Yeah, not punk. Never said punk. Came out of a weird set of interconnections between the punk scenes in Yugoslavia and the performance art movements in Europe.
1 Like
Whether or not Green Day is punk is entirely irrelevant. Their influences, however, are.
4 Likes
Which is entirely fair enough, I think, especially since they’re Slovenian.
Yeah, I think, from what I’ve seen is totally true. It seems like they’re creating a new set of symbols, kind of based on the ideas of the past (race, blood, soil BS). They know that walking about in an SS uniform is too obvious, so more subtle or new symbols should be employed. Oddly, the symbols used in the Charlottesville incident here were much more explicit. There was an occasional sieg hiel, and lots of nazi tats (88 and 14, especially) but it seems like it was more allusions to some mythical medieval past and the Trumpian alt-right memes.
You might be right. Which is scary.
That’s how I read it. I could be wrong, of course.
In my experience, plenty of people liked Green Day, but at least some subset of green day fans ended up getting into the punk scene after they got into Green Day. Same for the popularity of NiN, some just liked them, but others used that as a spring board into industrial and gothic musics more generally.
4 Likes
I mean, if you came into the scene in the early-to-mid 90’s Green Day (and Rancid and even Offspring, to a lesser extent) was kind of unavoidable. Even in my hometown scene, which was decidedly crust/streetcore (think Aus Rötten, Filth, Nausea,) Green Day was a common guilty pleasure- I still rock the fuck out to Kerplunk!, now sans guilt.
The Green Day Isn’t Punk You Poser joke is pretty old (how long has it been since High Fidelity came out?) that it’s meaningless to modern kids, and if even a small % wind up loving SLF because Green Day then that seems to be punk enough for me (unless the upcoming SLF stop in Portland is sold out, in which case fuck off kiddos, why don’t you go to some gabcore show or whatever the hell cool kids are calling whatever it is today…)
Woof, apologies if I’m derailing!
3 Likes
One of them. I don’t have many Slovenian friends.
Plus, and I think that is the important bit, based on reframed pop culture references. And they’ve got - at least in Germany - some glossy next-to-highbrow magazines at the news stand. They’ve got books written by people who know how to craft words, how to talk in public without making the impression of being an imbecile - short, they know how to do PR. It started to have an appeal to be a “true conservative” some time ago to younger people. Who take out some of the ambiguity and replace it with a competetive, yet “ironical” character.
Those young ones, they learned to mock their critics instead of being mocked. They also intimidate them, online, with hate speech, and v try to do similarly offline (but mostly fail to). They do it as a sport. They enjoy the conflict, testing out their limits. On the one hand, they style themselves as hard, ruthless warriors of a perceived truth, fighting against alleged oppression, and on the other hand they claim to do so “ironically”. They strive for ambiguity there, as well. Some, I think, truly believe they are doing no harm, but just pointing out the hypocrisy of their victims. The others are just hiding their hatred behind a laughing frog-face. The result is the same, as far as I can see.
It’s a gamefication of the competition of ideas in a time when original ideas seem to be of short supply, and many (most?) left-leaning people don’t believe in positive utopias any more, but still refuse to backwards.
3 Likes
True… wasn’t the basic premise of that book and later the film Look Who’s Back? the one where Hitler just magically appears in modern times in Germany and becomes popular on TV?
Also, it sounds exactly like the Alt-right here in the US, which were all claiming that their racism and anti-semitism was totally “ironic.”
Yep. This is what I mean, Pepe the Frog memes as far as the eye can see.
it’s a truly depressing thing and it’s clearly crossing national borders.
Yup.
This is not a time for subtlety; bring on the folk singers.
2 Likes
I was ranting at one of the Russia-focused cyberwar analysts the other day for claiming that the US is in a cyberwar with Russia.
He’s got it wrong: it isn’t about a revival of the Cold War. The entire non-fascist world is in a cyberwar with global fascism.
1 Like
2 Likes
Speaking of folk songs, I stumbled across this while at work today:
Funky little bit of history that I’d never heard of before.
2 Likes
I don’t read the bestseller, nor saw the film. The latter had some abysmal reviews, and the whole idea I didn’t find even mildly interesting any more. Walter Moers did good cartoons a while back, I stick to those. 
It might be that this had some similarities which what I observed, but it’s still plain satire, I think. It’s not affirmative behaviour.
Thankfully, not so much here. =)
By the way, since we were talking about appropriated and re-contextualized symbols, I still hope that someone comes up with re-reappropriations of new right wing symbols and codes. All that should be left to them is the usual 18/88 shit. The fun needs to be taken away from them, one way or another.
That, in a thread which basically started by me derailing a thread, was pretty funny. 
I learned a bit more about Laibach, and I will be thinking about ambiguity and context a bit more in the future. About whether Green Day is hard-core punk or not: not so much.
The folk song about St. Patrick’s Battalion, that was really interesting, @wanderfound. (Just FTR: I think the picture with the Bobbies in front of the house is from an eviction process on the Arran islands. I’ve seen this before.)
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
