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The Punk Art of Failure:
Punk, Queer Theory, and Alternative Epistemologies
DaN McKee
“My life, it’s a song…you won’t even let happen.”
- Black Flag[1]
Punk, as a musical and cultural movement, has always positioned itself in opposition to the mainstream. In the 1970s, when society was all about disco, electronica, and virtuoso musicianship, punk came along with raw, ragged bursts of short, fast, and loud guitar energy played by angry amateurs and said: fuck that. When the music industry demanded stadium tours and MTV coverage, punk gave us DIY basement shows and “MTV Get Off the Air”.[2] When parents, teachers, and bosses asked us to sit up straight and look smart, punk allowed us to rip up our clothes, flip the middle finger, and shave and dye our hair into whatever wild shape or style we wanted. “Punk rock,” says John Robb, “was a culture war. You were either on the bus or off the bus.”[3] And even within punk, when scenes became all about drugs and drink, punk gave us the alternative of straightedge. When too many people started sporting mohawks and leather jackets, differently dressed punks reminded us that non-conformity had no official uniform. When punk became a formula of three chord guitars, bands like Devo, NoMeansNo, or Refused pulled that formula apart. Punk can be oppositional even to itself – are Green Day “punk” or did they “sell out”? Are Blink 182? – and yet, even within this permanently oppositional viewpoint, punk’s arms remain open to welcome all the “freaks, nerds and romantics”[4] who don’t fit in anywhere else. “You’re never gonna be normal, cause you’re a punk” sing The Homeless Gospel Choir,[5] the seeming curse a badge of honour, coming as the solution to not wanting “to feel strange anymore”. It is not the strangeness – the queerness – which was the problem, it turns out, but rather the singer’s resistance to it. Embrace that otherness, we are told, find other otheredpeople, and you will discover that you are, in fact, ok. “There’s a real cool club and you’ll never be a part of it”, sing Screeching Weasel, and we punks sing along in celebration of that exclusion rather than in defeat.[6]
Philosopher, Judith Butler, has explained the value of the word “queer” before it was added to the familiar set of initials which tend to identify the LGBTQ+ community. Before it became more strictly associated with sexuality or gender identity, the term “queer”, she says, “moved us away from strict identity categories…queer means deviating, queer means odd, awkward, not following in a straight line, not following a developmental model of sexuality or gender or the transition from childhood to adult that depends on heterosexuality, marriage, procreation…queer meant taking your own path.”[7] Queer was intended as an inclusive and coalitional term for all who stood outside of the expected social rules. “Straight people could be queer...queerness ran through straightness, queerness ran through public life” because queer essentially meant a rejection of mainstream, heteronormative and patriarchal trajectories of life. Queer also, importantly, was a word being reclaimed from its previous associations as a negative slur against LGBTQ+ people. The supposed peculiarity and strangeness associated with being called “queer” was now to be celebrated rather than shunned. Yes, the idea went, what we are is considered “queer” when pitted against the standard constructs of life currently deemed to be “normal”, but this so-called queerness merely means that we are free to be ourselves. Rather than falling in line and conforming blindly to the same old tedious ways of living as our ancestors, we will create our own paths, our own norms, our own new and novel conceptions of the good life. We will be queer because being queer is better.
Liam Warfield has spoken of the entanglement between the terms “punk” and “queer”:
Before its musical application, as Bruce LaBruce notes, punk was jail-house slang for a guy who took it up the ass. But the word is much older, dating at least as far back as Shakespeare, and has referred, over time, to prostitutes, delinquents, cowards, and conditions of poor health (feeling punk). Queer has a similarly amorphous history: first appearing as a shorthand for anything odd, perverse, eccentric or otherworldy; later as a slur along the lines of fairy or fag; reclaimed in the 1980s by activists and academics and more recently in vogue as an LGBTQI catchall. In a sense, the two words have been fellow travellers through time, shifting from terms of derision to badges of otherness to popular acceptance and near-meaninglessness.[8]
I do not want to appropriate the Q from LGBTQ+ identities or deny that there are some specific areas of Queer Theory which are, rightly, particular to issues of sexuality and gender and the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people. Nor do I want to claim that identifying as “punk” is identical to identifying as “queer” in the contemporary sense. However, in recognition of the parallels between these, often intermingling, communities and conceptualisations of otherness, what I would like to do is consider an aspect of Queer Theory which Jack Halberstam has termed “the queer art of failure” and expand its application into the context of punk rock.[9]
Halberstam, inspired by Quentin Crisp’s quip that “if at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style”, has made the case that “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” than the more commonly sought alternatives deemed as “success”. Failure, Halberstam suggests, has a range of universe-expanding virtues that are too often ignored. Failure “allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behaviour and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods.” Failure can “poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” and be “a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline…a form of critique” which “recognises that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent”. Failure is a “category levied by the winners against the losers and as a set of standards that ensure that all future radical ventures will be measured as cost-ineffective.” Therefore to “fail” reminds us that “in the process of producing this reality, many other realities, fields of knowledge, and ways of being have been discarded”.
Similar ideas of triumph in failure can be found across the soundtrack of punk rock. The Vandals encourage us to “be proud of your flounders, and falter with pride, fail without shame, cuz you never tried”.[10] NOFX merrily admit to only giving “about sixty-or-so percent” in their “mission statement” of “total self-debasement and not giving our all”[11] and The Clash felt no shame whatsoever when telling us that, when they fought the law, “the law won”.[12] Propagandhi “can’t find the meaning in the great achievement” in their song,Ordinary People Do Fucked Up Things When Fucked Up Things Become Ordinary, whose very title could be seen as a cautionary tale against acceptance of the status quo.[13] Meanwhile the use of failure as a rallying cry in The Bouncing Souls’ cover of Ray Charles’ “Born to Lose” can also be heard from Against Me! when Laura Jane Grace asks: “Do you share the same sense of defeat? Have you realized all the things you'll never be? Ideals turn to resentment, open minds close up with cynicism. I've got no judgement for you. Come on and ache with me”.[14]
As a transgender woman and “true trans soul rebel”,[15] Grace’s invitation for us to ache with her straddles the boundary between punk’s more general emancipatory embracement of failure and Halberstam’s intended emphasis on specifically queer failure as liberation. Punk has plenty other LGBTQ+ examples to draw from too. Limp Wrist, for instance, proudly proclaim that they’re “not down with this normal world junk” because as “punk ass queers normalcy is what we hate”.[16] Tribe-8 describe the frustration of failing to “pass” when using the women’s bathroom on tour as a male-presenting lesbian: “I pull up my shirt, to prove I'm the right gender, but the looks they're giving me, are anything but tender.”[17] Such transphobic bullying is rebutted by We Are The Union when they let the bullies know “we don't give a shit what you do, or at all about you” because of the brute fact they have to accept that “boys will be girls, and girls will be boys, and everybody in between, we'll all be who we want to be”.[18] Meanwhile, Pansy Division’s concise deconstruction of hegemony and heteronormative ideology – “against all odds, we appear, grew up brainwashed, but turned out queer”[19] – says as much in twelve words as Halberstam himself does in fifty-five when, building on the work of Kathryn Bond Stockton, he points out that “if we were all already normative and heterosexual to begin with in our desires, orientations, and modes of being, then presumably we would not need such strict parental guidance to deliver us all to our common destinies of marriage, child-rearing, and hetero-reproduction.”[20]
Halberstam, however, is hesitant to celebrate affirmative failure outside of explicitly queer failure and actively uses punk as an example of why “failure that does not make the connection between failure and queerness” is not always radically emancipatory. While positively acknowledging “the powerful negativity of punk politics” in an analysis of how the Sex Pistols “associated themselves with the trash and debris of polite society” and “made the phrase ‘No future’ into a rallying call for Britain’s dispossessed”, he also acknowledges the limits of “unqueer failure” when looking at Irvine Welsh’s novel, Trainspotting. “Without an elaborate vision of alternative modes,” he argues, “the novel collapses into the angry and seething language of the male punk from whom a legacy of patriarchal and racial privilege has been withheld.” This kind of “punk failure”, Halberstam suggests “is the rage of the excluded white male, a rage that promises and delivers punishments for women and people of colour”, not the sort of loss which “imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”[21]
Trainspotting, however, being merely an imagined perspective of one punk in a single, fictional, novel is not really a strong enough example to exclude punk’s entire potential here. I think it merely shows a deficit in Halberstam’s familiarity with punk as it is lived and experienced by punks, rather than a genuine limitation on the possibility for equally liberatory failure to exist outside of specifically queer contexts. Halberstam himself acknowledges that even within the LGBTQ+ community the positive potential of failure is not universal. He battles in his book, for example, with the “politically problematic” issue of “the imagined and real relationship between homosexuality and Nazism” as one of the alternative possibilities opened up by a queer rejection of society’s dominant norms just as punks, too, sometimes fail in ways we might actually wish to describe as legitimate failure and not merely an alternative conception of success. As The Wonder Years’ singer, Dan Campbell, reminds us “I’m not a self-help book; I’m just a fucked up kid”,[22] and fucked up kids sometimes make mistakes they didn’t choose to make. Punk’s oppositional stance also includes those “oppositional identities along racist, fascist and neo-Nazi lines”[23] alongside the more inspirational identities we might like to celebrate. Such is the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of radical freedom and self-creation. However, the existence of such outsider groups or individuals within these already outsider communities does not negate for punks the radical potential of their failure any more than they do for those who are LGBTQ+ and might use their freedom to fail equally poorly.
Ultimately Halberstam is making an argument for “antidisciplinary forms of knowing”, and while he makes that argument “specifically tied to queerness” I believe the overlapping family resemblances between the otherness of being “queer” and the otherness of being “punk” makes punk just as relevant a venue in which to make a similar case for “stupidity, failure, and forgetfulness over knowing, mastering, and remembering in terms of contemporary knowledge formations.”[24] Indeed, when Halberstam tells us that “knowledge practices that refuse both the form and the content of traditional canons may lead to unbounded forms of speculation, modes of thinking that ally not with rigor and order but with inspiration and unpredictability”, I see myself at a Jello Biafra or Henry Rollins spoken word show. I see Riot Grrrl meetings, 924 Gilman Street, and the library of diverse homemade ‘zines stuffed into my bookshelves. I see myself, and so many others, as Bruce Springsteen once put it, learning “more in a three minute record” (or maybe that’s a twominute record) “than we ever learned in school”.[25] After all, as the Groovie Ghoulies sing, nudging unwittingly into Halberstam’s notion that knowledge does not always come from the places we expect: “just because you’ve been to school doesn’t mean you’re smart”.[26]
“We may want new rationales for knowledge production,” Halberstam continues, “different aesthetic standards for ordering or disordering space, other modes of political engagement than those conjured by the liberal imagination”, and again I see punk ticking all the boxes. I see day-glo, safety-pins and cut-and-paste. I see all-ages venues and co-operative punk houses. I see direct action, protest songs, anarchism and mutual aid. “We may, ultimately, want more undisciplined knowledge”, Halberstam concludes. “More questions and fewer answers.”[27] I hear Bad Religion singing “what we need now is a change of ideas.”[28] I see an activist stall set up at a punk show next to the merch table, surrounded by people all asking: “what do we do next?” I see the cartoon from Sniffin’ Glue fanzine showing me an A, an E and a G chord and telling me to form my own band.
Halberstam’s point is that traditional notions of what it means to “know” are far too conceptually bogged down in notions which exclude the unconventional. Queer – punk, outsider – routes to knowledge might prove equally, or even more, valuable if we opened our minds to their currently dismissed possibilities.
Consider that most established epistemological idea, with us since Plato first pondered the correct route to Larissa in his Meno dialogue, that for a proposition to count as “knowledge” it requires not only truth and belief, but justification.[29] Each condition, so the position goes, is individually necessary and jointly sufficient, and at first glance this claim seems fairly uncontroversial. To merely believe something that is truewithout any justification – what Plato called the “tether” which ties an abstract truth to your particular belief in it – is obviously not enough to count as knowledge, for it could just be a lucky guess. To have justification for a belief also does not, by itself, make that belief knowledge because, as the many seemingly well-evidenced conspiracy theories on the internet demonstrate, a justified belief can often still end up being untrue. And, finally, we cannot have a justified truth which we do not actually believe and still call it knowledge. It would be nonsensical for us to say a juror has “knowledge” of a defendant’s innocence if, having heard the defence’s justification for the defendant’s innocence, and it turning out to actually be true that the defendant is innocent, they still do not believe the defendant is innocent. They might be aware of a justified truth, but by not believing it, they deny themselves the status of having knowledge of it. If I believe the world is flat, I cannot know that it is round.
The problem, however, from a punk – or queer – point of view is that two of the three conditions – justification and truth – are inherently entangled in potentially contestable settlements about what might count as authoritative in any given case. And what is authoritative tends to coincide with relations of power. Consider, for example the so-called “knowledge” that one ought to do well in school, get a good job, and raise a family to live a fulfilling life. At every step of this widely-accepted knowledge claim, outsiders such as punks (or queer people) can ask legitimate and important questions about the truth and justification of each belief. For example:
1. Ought we really do well at school, or ought we attempt only to get the best possible education that we can? Because schooling and education are not always the same thing and for some people school might be the worst venue in which they could learn.
2. What constitutes a “good” job? Furthermore, should a life really be so focused on jobs anyway when the necessity for such employment is merely the contingent arrangement of our current arbitrary, exploitative, and ultimately changeable, economic system?
3. What exactly is meant by “family” here? If it is the traditional, heteronormative, nuclear family, based on patriarchal marriage and child-rearing arrangements steeped in notions of wives being their husband’s property and children being a biological obligation regardless of overpopulation or desire, then this has arguably brought great harm to the world. And not merely for the many women and children denied agency within it. It is a notion which has historically excluded LGBTQ+ people who did not fit into this myopic narrative of what a family could be. It ignores alternative, self-selected, kinship groups and other forms of social organisation which might be far more fulfilling, and it dismisses the potential flourishing of those who are either biologically unable to, or simply not interested in, having children.
At every step of this brief analysis of just one single claim to seemingly uncontroversial “knowledge”, we see that there are many hidden assumptions smuggled into what is considered to be “true” or “justified” when advocating for a particular belief. And I pick the specific example because each element – school, work, and family – has been routinely questioned from both a queer, and a punk, perspective. When Joey Ramone snarled that “we’re a happy family”, it was clear that his tongue was firmly in his cheek (not least of all because “daddy likes men”).[30] When Citizen Fish recommended that we “phone in sick of it all”,[31] it was a reminder that there must be more to life than “Work-Rest-Play-Die”[32] precisely because we don’t want to lose our authentic selves and “put our image up for sale” – including our gender and our sexuality – to fit into whatever limiting and self-denying identify our bosses demand of us each day.[33] And when Morning Glory called school “prison prep for the young”,[34] they brought to mind not only Dead Kennedys earlier words that school was a “life sentence”[35] but Team Dresch’s reflections about growing up queer in a small-town. Their school years, in such an oppressive environment, were “the worst years of my life”.[36]
Defining knowledge in this traditional way, reliant on satisfying contestable truth and justification conditions, is far from impartial or objective. The tripartite definition of knowledge can, and historically has, been used to weaponize what counts as knowledge and who holds it as a tool of ideological domination and political hegemony. Even familiar objections to the tripartite view, such as Edmund Gettier’s convoluted examples of justified, true, beliefs which we might exclude as knowledge,[37] or the reliabilist and virtue epistemology alternatives that followed his critique, still cling to some sort of formula for knowledge which places its definition primarily in a gatekeeping role. You do not get to claim to “know” something if you are not able to tick all of the appropriate boxes to convince others that you have legitimate license to be, in Quassim Cassam’s words “reasonably confident”[38] in the truth of your belief, or, in the words of Linda Zagzebski, that you actually are “in cognitive contact with reality”.[39] As Edward Craig has offered, in his explicitly social reading of the justification condition, “the concept of knowledge is used to flag approved sources of information”.[40] By definition, therefore, it can be used equally to blacklist those sources of information of which we do not approve. Conforming to the definitional criteria demands that others recognise that you have achieved the requisite conditions, but what both Queer Theory and punk have suggested in different ways is that there may be alternative ways of knowing, so outside the box of the conventional norms, that they may be unrecognisable to those conditioned into acceptance of society’s prevailing orthodoxies.
To be punk, to be queer, is to suffer the ongoing “epistemic injustice” Miranda Fricker identifies as “hermeneutical injustice”[41] because for the community of punks and others Bad Cop Bad Cop term “the pioneering underdogs of great humanity”[42] there is a necessary “gap in collective interpretative resources” which puts them “at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.”[43] Once we “entertain the idea that relations of unequal power can skew shared hermeneutical resources so that the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on…whereas the powerless are more likely to find themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly, with at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in an effort to render them intelligible”, we can see the importance of Halberstam’s desire to give new hermeneutical tools to those of us society might hold an ideological interest in labelling as “failed”.
Punks would benefit from these tools as much as any “othered” people. When Joey Ramone yells “D-U-M-B! Everyone’s accusing me!” it is not an objective fact of his stupidity but an accusation.[44] The chanting counter-argument, taken from Tod Browning’s Freaks, of “gabba gabba we accept you we accept you one of us” acts as an invitation to a world where you don’t have to be “a pinhead no more” if you don’t want to be, and where the accusations of being dumb will fall away. Accepting your status as “one of us” – a freak, a punk, a “queer” – and embracing it instead of running from it – venerating and owning it rather than feeling shame about it – means that you don’t have to be dumb after all. You might simply have knowledge that wasn’t being recognised as such within the dominant knowledge paradigm you were trapped in. In the freakshow, however, amongst your fellow freaks, a different paradigm exists, and the pinhead can now become the sage.
Dead Kennedys singer, Jello Biafra, has often said “don’t hate the media, become the media”,[45] and punk has long given a voice to marginalised groups and individuals who we might never have otherwise heard from – and the audiences they inspire and represent – by creating a “Do It Yourself” culture where voices usually considered weird or wrong can be welcomed instead of dismissed. From enabling controversial and negative expressions of how the world is experienced, usually absent from the lyrics of saccharine pop songs, and nurturing experiments in alternative conceptions of how society might be, punk has transcended being merely a genre of music and become and enduring global cultural movement which continues to thrive today.[46] When Bad Brains were “banned in D.C” they were “not worried about what the other people are gonna say” because they knew “we got ourselves” and “we're gonna make it anyways”.[47] Punk’s DIY community of local scenes, venues, and labels, interconnected nationally and internationally through a grassroots underground of handshake agreements and word of mouth, has made it possible for thousands of outsider artists to perform and distribute music around the world, completely outside of traditional economies, for nearly half a century now. A large part of that endurance is an intentional rejection within punk of what traditional economic ideas might deem as “success”. A punk band, sleeping on floors of strangers’ squats, driving from town to town in a beat-up van to make tiny shows, in venues few people have ever heard of, while selling handmade t-shirts and self-released records to pay for food, and fuel, enough to hopefully break even (and, just as hopefully, not break down) does not sound like the makings of a successful music career. But, for a punk band, this apparent failure to make a decent living playing music may in fact be all they ever wanted to achieve with their art. Rather than “failure”, it was the vision of success they had all along – playing music for the love of playing music. An end in itself, rather than an instrumental stepping-stone to future fame and fortune. Likewise, the numerous independent record labels which make no money from their output and are simply labours of love. Those which invest any earnings right back into putting out more obscure records from artists they like, rather than those artists they think will make them rich. Or the photocopied fanzines with a mailing list of subscribers you could count off on your fingers, which are, nevertheless, taken as seriously by their readers and their writer(s) as any mainstream publication might be. Art in punk is a calling, not a commodity. Even the music itself requires attuning one’s ear to an aesthetic others might dismiss as discordant. In the NOFX song, Jaw, Knee, Music, we hear singer, Fat Mike, lamenting fondly about how his old punk records make him sad because they are “so bad” and “no one seems to understand, the glory of guitar, when out of tune, the off timing, the singers who can't sing: the beauty of flaw.”[48] Subhumans allude, in Can’t Hear The Words, to the common rejection of punk as “the piercing sound of teenage screams” and note how, perhaps of their own singer Dick Lucas, “someone said ‘the boy can’t sing’”.[49] Meanwhile Johnny X, The Bouncing Souls tell us, is “bound by only six strings to this world”, but “says he’ll always keep them one turn out of tune”.[50] Ben Weasel owns up to his own potential failings as a musician when he confesses “I’ve got six guitars I can barely play and a questionable singing voice as well”,[51] which perhaps inspired my own lyric that “I'm only just one guy who can barely play a bass guitar, so who am I to write an album when I can't even read music?”[52] If punks have failed, Halberstam shows us, it is only by someone else’ standard of success. And it’s a standard which we have no interest in meeting. “We live our life in our own way,” The Bouncing Souls sing, and “never really listened to what they say.”[53] We have chosen not to succeed because we reject the given terms of success being offered and revel in superior alternatives of our own creation. Alternative ways of being and alternative ways of knowing. “I won't buy into this bad deal,” [54] sings Tilt’s Cinder Block, heeding the motto of NoMeansNo to “be strong, be wrong”[55] and joining Bad Religion “swimming upstream…against the grain”.[56] We haven’t failed at all. We are participating in a dance G.L.O.S.S have called “the outcast stomp”,[57] intentionally choosing a different conception of success because, as Rancid remind us, “when I got the music, I got a place to go”.[58] And the music – the place we go – is no accident. It has been intentionally created and cultivated by fellow misfits all forging newer, truer, identities in refutation of the old.
“Pay attention to the cracked streets and the broken homes,” Green Day implore us, asking us to confront what is conventionally seen as failure. “Some call it slums, some call it nice”, they acknowledge. “I want to take you through a wasteland I like to call my home. Welcome to paradise.”[59] The song begins with them inhabiting the traditional view and “feeling so alone” in the new, grim, economically undesirable landscape they have moved to, but ends with it “for some strange reason” now “feeling like my home”. “Slum” or “paradise” is a matter of perspective, they realise. To accept agreed standards, or contest and disrupt them, is a choice. Move into “another state of mind”,[60] as Social Distortion might put it, about being “down here with the rest of us”[61] and down can, instead, be seen as elevation. Meanwhile being “currently content with your surroundings” and possessing “a vague sense of accomplishment”, Pennywise warn, can be reconceptualised into something to regret rather than be proud of. Soon you will be wondering about “the miracles that could be found…waiting down the unknown road” you were too afraid to take.[62] And, as No Use For a Name’s, Tony Sly, put it, “living scared is just no way to die”.[63] Better to follow War on Women’s advice to “raise some wonderful, beautiful hell and make this world worth living in”[64] because, as The Linda Lindas wistfully opine, “when I don’t speak up there’s nothing but regret” even if “when I say something nobody backs me up”.[65] Good Riddance illustrate this feeling of standing solo against the world well: “when I beat my head against the wall of convention, the blood I taste is everyone's. I fought a battle thought unpopular, for stakes nobody seems to see, nobody sees but me.”[66] But for you to see them, for you to find those stakes worth fighting for, they tells us – punk tells us – is all that you need. Despite our parents’ warning that “not everybody feels the same as you, there are those who will oppose what you say and what you do” and giving caution that we must therefore “be prepared to face up to the consequence” of standing out from the crowd, a punk, as SNFU have highlighted, will “do just what I do, even at the risk of upsetting you” because they recognise that “first, I must satisfy myself before I can please anybody else.”[67]
On the one hand, you could read such a lyric as a creed of selfish individualism, but there is no reason to assume that satisfying oneself doesn’t involve a collectivist conception of satisfaction rather than an individualistic one, especially given the selfish individualism that is the norm in contemporary capitalist society. As the song is clearly an anthem against those norms, and gives voice to the strength needed to be yourself despite all the social forces which might oppose you, it is just as reasonable to assume that what is being advocated here is a resistance to such selfishness as a route to the authentic self. The entire point of Halberstam’s “antidisciplinary forms of knowing” is that it is in the contexts usually dismissed as our not knowing, as our failing to know, where creative and radical new knowledge might be found. “Life,” after all, as Bad Cop Bad Cop argue, “is a demonstrated dream, a work of art” which “can be as real as our beliefs.” The lyrics implies, as does Halberstam, that if we do not believe in something better, or hold only the limited or impoverished beliefs that are imposed upon us through socialisation, then life will be limited or impoverished instead of all that it could be. To make life truly fulfilling, the band tell us, along with Halberstam, you must “forget what you're taught, kill the machine and free from the flock”. You must remind yourself that you can be “anything in this world that you want” as long as you “forget what you thought” because “our agreed upon reality just doesn't pay our worth. We need to change, and the choice is ours to make” the band insist. “Through the lives we create,” they conclude, “we're greater than we're taught or told.”[68]
As punk artist, Scott Treleaven, recalls, “when you realise that you’re queer and you look back at the way that you’ve been treated, the way you’re supposed to think about yourself in relationship to society – you’re perverse or you’re evil, any of these pejorative terms that have been thrown at you – when you realise that’s fundamentally wrong, and that you know innately that you’re connecting with something that’s not only correct but natural, there’s a process that you go through where you start to analyse all the other systems you’re involved in.” This process makes “the alignment of queer and punk…really natural.”[69] When you see through the lies of one system, holes become obvious in all the others. When “everything sux”,[70] as the Descendents say, then it is not failure to seek alternatives to that “everything” and reject all that those who made it “suck” might call “wisdom” for something better. In the words of the Vandals, there’s “only one way of doing things right, but a thousand ways wrong, so join the fight in showing the winners we don't play their games.”[71]
“To live is to fail,” Halberstam tells us. It is “to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die; rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy. Rather than resisting endings and limits,” he asks us, “let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures.”[72] It is my opinion that punk does exactly that. Punk shines a gleeful light on fucking up and makes anthems out of disappointments, including death. Punk sings honestly about the fact that we’re all “born to die” – the ultimate, yet inevitable, failure – and doesn’t shy away from the reality that many of us will spend our brief time alive as “a slave for others and then you’re gone”, wasting most of our life in front of the TV.[73] As Bad Religion ask: “why do we pity the dead?”[74] After all, “slumber will come soon”[75] for all of us, and “how could hell be any worse when life alone is such a curse?”[76]
Punk, despite Halberstam’s reservations about Trainspotting, “imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being”,[77] encouraging freedom and experimentation in each of these areas which break the boundaries of conventional social norms and welcome the rejected and taboo. From its first angry chord to its continued outbursts in the current day, punk has relished in the full, unpleasant, spectrum of everything life has to offer, including all the things – and people – that mainstream society would rather pretend do not exist. Punk has attempted to flip what is called “failure” onto its head and wear it as a badge of pride, revealing alternative, hidden, knowledges and better forms of society along the way. After persisting and thriving for over five decades between the cracks and within the margins of mainstream society, despite being long-assumed dead as a cultural and social movement by the conventional media it has always rejected, I believe we have evidence enough now to claim that punk’s continued commitment to “failure” is an intentional, fertile, purposeful and transformative stance. A punk art of failure which reminds us that it is the system that has truly failed, and the world around us which needs to do better, not those of us who don’t comfortably fit within its constricting norms.
Of course, while I believe I have made a compelling case here for a punk art of failure that is at least akin to Halbertsam’s idea in Queer Theory, if not an extension of the very same concept, if it turns out that I have failed to make that case then perhaps it would be all the more fitting? There is always the caveat, after all, that, as Operation Ivy sing, “all I know is that I don’t know nothing.” [78] The band concede, echoing Socrates, that the only thing one can ever know for sure is that they “don’t know nothing” and, being punks – being failures – they, and I, are at peace with this inadequacy. “All I know is that I don’t know nothing”, they yell triumphantly, and I sing along with them to the final line of the song: “and that’s fine.”
[1] Black Flag. Damaged I. Damaged. SST Records. 1981.
[2] Dead Kennedys. MTV Get Off The Air. Frankenchrist. Alternative Tentacles. 1985.
[3] Robb, J. Punk Rock: An Oral History. 2006. Ebury Press: London.
[4] The Bouncing Souls. The Freaks, Nerds & Romantics. Maniacal Laughter. Chunksaah Records. 1996.
[5] The Homeless Gospel Choir, Normal. Presents: Normal. A-F Records. 2017.
[6] Screeching Weasel. Cool Kids. Bark Like a Dog. Fat Wreck Chords. 1996.
[7] Butler, J on The Owen Jones Podcast. January 29th, 2021. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXJb2eLNJZE accessed 01/08/21).
[8] Warfield, L, et al. Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution. 2021. PM Press: Oakland.
[9] Halberstam, J. The Queer Art of Failure. 2011. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.
[10] Vandals, Failure is the Best Revenge. The Quickening. Nitro Records. 1996.
[11] NOFX, 60%. Wolves in Wolves Clothing. Fat Wreck chords. 2006.
[12] The Clash, I Fought The Law. Hits Back. Sony Legacy. 2013.
[13] Propagandhi, Ordinary People Do Fucked Up Things When Fucked Up Things Become Ordinary. Today’s Empire, Tomorrow’s Ashes. Fat Wreck Chords. 2001.
[14] Against Me! Ache With Me. White Crosses. Sire Records. 2010.
[15] Against Me! True Trans Soul Rebel. Transgender Dysphoria Blues. Total Treble. 2014.
[16] Limp Wrist. Punk Ass Queers. What’s Up With the Kids? Paralogy Records. 2001.
[17] Tribe-8. Wrong Bathroom. Snarkism. Alternative Tentacles. 1996.
[18] We Are The Union. Boys Will Be Girls. Ordinary Life. Bad Time Records. 2021.
[19] Pansy Division. Smells Like Queer Spirit. Pile Up. Lookout! Records. 1995.
[20] Halberstam, J. The Queer Art of Failure. 2011. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.
[21] Halberstam, J. The Queer Art of Failure. 2011. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.
[22] The Wonder Years, Local Man Ruins Everything. Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing. Hopeless records. 2011.
[23] Dunn, K. Global Punk: Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday Life. 2016. Bloomsbury Academic: London
[24] Halberstam, J. The Queer Art of Failure. 2011. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.
[25] Bruce Springsteen, No Surrender. Born in the USA. Columbia Records. 1984.
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[27] Halberstam, J. The Queer Art of Failure. 2011. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.
[28] Bad Religion. Change of Ideas. No Control. Epitaph Records. 1989.
[29] Plato. (Guthrie, W. K. C translator). Protagoras and Meno. 1956. Penguin Books: Middlesex.
[30] Ramones. We’re A Happy Family. Rocket to Russia. Sire Records. 1977.
[31] Citizen Fish. Phone in Sick. Millennia Madness. Lookout! Records. 1995.
[32] Subhumans. Work-Rest-Play-Die. Time Flies but Aeroplanes Crash. Bluurg Records. 1983.
[33] Citizen Fish. Phone in Sick. Millennia Madness. Lookout! Records. 1995.
[34] Morning Glory. School is Bullshit. The Whole World Is Watching. Blacknoise Recordings. 2003.
[35] Dead Kennedys. Life Sentence. Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death. Alternative Tentacles. 1987.
[36] Team Dresch. Growing Up in Springfield. Personal Best. Candy Ass records. 1995.
[37] Gettier, E. ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ Analysis. 1963. 23(6): 121–123
[38] Cassam, Q. Vices of the Mind. 2019. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
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[42] Bad Cop Bad Cop. Community. The Ride. Fat Wreck Chords. 2020.
[43] Fricker, M. Epistemic Injustice. 2007. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
[44] Ramones. Pinhead. Leave Home. Sire Records. 1977.
[45] Jello Biafra. Become the Media. Alternative Tentacles. 2000.
[46] Dunn, K. Global Punk: Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday Life. 2016. Bloomsbury Academic: London.
[47] Bad Brains. Banned in DC. Bad Brains. ROIR. 1982.
[48] NOFX. Jaw, Knee, Music. The Longest EP. Fat Wreck Chords. 2010.
[49] Subhumans. Can’t Hear The Words. Worlds Apart. Bluurg Records. 1985.
[50] Bouncing Souls. The Ballad of Johnny X. Maniacal Laughter. Chunksaah Records. 1996.
[51] Ben Weasel. Patience. Fidatevi. Panic Button Records. 2002.
[52] Strangely Shaped By Fathers. The Day I Write That Song. 86. Who Killed Culture? Records. 2019.
[53] The Bouncing Souls. True Believers. How I Spent My Summer Vacation. Epitaph Records. 2001.
[54] Tilt. Dumb Little World. ‘Til It Kills. Fat Wreck Chords. 1995.
[55] NoMeansNo, I Am Wrong. Wrong. Alternative Tentacles. 1989.
[56] Bad Religion. Against The Grain. Against The Grain. Epitaph Records. 1990.
[57] G.L.O.S.S. The Outcast Stomp. Sabotage Records. Demo 2015.
[58] Rancid. Radio. Let’s Go. Epitaph Records. 1994.
[59] Green Day. Welcome to Paradise. Dookie. Reprise Records. 1994.
[60] Social Distortion. Another State of Mind. Mommy’s Little Monster. 13th Floor Records. 1983.
[61] Social Distortion. Down Here (With The Rest of Us). White Light, White Heat, White Trash. Epic. 1996.
[62] Pennywise. Unknown Road. Unknown Road. Epitaph Records. 1993.
[63] No Use For A Name. Night of the Living Living. The Feel Good Record of the Year. Fat Wreck Chords. 2008.
[64] War on Women. Wonderful Hell. Wonderful Hell. Bridge Nine Records. 2020.
[65] The Linda Lindas. Oh! Epitaph Records. 2021.
[66] Good Riddance. Steps. A Comprehensive Guide to Moderne Rebellion. Fat Wreck Chords. 1996.
[67] SNFU. All Those Opposed. Something Green and Leafy This Way Comes. Epitaph Records. 1993.
[68] Bad Cop Bad Cop. Originators. The Ride. Fat Wreck Chords. 2020.
[69] Warfield, L, et al. Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution. 2021. PM Press: Oakland.
[70] Descendents. Everything Sux. Everything Sucks. Epitaph Records. 1996.
[71] Vandals. Failure is the Best Revenge. The Quickening. Nitro Records. 1996.
[72] Halberstam, J. The Queer Art of Failure. 2011. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.
[73] Leftover Crack. Born to Die. Mediocre Generica. Hellcat. 2001.
[74] Bad Religion. Pity The Dead. The Gray Race. Atlantic Records. 1996.
[75] Bad Religion. Slumber. Stranger Than Fiction. Atlantic Records. 1994.
[76] Bad Religion. Fuck Armageddon…This is Hell. How Could Hell Be Any Worse? Epitaph Records. 1982.
[77] Halberstam, J. The Queer Art of Failure. 2011. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.
[78] Operation Ivy. Knowledge. Energy. Lookout! Records. 1989.