So. In my last column, while singing the praises of the humble safety pin, I may have outed myself as a punk.
But that doesn’t mean what it used to, as everything on the fringes tends to move to the center eventually. Sometimes that process is obvious, sometimes it isn’t.
However, in the ancient practice of body modification, we’ve been able to witness a glaringly visible journey from center to fringe — and back again.
Now, there’s body modification, and then there’s what we talk about when we talk about body modification. If you assume that I’m talking specifically about tattoos and piercings, you’d be right. But the practice is so old, and so ubiquitous across cultures, that its largely-forgotten influence must be acknowledged.
As V.Vale points out in his anthology “Modern Primitives,” every culture possesses a coming-of-age ritual involving pain, forbearance and some sort of body modification. The Ko tribe of West Africa uses ritual scarification to mark the onset of puberty. The Padaung women of Myanmar elongate their necks to incredible lengths with the use of metal rings. I went to Claire’s to get my ears pierced on my eighth birthday. I rest my case.
The thing is, body modification as a rite-of-passage has not always been a strong tradition in the Western world. It certainly is now; my friends and I made a beeline for the tattoo parlor at the stroke of midnight on our respective 18th birthdays, as have countless other millennials. But before our time? Not so much.
There was a time when tattoos were meant only for sailors and freakshow ladies. An elder relative once remarked, after discovering a rose tattoo on my back, that the only people she knew with tattoos in the 1960s were bikers and convicts. Hard not to take that as a compliment.
Up until the 1990s, Massachusetts residents had to cross state borders if they wanted a piercing done. The only people who took the time to get even a simple nose ring were, you know, ne’er-do-wells.
Eventually those walls had to come down. And they did so fairly recently. The steady rollback of prohibitive blue laws from the 1980s to the 2000s accounts for some of the practice’s increased popularity with us kids, but not all of it.
In my mind, the grapevine did the rest. There is an undeniable “lemming effect” when it comes to tattoos and piercings, or, to mix animal metaphors — monkey see, monkey do.
Two of the major apprehensions people have about tattoos — pain and permanence — can easily be assuaged by exposure.
So that’s the how. What about the why?
In our society, we don’t have village elders inducting us through painful, coming-of-age rituals. And yet the vast majority of our country’s pierced-and-tattooed population is young. I think we may be coming to an understanding of what the tribes of Myanmar and Benin have known for a long time: Growing up is a painful process, one that forces an understanding of the permanent and the transient.
Here’s what the coming-of-age ritual looks like for the modern American youth: You hastily get a tattoo at around 18 – 22 years old to prove how cool and individualistic you are, and then you regret it forever after because — surprise! — your definition of cool and self-expressive is constantly evolving. But maybe you need that regret etched into your skin to always remind you of your impetuous, young self.
That’s why I try to keep my tattoos from meaning too much. Nope, no infinity signs or motivational quotes for me. I take my mentality from those old sailors who chose anchors and pretty ladies “off the wall” at the tattoo parlor. That rose tattoo on my back will always be a rose.
I don’t think I’m alone here, but I know no one embodies this mentality more than my friend Chris. I accompanied him to a tattoo studio a few years ago during a trip we took to Vermont to cover a music festival. I wanted to give him privacy while the artist worked on him, and was nothing less than shocked when he came out with a freshly-inked pickle jar on his arm. You read that right.
I couldn’t help myself; I had to ask him what in God’s name possessed him to immortalize a pickle jar on his skin forever and ever. He merely shrugged in response, which put me in my place.
Turns out punk’s not dead after all.
