Punk's Not Fred

I was perusing the Twitters when I came across this on Bill Strickland's feed:

This is the professional casual upper garment of Those In The No. You have spread your peanut butter with the wrench, you remember the chamfer measurement of a proprietary square taper, or have even considered spending a fairly hefty sum on a fairly hefty cork puller, and you know.

Sorry, no it's not.

Sure, it's impossible to define punk.  It's an elusive concept.  If anything it's like porn in that you know it when you see it.  Furthermore, punks are like Jews in that if you pick two at random it's highly unlikely they'll believe in any of the same things.  (Some have long beards, others wear Mets yarmulkes, and still others seem just like regular people until Passover rolls around and suddenly they won't eat bread.)  And most crucially, just as only the true messiah denies his divinity, no actual punk would proclaim to be punk, nor wear a t-shirt describing anything as punk.

It is for all the reasons above that it's 100% safe to say that Campagnolo is in no way punk.  I mean come on.  For one thing, let's go back to that copy:

This is the professional casual upper garment of Those In The No. You have spread your peanut butter with the wrench, you remember the chamfer measurement of a proprietary square taper, or have even considered spending a fairly hefty sum on a fairly hefty cork puller, and you know.

Now I'm no punk, but I tried damn hard to be one when I was a teenager (unfortunately for me trying damn hard is just not punk), and I can assure you that I never say anyone spreading peanut butter with a Campy wrench at a Nausea show on the Lower East Side.  I mean sure, I was merely a suburban interloper, and maybe the actual punks were holed up in a squat with a peanut butter wrench, a sleeve of rice cakes, and a jar of Skippy peanut butter, but I tend to doubt it.

(Skippy is punk as fuck.)

And let's consider Campagnolo.  Granted, I'm no old-timer, and I don't have the Campy street cred described in the aforementioned copy, but I have been the owner of a full Campy group.  It was the Record 10 speed one, when they first introduced the crabon:

In fact I had it on that exact bike, which I bought entirely because it came with that group, and which I got a good deal on because even at the time it was ugly as shit and nobody wanted it, plus Festina was tainted by scandal unlike the pure riders of USPS.  The frame cracked in short order (Specialized replaced it with an Allez frame painted to look like an S-Works which I'm still angry about), but the Campagnolo stuff lived on, though eventually I sold it because I decided to go back to Shimano again.  (A decision, the designers of the shirt would have it, that is emphatically not punk--which, obviously, makes it totally punk.)

Anyway, thinking back to why I coveted that group in the first place, it certainly wasn't because it seemed "punk."  Indeed, it was quite the opposite.  That iteration of the Record group was positively decadent at the time.  It had ten speeds.  The levers were crabon.  And for some reason, so was part of the rear derailleur, an innovation that offered no tangible performance benefit but added hundreds of dollars to the price over the otherwise identical Chorus group.  Wanting this stuff was avarice on my part, plain and simple.  There was nothing to it beyond a bad case of expensive bike part lust.  And it was especially pathetic since at that age and in that income bracket and sucking the way I did at bike racing I had absolutely no business being on a bike that dear.  Really, the whole enterprise was about as punk as living in your parents' basement so you can afford the payments on a BMW.

Oh, I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking, "Campy's still punk, you just didn't understand it."  Maybe, but that still doesn't address Campy's much-touted "Italian-ness"--which is definitely not punk.  I mean sure, Italy had punk bands and stuff (I even have an Italian punk record in my painstakingly curated adolescent record collection), but there's really nothing punk about Italy.  You need shitty weather and wild income disparity to be punk.  There's nothing punk about male chauvinism, or proximity to the Mediterranean, or mouth-watering cuisine, or the design aesthetic that produced this:

Though wrecking one in an act of rebellion against your parents certainly qualifies.

Anyway, if you disagree go ahead and order the t-shirt, but if you agree you might want to consider my alternate design:

Come on, how punk is that?