Fireside Chat

Objectively, the Fireside Chat is probably the most straightforward assignment of the course. The difficulty, in my experience, is settling on a belief that you find sufficiently defining to work off of. Mine was a defense of artistic shortcomings via my love of punk rock. I have been a punk fan since at least middle school, so I am reasonably well versed. In high school I started to consider the movement intellectually, and read whatever books I could find about it. So the ideas I expressed in my fireside chat were not recently formed. I have had them in my head for some time. This meant that when I drafted a script for my chat, it felt very conversational to me.

Since the idea of a fireside chat, in its original incarnation, is to be conversational and familiar, I tried to emulate this in my writing. I tend to be nervous about speaking in front of people, so my performative abilities, or lack thereof, may have choked out these efforts.

The video I made was mainly intended to provide some excitement to my statements. I think there is incredible intellectual value in the punk movement. But I am also aware of the irony of pretentiously discussing a lower class protest movement built on vitriol in an academic setting. I hoped to demonstrate how truly rough, even to a fault, punk could be. There is plenty of righteous and well-deserved anger to be found. But we should probably be critical of the narcissist nihilism of the Sex Pistols, or the aggressive, hyper-masculinity of Black Flag’s Henry Rollins. Punk rock was genuinely dangerous, and while that could be problematic, it was also distinctly exciting. This sense of danger made sense as a reaction to sanitized, boring corporate rock, which was becoming increasingly prevalent. Punk began as an attempt by common, music loving people, to reclaim music culture from elites who cared only for profit.

These roots are vital. I wanted the video to reflect these roots, but also the evolution away from them. Bands like Joy Division, The Clash, and Gang of Four can fairly be called punk, but they revolutionized the movement. They harnessed the reactionary impulse, and created work that, in varying ways fulfilled punk’s artistic potential. When I cut from footage of Henry Rollins to Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, I intended it to be emblematic of a shift from populist punk to high art punk. Both performers are seen in a state of true mania, but they use that mania in starkly different ways.