AG: You also describe punk as ‘a working through of the creative possibilities of boredom that resist any easy translation into pleasure’ and go on to assert that ‘Boredom as the self-consciousness of naïveté is the Grundstimmung of punk.’ Could you explain this?

SC: I am alluding to Heidegger here, for whom anxiety is the Grundstimmung, the basic attunement that allows the world to withdraw and fall away, and allows for the possibility of the creative nothingness of freedom. Heidegger also talks, in the late 1920s, about ‘profound boredom’ as another possible basic attunement, and I was trying to link that to the theme of boredom that runs like a red thread through early punk, notably in the Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch and the opening track ‘Boredom,’ as Howard Devoto sneers.

¶ 6:43 PM