Ben Weasel, �Punk is a Four-Letter Word�
This is one of those, �If you know, you know� kinda things. If I tried to explain the person that is Ben Weasel for people that may not know who he is, like say, my mother, most of you would get bored, because you already know. So I�ll try and toe the line.
Ben Weasel is a guy who was in a band that was once great, then got really bad, then got okay, and then I stopped listening to him. Nothing against the guy, he just likes the Ramones a hell of a lot more than I do. He also wrote some pretty dandy columns for MaximumRockNRoll, and then got canned. I lost sight of him after that. So when this book came in, it was a no-brainer to pick it up.
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In the introduction, he says he thinks he�s a better writer now then when he first started in 1991. I�m not sure that�s true. True, his style has improved and he�s more careful about how he constructs his sentences. But once he moved past his glory days as a columnist he seemed to stop thinking in the present, instead dwelling on story telling from his past. That�s okay, reminiscing has its purposes, but he doesn�t seem to have central issue. Most stories, in fact, simply revolve around crappy jobs he used to work at.
There is no point to these stories, no lessons learned, and no epiphanies into his existence. This results in Weasel, a former fiery unwilling punk rock icon, turning into an old crank sitting on a porch, spinning yarns about how things were different when he was a boy, some even mentioning the clich� moments of having to trudge uphill in the snow.
It�s sad for me to read these in a way, for, if Weasel is to be believed in his own writings, the man suffers from a nerve disorder including agoraphobia. I wonder if Weasel has withdrawn so much that he can no longer speak about things in the present, because he no longer knows what is happening in the real world.
The book would get a much lower rating if it weren�t for his last essay on the nature of punk, which includes advice on how to make your band successful. In this piece, he loses almost all of his smarmy nature, showing pitfalls from his own band so that others can avoid them. What is interesting about the piece, however, are his ruminations on how the nature of punk has changed.
Back in the early 90s (ah, now it�s my turn to be the old crank on the porch), punk was about something. Bands were using their voice to try and convey messages, messages that weren�t provided in nearly every other genre, with the exception of a few bands in rap such as Public Enemy. That seems to have changed, and now so-called �punk bands� are doing all the same insipid songs about the girl they like that lives down the block. Moreover, a lot of bands seem to be shooting for stardom, rather than doing it for the sake of playing, which is what I always found the most satisfying aspect of being in a band.
I was thinking about this as I finished the book at Katie Blooms, and again while I sauntered over to the Caravan. I wondered if I wasn�t being cynical about the entire situation. After all, most of my friends� bands these days — Angry for Life, Whisky Sunday, The Flames, anything Joe is in along with a half-dozen other bands — are not shooting for stardom. In fact, I think they could possibly get it if they wanted to work a little harder at it. So maybe Weasel has it all wrong and just needs to get out of the house more in order to witness it himself.
After 20 minutes at the Caravan, thinking about these factors, a guy shoved a promo CD into my hand and launched into a spiel about his band. He seemed to mirror everything Weasel said was wrong with punk today.
One person who actually reads these rants I write tried to warn the guy that I didn�t like anything, but that just got him more excited because he wanted publicity. I questioned him and his partner for a while to see if they really were the fame-obsessed, vacuous people that they presented themselves as.
They were. But I took the CD home anyway and listened to it. And it was the same by-the-numbers crap that is on nearly every �alternative� station.
I�m sure they�ll do quite well.
