Also, is commodified DIY still punk?

Also #17

Greetings from an overpass in the middle of downtown Harajuku. Or maybe this street is still Shibuya. It’s hard to tell where one sub-zone of the megalopolis begins and another one ends. What I can tell you is that we’re not too far from a nice, shiny new mall near Shibuya station. You can tell it’s new because there’s a park on the roof with a robot lawn mower and a variety of pathways, play areas, and activity zones that are roofed off and unavailable to the public. Welcome to Tokyo where we have the coolest things you’ve ever seen and you’re not allowed to touch any of ‘em.

Welcome to the megalopolis. You can check out any time you like, but you can never…wait, no that’s a different place entirely.

We’ve ended up down here because we wanted to have a bit of an adventure. So we set ourselves a mission to head for White Atelier by Converse to get my kid her first pair of Chuck Taylor All Stars. At White Atelier, you get to pick and choose different elements from a large menu to end up with a custom, personal pair of shoes. It’s a cool, fun experience for her and a bit of a passing of the torch for me¹.

The store staff made a big fuss over letting her choose everything and letting her play through all the samples until she had a set she was fully comfortable with. As a parent, I watched the whole show and tried to stay in the background only contributing when some clarification was needed (like whether it was okay to add something that would up the price). Honestly, worth the crowds and the heat to be able to have a day out with my kid.

My inner 16-year old would have been absolutely appalled. Let’s see if I can channel him for a moment:

Seriously? What the hell, dude? You’re paying how much money for a pair of shoes you can get at any damn shoe store in Japan? If you want custom shoes, get her some fabric paints and let her do it herself. Paint something cool, paint something that will piss off her teachers, paint something worth fucking painting man!

God, being 16 was exhausting. But I may have had a point. Back when my outer shell still looked like my inner sixteen year old, DIY was the only way to do things. For my crowd, paying for custom work was a kind of betrayal, the kind of thing that only the preppies did.

When Veronica showed up to school with daisies painted on her Docs, we knew she had done it herself. When Lauren showed up with a Nirvana shirt featuring some questionable line-work, we knew it was because she was learning to air brush (and hadn’t learned the magic words “copyright violation” just yet). And when we had something to say, we wrote it down on hand-lettered signs, graffiti’d school lockers, airbrushed t-shirts and shoes and skateboard decks, handmade bumper stickers, and, most importantly, in ‘zines.

We also knew, of course, that you couldn’t DIY everything. When some of the girls made their own dresses, they used store-bought fabrics and patterns. When some of the guys made their own album they used the best recording tech they could beg, borrow, or steal. And when we did art, we used whatever we had to. In my case, I lived in the dark room my senior year of high school. I loved developing prints on my own and got kind of snippy with anyone who said they could just have their film developed and printed easier and faster and cheaper.

16-year old me again: “That’s not the point!” and then insert a lot of really colorful invective.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto, for doing the jobs that nobody wants to. Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto, for helping me escape when I needed to!” For those of you of a certain age, my most sincere apologies.

So even then, we knew that there was a line that DIY couldn’t cross. It became the topic of a lot of heated debate - how much could you use the tools already available and still be authentic? Was punk more real than rap because punk wrote their own music and played their own instruments where rappers borrowed and sampled other people’s sounds to create something new? Basically, it all boiled down to painting vs collage - are you making something new if you borrow all the pieces you use to make it?

Here’s the answer by the way: nobody knows. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. It is entirely up to the both the artist and the recipient of the art to decide for themselves on a case by case basis. That’s what art fucking is.

Anyway, if you find yourself in Tokyo and you like Converse shoes, the White Atelier store is a good experience. Pick out the pieces and designs and styles you like and make something new. Or not. It’s up to you.

1. I only ever wore black high top Chucks but, then again, I never really had any other options.