I told you all about it here.
Today, “hoping for an angry tirade, [VICE] called up Penny Rimbaud, one of the founding members of Crass, at his home in England. Instead he took the opportunity to tell me how much he dislikes the current crop of DIY punks.”
As you’d have guessed:
I mean it amused me that Crass is sort of the main feature on it and the Sex Pistols and the Clash dropped down to the bottom. (…)
The sort of people who will be pissed off are the sort of people that are very happy to be working on a very small, almost ghetto existence within a particular genre of thought, a particular genre of action, a particular genre of behavior, and particularly a predictable set of political ideas.
Well, the world’s changed a lot in 30 years and I think we’ve got to get hip to that.
My increasing experience is that the so-called commercial outlets will get the job done quicker, better, very often in a much more friendly way. An awful lot of the DIY outlets are endlessly bantering about all sorts of ethical nonsense, which, in any case, they’re stuck with because they don’t have the alternative; they don’t have the opportunity. And I’d put my bottom dollar on the fact they’d take the opportunity if given it to expand. (…)
In a funny way, that’s more akin to some fashion house putting out a Crass leather jacket than it is to someone doing yet another sort of rather bad imitation of Crass’s music, which was relevant 30 years ago and is pretty irrelevant now.
Somehow the gold teeth and the “fuck you honky” [of rap and hip hop] are closer to punk than anything else in the music world. I find that stuff terrifying, but then people found punk terrifying.
