I'm Still a Punk Rocker!
I’ve been spending a lot of time speaking with a friend of mine via social media about our years being punk rockers. She was more on the fan side of things where I was a drummer.
Back in the day (the early to late 80s for us), being a punk rocker meant bucking the establishment. It meant shunning the central gatekeepers. It meant being independent, and shocking, and almost tribal in our belief system which was pretty much, Fuck off, and get out of my way while I make a lot of noise.
We rejected the collective communism of hippidom, cut our hair and, if you were a mod like I was, you wore conservative clothing like button downs, Salvation Army trousers, and black shoes.
Some kids, like the hard-core gangs wore spiked hair, lots of leather and combat boots. We might have looked different but we were all in the same tribe and as much outsiders as anyone else. It’s just that our genres were slightly different (think sci-fi vs. psychological suspense in publishing terms).
If you were in a band, you didn’t hope for a major record deal. You either worked with an independent label like SubPop or you put the record out yourself on your own label.
We didn’t know it then, but we were hard workers, dedicated artists, and savvy business persons. That’s right, businesspersons. Unlike the hippies and the classic rockers who smoked dope and slept in, we were capitalists who, while often singing on behalf of the lumpen prole, were actually busy building out own little publishing empires.
Now, fast forward almost 40 years, and the same thing has happened with fiction writing in the wake of a traditional legacy system that is collapsing on itself. Sure we might take a lucrative deal now and again (God knows I have), but AT BASE, we’re still dedicated indies and depub activists. And trust me when I tell you no one…no editor, publisher, marketing person, or agent…tells us what the fuck to do.
We all belong to Web 3, since we buck the centralized establishment. We don’t belong to CNN or NBC or any other corporate “for profit” media. We subscribe to YouTube for our news.
If you want to defund the police because the Clintons told you to, we buy our own guns and weapons and take the law into our own hands, thank you very much.
If you no longer trust the Fed and the dollar, you’ve already switched to crypto and especially #BTC, and reaped the financial awards that go along with it.
We are renegades and we are driven and no one establishment can stop us.
Depub/indie publishers and punk rockers. We are one in the same.
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