I suppose I should call it the Chumbawamba Question. I used to call it the Rage Against the Machine Question. Before that, it was the Clash Question. All the questions are the same: How is it that bands can preach revolution night after night to sold out crowds, yet no insurrection follows by morning? "Anarchy in the UK/It's coming some time/It might be," the Sex Pistols promised; "Career opportunities," the Clash sang, "are the ones that never knock." In Britain punk was the voice of working-class kids, pessimistic and pissed about their prospects in a country slipping into a mid-'70s post-industrial sink hole. Against the nostalgic delusions of royal grandeur and noble tradition, Johnny Rotten growled back: No Future. Back here in the States punk politics were a bit different, more ironic. Years before the Clash's "I'm So Bored with the USA," the Stooges punched out songs like "Search and Destroy," a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the Vietnam War and America's testosterone driven culture, sung by a skinny little draft dodger named Iggy Stooge (now Pop). Later came the Ramones' campy thrash, Patti Smith's poetic rants, and all the others who filled in Richard Hell's "blank generation" of post-Woodstock, post-Watergate, seemingly post-everything youth.

American punk really came into its own with the Southern California hardcore scene in the early 1980s. The setting couldn't have been more different from the declining UK (or, for that matter, The Stooges' wasteland Detroit and the New York City falling down around the Ramones, Smith, and Hell). California was the American Dream. Its economy, pumped up by Reagan's military spending, was booming. The punks were middle-class white kids from the "good" suburbs of Orange County. The weather was nice. They had it all -- and didn't want it. "I went to your schools, I went to your churches, I went to your institutional learning facilities, so how can you say I'm crazy?" the Suicidal Tendencies chanted over a heavy grind in 1983 " I'm not crazy, you're the one who's crazy!" Unlike their UK brethren, these punks weren't pissed about being excluded. They were angry about being included. American punk was and is a howl of rejection by those who ostensibly have the most to gain. Most Americans fantasize about a new Chrysler in the car-park, a self-cleaning range in the kitchen, and Sundays spent mowing a well fertilized lawn or toning up with an aerobics workout at the mall. Looking at the "Good Life," punks saw only boredom and a life of quiet lies. Punk rock's quarter-century in the US has been one long F#$% You to the American Dream. So how come the American Dream keeps chugging along so merrily?

Because Bon Jovi rocks the charts, not Black Flag. No matter how popular punk music became in the wake of Nirvana and its transformation into "Alternative Culture," punks are an extreme minority. And most punks want to keep it this way. Yelling "f@#$ you" is less about challenging the system and more about celebrating your marginal position on the outside. It gives middle-class white kids the much exalted-in-America status of victim (but without that messy racism and poverty stuff). Following this logic, failure is good. As Christine Boarts, editor of the punk zine Slug & Lettuce, once explained to me, faced with the option of moving to a bigger label or quitting, bands that "just cease to be are the ones that get more respect, because they don't compromise or they don't sell out." By reaching people outside the punk ghetto, Chumbawamba -- like the Clash before them -- are sell outs. They'd be more punk if they just didn't exist.

Purity aside, punk hasn't had the political impact it should because of a much simpler, often overlooked fact: Music is cultural expression, not political action. Radical culture is as much a safety valve as it is a call to arms, and rock 'n' roll has long served as safe rebellion. Back in the 1950s, Elvis Presley let the white kids flirt with black culture -- safely on their side of the tracks. (The real race mixers of that decade, the Beats and Civil Rights activists, were listening to jazz and folk respectively.) Similarly, with punk you can stick it to The Man, whether The Man is your parents who hate your new haircut or the Multi-National Corporate Death Burger, and you never have to move outside your cultural identity.

Punks, identity politicos, and multi-culturalists like to think of The System (capital T, capital S) as a gray, pleasure-stomping behemoth: IBM in Elvis's day. It is that. The rabble have to be kept in line, and the best way to do that in a society where the jackboot is frowned upon is to impose a uniform set of values and norms. But the system is also something else: It's a consumer capitalist economy that depends on new ideas and new styles to open up new markets and sell more goods. In our world, rebelling through culture means being an unpaid intern for a market research firm. Any doubts I may have had about punk's market viability evaporated a few years back when I heard a Nike ad backed by The Stooges' "Search and Destroy."

I could stop here: All rebellious culture gets co-opted, punk is hopeless, resistance is useless, I'll probably get hit by a car anyway. It's a neat conclusion which allows me to stay safely and sanctimoniously in my armchair. But it's bulls@#t. Punk is political. Not necessarily because of what bands yell out to their audience, but because of what their music and performance promises: You can do this too. "This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now Form A Band," the punk zine Sideburns commanded. Do-It-Yourself is the prime directive of punk rock. After listening to my first Ramones album (bass mixed into the right speaker, guitar in the left) I got the message and went out and formed a band. From there it wasn't a big leap to forming DIY political organizations.

I'm not alone. Most of the young, white political activists I've worked with over the past fifteen years spent more time listening to Black Flag than Bon Jovi, and were more into the Dead Kennedys than Donovan. In punk they, like me, found assurance that it was okay to be angry at the world, that politics could transcend the twin parties of tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, and that radicalism wasn't limited to feeling guilty for being white. Listening to the DKs I learned I could hate liberals and despise Ronald Reagan--and have a sense of humor. Like me, my comrades not only listened to the lyrics of punk rock, but we also internalized its participatory message. And this is punk's most radical lesson. For in the United States, where we shop for everything from our identities to our presidents, what really threatens the powers-that-be is the spectre of a citizenry who would rather do it themselves than have it done for them. DIY is the basis of a real democracy.

So why isn't there mass rebellion at a Chumbawamba concert? Because the audience is just that, an audience. Watching, listening, cheering. But not doing. The politics of punk have always been about something more.