What can modern punk music learn from Bill Withers’ song ‘I Can’t Write Left-Handed’?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is a form of marketing that all businesses with an online presence use. It basically means incorporating keywords on your website so that when people Google the thing you sell or the service you offer, your organisation is one of the first results to come up. To find out what the most relevant keywords are, people use different technologies that tell them. For instance, if you sold windows, you would search the term “good windows near me”, and in doing so, you would receive multiple prompts of words and headings you could use to gain people’s attention. Today, punk is reflective of SEO marketing strategies.
It’s worth noting that punk music has always been like this. When Sex Pistols burst onto the scene, they weren’t given a scholar-like insight into the country in their lyrics; they just voiced their disdain towards it. However, the difference is that when bands in the 1970s did it, it was genuinely shocking and innovative. For some reason, many punk outfits don’t seem willing to let this period of music go.
Conveying disdain has changed. It is no longer taboo to openly sing or speak about negative attitudes towards the country, the government, and the monarchy; if anything, doing so is now the social norm. Not only that, but it is also easier to have a voice against corruption thanks to social media, which gives everybody a platform. This is a good thing. There are clear benefits to voicing an opinion becoming easier, and we should be able to vocalise why we aren’t happy with political and societal practices; however, as voicing these opinions becomes less cutting edge, it steadily loses artistic merit.
Many modern punk bands now seem to look at social media, see what people are angry about, and re-write those opinions to music. It is the artistic equivalent of typing “why are people angry?” into an SEO marketing tool and going from there. Today, punk sounds less like rebellion and more like a plethora of buzzwords thrown against a bog-standard distortion-laden riff. What initially made punk enjoyable is less so in the modern age of the internet and social media, so the genre needs to evolve to become more exciting to listen to.
This can be (and is being) done in a few ways. Firstly, in instrumentation. A lot of music that is getting made at the minute, when trying to convey an emotion or voice frustration about something, does so through sound instead of through lyrics. Acts like Chalk are a great example of this, which can create chaos in their sound to convey feelings of anxiety and anger.
Bands could also change how they write about political content. Rather than spending their time writing about how “the country is fucked”, as Sex Pistols did, they could be much more human in their approach. A lot of people are now talking about how much of a bad state the country is in, so why not offer a fresh perspective nobody else can rather than just trying to scream louder than everybody else? This is where Bill Withers comes into it.
‘I Can’t Write Left-Handed’ is one of the best anti-war songs ever written. In it, Bill Withers sings about a soldier who is sad because he was shot in the arm and so is incapable of writing a letter home to his mother. A lot of people, if asked to write an anti-war piece, would likely focus on the untold devastation that it brings as a whole, and whilst that would be valid, the picture is almost too big to look at. It becomes hard to relate to the message because many of us haven’t fought in a war, so in hearing that they’re bad, we aren’t told anything we don’t already know.
With Withers, he focuses on a particular person and a particular situation. A lot of us love our mothers, and even those who don’t will have someone they would want to write home to if they found themselves in a warzone. The image of the poor soldier who is incapable of doing so is heartbreaking and entirely relatable, more so than the general proclamation that wars are horrific things.
Punk could do to learn from this style of songwriting. Laura Jane-Grace manages to replicate it on her new album Hole In My Head and ‘Dysphoria Hoodie’. The track is about the plight of the trans community, but she closes in on a particular situation. She writes about the baggy hoodie that she wears on days when she is feeling low and doesn’t want people questioning her gender. Rather than focus on the backwards opinions of those who oppose the trans community and like to try and victimise trans people, she embodies the side effects of such bigotry by focusing on a small detail. Even if you’re not trans, the situation becomes relatable, and it, therefore, conveys her message incredibly effectively.
It would be nice if some punk bands tried to be more innovative with how they approached lyrics and, rather than voicing a general frustration, tried to offer a unique perspective on something that is already spoken about at length. Tracks like ‘Dysphoria Hoodie’ and ‘I Can’t Write Left-Handed’ are perfect examples of this, as they manage to write about big problems by focusing on small details, making their point all the more clear.
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