Melon Balls, Fuckin Melon Balls

A few weeks ago, I attended the prolific Punk Rock Holiday, a festival like no other in the punk world. 55 bands, big and small, shredding all week across 2 stages in a beautiful campground along the banks of the ice blue Soča River. By any and all regards, it was a legendary experience that most would be lucky to have. I spent the week drifting between campgrounds where we’d shoot the shit with our new international friends and drink, to the beach where we’d watch bands and drink, to the main stage where we’d mosh, sing along and drink, and to the food area where we’d eat pizza better than we’d had in Italy earlier in the week… And drink. Melon balls man, fucking melon balls.

A funny thing happens when I drink that much though. Somewhere between 5-7 shots, I get weirdly reflective and poetic. It gets me over the hump of lethargy and depression that comes with 2-4 drinks, but doesn’t quite get me to the belligerence and haphazard motor controls of my 8-10 drink self. My “Santiago Drunkenness Scale” tends to progress something like the following:
1 Drink Kieran – Just getting warmed up
2 Drink Kieran – Fuckin tired
3 Drink Kieran – Depressed
4 Drink Kieran – Just Vibin’
5 Drink Kieran – Blissful Observer
6 Drink Kieran – Contemplative and Pensive
7 Drink Kieran – Inspired and Galvanized
8 Drink Kieran – Getting Fuzzy
9 Drink Kieran – Where’s the water?
10+ Drink Kieran – I’ll need some eye witness testimony to continue the scale here.

When you can order cocktails by the litre though, it’s not too hard to get over that initial hump. I hit that perfect middle ground almost every night, typically as the sun was setting and the main stage was beginning to attract the degenerate punks out from their tents in the woods.

I remember losing myself a few times. Tuning the music out to a subtle din, and just staring into the crowd pondering the significance of this. It was my vacation. My getaway. My escape from things. But as I stared into that crowd, I started wondering if this was truly the experience of a lifetime I had been expecting. Something about it felt inauthentic. Stacks of bands I was supposed to like were ripping on a non-stop schedule, and I was surrounded by food, drinks, and smiling faces of like-minded people who would rather be nowhere else in the world than in that crowd with me. Yet something wasn’t clicking. I mean, I was having fun, don’t get me wrong, but it was a bit of a fleshlight experience. Gets the job done, and does a damn fine job, but there’s definitely something missing.

As my contemplative and pensive self gazed on into the crowd nodding shallowly in beat with the kick, a front-man stepped to the microphone and began telling everyone to get low to the ground. ~2000 people knelt as Jaya The Cat chugged palm muted chords to a kick drum and the singer instructed them to descend to the floor, just so that they can all jump up together for some reason.

There’s something deeply ironic about a crowd of supposed anti-authoritarians all kneeling to the ground and waiting for a man with a microphone to tell them to jump in synchronicity. I remained standing, and sipped on my Melon Ball while snapping the above picture, and thinking to myself “Dance monkeys, dance”. I shouldn’t begrudge people their fun, but there’s a sour punk bitch somewhere deep within me that screams when someone tells me to “Have a good night!” that goes “Well now I’m gonna show you. I’m gonna have the worst night I’ve ever had. Fuckin tell me what to do. Pfft.” It just conjures images of a scene I’m almost certain has played out somewhere in time, with Zack de la Rocha telling a crowd to sing along to “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” and having them just do it.

I was honestly going to lose my shit if one more singer ran to the front of the stage, spun their finger around in a downward circle, and screamed “CIRCLE PIT MOTHERFUCKERS”. It’s not that I couldn’t fuck with a good circle pit, but more so that this now-global scene has developed a formulaic simulacrum of chaos that is not only played out on the regular, but doled out upon request. Enough iterations and replications of once-chaotic behaviour have sanded down the rough edges, and created a repeatable, expected, and even marketable experience. No longer is it born of one lone soul deciding he’s going to put his head down and plow through people towards the stage and back to clear out a pit for him and his friends to slam around in. Rather, the exalted artists on stage decide that the crowd just isn’t into them enough, and instead of playing faster, harder, louder music to draw that energy straight out of the bowels of every witness in attendance, they choose instead to cash in their fans adoration, requesting that they perform the same way they themselves have to. This dissonance I think is what makes me crack up every time The Dreadnoughts ask their fans to self-organize and create a “Triangle Pit”. “Fuck you, here’s something you can’t do. Devolve into anarchy and have fun kiddos.”

Moshing, circle pits, stage diving, slam dancing, and even the trashy instruments and vocals themselves were all a raw and unfiltered happenstance expression of angst, dissatisfaction, and primordial rage that grew out of young and early punks. I don’t think that purpose has really changed. Those emotions are still channelled in people, but it’s now almost done so as a ritual. A performative ceremony, dedicated to excising one’s personal demons and basking in a pool of everyone else’. There’s purpose in that. I’m not one to say it needs to be anything but that. However the more times I watched this ritual play out, the less chaotic it felt, and the more distant it felt from the slogans and symbolism scrawled across the participants t-shirts and skin. The pattern repeated night after night. “Come closer to the stage! We don’t bite!”, “I wanna see you guys jump!”, “C’mon you know this one, sing it with us!”, and of course… “CIRCLE PIT!”

To quote the ever-poignant Propagandhi as they skewered Fat Mike in their song “Rock For Sustainable Capitalism“

Music’s power to
Describe, compel, renew
It’s all a distant second to
The offers you can’t refuse
Anyone remember when
We used to believe
That music was a sacred place, not some
Fucking bank machine?

Not something you just bought and sold?
How could we have been so naive?
I think when all is said and done
Just cause we were young
It don’t mean we were wrong

I don’t think the artists are necessarily engaging in it as some sort of profit-driven scheme to rake in millions, (god knows 90% of them are just scraping by to be able to tour) but the scale of the event, and the money behind it, and the liabilities that come with that money, demands an experience that conjures the feelings that draw punks in. I think every punk I’ve ever known has had some formative experience around the music wherein their anger and dissatisfaction with the world as it existed was validated by music. When they put on that first record, or went to that first show, something in them felt right. Their anger, their depression, their dissatisfaction, their political extremism, their absolute nihilism, it suddenly had a home. That urge they had to run up to the stage and throw themselves off, gravity and consequences be damned, was welcomed in that room. They jumped off of stages because they wanted to trust strangers. They got clocked in the face in that mosh pit because they wanted to feel anything. They sang until they were hoarse because those lyrics were the first time someone said what they’d been thinking for years.

When you’ve found your tribe though, once you’ve been recognized and validated, the high wears off a bit. When you have the music on hand, and when these live events are a regular part of your life, the release of these emotions just doesn’t expunge as much as it once did. Yet we are all seeking it constantly. Thus the exorbitant pageantry being dumped into coercing us to move more, to jump more, to mosh more. We’re being sold the idea that if we get into a big enough crowd, with a big enough mosh pit, with a big enough band, from far enough away, singing their biggest song, that we’ll feel that surge of liveliness we did when punk was new to us. Maybe for some that’s true, but personally as I stood there, I couldn’t help but feel distant from it. As though I was being milked by a capitalist machine the same as anywhere else in my life. “Come have the MOST PUNK experience ever… and if you wanna buy a $55 t-shirt to remember it by, then by all means!” I guess to me, the bigger things get, the more I lose the connections that to me, really define punk. I actually felt more connected and in tune with my surroundings when the gang of friends I’d met were hanging by the tents or the skate ramp, than when we were all standing in a crowd watching Pennywise.

For me, that’s what Punk really is. It’s small. It’s personal. It’s direct. It’s local. It’s communal. Bringing it to a stage, and a crowd that size, loses something. It loses the face-to-face. The politics slip away. The anger and the struggle slip away. No longer are the issues being screamed about on stage your issues. They’re someone else’ from somewhere far away. No longer can you crack a beer with that musician and hear them talk about why and what their art is. And no longer does the basic set up of “room + people + music” facilitate the individuality and creative expression that moves our scene forward.

I remember growing up in a christian family and wondering every week when I was dragged to church, why “worship” took the form it did. Why it seemed that the only way people could agree to express their belief in this deity was to have house-wives whose music careers had never taken off sing shitty 40bpm songs riddled with old-timey words no one really understood. I wondered why churches didn’t have rooms for painting to god, or dancing to him, or hell, cooking and feeding the poor in his name (like the motherfucker specifically asked for). When I later found Punk, the expressionism seemed so much more bombastic. The venues were filled with street art, people danced, sang, and thrashed in any way that seemed sensible to them, and the music took dozens of different forms from country-inspired rockabilly, to metal-inspired thrash. Every person’s individual idea of what Punk was, was right.

So as I stood in that crowd night after night, cruising past drinks 4 and 5, being instructed by world-renowned singers to move, or dance for them as clouds of second-hand smoke filled my lungs, I found a bit of introspective grumpiness. But I did genuinely have a blast there. I met some amazing friends, drank myself silly, sang karaoke, camped out under the stars, splashed in an ice cold river, and listened to a ton of amazing music. All of that was well worth the hundreds of dollars for the ticket and the thousand more for the plane to Europe. Hell, I’ll probably go back and do it again. But when I think back on it, that week was more “Holiday” than “Punk Rock”. I think on a return visit, I’ll have to focus a little less on connecting to the profundity of the music, and the politics that birthed it, and more on just having a good time. When it comes to punk, bigger isn’t necessarily better, but spending a week somewhere that you’re not an outsider is truly special.

Melon balls man, fuckin melon balls.