American DIYstopia

A few months back, I saw David Byrne on his “Who is the Sky?” tour. While my tastes happen to skew more toward the taught claustrophobia of earlier Talking Heads than Byrne’s recent work, you couldn’t have asked for much more from the man. It was a stellar show that raised provocative questions, including about the relevance of punk culture in 2026.

In interviews, Byrne has mentioned director John Cameron Mitchell’s heretical suggestion that the “punk” thing to do now might be to be kind and empathetic rather than scornful and snarling. Byrne brought up that point at the concert as well, and that belief likely goes some way in explaining his creative direction on Who is the Sky? or his previous American Utopia. It’s easy to see why that perspective resonates with him: as a matter of principle, punk has always been about contrarian stances that challenge the status quo. At a time when seemingly everyone is being willfully obnoxious, offensive, and ignorant, it stands to reason that the meaningful alternative is to be generous and kind.

It’s an interesting and well-intentioned take. Still, while I’m not especially eager to debate the meaning of “punk,” I never quite know what to think when people define it as essentially “anything one happens to interpret as favorably rebellious” (here’s Henry Rollins giving his less saccharine rendition). Punk has always struck me as more closely tied to a particular aesthetic and time, as put forward in accounts like Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Then again, I suppose it stands to reason that Talking Heads and Black Flag alumni might have a better beat on that than most of us, and I’m happy to leave the question alone.

Contemporary DIY?

Anyway, in thinking about the contemporary meaning of punk, Byrne’s observations got me thinking about the contemporary applicability of the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos. If there’s anything that everyone would seem to agree is a pillar of the punk viewpoint, it would have to be the DIY ethic i.e., the belief in independently releasing one’s own creative output and managing one’s own artistic community. Seen from that perspective, if contemporary punk means empathy and kindness, then what would modern DIY look like?

Perhaps the ideological core of DIY is the belief that one ought not wait to get permission to release one’s art. More concretely, this leads punk artists to develop independent record labels, concert bookings, fanzines, and the like. A case could be made that at its best, DIY is about broadening the reach of artistic channels to introduce new and original voices and ideas. From one vantage point, there’s something of an implied egalitarian, utopian impulse behind it.

I first saw the DIY ethic at work in ‘90s hardcore/punk. It was inspiring to see an artistic sub-community often run by kids only a few years older than you that had its own periodicals, booking agents, record labels, merch companies, etc. The community had its own norms and means of communication that largely operated apart from the mainstream.

I adopted that perspective so thoroughly at such a young age that I came to take it for granted. I remember reading one of Jonathan Franzen’s novels, I think it was Purity but it might have been Freedom, in which an ambitious college student is struck by the DIY vibe of a ‘00s Green Party meeting (unsurprisingly, a long and diverse history links “open enrollment” social movements and DIY art; I still hope to be proven wrong in finding those links to be a little dubious). For a long time, I felt no tension between ambition and self-undertaken enterprise. It was only when I got a little older that I started to wonder if I wasn’t missing part of the story. DIY can be exciting, and while Franzen’s depiction of a pre-professional student’s lack of imagination has considerable merit, it strikes me that at its worst, DIY can be a cover for mediocrity and an excuse for the avoidance of challenge.

Three Chords and an Instagram Post

Anyway, to return to Byrne’s point, it would be an easy case to make that the willfully offensive, angry juvenilia and snark of the traditional punk aesthetic has penetrated the mainstream. Similarly, on a first pass, a case could be made that DIY is more active than ever. These days, anyone with a phone (i.e., everyone) is a pundit, a film maker, model, author, etc. We’re all doing it ourselves all the time. Even the term itself has entered the modern lexicon (“DIY toilet repair”).

Modern technology has certainly made DIY easier and more accessible. I’ve even seen the argument made that Instagram is the modern fanzine, where we all go to chime in with our two cents and build our micro-communities. Such methods pose certain practical advantages, no doubt, but it strikes me that when conceived in this way, modern DIY is the sickness as much as the cure. Given the rising recent backlash against social media, I doubt I’m alone.

“Expertise is the new DIY”?

What to make of this? A first response might be to pull Byrne’s maneuver and put forward a straightforward reversal: “Expertise is the new DIY.” This is satisfying as a rhetorical strategy, and it speaks to a troublingly widespread lack of regard for scientific evidence and the role of the expert more generally in our post-truth age, as Tom Nichols sets forward in The Death of Expertise. What it lacks in coherence it might make up for in rhetorical flare. Fair enough.

Of course, a few problems come to mind. The most obvious might be that the “DIY as expertise” slogan commits the error of overly elastic definitions of punk described above: if we define DIY that broadly, then we quickly make the concept incoherent. If DIY means deferring to experts, then why bother talking about DIY at all other than to waste time provoking the small subset of the population that has some dog in the race regarding the term.

Too Much or Too Little?

Ultimately, the problem might be less that we have too much DIY than too little. This isn’t to say—god forbid—that we need more people chiming in on social media. Rather, when channeled through something like Instagram, DIY is less about doing “something on one’s own” than participating in heavily commodified, ready-made platforms that encourage a fixation on social approval and status. It doesn’t take much to see that this is not DIY: it’s just choosing to participate in pre-established channels of communication. This is no different than choosing to sell records through major record labels, publish books with major publishers, or learn new topics at major universities.

To be sure, those are completely fine things to do, but it’s important that they not be confused with doing something yourself in the DIY sense. A major indicator of trouble here is that much of our social media, streaming, “be-a-brand” landscape can feel compulsory. Feeling obligated to post on social media can start to look a lot like feeling obligated to release your records through a major label because no other meaningful alternative seems to present itself. Again, there are advantages and disadvantages to both, but that path isn’t especially “DIY” in any meaningful sense.

Lipstick Traces on a Rolled Cigarette

For my money, I’ve always thought Greil Marcus’s classic Lipstick Traces gives one of the more provocative accounts of punk. On Marcus’s reading, punk gave (gives?) spontaneous voice to a subterranean counter history running below the surface of modernism. Marcus achieves this by linking punk to artistic movements that preceded it viz., surrealism, situationism, Lettrism, Dada. To be sure, he doesn’t argue that these sources were direct antecedents in the sense that punk musicians were consciously responding to those exact sources (though some were, and Byrne’s own riffing on the direct influence of Dada/Hugo Ball on “I Zimbra” is too delicious not to mention). Neither does he do the classic academic thing of trying to use those frameworks to illuminate punk music from the perspective of a commentator.

Rather, Marcus’s idea is that the inner contradictions and tensions of modernism spawned its own internal counter thrusts, which came through in art as well as of course other aspects of society. These reactions then circulated in the general atmosphere and climate of the times by being passed down through discussion, art, public displays, protest language, record shop marketing strategies, the impact of concert promoters and managers, and so forth. Punks the experienced direct and indirect exposure to the ambient terms of that counter history in ways that surfaced in their art.

It’s an interesting take. It certainly stands to reason that such a context might have surfaced in the music regardless of the degree to which those characteristics reflect kernels of discontent at the heart of modernism. And, while by now no one needs yet another person to point to the parallels between Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle and modern culture, the point is even less about the connection between DIY and any particular claim or school of thought.

Rather, the point is the conceptual weight and critical attitude that traditional DIY punk aimed to retain and our pallid contemporary sense of DIY lacks. On the link between Dada and punk, Marcus writes:

It is less easy to demonstrate that, as a constellation of hidden desires, the time during which those desires remained hidden, and the magic of rediscovering both the desires and the time, all of this was blindly coded in certain rhythmic shifts and turns of phrase, so that each gesture and accent bespoke the negation of an old world and a reach for a new one—but that is why every good punk record can sound like the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. And that is why the dadaists never got over it: they saw the transformation of the world for a few days in a Zurich bar, and while they glimpsed fragments of that vision for the rest of their lives, they never again saw it whole (224).

For Marcus, through its (literal) nonsense, Dada allowed its participants an earth-shattering glimpse of a transformed world. Similarly, the vision of a transformed world glimpsed through (authentic) DIY is still worth considering.

Put differently, Marcus is right when he says that is why a good punk record sounds like the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. And that is also why even the best social media post sounds like the worst thing you’ve ever heard.