Hearing people a few years younger than you talk about what band is responsible for stealing the life and passion and politics from punk rock is like hearing teenagers talk about how saturday night live started to suck when Jimmy Fallon and Chris Parnell left. back in my day, you hear in your own head in your father’s voice, we thought punk rock was ruined by green day and snl lost it when dennis miller left! Meanwhile, go back a few years and you’ll find a dude who’s got a thesis about how punk rock lost its soul when Henry Rollins started singing for Black Flag, and snl was never the same after Belushi died…

And I didn’t really mean to tie the two up like that, punk rock and saturday night live, but maybe there is a correlation… Both products of the same era- snl started the year after the first Ramones album came out, both counterculture voices that got swallowed up at some point, even if the folk-punk kid I saw play last night thinks that it didn’t happen until Good Charlotte debuted. And didn’t Fear play saturday night live once and almost start a riot? Who the hell knows- perhaps this is a dual history that needs to be written!

But not by me. I’m content to muse on it, feel my beard grow as I think about the way these things are reinvented over and over again, made new for each group of teenagers and then, as the new-making process warps it into something unrecognizable, the group that’s growing up feels betrayed. It happens every time; it’s just good to know that it ain’t just me.

And hell, if you wrote off punk rock when whatever-band-ruined-it-for-you showed up, you’d probably miss out on something great. If I’d given up on it when I was nineteen and Blink-182 had become the dominant artist in the medium, I’d never have heard the shape of punk to come by Refused. There’s life in these old dogs yet.

And maybe what I really mean to write about isn’t punk rock or saturday night live, but Hunter S Thompson.

I re-read the rum diary in Switzerland, and it’s still terrific, but what’s so interesting about it is that it was written twice- once when he was twenty-two and once when he was in his sixties. He wrote it in 1959 and then re-wrote it in 1998. And it reads like a collaboration between young Hunter S Thompson and the man he would eventually become, which is to say- someone who was at his height in the 70’s and then tried to reinvent himself over and over again for the subsequent generations, losing adherents with each new iteration of self.

But there was life in the old dog yet, right up until the end. the rum diary still sings in a way that few writers in the last century managed to sing; he really knew how to use language as a musical instrument. But even in his final books, kingdom of fear and hey rube, there’s newness to be found. Maybe not on every page, but who can expect that much newness from any one source? Whether it’s punk rock or sketch comedy or the best writer of the 70’s, working past his prime- eventually those returns will diminish.

So what more do you want? Do you want these things to remain vital and important forever and ever? If things worked like that, if they ever could be, then we wouldn’t have needed any of them in the first place. We’d be busy rebelling with rites of spring or “Rock Around the Clock” and doing the lindy hop till dawn, giggling at radio vaudeville routines and trying desperately to figure out how HL Mencken applied to our current political realities.

There’s a comedian in London who does a one-man show called bill hicks: slight return. Basically he performs as Bill Hicks, mixing old Hicks material with new stuff written in Hicks’ voice, trying to imagine what he might have to say about whatever’s happening in the news today. This is what happens when someone reveres the institutions instead of what they were created to attack. Because it was always an attack.

I have some faith left in the old attack dogs, even the dead ones like Thompson, but I expect that as I get older, my opinion on these things will get less and less relevant.