“ohhhh, punk has been made too widely palatable and for everyone. REAL punks are like presbyterian minister mr rogers!” there are still hardcore bands out there! you can go see them if you want! i bet this person would listen to the ramones and go “umm, he wants to sniff glue? are we glorifying drug addiction now? this is SO not punk!”
there are people in the notes going “yeah! this is so true!”
i think this is part of a broader trend of people feeling to need to justify everything they enjoy, it can’t just be a show they remember fondly from when they were a kid, it needs to be punk
This is why I always say, Punk is an aesthetic
It’s not an ideology so much as the appearance of one
Plenty of self-described punks are leftist and do righteous shit, but so many are just angry middle-aged kids who want to seem cool
Hence why you always get the Conservatism is the new Punk shit every copy of years or so
new phone
Smh don’t you know phones are bourgeois decadence? Communism is when no iPhone, silly
as a participant of DIY music scenes, that is a difficult pill to swallow. on the one hand principled individuals foster a sense of community around what they do with political outreach front and center, things as simple as pamphlets talking about veganism and such at house shows and vfw halls they themselves have organized.
on the other there are way more people who show up because it’s something to do on a saturday night.
They tend to wash out after spending their summers day drinking at the show, hitting on all the underaged girls, and can only remember the style of clothing, and never engaging with any of the present political outreach that’s ALWAYS THERE. They’ve only ever been a warm body that paid $5 to make people uncomfortable like the nihilism they cosplay for is about them as individuals instead of a social one that remains present even today. if they know anything about the history, it’s idolizing Syd Vicious for some reason.
When they say Punk is dead I tend to agree with them.
as a participant of DIY music scenes, that is a difficult pill to swallow
DIY isn’t exclusive to punk, tho. Punk definitely pioneered it, punk is also likely to still be the genre with the biggest DIY subculture, but DIY as a mode of minimum-capital, non-exploitative, cooperative cultural production that’s available to everyone can work in any scene that has diehard, enthusiastic fans. Does that mean that people who organize underground raves are techno punks? Does that mean metal bands that put out records DIY and go on tour sleeping on their fans couches are metal punks?
idk, i’m inclined to say no because then you’re at “everything is punk” again. I don’t think punk can be meaningfully defined as anything but an aesthetic and a vibe, and that aesthetic and that vibe are very closely tied to DIY, but are also very closely tied to “what if we start DIY, but then it works out too well and we become actual capitalists”, aka how indie labels start, something which was also pioneered by punks. And that aesthetic has also from the very start been something that has been co-opted and monetized by established capitalist actors within the cultural industry, sellouts and posers have been a part of punk since before people started to call it punk. As soon as punk became noticeable, there were corporate ghouls who realized that a movement built around aggressive contrarianism was something you can market to suburban teens with rich parents, just as there have always been kids who’ve genuinely needed punk as a first step to reject the norms of capitalist society.
Punk also always had a revolutionary, liberatory and inclusive side to it and it always had a toxic, nihilist and exclusionary side to it, these have clashed with each other since the very start. As soon as there was hardcore, there were both subversive queer kids who found they could be themselves at punk shows and violent meatheads who went to shows to beat people up and be sex pests in the pit. I agree that the latter should have no part in the scene, but it takes work to keep them out. You have to watch out for people when you don’t want punk to be a space that’s only safe for white cishet boys who can hold their own in a fight. Building a punk scene that isn’t awful, violent shit requires active struggle.
”I think Ronald Reagan was the best President of my lifetime." -Johnny Ramone
Extremely punk
The guys in Skrewdriver probably sniffed glue too, just using drugs isn’t really good by itself
punk is about being a contrarian asshole, that’s the only requirement. that’s why it’s good a lot of the time but also contains some massive reactionaries
and i wasn’t making a statement about drug use being ipso facto a good thing, simply that the vibes on the people who sincerely say “mr rogers was punk” are not right.
I feel like “punk” gets mis-attributed as “authenticity” so much. Mr. Rodgers seemed like a guy who walked the walk and that gives him authenticity, but it sure doesn’t make him punk.
Edit: Ruminated this a bit and I feel like the attribution of “punk” is probably because it’s the last widespread cultural touchstone where “authenticity” was an assumed component of it. (I don’t think this reflects the reality of it though, the Sex Pistols were a boy band after all).
My punk credibility is super high and yup, also it’s been an ongoing thing in a very underground capacity for the last 30 years and people’s last mainstream touchstone is the 90s. DIY punk has been an ongoing international network that’s grown since the 80s and lets bands from Columbia or Russia play anarchist community centers or peoples basements and still make enough to get home and hopefully some pocket change, bands get well fed and drink for free in any town that has its scene together enough to get touring bands. But yeah, there is a pretty deep and historically long rooted international diy punk network and if you’re around long enough you can easily contact just about anyone cause everyone is a friend of a friend and being a Rockstar isn’t allowed everyone in the audience is also in bands generally, there isn’t really a division between bands and Fans and the worship that comes with it. The second singer for Black Flag lives in BC and picked my friends up from the airport on their first tour. He also still has to work a day job. People just really like punk enough to do this work.
Hippies were mean people pretending to be nice, punks were nice people pretending to be mean—change my mind
plenty of hippies were genuinely decent and plenty of punks are huge pieces of shit. but broadly i think these are trends that can be drawn.
not important to this post though because mr rogers certainly wasn’t pretending to be mean at a single point of his public persona (i mean maybe in an episode where someone says “that made me feel bad” and then he apologized or something, but you get it) and therefore isn’t punk. cannot fathom a world where i believe he was
anything is punk, especially things i like. it’s double punk if my parents didn’t like it
