The older I get, the more I learn that punk is less about following a movement, but more about finding a movement within yourself,” Beth Ditto told Dazed & Confused magazine last year. I may not be in a band like The Gossip, but in many ways, the greatest challenge — and the greatest pleasure — of writing a weekly column involves a similar path of honesty, serendipity and self-discovery.
It was in 2007 when the Portland group’s disco-punk-meets-Dolly Parton anthem Standing In The Way of Control became the cool-kid song of the summer, thanks to the cult British series Skins. I remember that time all too well: Aside from the fact that the Soulwax remix (and the show) changed my life, it was also around that time that Supreme was sprung from the earth, fully formed and slightly moody. The journey has turned out — as dreaded events rather do — to be rather magical.
Unlike Gossip Girl’s Dan Humphrey, I don’t consider myself a writer in the most scholarly sense. I’ll be the first to tell you that I prefer The Fader over Jonathan Safran Foer. And that I do buy books — hardcover — based on the dust jacket and the It-ness of the author. I majored in art and Spanish, not world literature or journalism, so I tend to see the world as a series of touch-screen photos with captions and not the other way around. If I have become one, I’d like to think I snuck through the back door, learning how to cobble columns together organically, bit by bit and dogged, at times, by indecision and deadline-induced neurosis.
It hasn’t always been a magic carpet ride, but I find that writing what you love — and what you know — is a good place to start. A well-articulated essay is brain activity balanced by good old heart and soul. Personally I have a weakness for the obscure and the emergent, things that have yet to make their cameo in the mainstream, whatever that is.
At our first-ever Supreme dialogue last Saturday, I had the opportunity to touch on this subject. Now that I think about it, however, I still don’t know why I like the things I like or why I tend to hump a trend — then dump it — earlier than most people. This will be the last time I quote such a person, but Katie Couric once stated, “Intellectual curiosity is important no matter what field you get into.” Maybe that’s it. That would be an entire grad school thesis in itself.
Next, and corollary to that, I’ve learned that it will do you better in the long run to define yourself more in terms of what you stand for rather than what you oppose. Of course it requires less effort to throw down a reaction but no one said being an independent thinker was easy. My most enduring pop culture influences — Japanese-Italian stylist Nicola Formichetti, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, David Bowie and Skins — are, in my estimation, true originals. That said, my idol remains myself foremost.
Last, I’ve discovered that while the Internet is home to homeless blogheads everywhere, real life comes first — or at least it should. Despite the convenience of hitting up Yahoo! Answers for crowd-sourced solutions to life’s myriad problems, nothing beats getting out in the world and gaining old-fashioned, non-virtual experience. After all, creativity can’t be taught — it has to be nurtured.
As I look back on three years of Supreme — not too melodramatically, I hope — I’d like to share another nugget of wisdom uttered, again, by Beth Ditto: “It’s not about the hundred people whose minds you can’t change. It’s about the two people you empower.” And with that I’d like to say “Happy Birthday!” not just to us, but to all of you. Here’s to the future.
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