The following text is taken, wholesale and without permission, from the servers of The New York Times. You may ask how I think I can get away with such a bold and brazen move? Well, I don't know. Until I get a letter, it's here. And, after I get a letter, it's still gonna be here. Just because I'm too stupid to believe in lawyers.
To my utter amazement, this single page gets about three to five hits a day. Are that many of you out there so starved for punk culture? Please, take a moment to email me about it, alright?
February 22, 2004
Preppy Punks
T
was a Thursday afternoon, and Sam Stillman was starting the trek back
to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. From the stone-arch doorway of Elisabeth
Irwin High School, the West Village private school where Sam, 16, is a
sophomore, he headed to the F train, book bag slung across his chest,
just another teenager headed home.
The stares began when he got off the subway near his house. An old woman did a double take; toddlers in strollers turned their heads as he passed. Sam is a punk, and he carried his Mohawk - all 10 glorious pink inches of it - high and proud, defying gravity and the bright blue sky above.
But by the time he got to his street, a tree-lined row of brownstones and brick town houses, he was greeted with smiles and looks of recognition. As he climbed his stoop, he waved at a man outside the deli next door, the postman gave him a nod, and, suddenly, Sam was once again just another private school kid from the neighborhood, albeit one sporting a black studded leather jacket and a huge, pink buzz saw atop his head.
Punk, born of marginalized misfits in New York, has spread to the mainstream and beyond. The music has seeped into most corners of teenage life in America, in cities, suburbs and small towns. And in the city of its birth, punk has established a stronghold among a growing number of the upper-middle-class young. Good students by day, they mosh by night. The neighborhood baby sitter has a Mohawk. That once-preppy girl from Dalton? She just pierced her nose with a safety pin when Mom and Dad weren't looking.
One explanation may be that society is on the threshold of a new punk explosion, much the way hip-hop was embraced by white suburban teenagers in the 90's. Donna Gaines, a sociologist, a Ramones fan and the author of "A Misfit's Manifesto: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock-and-Roll Heart" (Villard, 2003), has noticed a growing number of new, younger punk fans, not only at the Ramones Web sites but also at shows at punk's temple, CBGB. "Before, punk was more edgy and subversive," said Dr. Gaines, a native New Yorker. "But now it's moved into the mainstream. It's become safer to be disruptive."
The Bush presidency, the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq may also be fueling the punk bonfire. "Kids are angry and scared because of what's going on in the world," she said. "We're living in very scary times. Punk's only going to get bigger."
And for students in the city's pressure-cooker competitive high schools and especially its private schools, punk may have a special allure. "At private schools, there are these increased pressures on kids,'' Dr. Gaines said. "It's this small community, with so much adult authority and surveillance. Sometimes kids feel like they don't have free space. So punk is this oppositional culture. It gives them their own identity."
Of Human Bondage (Pants)
New York, where punk was born 30 years ago, is still the center of the punk universe. There are dozens of performing spaces for famous punk bands, and for bands that you or your friends are in. There's the holy ground of CBGB on the Bowery, where howling is still a rite of passage for most young rockers.
While suburban punks must shop at the mall or online, New York teenagers can explore the punk wonderland that is St. Marks Place in the East Village, and many have the disposable income to make rich use of it. At Freaks, a punk clothing store on St. Marks Place, sales of studded belts and bracelets have quadrupled in the past two years. "We keep getting more normal-looking kids buying punk stuff," said Chris O'Hearn, the store's buyer. "These are kids who would have beat up the punks back when I was in high school."
At Trash and Vaudeville down the street, Jimmy Webb, the buyer, recently sold "an intense number" of bondage pants, a black, zipper-and-buckle-covered punk basic. Sales of hooded black sweatshirts, a staple for punk girls, has tripled in two years, and bullet belts sell out repeatedly.
From Debbie Harry's godson to Catholic schoolgirls who shop with their mothers, Mr. Webb dresses all the little New York punks. "Sometimes the parents are there to remind them what the school rules are," he said. "Like: 'This is fine. You can take the chains off when you go to class.' ''
One of Mr. Webb's regulars is Amanda, a 16-year-old who lives on East End Avenue. Her punk revelation came one day after school last year, as she was heading to St. Marks Place in the pleated green, blue and white Gordon plaid skirt that is part of her Chapin uniform. An aging heroin addict whom she used to chat with from time to time asked her where she was going. "I told him I was going to buy a skirt," she said. "And he's like: 'Don't buy a skirt, man. It's too expensive. You have to make it. You have to go back to the way things used to be.' "
Amanda duly returned to her doorman building with its marble lobby, settled into her bedroom with its black-painted door covered in obscenities and antiwar stickers, and made her own punk skirt from one of her Chapin uniforms, adding studs, safety pins and a red-painted anarchy sign. Perhaps not surprisingly, Amanda no longer attends Chapin; last fall she transferred to the more liberal Fieldston in Riverdale, where she is a sophomore.
Even out with her mother, Amanda is outfitted in full punk garb. On a recent mother-daughter trip to Staples to buy school supplies, she wore a black-hooded Misfits sweatshirt over a Casualties T-shirt and a chest full of buttons, including one of Che Guevara. Completing her ensemble were a pink paper clip in one ear, combat boots and bondage pants. Her mother, Margaret, who works in the admissions office of another Upper East Side private school and who spoke on the condition that the family's full name not appear in the newspaper, wore jeans and a turtleneck.
Last summer, while her mother was at the family's house in Hilton Head, S.C., Amanda dyed her hair pink. "I was really livid," her mother said afterward. "I refused to go anywhere with her unless she covered her head with a hood."
Margaret lets her daughter wear bondage pants, but she draws the line at the bondage strap, which joins the two legs together near the knees. Or, as Amanda put it: "She told me that if she ever saw me wearing the strap, she would take it off, strangle me with it, then throw the pants away."
Living for the Weekends
Many of New York's original punks sprang from comfortable backgrounds: Debbie Harry and Patti Smith came from the New Jersey suburbs, the Ramones from Forest Hills, Queens. The difference is that back then, young punks ran away, ditched school and moved to ramshackle apartments on the Lower East Side. Today's punks are younger and live at home; they get to rage only on weekends.
Sam Stillman, the Cobble Hill punk, usually starts his Saturday around 4 p.m. when he groans awake, his Mohawk wilted after an exhausting night in the clubs.
"What time did you get in last night?" his mother asked one afternoon recently as her son lounged around his bedroom.
"Around 2," he replied.
"But you called three times," his mother said with a smile. "I like it when you call."
After she left, Sam admitted that he had actually arrived home at 3:30, after both his parents had fallen asleep. He had gone to hear a Scottish punk band called the Exploited at L'Amour in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, along with a group called Total Chaos; last October crowds in Montreal that were waiting for the two bands to play rioted when the performers were stopped at the border and the show was canceled.
There were no riots in Brooklyn, but Sam would not have minded if there had been. What scares him is the dilution of punk. "Punk comes in these surges," he said, sitting on the edge of his bed. "Now there's all these people coming from Westchester in minivans, calling themselves punks." Shaking his head, he pretended to machine-gun Punky, his cocker spaniel.
Sam's bedroom is a salute to the good old days of New York punk: the door is punched in, the mirror is cracked and the walls are scribbled with band names. "I'm sick of coming home," one wall announces. The room is his oasis in his family's comfortable red-brick town house.
Sam is quick to point out that he is on partial scholarship at his expensive private school and he all but apologizes for the fact that his mother is a lawyer. His friends, some of them less affluent, don't have a problem with his comfortable surroundings. "Sure his house is huge,'' said Max Hambleton, a 15-year-old punk from Boerum Hill who attends the School of the Future, a highly rated public high school in Gramercy. "But it's O.K. I mean, he lets everybody sleep there all the time. And his parents let the band practice.''
Despite his relentlessly middle-class surroundings, Sam is doing his best to maintain his punk lifestyle. In the past two years, he has been the lead singer in four bands: the Minors, Malchix, the Cadavers and one whose name can't be printed in a family newspaper. "My life's goal was to play CBGB," he said. "But then our first show was at CB's. That left the band kind of goal-less."
Two Flavors of Rage
One sign of the changing face of punk in New York is the growing number of shows at CBGB. Hilly Kristal, the club's founder and owner, says the number of bands playing his club has more than doubled in the past two years, to more than 400, because so many bands send him demo tapes. And though over the years the club has remained mostly the same, with its grungy cocktail area and layer upon layer of ever-changing band posters - Japunks, the Infucted - the audience is changing. "Sometimes,'' Mr. Kristal said, "you have kids dragging their parents to shows, or even parents dragging their kids to shows."
At Tower Records a few blocks away, the management recently ordered that end racks - the feature-CD racks at the end of the larger alphabetized racks - be placed near the front of the store, spotlighting punk and some of its offshoots, like emo, short for "emotional," which is characterized by whiny, self-involved lyrics. Recent in-store appearances by punk grandfathers like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop have drawn hundreds of young fans to the store.
To punk purists, the influx of fans is not necessarily a good thing. In the past few years, punk has split into two camps - the pop-punk crowd that listens to bands like Good Charlotte and Blink 182, and the hard-core crowd, whose music, like Toxic Narcotic and Leftover Crack, is so harsh it makes Iggy Pop sound like Perry Como. The harder the music you listen to, punk wisdom goes, the more authentic you are.
Becky Miller, a Princeton sophomore and a drummer in a punk band, has nervously watched the legions of punk musicians and mosh-pit members expand. But she believes there's enough punk sincerity to go around. "I know some hard-core people who are always lamenting, 'It's not as dangerous as it was,' " Ms. Miller said after a recent Sick of It All Show at the Knitting Factory in TriBeCa. "But I don't know what they're talking about. I've broken my nose three times, and I've had two concussions in two years."
Authenticity has always been an issue. For some people, Dr. Gaines notes, punk is only about fashion. "And for some,'' she added, "there's an ideology and belief system attached to it. And beyond that, it becomes a lifestyle and a commitment to a subculture."
Sam Stillman insists that for him and his friends, punk is not just playing dress-up but a way of life, a way to challenge the status quo. "Everybody makes you think if you don't go to an Ivy League school, you're going to die alone," he said not long ago en route to a show at ABC No Rio arts center on the Lower East Side. This particular evening, his Mohawk was gone. In another burst of teenage rebellion, he shaved it off before being photographed for this article.
My Father, My Roadie
Parents, educators and other adults with young punks in their universe are often surprisingly relaxed about the whole thing. Sam's parents, who describe themselves as former hippies, not only tolerate their son's lifestyle, they encourage it. When Sam performed, his mother would hairspray his Mohawk to keep it crisp, and his father is the band's roadie, since none of the members are old enough to drive.
Administrators at many of the city's private schools are liberal in outlook, which means there may be no dress codes and punks can roam the halls freely. Susan Fiebelman, the upper school director at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights, recalled a student who was, as she put it, "deeply committed to various Mohawks and safety pins, and it was just like, 'How do you get your hair to do that?' ''
Administrators at the more conservative Chapin School would not comment on the school's attitude toward punk attire, but Amanda said that when she was a student there, she was allowed to accessorize without interference. And unlike the punks of the 70's, punk rockers today feel no compulsion to do badly in school. "You don't have to be a junkie,'' Mr. Webb, the buyer at Trash and Vaudeville, tells his young customers. "You don't have to die young. Live the punk lifestyle, but live it to the fullest. Become an Iggy rather than a Sid Vicious."
Amanda has no desire to die young, or even to do poorly in school. While researching a paper for English class on the Ramones, she learned that all of them had dropped out or been kicked out of high school. And half the band members are dead. "You don't have to be a total degenerate to be hard core," Amanda said during the shopping trip with her mother as she sipped a hot chocolate at a Starbucks on Lexington Avenue and 87th Street.
Like a ghost from the past, a girl from Chapin wandered in. She wore a red pea coat, and her blond hair was smooth. Pausing, she took in the new Amanda: the combat boots, the paper clip in the ear.
"Amanda?"
"Yeah, hi. How are you?"
As the Chapin girl walked away, Amanda's mother said philosophically: "I truly believe this will all end, just like her other phases have ended. I mean, a year before this all started, Amanda was into Tiffany jewelry and Burberry bags. Who knows what the next phase will be?"
Amanda has news for her mother. Upon graduating, she plans to defer college for a year and go abroad, not to study or even bum around Europe but to squat in an abandoned building in London, like a true punk. "I hear," she said, with all the verve of an excitable teenage girl, "that squatting in London is, like, the best."
Helene Stapinski's newest memoir, "Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair With Music,'' was published last monthby Villard.
