Quick Take
Santa Cruz journalist, filmmaker and musician John Malkin brings together two unlikely subjects, punk rock and spirituality, in his new oral history, "Punk Spirit!" The book explores the many religious/spiritual traditions that punk musicians have embraced, as well as the spiritual dimensions of art, music and activism.
Before diving into John Malkin’s absorbing new oral history, you’ll likely need to reckon with two terms: “punk” and “spirituality.”
They are both slippery words. Each carries an ever-shifting cultural meaning, depending on whom you talk to, weighed down with connotations and stereotypes beyond any kind of literal definition. My idea of what “punk” means is probably different than yours, subtly or not. Your view of “spirituality” might not fit snugly within mine.
One thing we’re likely to agree on, however, is that these two resonant terms are almost never used together in the same context. One is defiant and aggressive, the other is ephemeral and transcendent. Surely, this is a Venn diagram in which the circles never meet, right?
If you’re ready to question that assumption, then you’ll be ready to pick up Malkin’s “Punk Spirit!: An Oral History of Punk Rock, Spirituality and Liberation” (Bloomsbury), an often blunt, rowdy, kaleidoscopic dumpster dive into the deeper meanings behind the 50-year-old punk movement in music.
In his book, Malkin, a veteran Santa Cruz journalist, broadcaster, musician and activist, focuses on the music genre launched by the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and others in the mid-1970s and continuing to this day. The book includes the perspectives of many of the greats in punk’s long history: John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon of The Sex Pistols.
Malkin had gathered his 200-plus interviews of musicians, authors, activists and artists from 25 years of his work as a journalist, much of that with the unlicensed “pirate” radio station Free Radio Santa Cruz.
Many of his interview subjects in the book stray from a strict interpretation of “punk rock.” Among those quoted in the book are rap frontman Chuck D from Public Enemy, the late Ray Manzarek of The Doors, Amy Ray of the folk duo the Indigo Girls, two-tone ska vocalist Dave Wakeling, activist Rev. Billy Talen of the Church of Stop Shopping, composer Danny Elfman and Go-Go’s singer Belinda Carlisle.
Let’s follow Malkin’s lead and assume there is such a thing as a punk rock ethic — a rebellious or provocative spirit of challenging cultural conventions or stereotypes, or just an insistence on following a personal passion or conviction against the tide of societal norms. Taken together, all these diverse voices share that ethic.
Malkin, 62, will be on hand for a book release event Nov. 25 at the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz. The gathering will feature a concert by Sihasin, an Indigenous punk/folk band from the Navajo Nation. (Sihasin is prominently featured in “Punk Spirit!”) The new book follows his 2023 oral history “Punk Revolution!: An Oral History of Punk Rock Politics and Activism.” “Punk Spirit!” brings together two threads that have animated Malkin for years.
“I’ve always been interested in the integration of the inner world and the outer world,” he said. “Punk rock was one of the things that spoke to me as a young person, but so did Buddhism and other spirituality. So, it was fun finding people who had integrated these things in the punk world, and in other worlds too.”
At times, Malkin was confronted with the seeming contradiction between punk rock and spirituality. When he broached the subject with Jello Biafra, of the seminal Bay Area band The Dead Kennedys, Biafra told him, “You’re talking to the wrong guy.” But the conversation eventually came around to Biafra’s experience with Buddhism.
A theme running through the oral history is the uncomfortable clash between punk’s anti-authoritarianism and the autocratic history of organized religion. Still, Malkin was able to find many who saw no contradiction between the medium of punk music and its spiritual message. Pastor, author and onetime punk rocker Dan Kimball, a founder of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, saw punk as a perfectly appropriate vehicle for his evangelical message. “Jesus was rebelling against what religion had become,” said Kimball in the book. “It’s the punk-rock attitude.”
Another Santa Cruzan, Noah Levine, the author of the memoir “Dharma Punx,” said, “Punk made me aware of political injustice and Buddhism has taught me how to respond to it skillfully.”
On one level, “Punk Spirit!” is a tour of the many ways that punk rock is carrying on and passing along many of the world’s great spiritual traditions, including Catholicism, evangelical Christianity, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam and Native American spirituality. It explores a number of values and practices, from “straight-edge” sobriety to meditation and mindfulness. It offers punk as a way to survive a personal crisis, like addiction or self-harm. There is also a chapter that brings a crucial historical perspective with the story of how punk rockers in East Germany, working through churches, helped contribute to the fall of communism.
The book even makes space for principled atheism. Malkin interviews Greg Graffin, the Ph.D.-trained scientist who fronts the legendary punk band Bad Religion. (There’s a lot to unpack even in that name.) Graffin studies and teaches evolutionary biology when he’s not writing and touring with Bad Religion, whose music has always been infused with a visceral sense of right and wrong. In his interviews, Graffin shied away from the term “spirituality,” but embraced “morality.” “I’m a moral person,” he said, “but I don’t believe in God. My morality comes through naturalism.”
It is through interviews with Graffin and others that Malkin’s book grapples with many of the central questions of human existence, questions that are as relevant today as they’ve ever been: What is the relationship between faith and science? What is the purpose of human suffering? What is the nature of the moral crisis facing the world?
Of course, such weighty questions have been the preoccupation of millions who may never hear a single ear-bleeding power chord of a punk song. The immediate lesson of “Punk Spirit!” (especially in the midst of America’s Trump era) is about punk’s “elephant in the room”: anger.
As Malkin’s book illustrates, punk is often a response to a world gone insane, and that response is couched in anger, more often than not. Anger, as an emotion and as a stance toward the injustice of the world, is a built-in feature of the punk movement, but certainly not exclusive to it. Can punk teach us all how to deal with anger? Is it something to be exorcised on stage or in a mosh pit? Or kept alive, like a pilot light in a furnace?
“I asked [Canadian punk rocker] Chris Hannah that one central question about anger,” said Malkin. “Does being angry diminish your anger? And he’s like, ‘I’m not sure I am less angry, and I’m not sure I want to be less angry. All that stuff I’ve been angry about is still happening.’ Anger has its place. It’s a messenger about what’s not going OK. What you do next is significant, but in the moment, anger can be useful, even in art and creativity. If you’re in a room with a hundred other people who are, like, I’m glad you noticed the war and the poverty and the sexism and the racism. Let’s move our bodies for a couple of hours about it.”
John Malkin will talk about his new book “Punk Spirit! : An Oral History of Punk Rock, Spirituality and Liberation” (Bloomsbury) on Tuesday, Nov. 25, at the Resource Center for Nonviolence. He will also be at Bound Together Bookstore in San Francisco on Dec. 6.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.