The Healing Slam of a Punker's Hand

By Brian Elroy McKinley

How do face paint, mohawk hair cuts and chains bring out the better part of our humanity? How do punk bands called Phantasmorgasm and Splitting Headache produce a sense of community and belonging? How does being slammed around by men and women in leather and studs create a better sense of well- being? How can what appears to be a counter-culture bent on spitting in the face of traditional values have any positive influence on its participants at all?
In order to answer these questions, we must first take a peek into the culture modern punkers have rejected.
Modern culture brings us many comforts and conveniences. We have insulated homes wired with phones and television. We have cars and public transportation. We have an abundance of food stores and restaurants. We have public education and a smorgasbord of colleges from which to choose. We have institutions that offer us opportunities for personal and professional advancement. But all these cultural advantages come at a price.
The price of admittance is a certain amount of conformity. Our education system gives us standardized tests to make sure we learn a set number of variables. It also serves as the social structure where young people first find or lose acceptance outside their families. High school and college continue to add demands on who we are and what we know in order to be fully admitted into the culture. And the work place has its own demands on what we be in order to be "successful." Sure many different people are involved in the process, but a certain amount of homogenizations takes place. And even if the homogenization doesn't take root inside us, it is required to at least look as if we have conformed. What we wear, when and with whom. What we say, and how we say it. What we do, and for whom. Each of these things are important if we desire the benefits of the culture.
But in conforming in order to obtain the benefits the culture has to offer, we often lose the ability to interpret one of the most fundamental needs of human existence: when someone really loves and accepts us for who we are.
If we become, or at least look like we've become, an integral part of the culture, we will find acceptance. But since that acceptance is based solely on how well we've modified our appearance, we cannot know for sure if people love and accept us for what we are inside or for what we've learned how to show on the outside. Finding someone, a best friend, family member or lover, who will take the time and the risk to find out who we really are becomes one of our major objectives. As our culture becomes more mobile and more demanding, this becomes increasingly difficult. One need only stay up and watch late-night television with all its expensive but successful "love lines" to see just how pervasive the search for acceptance has become.
It is in this search for love and acceptance that punks find their birth. They have hit upon a simple and almost foolproof way to delineate between cultural acceptance and personal acceptance. They have blatantly and forcefully rejected the culture. They dress to offend the sensible. They make themselves appear reprehensible. They listen to music that is not eloquent nor melodic. With their faces, their bodies and their environment they make clear they do not and will not fit in the dominant culture. They get a lot of rejection, but they know it's from people who would only accept them on a cultural basis. And when others do continue to love and accept them, they know it is not a cultural acceptance but a personal one. The fact that you don't have to be a punk to be their friend attests that they are not merely adding an alternate cultural norm to adopt in order to have value.
Though you need not be a punk to be their friends, it is quite understandable that people willing to subject themselves to massive rejection in order to have true acceptance by a few would naturally have much common ground for friendships. What many punks didn't get from the dominant culture, they are able to give and get from each other. Where the outside world offers false acceptance if they conform, their own community of friends offers acceptance regardless if they've conformed.
In this community of acceptance many punks find a freedom to be themselves. You can be an atheist or a Christian. You can be republican or democrat, a communist or anarchist. You can be in good shape or bad. You can smoke or not smoke. You can dance or not dance. You can be rich or poor, and it doesn't matter because those values ar no longer the basis for acceptance.
Probably the most visible and powerful arena for this community of acceptance happens at a punk concert. Punk music originated as a rejection of the high-tech musical styles of the seventies. Its simplicity and counter-culture style have remained intact for over fifteen years. The rest of the musical world moves and fluctuates according to what's in fashion, but punk music remains an outlet for anyone who wants to participate. Its lyrics are often filled with rejection of cultural norms, just like the punk doing the singing. It's brash, offensive and generally not very melodic, but the anger is sweet liberation for its adherents.
To its throbbing rhythm punks can dance in what seems closer the African tribal dancing than to anything we normally see. Rather than dancing with a partner -- with dateless individuals feeling left out when no one wants to dance with them -- anyone who so desires can join in. Usually moving in a circle in front of the stage, punks often push and shove those around them. Called "slam dancing," it is not violent as it first appears. Rather, it is a form of contact, of physical interaction that is acceptable to both male and female. Each slam by a punker's hand is contact with another human being in a society that defines contact between males as abnormal and contact between males and females as sexual. Each slam acts as a form of communal healing, the absolute radiance from the participants' faces attesting to the fulfillment they feel. It is not unusual to see someone literally throw themselves into the supportive arms of the dancing crowd or to see a slam lead to a bear hug between men, women or both.
This unusual form of community life that punks have developed does not make them immune from human failings. They screw up as badly as the rest of us, and they also love and care as do the rest of us. They have all the same attributes of humanity as the business person, the homemaker, the college student and the retired person. But they also have a community in which they know they are accepted for who they feel they are rather than for what they're told to be. And they have found this to be worth the rejection they get from society by their refusal to play what they see as a heartless game.

Email: el@elroy.com

Go Back to The Event Horizon Rider