[Nettime-bold] Was the new economy the punk rock of the last decade?

["David Garcia" <davidg@xs4all.nl>]

Title: Was the new economy the punk rock of the last decade?

Was the new economy the punk rock of the last decade?

Punk was the movement that finally demystified being a rockstar.
Traditional musical skills of even the most basic kind were ditched. the paradigmatic punk band would only need (accompanied of course with the right attitude and or haircut) to thrash away at their instruments and concoct a bold sloganising dittie Œanarchy in the UKı ŒGod Save the Queenı. All you needed to be a rock star was energy (lots of it) attitude (even more of it). And for a few months some of them were right!

well for a while Iıve had this de ja vu thing of thinking I was back in the late 70ıs when every one I knew seemed to be in a band but this time round everyone has a dot.company. Types of people who  generation ago would have talked about Œselling outı are now ONLY selling out, to the highest bidder. Money is cool, money is the new black, youth culture has organised itself around money as never before. Money doesnıt buy culture it is culture. Just as once you didnıt need to hold a tune to be a rock star this time round you donıt have to make a profit to be a billionaire. So what if its only for a week. In the future will every one be a millionaire? Yes but only for 15 minutes.

So can we learn anything from what happened when the punk bubble burst?  When the emperors clothes were only held together with safety pins. Well interestingly punk never went away. It is still with us. From the wild speciation of those heady days a surprising amount made the transition into the pop version of viability and the DIY approach to fashion, music and art is still visible-particularly in Brit. art from T.Emin to D.Hurst the Œin you faceı combination the  entrepreneurial punk ethic/aesthetic remains with us and can still be re.freshing.  In much of indy pop culture. the territories opened up turned out to be real and the insights and procedures are continually  re-purposed and re-mixed for new eras. And when you see footage of the sex pistols in full frenzy you realise that they were even better than we thought at the time. Whatever they could or couldnıt do they were a bloody good band  

I have only one fear of pursuing this spurious analogy and that is that punk was followed by the pathetic...sigh.... ŒNew Romanticsı... sigh...

Are we in for the New Romantic economy? Geert Lovink please put this on the agenda of your conference so that we me know how it will look. Personally Iım waiting for the grunge economy. Iım told it wonıt be long.