A few months ago, I wrote a post criticising people who claim to be punk without understanding the term. Even back then, I was wondering about the entire concept of authenticity and the idea that listening to certain bands, dressing in a certain way and associating with a particular scene makes a person authentic and more ‘real’. It sounds crazy now, but the thing is that when I wrote that post, I couldn’t understand the very essence of what I was writing about. If I stopped listening to those bands tomorrow, changed the way I dress or left the scene, I would still be myself. So why did those things feel like me?
I think it all goes back to adolescence. The first scene you step into feels like a ready-made self; for me it was grunge, then Britpop, the bands, the clothes, the attitude were all handed to me before I’d even worked out what actually fits. At this stage of our lives, we’re trying to understand who we are. Unfortunately, the world around us is trying to give us its version of who we should be. With the help of music, fashion, social circles, trends and culture, we’re gradually moulded into a version of ourselves that we consider real. However, in most cases it is simply a selection from pre-existing options. I’ve learned this through detachment, not indifference, but the ability to like the record, the jacket, even the scene, without needing them to define me.
Not that there’s anything wrong with punk, indie, mod or any other music scene; it’s just that the majority of the things that I considered to be a part of myself were created by someone else. Detachment has allowed me to realise that in many ways it is not about self-discovery, but about breaking free from everything that has been imposed on us by our environment.
But it doesn’t happen only in the context of music. I used to think it was a music-scene problem. It isn’t. People attach their identities to the concepts of being intellectual, artistic, philosophical, spiritual or politically aware. I did it too. Occasionally those labels get treated as enlightenment or as being smarter than everyone else. The more I look at it, the clearer it becomes: whether it’s punk, artistry, philosophy or anything else, the underlying mechanism is the same, attachment to an identity.
What I was circling has a name. Cultural identity theory says the self is not just private. It is also a position we take up inside a group story punk, mod, intellectual, political, whatever is on offer. Stuart Hall put it simply: identity is not a buried essence you uncover. It is the name we give to the way we are placed, and place ourselves, inside a narrative. That is why a scene can feel like home and still be a costume. You are not discovering who you are so much as stepping into a ready-made role and repeating it until it feels natural. The trouble starts when the role hardens and you cannot tell the difference between the story and the person wearing it.
During the past few months, I’ve been learning a lot about detachment, and it has completely changed my views on music and who I think I am. It isn’t easy as I realised I wasn’t protecting myself, I was protecting this idea I’d mistaken for myself. I remembered how defensive I got whenever someone questioned the scene I thought defined me, this is who I thought I was, how dare anyone question that?
Punk, mod, indie, rocker, metalhead, raver, we create an endless amount of labels and defend them like crazy. I used to do it myself, one comment about the scene I was in and I’d react like someone had insulted me personally. I treated the label like a religion, even though it was only a category culture had handed me.
The same goes for clothing. We wear certain jackets, shoes, hairstyles and brand names because they say something about us. There’s nothing wrong with it, but over time many people stop being themselves and start playing a role. They get attached to an image and begin treating it as their true self, simply copying someone they’ve put on a pedestal.
We worship the movie Quadrophenia, but we forget the core message behind it. It’s not about turning yourself into a carbon copy of a Mod, it’s about the ease with which a person gets lost in his or her constructed self. Jimmy doesn’t fall apart because he isn’t Mod enough. He falls apart because the suit, the scooter and the idol were the self, and when Ace Face turns out to be a bellboy, there’s almost nothing left underneath.
The more detached I’ve become, the more I start to ask myself uncomfortable questions. For example, if tomorrow I stopped listening to a certain genre or bands, would it stop me from being myself? Or would I change into another person if I changed the way I dress or my hairstyle? The answer to these questions is clear: no. Then why do I place such a great value on all these things?
What I’m starting to see is that a lot of our identities are borrowed. They are inherited from our upbringing, our social circles, advertisements, media and our culture. From an early age, we’re encouraged to choose a tribe and stick with it. This is your music. These are your clothes. These are your beliefs. This is your identity. But what if it is not? What if beneath all of this there’s something more genuine that is being buried under years of conditioning?
One of the reasons why I got tired of a lot of music lately is because of this. Not because I think it’s bad and not because I became miserable, but simply because I’m not consuming it in the same way anymore. I’m questioning it now. I’m thinking about what thoughts it’s trying to impose on me and whether it enriches my life or distracts me from myself.
Every scene is a lineage of imitation dressed up as individuality.
Music, like anything else, can be a tool. It can inspire you; God, at one time I thought it even healed me. When I went through the most difficult period of my life, it was like a crutch for me. But it can also become just another kind of noise; it can revive painful memories and depress you. It can be just another thing that fills the silence in a world that’s designed to keep us entertained from the moment we get up until the moment we go to sleep.
Nowadays I’m drawn to artists who model something closer to the detachment I’ve been learning. Ian Brown is one of them. He doesn’t just make music; he demonstrates a way of refusing the scripts the industry and the culture keep handing out. His independence has never felt like a pose. It looks more like a consistent decision not to let the crowd, the press, or the scene decide who he is. That willingness to be misunderstood rather than perform an identity that isn’t his is what stays with me, not the genre, not the look, but the example of someone who keeps acting from his own centre, refusing to play along even when it costs him. Copying the clothes or the attitude, what not only fans but other artists do too, misses the point entirely. That’s just another costume. Scenes keep surviving because each generation mistakes the costume for the real thing.
Ironically, the more detached I’ve become, the less interested I’m in judging other people’s identities. The post that I wrote months ago was based on seeing through the labels. However, what I couldn’t see at the time was that I was still giving importance to these labels. I was still considering them as something worth arguing about. But now I can see that whether someone considers himself or herself a punk, a mod, or anything else is something that doesn’t matter much to me.
We’re all searching for the meaning of our life in our own ways. What’s more important is to be honest with ourselves.
For me, detachment is simply the process of letting go of labels, of image, of the need to belong to a tribe, and of caring how other people see me. I’m starting to understand that freedom comes when we stop defining ourselves through external things.
Music genres, fashion, social circles and labels can all be enjoyed, but they are not who we are. Being attached to an identity that was given to us by society is still an attachment.
The thing that I didn’t realise when I started this process of detachment, criticising people who called themselves punk but didn’t act like it, was that I was about to learn something about identity. How easy it is for all of us to become attached to our ideas about ourselves and how much energy we’re spending protecting them. I know this used to make me defensive. That was the part I was protecting.
The more all these ideas fall away, the more lightness I feel. And sometimes, instead of looking for another song, I find myself sitting in silence, because silence asks a question that no genre, scene or label can answer:
Who are you when all that disappears?
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