Punk Rock is Alive and on the Internet

Punk Rock’s home is on the Internet

Punk rock (in its antiquated form) is dead, but it can be born again. Not through music, but as a new form of writing on the internet. Conceptually, punk rock champions two things: rebellion and grueling pace. Essay writing on the Internet necessarily operates at a grueling pace and (if one were so inclined) could be terribly subversive.

Faster: essays on the Internet feature short, sharp paragraphs with punchy sentences, ringing in your ears like Jello Biafra’s shrill proclamation, “I kill children!” Faster: meaning is born on the Internet. The punk rock essayist can interpret, rebel and destroy at the same pace that major, bland news corporations publish shit.

Faster: the hierarchy of publishing houses, the Penguins, even the McSweeney’s are dead. Nobody cares about what time honored institutions tell us we should read. The Internet tears down that barrier. The only distance between us and the words is a permalink.

Faster: fuck the belittling, reductive categories. Fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, essay, news, scholarly paper, article, piece, post, novel, interview, short fiction, micro-fiction, semi-autobiographical fiction have absolutely no use here. The Internet offers a blank page with no categorical borders. Take advantage of the fact that this type of writing is wholly unprecedented. Nothing like the form we’re operating under has ever happened before; we’re inventing something entirely new.

Faster: we are under no obligation to adhere to any suffocating social definition of truth or objectivism. The only truth is that which we can establish between our first sentence and our last.

Faster: write, write constantly, write brutally, write words that devastate like Joe Strummer’s guitar and explode with fury like steel on Kurt Cobain’s bloody chin.

Faster: while rock stars entertain from stages, punks dance maniacally in basements. Comment boxes are only below the essay out of spatial convenience. The essay and the comment both share the basement. Text, like music, is the only authority.

Faster: play with contradiction. It’s everywhere. Embrace it and make it true.

Faster: nothing ever ends. Text can be perpetually edited and reformed. The need for an ending is an outdated notion. Leave ending to Balzac, Dickens and Tolstoy.

Faster: #faster__________

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