Urchins and ushers

Below please find a useful chunk from Mark Sinker's tl;dr "The Shock of the Library: Oasis Versus All of Art and Culture." I like how it conceives rock as not only a fortress warding off parents, school, high art, etc. It also aimed to curate itself, to create gatekeepers who could show us that "Soldier Boy" and "Surfin' Bird" were equal in profundity to Aeschylus and Shakespeare or whoever.

"All kinds of commentators caught up in punk’s aftermath ('flamboyantly new creative language and attitude') had placed themselves at the exact same oedipal fork: of course they too want to be urchins running through museums, but there’s also the urge to seek employment as enthusiastic ushers, showing one and all how exactly this (old-school) radical art ought to be understood and used. And so there was always already a schoolyard-type squabble who gets to be a consider a 'thinker.' Rock was always a dramatisation of growing up in public; less a refusal of the demands and changes and skills that school might produce than a theatre of the confused hope of an alternative: combination NO and YES."