Nostalgia Is Futile

This past summer the 40th anniversary of the original Woodstock Festival came and went to little fan fair. There was some crappy comedy movie made about it and a few bands (or rather one or two members of the band and a bunch of ringers) who played the festival tried to cash in by doing a Woodstock anniversary tour. But the best look back at Woodstock was this article by Larry Livermore who attended the festival back in 1969. With all the after-hype that's been put on it he looked back and stated, "Hey, kids of today: don’t let the parents or grandparents fool you into thinking that your own lives can never possibly be imbued with such Importance and Meaning as theirs were. Ultimately it was half a million mostly middle class kids gathering together in a field to take drugs, have sex, and listen to music. Happens dozens of times every summer, all over the world, every year, and probably always will as long as there are kids, fields, drugs, sex and music."

There's no point living in the past, nostalgia is futile, you might as well embrace what you can in the present. Unfortunately this mentality is lost amongst not only burnt out ex-hippies and younger wanna be hippies, but its also infected into the minds of fans of punk rock.

Forget about yahoo! declaring that punk is once again dead (while completing ignoring a number of mainstream bands like Rancid, Bad Religion, and Against Me! who are still selling plenty of records and maintaining large fan bases, and being seemingly oblivious to any sort of existence of an underground scene), people who should know better, people who actually follow punk music seem just as stuck in their nostalgia and oblivion.



While watching this video I noticed some comments like "bands now won't be rememebred so much as the late 70's early 80's punk movement on the east and west coast and britain was when punk rock was at its peak and we missed it" and "if only the scene and the bands were still like this.now its just pure oi oi,fuck the pigs".

Punk is constantly evolving and in every era there has always been great bands coming and going. These people sound like some wanna be hippies complaining about how the 60s are over. What's the fucking point? You might as well embrace what you can in the present as it's impossible to live in the past.

Gallows, Psyched To Die, Banner Pilot, Rich White Males, Fucked Up, The Copyrights, Leftover Crack, Black President, Cobra Skulls, The Lanterns, Have Nots, Teenage Bottlerocket, This Is Hell, Jetty Boys, The Guts, Zatopecks, The Ergs!, Dead Mechanical, Classics Of Love, even Rise Against. There's 20 great bands off the top off my head all of which formed in the last decade, not to mention there are still bands from the 70s, 80, and 90s putting out recent material that is great. Of course you could make the argument that the punk music of this decade isn't as good as decades past, but to write off the entire current as forgettable is a joke. Good punk rock always exists all you have to do is look for it. And 30 years from now people will be complaining "Oh I wish Teenage Bottlerocket was still around!" or "They don't make bands like the Cobra Skulls anymore!" or even "I can't believe Tim Armstrong is dead! If only I had been born earlier and able to see Rancid!" (remember how bummed people who never got a chance to see The Clash were when Strummer died?).

Nostalgia is useless, make use of present time because the past will always be dead. Speaking of things that are dead who the hell uses yahoo! anymore? Hasn't google effectively killed them?