Wherein Director/Producer Lech Kowalski and company document the already dying punk rock phenomenon. But it was only 1980!!! You might say, but it was already in. There were a few more years of TV talk shows and the Quincy and CHiPs punk episodes, but it was pretty clear by 1980 that the world changes for everyone. The Love Generation had already fallen to a dual flank assault by violence and methamphetamine on one side and the banality of suburban acceptance on the other. Something was going to fill the void that more fit the zeitgeist of the Reagan Years.

This was the first time I’ve seen DOA in its entirety but I’ve seen the same footage fed into countless other sources. I lived through it all anyway to it’s all become redundant at this point. I will always love the music and the time, but lets face it. Every revolution begins and ends the same way. There is a vision. There is action. There can be victory, and if there is, the revolutionaries settle in and then the slow process of assimilation begins.

Mark Fisher (K-Punk) wrote of the immutable, immovable force of capitalism and the inevitability of it all. People, at the end of the day, have to find a way to monetize everything (even ideas and concepts like freedom) to sustain it.

And so on…

God, reading these few short paragraphs seems so bleak and depressing. That’s how I felt watching DOA though. Punk was cool when nobody really knew how to define it. Part of freedom is freedom from definition and defined boundaries. Once you put words to it, you’ve caged it and it has already ceased to exist. And I’ve watched people argue the value and significance of punk rock for over forty years. This doc would be good for people who weren’t alive then. For those that were? Been there, seen it, done it, have a drawer full of black t-shirts with garish designs and silly fonts on the front. (I’m actually sitting here right this moment in a black Madball t-shirt and the design is a set of brass knuckles dripping blood. (Insert smiley face here.) Or maybe it would be cool for someone who was alive then but punk didn’t register on their radar. It’s not like it was as big as people made it out to be. It’s taken 4 decades for some of the accoutrement to make into mainstream fashion. Punk rock was a relatively tiny scene in any part of the world. It was kind of a germ though. It got around.

Credit where credit is due though. There was something happening that needed to be documented and I can’t really blame the people that did that for where they might have failed. There was no way to get it right until later on, long after the revolutionaries became cops.