CBGB's legacy

This past Sunday, legendary New York rock club CBGB hosted its last live show, a three-and-a-half-hour farewell by punk-pioneer Patti Smith. Founded in 1973, CBGB was the unlikely launching pad for a revolution in popular music. By being a dive in a bad neighborhood, desperate for acts, it became a place where anyone could play and be heard -- and "anyone" turned out to be The Ramones, Television, Blondie, the Talking Heads and many, many more. Although justly celebrated as the birthplace of punk rock, CBGB was, more importantly, the place where the DIY ("do it yourself") aesthetic crystallized -- the idea that anyone, regardless of technical skill or financial resources, could make great music. And for the last 30-plus years, the DIY aesthetic has powered much of music's innovation, whether as punk, college rock, alternative, indie or, most dramatically, hip-hop. Yet at the end of this month, CBGB will be gone (although there are alleged plans to resurrect it in Vegas).\nWhen something happens to a cultural symbol like CBGB, the question then becomes: What does this mean? To invoke the standard cliche, is this the end of an era? What does it mean for music? For the DIY aesthetic?\nDIY emerged because misfits such as Smith and The Ramones felt alienated by the mainstream music of the '70s, and took it upon themselves to make their own. Upon looking at such guides as the Billboard charts, iTunes' top selling songs or MTV (when it deigns to show music videos) -- and seeing them dominated by slickly produced, mass-marketed, lowest-common-denominator, soulless dross -- the temptation is to say that in its war with the mainstream, DIY lost. Sure, every once in a while it pops up and overturns the mainstream -- punk's late-'70s explosion in Britain, Nirvana, '80s-'90s hip-hop -- but the sound always ends up being corrupted and co-opted. Bands sign to major labels and lose their inspiration, opportunistic copycat bands emerge, a movement runs into its logical limits (you can only play hardcore punk so fast, for example), etc.\nBut this falsely assumes the mainstream actually has that much to do with culture today. Sure, someone still has to be the most popular -- but the major labels' declining sales, combined with the rising sales among independents, show that the world of music is diversifying and decentralizing. Indeed, the question has become whether a band even needs a label to succeed. Other top-down mass media -- Hollywood, the broadcast TV networks -- find themselves severely challenged by a proliferation of competitors armed with cheap, high-quality, easy-to-use recording and broadcasting technology and no one to answer to but their own creativity. In the cases of MySpace and YouTube, media firms have found that their future rests in turning over the reins to you and me. \nThose who say CBGB's closing is an end of an era are right. The war with the mainstream is over -- and we won.