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 hen punk broke, Don Letts just happened to be there holding a camera. The dreadlocked Renaissance man went on to direct the Clash documentary Westway to the World as well as hundreds of music videos for acts like the Pretenders, Elvis Costello and Musical Youth. Occasionally, Letts would rack up even more cred playing in the bands Big Audio Dynamite and Screaming Target.So it's notable that in his new documentary, Punk Attitude, Letts doesn't go the pretentious if-only-you'd-been-there-in-'77 route. Instead, he echoes Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, envisioning punk as a spirit that pervades the cultural revolution, something he expects to endure long past Mohawks and safety pins. — Lily Oei Aren't people sick of talking about punk? If I had gone to them and told them I was making a documentary only about punk rock, they would have told me to fuck off. They, like me, are so over the whole "punk" thing. When I was growing up, music was very much an anti-establishment thing. It was ours. Now people are getting into music to be part of the establishment, to get on the charts. But I believe the punk attitude is like the Force in Star Wars. It's a birthright. And it's out there somewhere, but probably not in the top forty. Like Joe Strummer said, you gotta make sure your bullshit detector is finely tuned. Maybe you have to look in places off the beaten path, like Iraq or China, where people haven't had MTV rammed down their throat. MTV has helped me and my videos, but they've still got a lot to answer for. How did you become the chronicler of the punk movement? I wanted to get involved — punk rock was never a spectator sport. I could have maybe bought a poster and stuck it on my wall, and we wouldn't be here talking now. So I picked up a Super 8 camera and I tried to film the bands that I thought were interesting. Funny enough, two months later in the press I read, "Don Letts is making a punk rock documentary." I really wasn't — I was just trying to get my shit together. But I'm like, "Oh that's a good idea. I'll call it a movie." And that was my first film, The Punk Rock Movie.
I got asked a year ago to make a documentary on punk rock. I don't know about here in the U.S., but in England, punk rock has never gone away. Every other year there's a punk rock revival. I was kinda over it. And then I thought, Why do people keep going back to this particular time? And I realized that what we were really talking about was the counterculture. And counterculture didn't start and certainly didn't end with punk rock. I realized there's always that emphasis on the late '70s incarnation of punk, but that's a disservice. The counterculture isn't something that began in '77. When Jerry Lee Lewis jumped on that piano that was punk attitude. Chuck Berry. Buñuel movies. Lenny Bruce is punk rock. Albert Camus: punk rock. It's not just about music. It's the way you do what you do, not what you do. Even within the confines of music, you cast a wide net, including people like Patti Smith. The media picked up on the "punk" label and reduced it to the ridiculous, to the safety pins and ignored what Patti was doing — and Suicide, Television. Do you feel that the movement, this galvanization effectively continues today, or is the younger generation more apathetic? Apathy is one of the main problems of the twenty-first century. It's AIDS and apathy — they're both dangerous. There's so much shit going on, I'm surprised it doesn't have a more galvanizing effect. Having said that — I live in the West and most of my information comes through western media; that's what I mean about having to look further afield. Don't get me wrong — I have every confidence that there will always be someone out there pushing the envelope. Maybe just not the young in the West. How in touch are you with things non-Western? There are a lot of people on the path, but they're all going in the wrong fucking direction. All the things that interest me these days come off the beaten path. I actually believe the most interesting things now are going to come from the naïve, from the amateur, from people who haven't been bombarded with popular culture so that everything becomes derivative. Orson Welles once said something like, "You want to write a treatment of a truly original film? Don't watch films." Knowledge can be a mother-fucker; you can know too much. Your post-premiere party will be at CBGBs. How do you feel about the gentrification of the Bowery and the possible closure of CBGBs when its lease comes up August 31 of this year? The Bowery? Whole fucking New York! Used to be the town that never sleeps, but it seems to me now that New York definitely naps. CBGBs might go as well. And CBGB is like the heart and soul of punk rock and roll. They shouldn't let it happen. It should be a protected building. You always see tourists there with their cameras up. It's a tourist attraction. It's got more relevance than the fucking Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum wherever it is. Cleveland. You know see what I mean? If you're going to have a rock and roll museum, it should be CBGBs. It's a museum that's still going on, actively part of the process, not wallowing in what it did back in the day. How do you feel about the newer bands mentioned in the film, like Offspring and Green Day? Better Green Day than half the shit that's out there, I have to say. Whether I like them musically is beyond the point. What is interesting is that within the pop medium they're still trying to say something interesting, still trying to bring debate to the table. Whether I like it is irrelevant. Who the fuck am I? What currrent acts impress you musically? I like Beck, probably one of the coolest dudes in the U.S. But there's probably a lot of things you wouldn't have heard of, like Asian Dub Foundation, Roots Maneuva, operating at the outside of the top forty. If you want what the Man's offering, invariably you ain't going to be saying that much. It's like hip-hop, why is it the largest selling genre in music now? Is it because it's radical and contentious? No. Because it ain't saying shit. It's hip-pop. So do shows like American Idol just kill you? You know what's funny about that? I don't know if people realize it, it's not a new idea, that stuff. The manufacturing has been going on since the '50s and many years before that. What couldn't you include in Punk Attitude? I'm trying to get thirty or forty years of counterculture into ninety minutes — there's going to be a lot of shit missing. I came across this band Flipper through Henry Rollins and Jello Biafra. They were so radical that they thought Black Flag was too commercial. What ties your films together? They're about music that has an agenda other than ego. Punk Attitude will air on IFC July 9. See IFCTV for additional showtimes. n° 
©2005 Lily Oei and Nerve.com. |
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