Something To Believe In

In Cranked Up Really High Stewart Home wants to sever punks ties to Situationalism and Dada. Still, punk’s vague origins intend to be based on disruption, rejection, and revolution. Ironically, the documentary titled 1991: The Year Punk Broke would actually become a beginning of the end. Documenting Nirvana’s rise, the underground became an open door to the mainstream, positioning indie now, not as opposition to popular music productions. So where the beginning lies is still up debate.

For now, we can evoke the undead ghost of Richard Hell as introducing Rimbaud and nihilism to punk rock’s destructive philosophy recreating punk as art and poetry. Still, this often gets trumped by punk’s politics. That’s why the band Rancid proves so interesting.

Richard Hell and New York proto punk rock by 1977 was less important historically compared to what was happening in England at the same time. The British punk rock bands of '77 were arty and adventurous. Slogans that conveyed possibility by ’81 evoked nothing but literal emptiness. The second wave of punk commonly called streetpunk or Oi was unimaginative and lost much of punk’s vision. What remained was the working class concerns embodied in the cry of “No Future.” Johnny Rotten has revisited this proclamation claiming what he actually meant was there’s no future unless you make one for yourself. Sounding a lot like Sleater-Kinney’s coda at the end of “#1 Must Have,” “Now’s the time to Invent!,” Punk would once again regain possibility but only through genre revisionism.

The particular case of Rancid is that in form they evoke the streetpunk hopelessness of British working class Oi, but in content they hold on to the long-lost hope of punk’s enduring value.

To put it another way, Punk’s original nihilism was first artistic but became political. Rancid have reverted it back like holding a mirror upto itself. The anti-artistic formal qualities of Oi, somehow sound arty in their resurrection while the nihilism romanticized comes across as hope.

Rancid represent belief and may have both resurrected and killed punk rock. Now that punk has been coopted by Ben Stein and the Christian church, punk rock is belief and this may all be Rancid’s fault.

In the song "Ben Zanatto," an unimportant B-side, that only takes the place of every other rancid song includes a pretty trite chorus of:

There was romance in the air for sure
There was romance in the air
When the autumn sun light(ed?) Sharmon Palms
There was Romance in the air

The song points to other rancid songs namely "Nihilism" off Let’s Go and "Roots, Radicals" off And Out Come the Wolves. Sharmon Palms, the white ghettos that paint a picture in "Nihilsm," this time have a nostalgic quality in which romance is in the air. While the songs title is the same Ben Zannatto that appears in "Roots, Radicals."

Rancid songs, lyrically are often nostalgic, romantic, wistful and meaningful. Tim Armstrong’s 2007 solo album was appropriately titled A Poet’s Life, because like Richard Hell and Rimbaud before him reimagines punk as poetry.

And like Rancid as well as Armstrong’s previous band Operation Ivy, it is difficult to find a time before then that punk rock was something to believe in.