TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to Tomata du Plenty, 52, who’d cofounded Ze Whiz Kidz (a gay-camp theater troupe that pretty much established the funky-but-chic tone of Seattle nonprofit theater) and the Tupperwares (a drag vocal trio that included the man who inherited and closed the Dog House restaurant), before heading off to be an L.A. punk rocker, a Miami painter, and assorted other roles in assorted other towns.
LAST SATURDAY, those wacky petrifiers of ephemeral art forms at the Experience Music Project held a museum-piece tribute to that one musical/subcultural genre one would never expect to ever see turned into a museum piece, the skate punks.
Those late-’70s-early-’80s skater boyz had been vilified by many “intellectual punks” at the time. In this scenario, the Black Flag/TSOL/Germs gang had singlehandedly turned punk rock in L.A. (and by 1981 in the U.S. as a whole) from an attempted populist musical revolution into an exclusive, often violent, “hardcore” clique dominated by white male suburbanites of questionable intelligence and serious drinking-drugging-fighting proclivities.
But that young white male suburban demographic was just what ad agencies craved a decade later.
Skate punk’s somewhat more respectable next generation, and the overlapping snowboarding and “beach sports” scenes, became favorite iconographies for the selling of everything from soda pop to cereal.
Skate punk has become the illegitimate parent of “good” and “evil” twins–the clean-cut, corporate “rebellion” of the ESPN X Games and the Hollywood-promoter-contrived, white-trash trash talk of the “aggro” music scene.
And the skater doodz were from L.A., which is always a geopolitical plus to the marketing biz. TV networks, record labels, and ad agencies forever want impressionable teens across the globe to believe their own lives are empty; that you’re not a true “rebel” unless you look, talk, and behave just like someone in N.Y./L.A./S.F. is doing; and that the only way to keep up with these style dictates is to keep buying what you’re told to buy.
(But on the flip side: While many U.K. and N.Y. punk bands got released on major labels, L.A. skate punkers had to rely on feisty indie outfits like Tommy Boy (now selling ESPN soundtrack CDs), Frontier, and Slash. These supposedly nihilistic self-destructors turned out to have helped jump-start the whole indie rock phenomenon, from within the shadows of the Hollywood entertainment oligopoly.)
Hence, skate punk really is a topic deserving of museum-piece recollection.
And, yeah, there’s irony up to the armpits in those no-future crusters not only turning 40 but becoming idols to hundreds of fresh-faced young ‘uns at the municipal skate park across from EMP.
And a few looks at those old punkers, especially their hands and their kneecaps, gave me a revelation. I may be “sex-positive,” but I can still find certain body parts to be completely icky.
MONDAY: The larger ’80s nostalgia problem.
IN OTHER NEWS: Speaking of being stuck in the past, Mayor Schell has vetoed the Seattle City Council’s repeal of the onerous, censorious 1985 Teen Dance Ordinance; making his own re-election next year even more doubtful.
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