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They say Musk has turned the GOP into the new punk rock but I say ‘never mind the bollocks’

Elon, enough! In the past two weeks, the world’s richest man has teased economic Armageddon in the US, spruiked for a violent far-right extremist and meddled in the domestic political affairs of at least two sovereign nations.

There’s more. A lover’s quarrel with Nigel Farage? Something “gamechanging” to do with crypto? It takes a fine talent to make omnidirectional megalomania boring, but our boy has done it. His purchase of Twitter has transformed the site from a hubbub of views to a rightwing toilet of whatever his brain is farting that day.

Whether uninformed, cruel or direly unfunny, he hits the headlines like relentless flatulence. Sixty-seven tweets a day from someone who thinks “pedo guy” amounts to wit makes you want to grind your face in damp sand.

David Bowie – who knew a thing or two about entertainment – once discussed overexposure in an interview with Esquire. “Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.” In Musk’s case, rendering Twitter into a direct mailing list for himself has thrust mediocrity on the entire world.

I resent that I’m obliged to talk about him so that I can suggest a means to escape him. I’ve been provoked by comments made by a GOP representative who claimed Musk’s self-recruitment to Trump World made it “punk rock to be Republican”.

There’s some validity to her claim: seminal punk band The Saints – like the median registered Republican – was born 52 years ago.

But you shouldn’t believe that Senator Chuck Grassley is suddenly arguing whether or not Mo-Dettes bassist “Mad” Jane Crockford really bit the ear off Shane MacGowan at a Clash gig. Downloading the entire back catalogue of Stooges albums from iTunes, buying a Ramones T-shirt from Kmart or having Elon Musk slamdancing himself at your rally does not punk make.

The “punk rock” claim is long-established on the far right. Billionaire-backed irritation agent Milo Yiannopoulos was insisting on his own punk rockness back in 2016. It’s an attempt to retrofit a rebellious, “maverick”, “renegade” brand to an ideology that ultimately demands your submission to concentrated power and falling into line. “Your body belongs to your nation”, with these people, Sheena, not in New York City.

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No doubt, they get away with it in short-attention-span electorates. Alas, on consideration, the claim reeks with “my girlfriend lives in Canada” energy. The median age of GOP reps in the US Congress is 57 and in the senate 65 (Musk is 53). These folks could have been the old punk rock but chose to shit on the different and concentrate wealth instead.

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Punk emerged in the western 70s amid cold war fears of imminent annihilation, economic stagflation and mass youth unemployment. The Sex Pistols elegantly distilled the vibe of generational nihilism in the God Save the Queen lyric “there’s no future”. Punk life was visibly unconstrained: you don’t sweat the consequences of putting superglue in your hair, shoving a safety pin through your nose or developing a heroin habit if you think the only thing awaiting you is an H-bomb.

Not really the mindset of dudes planning missions to Mars and humanoid robots, is it? That’s the Jetsons, fellas, not Johnny Rotten.

Rejecting the right’s retrospective claim to punk isn’t to idealise it as a left-wing cultural assail. Sure, the Dead Kennedys were explicit in their progressive politics but songs like Nazi Punks Fuck Off only exist when there are Nazi punks in the first place. “As someone who was there with spiky pink hair …” wrote a friend on Threads, “punk was a movement beset by hopeless political confusion and one which frequently flirted with fascism”.

This detail may explain the punkophilia of the western internet fashosphere. But if there was one universal value to punk it was anarchy in the face of the establishment. For all the Musk/Trump/QAnon/white-supremacist insistence of a “deep state” – potentially made up of lizard people, Jews or Big Feminism, depending on the conspiracy theory – there isn’t one. There’s just a bunch of the richest pricks on earth, dominating the world economy, now about to take control of the Congress, Senate and presidency in the US, out to exert influence on governments elsewhere.

They are the very definition of the establishment, the purest essence of what punk is not. L’état, bros, c’est vous.

And that’s the opportunity old punk offers to young people. Back when Musk and Trump were inheriting aristocratic fantasies of inherent superiority, punk’s “here’s three chords, now form a band” ethos inspired communities of kids who lived in powerlessness, exclusion and poverty to a low-cost self-expression so wildly liberating that the richest men in the world yearn to align themselves to it 50 years later. Vivienne Westwood, John Lydon, Iggy Pop, John Cooper Clarke, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene and Joey Ramone came from no wealth and no advantage and yet came to exert exciting cultural power.

If there’s an escape from the agglomerating omnipresence of Elon, it’s this. Throw your phone in the sea. Form bands. Dress up. Have parties, dance, sing, stay out all night. Those bound to authoritarians covet your freedom; indulge it. There’s a power greater than Musk’s money that the cool have always known: you can make fun out of nothing in the crowds of a good time.