This is how I remember Rollins (not the gym guy with a massive neck). Image link.
A miscellaneous Henry Rollins quote that surfaced on the Web like digital driftwood on the cybernetic beach. Here he discusses “selling out” a major theme from the punk days that essentially defined ones legitimacy within the scene. I wrote an essay about the issue entitled, A Community is Not a Demographic. Anyhow, I think he makes some good points, but was surprised to see that he is a fan of punk music in commercials. From Mother Jones:
HR: [Punk] gave music back to people. For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16 and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that. Me and [Minor Threat and Fugazi vocalist] Ian MacKaye would go to these concerts, and it was fun. You know, seeing Led Zeppelin did not suck, in the least. And then punk rock came along and all of a sudden you are standing five feet away from Dee Dee Ramone or the Bad Brains, or you’re carrying in the gear with the band, or now you’re in the band, and so music became this very immediate thing to me, where I could experience it from a very close-up vantage point instead of bringing binoculars, which I literally did to see Led Zeppelin. So I think it actualized music for a lot of young people. If you wrote the band, they would write back. You could meet the band. It became this thing that was a part of your life, not this thing that you paid a ticket for and through peanuts at. And that to me was huge. I think a lot of people became very inspired by that ethic of, you know, I’m gonna confront authority and really see what that’s all about, and question authority, read between the lines, and be suspicious. And I never heard that in a Ted Nugent record.
Where did it fail? I don’t know that it failed, I think it kind of just got absorbed into popular mainstream. When you hear a Stooges track or a Buzzcocks track or a Ramones track or a track by the Fall, or what have you, in a car ad, some people, whenever that happens, I get a letter saying “What a sellout.” And I say “no man, we’ve arrived.” The person making that ad grew up on that music. You’re no longer confined to interstitial, instrumental music, you’re gonna get Iggy Pop and the Teddy Bears singing I’m a punk rocker to sell a car. What would you rather hear? Some wanky keyboard or Iggy and the Teddy Bears? I know which one I’d rather hear, and I just hope they get paid quickly and double scale, because it’s about time. I don’t so much see the failure in as much as that anything that has been around for 30 years or more.
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