.
They were sure I was getting drunk, which for the record, I never did until I started hanging out with parentally-approved buddies. They hated my clothes. They hated my friends. They hated that I played in a band. They hated that I didn’t really want to play sports anymore. They hated my tuneless music.
And I hated that they hated it.
I couldn’t understand why they were so against what I was so in to. What I thought was so positive, they saw as embarrassing. They couldn’t believe their son wanted to piss away his talents chugging out power chords on a $300 Fender Squire. Even my good friend Kim got in the mix, as she let me know that my planned hairstyle of white hair with red, spiky bangs would “make me look like a freak.”
“What do they know?” I wondered out loud on a number of occasions for about fifteen more minutes. Until I realized that they were probably right; I was being ridiculous. This wasn’t about my deeper beliefs; it was about learning to be myself. And deep down, I wasn’t a punk, not really.
Under my own volition, I eventually hung up my teenage angst in favor of a somewhat more mainstream adolescence. I won awards for my writing and became a sports writer for the Beloit Daily News. I earned three varsity letters in football and three in track, eventually qualifying for the WIAA State Track Meet in the 100m dash, which isn’t bad for a kid who listened to a band called Anti-Jock in a subconscious effort to piss off his dad.
Looking back on those days, I’ve got a mixed taste in my mouth. Some of those records I bought still rip hard (Dillinger Four’s Midwestern Songs of the Americas and the Dead Kennedy’s Plastic Surgery Disasters/In God We Trust, Inc. to name two), but some I can’t justify at all (Spazz was never a good band, okay?). What I did learn from my rebellious phase is that rebellion isn’t a bad thing for kids to go through. There has to be a phase in your life where you think that everything you’ve ever been told has been crap. But then you have to find your way back. You’ve got to find that mix of cynicism and trust that allows you to think critically about things, but not completely throw what’s been tried and true for you all along. And while you’re working on that, lose those stupid wallet chains.
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