Last night I saw a very enjoyable documentary, “We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Following the rise of the punk band up to the early death of guitarist D. Boon, it was at once a great appreciation of the group and its music, and a fascinating, hilarious look at what has happened to many of the people who made music in LA’s punk scene in the 1980s. Fortunately, the filmmakers avoided the clichéd voiceover-intro or title-card-lower-third, giving us the career update on so-and-so from SST or such-and-such from the Dead Kennedys. Instead, they just shot people in their homes, apparently wearing whatever clothes they happened to have on, twenty years later. Some old punkers still had funny hair and garish clothes, doing their own thing; others looked like record label executives, maybe holding onto their greying soul patch for the few hairs of street cred it might yet provide; and still others looked for all the world like investment bankers. One guy was interviewed in standard-issue Banana Republic and his cat sitting in his lap.
Mike Watt, the Minutemen’s bassist, looked older but maybe otherwise unchanged since his bandmate and childhood friend’s death twenty years ago. The filmmakers did away with the idea of a smoothly-edited interview (throughout the film), and tried to jump-cut together Mike’s sentence fragments into coherent thoughts and stories. Some of the results were amazing. I particularly liked one riff on how important it was for bands to find their own music, and not just copy other people. “You had to do your own thing, find what you could bring to the scene,” he said. Just copying others wasn’t enough. What was clear from all the interviews was how much the exchange and the competition between musicians meant to the creativity that came out of the movement.
I thought about Mike’s words again this morning, looking at another new Web company whose design feels way too familiar. Imitation is flattery and all art is theft, sure, but go find your own voice, too. Come up with something wholly new and interesting. Web apps aren’t punk bands and aren’t artwork, either, but there’s a lot of creativity around web development right now. Go find some of your own, and add it into the mix.