Taki's Mag

Dash Snow

Seminal punk legend Ari Up just died. She sang for The Slits, had dreadlocks down to the floor, and is credited for helping put women on the punk map. She also followed the inexplicably hip Rastafarian religion, so when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer, she refused a mastectomy. This is how Bob Marley died. A simple toe amputation would have saved him, but as he put it, “I don’t allow a man to be dismantled.” In both cases the cancer metastasized and they died. As Jim Goad put it, “Haile Selassie? Highly retarded.”

Rumor has it that a founder of my favorite punk band Crass was recently diagnosed with cancer. If true, he will probably take the Ari route of treatment because he is a rebel and rejects Western tradition.

I love the idea of bucking the system and shocking the squares. It’s exhilarating to tell a racist you’re a race-mixer or to drag a homophobe to a gay bar. It’s a fun game that encourages discourse and it’s probably the best way to keep things fresh and exciting, but it’s just that—a game. You’re not supposed to take it to the grave.

The Sex Pistols were originally all about rebellion for rebellion’s sake. During the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, a sarcastic “God Save the Queen” became their mantra. Then bassist Sid Vicious met a group of New York junkies called The Heartbreakers and decided heroin should be part of the revolution. Sid died from an overdose barely a year later at the ripe old age of 21. Since then, heroin has been inexorably linked to cool, and you don’t get much friendlier with the Grim Reaper than heroin. Instead of Sid’s death being a wake-up call, it made the drug even cooler, and the “hope I die before I get old” culture got a big injection of “Live Fast, Die Young.” Thirty years later, we have today’s anti-conformist youth combining, “I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars” with “This is our decision to live fast and die young/We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun!”

Heroin has a way of getting in your ear like a little Rasputin and telling you death is no big deal. That’s why it feels so good. Like Christianity, it assuages the fear of death until you’re in a state of fearless bliss. It’s possible atheism’s vacuum drove some kids to heroin. Dash Snow was called everything from one of “Warhol’s Children” to the New York art scene’s “Enfant Terrible.” He defined New York cool for a decade, but when smack got in his ear and told him to end it, he abandoned his daughter and girlfriend and said goodbye to the living. Was he trying to capture some of Sid’s permanent icon status? Fuck, I hope not. Heroin has taken a good dozen of my acquaintances over the years, and if it’s not an overdose, it’s liver cancer from the hepatitis C they got sharing needles ten years earlier. How avant-garde.

This self-annihilation really rears its ugly head in child-rearing’s uncool world. Among my peers, abortion is considered about as consequential as taking a shit. In fact, it’s empowering. I had a New Year’s Eve party last year where a feminist writer was pregnant and took magic mushrooms anyway. Concerned about this, I asked her if she was keeping the baby. “I’m not sure,” she laughed. “Probably not.” She aborted it a week later. I’m still not positive how I feel about abortion, but I don’t like seeing it abused, and I notice that none of the new moms I know (all pro-choice) would ever consider having one now. I recently asked a friend who had three kids barely two years apart what she would do if she got pregnant again. “Probably lie on the floor and cry for three days,” she said. After seeing what babies look like when they come out, she would never consider aborting again. This is life after cool. It doesn’t have ripped jeans and sunglasses on, but it’s alive.

We like to scoff at pro-lifers as uptight old fuddy-duddies who want a woman to keep the retarded baby she got from when her dad raped her. However, I’m starting to think my people have swung the pendulum so far the other way, they’re pro-deathers. I mean, who’s at the soup kitchen doling out stew to the homeless? Certainly not the In Crowd. It’s uncool to care about life. Death is badass. Life is for assholes. Death is an awesome Detroit punk band made up of black dudes in leather jackets, and they’re still considered one of the coolest bands of all time. Conversely, “Choose Life!” was the motto of one of the planet’s least-cool bands, the literally gay Wham! My generation of punks has successfully rejected nearly everything our parents believed in, including existence itself. I published many articles promoting The Church of Euthanasia and often argued that overpopulation dwarfs any other abuse Mother Nature suffers. I even wrote an article when I was 25 entitled “Stop Breeding: You’re Killing the Planet.” Since then I’ve survived heroin and rhetoric and fashion, and I’ve realized there is life after youth’s naïve arrogance. My great-grandchildren will realize the same thing one day.

My peers, on the other hand, are all but extinct. I recently did some stand-up comedy in Vancouver, and all my old punk friends came by to say hi. Twenty years ago we were in bands with names such as Anal Chinook, Black Jello, and Dead Trout, but now we’re 40 and trying to get paid for our rude behavior. There were at least a dozen of us backstage, and I asked how many had children. Only one, and it was out of wedlock with a woman he hated so much, he was in a custody battle with her. For tens of thousands of years our ancestors battled famine, disease, wars, and starvation. They traveled the world suffering primitive cultures’ abuses and doing everything to stay alive and then, due to one fashion trend, evolution stops. You can almost see a caveman’s ghost hovering above us screaming, “I ran from a saber-toothed tiger for this?!”

Rejecting medicine will kill a thousand rebels. Heroin will kill thousands more, but this hatred for “breeding” has prevented the lives of millions. Cool culture has inadvertently led to an invisible genocide. We were supposed to rock the boat and maybe even smash the state, not line up in front of the celestial firing squad and say, “Go ahead, punk, make my day.”

The Sex Pistols were an exciting band that shook the foundations of “dinosaur rock” and changed the way people think about music and fashion. Vocalist Johnny Rotten is brought to tears when he talks about Sid Vicious. Rotten doesn’t have kids, either, though he did adopt one. Her name was Ari Up.