WHEN HENRY MET JOE...

Henry Rollins, former punk singer and enduring Renaissance man, is on stage at Warsaw in Brooklyn telling stories about his pandemic lockdown.

Under the lights, he clutches the mic in a kind of wrestling pose. His hair has grayed and his trademark biceps diminished, but he’s still a “ricocheting bullet of curiosity and anger,” as he puts it. The audience settles in as Rollins screeches and howls through the centerpiece of his set, an hour-long anecdote about a mentally distressed Finnish fan who broke into his “concrete fortress,” a $3.9 million mansion in the Hollywood Hills, several times during 2020.

“My heart rate elevates, my breathing elevates, my body flushes cold,” Rollins says, with staccato intensity, “because someone came over a wall or a gate and is in my perimeter, kicking my garage door.”

The climax arrives when Rollins catches the fan, interrogates him, and finally punches him in the face before calling the Los Angeles Police Department. In his youth, Rollins had something of a sadistic streak, but he has grown more gentle with age. “Mental illness is a real thing,” he says. It’s not right to “take someone who is in need of a doctor and a pill and treatment, and punish them.” In the end, he doesn’t press charges, and the L.A. County courts release the man to his mother and ultimately back to Finland.

Still, Rollins can’t resist offering a solution to the problem of society’s ill and uncared for, in keeping with the rugged individualism he has always espoused: “Stop having five children,” he advises, to peals of audience laughter. “Control yourselves.”

It’s the kind of wisecrack you might expect to hear today in other quarters, from an anti-woke comedian, a canceled professor, or a member of the self-appointed press. Or, more likely, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where all such figures are welcome. In his heyday, Rollins was not unlike Rogan, an everyman preoccupied with touring, tattoos, kicking ass, commonsense politics, and the value of the hustle. To disaffected people who aspired to succeed in a society that seemed intent on leaving them behind, Rollins was authentic, a truth-telling man of action. In recent years, as Rogan’s creeping ethos—call it Roganism—has become a phenomenon, it’s hard not to think of Rollins’ influence.

Rollins could have been Rogan. At the very least, he was Rogan’s prototype.

The most lasting punk icon of Generation X, Rollins turned 61 this year. His public profile as the hard-touring singer of Black Rag and Rollins Band has faded since the mid-1990s, when The New York Times Magazine called him “punk rock’s first do-it-yourself mini-mogul.” But his influence as an actor, author, and spoken-word artist remains durable—and pretty weird. He has appeared as a storyteller on Showtime and in ironic self-reference on TV shows like Portlandia and Sons of Anarchy. He was a favorite performer on USO tours during the Iraq War. To some he remains the 7-Eleven guy. To others he’s a stoic weightlifting guru. For many brought up at the millennium’s end, he was an elder-punk proselytizer for unheard music and a self-styled beacon of integrity and introspection.

After a pandemic hiatus, Rollins is back on tour. His recent shows are proof that, in this era of niche media, thousands of people will still pay good money to see him. But today Rollins’ influence reveals something defective about the American counterculture. He’s our greatest avatar for the way punk’s DIY ethos has graduated into a lucrative brand of reactionary individualism—and an object lesson in what the culture industry will assimilate.

America is a hothouse for dissent. Countercultural forces crop up in every generation to define the styles and attitudes that stand in opposition to the norm. Before punks there were hippies; before hippies, the Beats. Born under the appropriative logic of capitalism, these rebel movements have rarely been much more than an annex of the mainstream. Punk was self-consciously a vision of resistance, and its American hardcore outgrowth—faster, angrier, heavier on politics, lighter on fashion—was even more so. In the ’80s, it raged against the Reaganite mission to gut social spending and deepen inequality. But by the ’90s, the counterculture was largely defanged. “The problem with cultural dissent in America isn’t that it’s been co-opted, absorbed, or ripped-off,” cultural historian Thomas Frank argued in The Baffler in 1994. The problem was that the countercultural idea, having converged with corporate profit motives, was “no longer any different from the official culture it’s supposed to be subverting.”

The counterculture has transformed again for our era. Today it runs cover for the most vulgar mainstream ideology: that working people are responsible for their own survival, and the ruling class owes us nothing. Rollins’ DIY ethos has made him a natural salesman for that idea. For a certain cohort of iconoclastic dork, he’s an obvious forebear, and despite his boilerplate left-liberal politics, Rollins’ vision is often regressive. It’s no wonder, then, that he has found admiration from Rogan and his audience. Twice he has appeared on Rogan’s podcast to talk about how his personal code rescued him from “minimum-wage work.” Their conversations are strange praise songs to the Protestant ethic. “I wake up every day wanting to get back at every teacher, every guy at school, every bad boss,” Rollins told Rogan in 2018. “It’s four in the morning. You want to work? Yeah, I’ll work in a snowstorm.” To Rogan this “manic dedication to work” is not disordered but “very inspiring.”

You can hear in Rollins’ adversarial worldview a template for the Roganist ethos, in which antiauthoritarianism means hacking the American marketplace by force and younger critics are just self-entitled elitists who can’t compete. In retrospect, it should be no surprise that hardcore, from its posture of finger-pointing accusation, would lend itself to the politics of personal responsibility.

Among Rollins’ many cultural contributions, Get in the Van: On the Road With Black Flag, his tour journal, may be his most lasting. Published in 1994 on his own small press, the book is an introduction to hardcore’s DIY ethos for kids who missed the early waves of independent music. In his telling, Rollins is self-made, his stature as an artist less the result of communal punk-rock spirit than Tony Robbins-style bootstrapping and bravado. Consider his origin story: In 1981, Rollins was 20, a college dropout and Black Flag fan living in Washington, D.C. When he met the L.A. band on one of their early East Coast tours, he worked at Haagen-Dazs and fronted a local hardcore outfit, but he dreamed bigger dreams. One night, at a Black Flag show in New York City, Rollins stomped on stage and sang “Clocked In”—the band’s ultimate shift-work grievance—before driving back to D.C. to open the ice cream shop. Later that week, Black Flag called and asked him to join. “I left my hometown like a guy making a jailbreak,” Rollins writes.

In L.A., Rollins gained a new “work ethic.” Black Flag were “the hardest-working people I had ever seen,” he writes. The band ran their own record label, booked their own tours, and slept in practice spaces where they held grueling daily rehearsals with guitarist-mastermind Greg Ginn. The LAPD harassed them constantly, a sign of their rebel credentials. “The way they were living went against all the things I had been taught to believe were right,” Rollins writes. “If I had listened to my father, I would have joined the Navy, served, and gone into the straight world without a whimper.” Instead, young Rollins risked a life outside the confines of mass culture.

Better than any other document, Get in the Van captures the middle-class fantasy of fleeing the suburbs for the counterculture. That fantasy, like the one that animated the ’60s protest movement before it, was deceptive. When the book came out, punk had already been absorbed into the American bloodstream through the success of bands like Nirvana and Sonic Youth, without which most people would never have metabolized Rollins at all. But where those bands were exotic geniuses, Rollins was an everyman whose lifestyle seemed attainable. He was the best-known spokesperson for a powerful idea: that anyone, anywhere, could access the underground. Anyone could get in the van.

Along with Rollins’ rebel heroism, however, came a doctrine of grievance. He was a victim of punk’s ugly unconscious: corrupt cops, lying promoters, nihilistic scenesters. His personal demons raged. “Rollins seesawed indulgently between self-pity and macho excess,” music journalist Michael Azerrad writes in Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, the definitive account of the era. Nourishing himself on a diet of tedious misanthropes like Henry Miller and Hubert Selby Jr., Rollins developed an impenetrable persona, diligent like a drill sergeant, stridently self-righteous. In his journals, touring is an “endurance test” to outlast “these fuckers.” In the gym, he grows his neck to its legendary width. At shows, he meets audience transgressions with staggering violence (“His mohawk made a good handle to hold onto when I beat his face into the floor”).

For outcast kids of the ’90s, Rollins’ words read like a secret language. He captured the manic-depressive histrionics

of adolescence—and, truly, of unresolved trauma—that no one in the adult world seemed to acknowledge. He promised, too, that your suffering could be sublimated into art, if only you were willing to grit your teeth, chalk your hands, and get to work. “I must work on my discipline,” Rollins writes in a 1984 entry. “There’s no way to relate to anyone but yourself. When I get sad I write it out. The less I talk the better.”

By the mid-1980s, Rollins was talking more than ever. Between tours, he began performing in L.A.’s spoken-word scene alongside poets like Wanda Coleman and actors like Harry Northrup. When Black Flag disbanded in 1986, Rollins worked harder, forming his eponymous band and turning speaking tours into a secondary hustle. He wrote columns for Spin magazine, self-published his poetry, and befriended luminaries like R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. He became a minor celebrity, one of the most recognizable faces in indie music.

In 1991, when punk broke into the mainstream, Rollins was poised to break along with it. He was undeniably hot, an archetype for Gaston from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, with a dramatic jawline, permanently furrowed brows, and a heroic dimple centered on his chin. With Rollins Band, he muscled his way into high-profile gigs like Lollapalooza. On MTV, he engaged in adolescent foreplay with Alternative Nation host Kennedy. Plus he could sort of act and landed roles in movies like The Chase and Heat. But it was in his spoken-word material that Rollins’ worldview was clearest. Charming and juvenile, he narrated the dark sides of modern life: women on crack fighting, cops taking bets on the fights, travel to hostile foreign lands, fans he’s compelled to fight. Beset by forces of decadence, Rollins was the lonely American rebel, soldiering nobly forth with Black Sabbath blaring in his headphones.

That perspective, as much as anything, catapulted Rollins to real fame, which in turn only seemed to harden his resolve. As a member of the last viable counterculture, he was also a crusader of the last cohort for whom “selling out” was a specter of unironic anxiety. (Rollins was not without critics on this score. Music journalist Ira Robbins sneered at him for attacking MTV off camera even as “the network’s red light winked dollar signs at him on Alternative Nation,” and Thomas Frank skewered Rollins’ obsession with self-discipline as “the automatic catechism of any small entrepreneur who’s just finished brainwashing himself with

the latest leadership and positive-thinking tracts.”) He would appear on late-night spots in disintegrating gym clothes to insult empty celebrities and bluster about the nobility of true art, a transparent attempt to regain whatever veneer of authenticity he compromised by appearing on national TV in the first place. “I only do music and writing and all that to ventilate rage,” he told Dennis Miller in 1992, on the comedian’s syndicated talk show. “I’m not in it for entertainment.” It was, by then, a textbook move for a young punk to get famous by scorning show business. On the whole, though, the establishment liked his shtick— particularly his claim that work will set you free. “You’re probably the most ethical, serious person I’ve had on this show,” Miller told him.

It’s true that Rollins seemed like a principled alternative, given the vain weenies who populated the mainstream. Still, it was hard to escape the suspicion that his work ethic was freighted with unconscious cargo. Rollins had advantages. He was resolutely middle-class, the son of an academic and a federal bureaucrat. In the early days, his mother regularly paid his rent or sent him cash to help out. Black Hag were able to exist partly through the patronage of Ginn’s parents, who rented vans for the band and let Rollins live on their property for years. At the same time, there was a desperation to his famed ethos that appeared self-harmfully “workaholic.” Maybe it was a distraction from the traumas he routinely raised for comedic effect and dismissed: experimental Ritalin treatment, physical abuse by his father, sexual abuse by his mother’s boyfriend, witnessing a close friend’s murder in early adulthood. These features of Rollins’ narrative always complicated the picture of happy individual effort.

How much did Rollins’ brooding-blowhard attitude differ from the older cultural norm? Had punk ever been a true alternative, or was its antiauthoritarianism just one more brand? In the end-of-history ’90s, the answer still seemed uncertain. Even a punk who operated in the country’s underbelly could salvage the American dream. Rollins was the exception who proved you could be an exception too. “If I can get this far, I would be very surprised if you couldn’t get at least twice as far,” he writes in Get in the Van. “Fuck them. Keep your blood clean, your body lean, and your mind sharp.” But what meaning could this motivational mush hold today, when fewer opportunities than ever exist for artists to make a living, Americans work longer hours than people in almost any other rich society, and even “straight jobs” are precarious? Rollins wasn’t designed for an America in terminal decline. The country needed a more agile beast to take up the yoke of personal-responsibility politics and carry it into the counterculture of the new millennium.

Mass culture remains the clumsy machine it always was, grinding up elements of the counterculture to refine and recombine. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, their landmark 1947 book of social criticism, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno noted the “assembly-line character” of the culture industry. When a cultural product turns a profit, they wrote, the industry repeats its style. It becomes a piece of propaganda—a “procedure for manipulating men.”

Rollins’ legacy is a case in point. Even as he declined in relevance, any number of public figures aped his style: the physicality, the claim to telling unpopular truths, and especially the outsider persona embattled against the establishment. For the promoters of a new individualism, it formed the basis for a whole merit-based ideology that they sold as counterculture. That ideology informed Vice magazine’s smug political incorrectness in the early ’00s. It took shape in loathsome “manosphere” pioneers like Adam Carolla, who identified Occupy Wall Street protesters as “self-entitled monsters” seeking a “participation trophy.” It lives on in Barstool Sports’ gleeful defense of social hierarchies today.

No one, however, has promoted that ideology more successfully than Joe Rogan. Rogan, 55, has tamed the shaggy countercultural id that once found voice in the punk singer. He may lack Rollins’ weird charisma and certainly lacks his looks—each year Rogan more closely resembles a Virginia country ham—but as with Rollins, Rogan’s rise is bound up with questions of hard work, self-discipline, and authenticity. In 2009, after years as a stand-up comedy hothead, gross-out reality TV host, and mixed-martial-arts commentator, Rogan did the obvious and started a podcast. On The Joe Rogan Experience, he plays a straight-shooting bro in a world of falsity and elitism. The show presents itself as subversive, a nonideological repository of forbidden knowledge. What started as a platform for chats between Rogan and his friends, mostly MMA fighters and fellow comics, is now best known for hosting a range of “free thinkers”—angry professors like Jordan Peterson, Substack journalists like Bari Weiss, sniveling YouTube commentators like Tim Pool—who provide an explanation of American life not rooted in the egalitarian pieties of corporate media. This agenda has won Rogan a position of tremendous authority and relentless profit. Today, JRE is Spotify’s most popular podcast, averaging Rogan over 10 million listeners per episode and netting him hundreds of millions of dollars.

Roganism might be understood as the DIY ethos taken to its grim individualist extreme. Success in America, the story

goes, can still be accomplished by virtue of personal effort. But too often, hardworking producers who make their beds and take the recommended performance-enhancing supplements are not getting their due. The problem is a parasitic racial and gender underclass and their woke defenders who demand unearned benefits while marginalizing straight, white Americans. Sure, the Roganists concede, this underclass faces disadvantages. But imagine if they would simply live up to their potential. “That is a big problem with the phrase ‘income inequality,”’ Rogan mused to Peterson in 2016. “You never hear about ‘effort inequality.’” The two devoted a lot of airtime to the distinction between “equality of opportunity” (the goal of providing everyone the same starting block, which they agree is noble) and “equality of outcome” (the goal of everyone getting the same results, which they attribute to a woke left that forgets the tyranny of socialist states). It’s a theme that comes up a lot on JRE. In 2018, speaking to an MMA fighter, Rogan elaborated. If you understand the “value of competition,” he explained, then you know that people who demand that everyone be paid equally, for example, simply “don’t know how to compete.” People should achieve based on their merit, according to the Roganist logic, and tipping the scales toward equality would undermine natural human hierarchies. “If you want equality of outcome,” he said, “you can suck my dick.”

These claims, it should be emphasized, are in no way the subversive dispatches of silenced dissenters. They are conventional individualism, expressed by wealthy culture warriors to millions of people on the world’s largest podcast platform. A series of avoidable crises has left Americans hopeless and insecure, with little in the way of social aid. Virtually no one is worrying about lofty goals like “equality of outcome. ” Most people just want access to a scrap of the wealth that corporate profiteers are extracting from them. In this environment, the Roganists’ most treacherous trick is to exonerate the ruling class that produces these ills, pit Americans against each other in free-market “competition” for resources, and demonize those who fail over a supposed lack of effort.

If there’s one nice thing about JRE, it’s that it lets you see the assembly line of reactionary propaganda in action. Rogan didn’t invent the politics of personal responsibility any more than Rollins did before him. He’s just the latest in a long line of rebels selling these politics as counterculture. Who can blame the people who buy their message? Millions want to hear that their own agency will catapult them to the top of the heap. If anything is, as people say these days, the “new punk rock,” it’s Roganism, with its rugged reassurance for the masses. As Horkheimer and Adorno wryly observed, wide appeal was always the promise of the culture industry: “Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape.”

Maybe Rollins should have gotten deeper into the podcast game. But he was never the polished communicator that Rogan is, and the big time seemed to make him itchy. The series of scripted shows he landed in the ’00s were too crudely libidinal for any broad audience to stomach. A 2006 episode of The Henry Rollins Show, for example, features a satirical dominance fantasy in which Ann Coulter, whose politics Rollins dislikes, is his “window-washing, grocery-buying, dinner-cooking, obsequious, submissive concubine-domestic.” It’s enough to convince any adult who’s not a full-fledged men’s rights activist that Rollins would be a deeply unpleasant person to be stuck with in a tour van. (Rogan, unsurprisingly, thinks it was terrific: “I really, really enjoyed that,” he told Rollins in 2018.)

As his star faded, Rollins recruited his didactic impulse to an ideological project not so different from Rogan’s: telling his fans to take charge of their own economic mobility. In his personal rags-to-riches story, he always sounded like your standard motivational speaker. He learned discipline at a naval academy for troubled youth. As a teenager, he never had an allowance and worked menial jobs. A few years of full-time shift work has become the basis for 40 years of hustle mythology. “The fact that I have a comedy special on Showtime is so unlikely for some guy from the minimum-wage working world,” he told Rogan in 2018. A generous reading of this narrative is that Rollins’ short experience of day jobs scared him shitless—it’s not hard to relate to that fear. But the story’s centrality forms an insistence that others should bootstrap their way to freedom.

To be fair, Rollins’ public politics have always been left-liberal: He’s an outspoken advocate of gun control, LGBTQ rights, abortion access, and a strong social safety net. He opposed both Iraq wars and has written on the harms of “toxic masculinity.” (One imagines that Rollins would object to many of Rogan’s politics, particularly his commitment to transphobia, conspiracy theories, and COVID-19 misinformation, though Rollins has never publicly rebuked him.) But these commitments exist alongside his individualist streak. Age has made Rollins a legacy act whom new media looks to for easy sound bites, and he has emerged more as a Randian mouthpiece than a progressive punk. In 2012, for example, Rollins penned a letter to a young American for the video platform Big Think. What is his sage counsel to those who, in his words, “come from nothing”? Should they organize for better pay and stronger social programs? No. “If you have an idea of what you want to do in your future, you must go at it with almost monastic obsession, be it music, the ballet, or just a basic degree,” he says. The people you admire—like Muhammad Ali, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, he offers—all “work and work and work.”

Elsewhere, Rollins counsels against collective effort wholesale. “I am quite done with the idea of ‘we,’” he said during a 2016 spoken-word performance. “People are basically ungovernable and they are untamable.... If you really want the world to be a better place, it is up to you, the individual, to choose to do good things.” For equality, morality, and the common good, his basic prescription is familiar: Work harder. Rollins’ grasp on this ideology is more idiosyncratic than Rogan’s, more home-cooked and less informed by a parade of reactionary dolts. Today, though, he can’t transcend Rogan’s dominance. The culture industry has flattened Rollins into a Roganist.

There was always an alternative. While Rollins was busy fashioning himself as an entertainment ubermensch living on the edge of sanity, the post-hardcore kids in his hometown of D.C. were building a DIY music scene modeled as a true collective. They designed group houses as radical communes, organized political actions, and released anti-commercial albums on Rollins’ old friend Ian MacKaye’s independent Dischord Records. Positive Force DC, a punk activist group, held benefit shows for the city’s downtrodden. MacKaye’s band Fugazi, a flagship for the local scene, played ’90s protest shows across from the White House and the Supreme Court. Even as punk became a commodity, the band rejected major-label record deals, refused to appear on MTV, and capped ticket prices for their shows at five dollars. “In response not only to a corrupt music industry but to an entire economic and political system they felt was fraught with greed for money and power, the band developed a well-reasoned ethical code,” Azerrad writes in Our Band Could Be Your Life. Fugazi’s output formed a nagging reminder that a more meaningful counterculture was possible—one that strived to build a new society, not just rail against the existing one. It also made Rollins appear pretty desperate by contrast.

By the 2000s, though, what the D.C. scene had done was almost unthinkable. Punks were still getting famous. Indie music, far from operating on a collectivist DIY ethos, had largely become a parallel entertainment industry, a miniature of the major labels, with atomized musicians scrambling to make a living while various intermediaries did their best to cash in. It wasn’t so much that indie artists were “selling out”; the underground had simply become one more mainstream option. Rollins, with his relentless focus on success, was the godfather of this dispiriting landscape.

In recent interviews, Rollins is frank about what his ethos has cost him. His obsession with writing and touring precludes close friendships and committed romantic relationships, he explains with prideful resignation. “I don’t have a family,” Rollins told Rogan in 2018. “I’m just not chipped that way. I never thought of having kids. I don’t have a wife. I don’t have friends, really. Most of the people I know I either pay a salary or commission to.” He doesn’t want to come over to dinner. He’s worried that he’ll “say the wrong thing.” This was not the happy spin that Rogan likes to put on overwork. The podcast host tried a bit of pop psychology, suggesting that maybe Rollins was just “managing social expectations.” In reply, Rollins bowed his gray head and cracked little jokes that sounded like deflections before launching into a stock anecdote from his spoken-word set about meeting famous people at William Shatner’s house. The exchange is plainly sad. In it, you can hear Rollins as an emblem of the failed promises of the counterculture in our era. Once, DIY aimed to bring people together beyond the ownership of capital. Its main legacy today is division.

Henry Rollins still haunts us. Like other foundational myths, his story has become a dim, flickering light in the culture. He will, undoubtedly, keep touring and bringing joy to audiences across the world. But when I saw him in March, his set felt like an elegy. He memorialized New York City’s punk-rock style icon Jimmy Webb, who died of cancer in 2020; he reflected on rejecting his abusive father’s dying attempt to talk to him; and he pleaded with America’s new crop of multicultural youth to replace the gerontocracy (“vote, vote, vote”). At one point, he rehashed his ancient line about getting “plans B, C, D, E, F, and G” in place when he was a young punk so he wouldn’t “starve to death.” The hustle lives on.

Here it might be customary to offer a caveat. There’s no shame in working hard, I might say. Make your bed! Hone your craft! How you do anything is how you do everything! Sure. But that’s been said often enough, by a familiar roster of self-help grifters. Instead, I’ll say this: The idea that we’re worth no more than what we produce is the sustaining lie of capitalism. Identifying ourselves with our work is a bankrupt strategy for leading a happy life. Opting out of the “straight world” never required forgoing the social bonds that form meaningful politics.

Beneath the bravado, Rollins seems to know this. His most redeeming quality—and probably the one that has prevented him from ever approaching Rogan’s level of success—is that he shows, at times, a genuine compassion for people the system has failed. It sits in strange tension with his bootstrapping tendencies.

There’s an old Rollins story that has stayed with me for years, and it illustrates this tension. After a show one freezing winter night, he meets a fan afflicted with spina bifida. The man reveals that he relies on government assistance. His condition makes it impossible to work, but the assistance is not enough to cover both medication and living expenses. He tells Rollins that he’s planning to drop the meds. The encounter ends when the man refuses to let Rollins help him get home, toughing it out in the cold. Rollins loves this. “This guy wanted no pity, no money, no nothing,” he says, “and in my opinion our America is letting this guy down.” But that’s not simply because the man deserves care: He’s one of the mythical deserving poor. “It’s not like he’s lazy,” Rollins says. “He’s not like, ‘Hey, man, I don’t want to do anything because the system sucks.’” Time after time, Rollins promotes social responsibility to the disadvantaged, but only on the condition of their individual merit. If this is the rubric of a rebel, it’s hard to see how we make it to a better world. His politics offer no way out, no future. He has taught himself—and his audience—that it’s best to be an island.

Isolation is what makes Rollins’ story so tragic. Mostly, he’s a reminder that the counterculture has failed as a lasting site of struggle. For Rollins, making good in the underground always meant entering the mainstream through a side door—one that was put there by elites in the first place—and loosening it for men like Rogan to barge through. Today, what masquerades as dissent in America is most often an individual consumer choice that feels like radical action without challenging the most pernicious hierarchies.

To reclaim the counterculture from reactionary forces demands a new collective vision to remake society in egalitarian terms. “You, in my opinion, are my people, and I am your person, and we all are each other’s people,” Rollins said as he closed the show. “That is an agreement, a social pact, that I can live with.” To truly realize such a pact, though, requires more than the safe one-way communication of entertainment. If free time is the indulgence most forbidden to Americans today, the most subversive thing we can do is to stop hustling and come together. From there, we might build a new counterculture, replacing the old punk imperative to do it yourself with a new one: do it ourselves.