The profundity of personal post-punk philosophy

I’m no idiot, but I wouldn’t call myself a remarkably intelligent person either. If I’m being completely honest and letting go of any pressure to fake humility, then I have no problem saying I’m likely slightly above average intelligence.

But, Jake, I can hear you say, that’s hardly worth bragging about, considering what passes for intelligence in the 21st century. I agree, dear reader, and that’s why I ain’t bragging about it.

Just so you don’t think I’m being unfairly self-deprecating, I will toot my own horn and say that I think I’m quite wise. There, I’ve said it. No shame in my game.

But, Jake, you chime in again, what’s the difference in intelligence and wisdom? You’re talking like a idgit.1

To make my point, I won’t bother with textbook definitions. You can google those up on your own time. But I’ll define the terms below in the best deep-fried way I know how.

So, here’s goes:

Intelligence is the ability to figure out something new the first time you encounter it.

Wisdom is the ability to learn from experience (both your own and other people’s).

I’ve made plenty mistakes over the last 40 years. Intelligence would have helped me not mess up the first time. But wisdom keeps me from messing up the same way twice. If I gotta have problems, at least make them new problems.

How accurate is this summary? Dunno, dun care. It’s my worldview and I’m sticking to it.

Teenagers have this nasty habit of thinking they’re smarter than they really are. (As the parent of tween, I cannot stress enough the anxiety I felt while typing that last sentence.) Why do teens suffer this affliction? I suppose that’s because their brains have reached a new level of computation and consideration at a time in which they lack the life experience—and therefore, the wisdom—to know just how ignorant they really are. So many teenagers become these uncompromising, judgmental twerps who couldn’t see nuance if it looked them straight in the eye. (My dear tween, if you’re reading this, remember that Daddy still loves you.) As a middle-aged man, I have no problem admitting that description applied to me in my adolescence.

The good news is that it was in adolescence that I found my first love: Music. And the exploration of that love was powered by a 56k modem which rarely saw speeds over 19200bps and Napster and the websites for ordering CDs from Tower Records and CDNow. (I just lost any Gen Zers who may have found this newsletter, and that’s okay. Does Gen Z read anyway?)

I could go on and on about the bands I discovered in those days, such as The Cure, Pixies, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream—but that’s not the point of this post.

This post is instead about putting wrong stock in labels.

You may have seen a trend with the bands I lifted above. They’re largely post-punk bands. Maybe even alt-rock, depending on how you define genres, though I lacked the vocabulary to describe those bands in these ways at the time. But I thought I had a good idea of what they were not.

As far as I was concerned, my favorite bands most certainly were not pop and they were not punk. George Carlin said there were seven dirty words2, but I had added two more to my naughty list.

(Funnily enough, one of my favorite bands during this time was The Sex Pistols, whose iconic Never Mind the Bollocks… is a punk record with pop production. But that’s a point for another post, another day.)

What did I have against pop and punk? Well, pop was for sellouts, and punk was crude. Though I didn’t quite appreciate it at the time, the bands I was falling in love with were firmly in the middle.

These days, I think of myself as a post-punk artist in all I do. While I see post-punk as a hybrid of pop and punk, my definitions of those core terms have grown, as has the way I define my personal philosophy. Now, I no longer think of pop as being exclusively for sellouts. Pop now means *accessible*, as in it has the potential to be adapted by the masses. You can’t guarantee your work or message will resonate with everyone, but you can improve your chances by not pushing them away.

And what about punk? Isn’t its anti-establishment noise at odds with a style that focuses on accessibility? Perhaps, but punk also had a certain DIY aesthetic that made the act of creating more accessible to more people, a distinction I find highly inspiring.

And so, wisdom has informed my post-punk philosophy, guided by the simple question How do I make the most of what I’ve got to make something that most people can understand while staying true to myself?

That last little bit—the part about staying true to myself—is the most important part of the equation. When we care only about the numbers—likes, followers, dollar signs—and disregard how we get these numbers, that’s when we’ve become sellouts.

I wasn’t intelligent enough to consider all this in my teenage years. But today I’m wise enough to know just how true it all is.

Goodbye. Adios. Adieu.

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