I love Punk Planet like I love The Weakerthans, deeply, with words I can’t pronounce or fully define.   I love them for conviction and for heart, I love them for caring and for trying. I love them for painting the grey sky exactly as it is, for realizing exactly how important love is in politics. I love them for growing up but knowing exactly when I needed to piss out 5 beers at once on my highschool’s science building, for the light goading when I lit up another cigarette everyone knows I don’t need and don’t look good smoking.   I love them because they’re both poets, they take things I’d normally bristle at (sonnet form and Foucault from the weakerthans, Jello Biafra and Taking Back Sunday from Punk Planet.) and made them less of a headache.   They left nothing as an afterthought. I know I said it already, but they both cared so deeply. 

 

            Fittingly enough, my relationship with one started with the other. In the summer of freshman year of highschool, a friend and I took a trip out to Berkley, and spent most of the week or so we were there walking in between Rasputin Records, Amoeba Records and a 99 cent Chinese restaurant we found early on.   I had recently gotten Left and Leaving, The Weakerthans second album after hearing one of their songs on a label compilation, and when I saw them on the cover of punk planet 44, I snatched up the magazine immediately.   And I fucking hated it. Former Lookout! Co-owner Larry Livermore spent a majority of the interview talking politics with Weakerthans singer John K Samson, and I got fed up. I wanted maps through the density of songs like Without Mythologies.   And I got talk about Canada’s treatment of Native Americans, his left-wing publishing house Arbeiter Ring, and whether poetry was a democratic art form (Samson said yes. I’d still probably disagree).   And I got fed up, because, honestly, I wanted something pretty but dumb.   I wanted glowing accolades and a flattering interview, and I was thrown into an intense, real political discussion. I’ve warmed up to the interview, and the cover of the issue hangs on my wall, but I reread it now and can see exactly why punk planet mattered. Because this was a magazine where smart people asked the questions they wanted to know the answers to, with no regard for the reader. And, it turns out, almost always, this results in candid, fun, honest, heartfelt writing.   The weakerthans interview reassured me about them, but through punk planet I discovered Jawbreaker (10 years after I should have), Lucero, Deltron, Plan-it-X, and the whole idea that punk was all in the mind and in whether you felt motivated by it. It was dead if you thought so, but god it could be so fucking alive.   And they wanted you to know more. The back page of every issue was a list of recordings by bands interviewed, a list of the addresses and contact information for any authors, labeles, charities or political action groups that were profiled.  

 

            And that was one of the other great things about the magazine, that, unlike the deplorable, pathetic Maximum Rock and Roll, they wanted change, not just complaints. They focused whole issues on life in the West Bank, had long stories about hospitals in Iraq that were being turned into barracks at the expense of local residents. They wrote about the reckless capitalism of the warped tour, the corruption of Vagrant Records, the implications of a DIY porn site like suicide girls on third wave feminism.   They had columns from Jesicca Hopper that talked about being a girl in the scene instead of just a person in the scene, they had columns from Al Burian about disunity and bickering in the Chicago punk community, they had columns from Sam McPheeters who managed to tackle politics with comedy and intelligence, miles away from an op ed in the Times. Its tired, sure, but these guys were The Clash to the MRNR’s Sex Pistols. The former in both cases stayed relevant by preaching change, by inciting progress along with riots. The latter decayed and rotted on their stupid, ridiculous nihilism and are both jokes.    Punk Planet was a magazine with an awful name, a huge heart, and a bigger head than anyone else writing about this stuff below the age of 30, and god damn I’m going to miss it.