Punk Is (Not) Dead

I am of the opinion that genre boundaries were never really important, though I’ve always found them fun to talk about. While I don’t think we should place any substantial value in the names of genres, there’s no denying we can trace the changes to musical styles over time, and it is fascinating to step back and look at the evolutionary process across full decades and longer. Genre names serve as useful labels to organize and observe music, and beyond that I’m not one to get uppity about how those labels get applied… with one exception.

Much as I disdain music snobbery, I still find it hard to stomach a specific misnomer in the music world. I know it is a long-running joke that each generation of Punk Rock fans claims to be the last “real Punk”, and that anything to come after is misappropriating the label. I recognize it is perfectly arbitrary to draw the line anywhere, but I do have a line.

I draw it earlier than you might expect for someone my age, since many of my cohorts grew up on Green Day and Blink 182. I don’t want to sound like a dick—maybe I do a little bit—but I never liked either of those groups, nor the sub-genre as a whole, I’ve never considered them Punk. As a teen I argued this point endlessly with my friends, and it’s a hill I’m still willing to die on.

While I do enjoy some Green Day tracks, I have always had a slight grudge against them for corrupting a genre that I considered to be, as a whole, a very pure and important cultural statement. NOFX—who ironically may be the ones more directly responsible for Punk’s downfall, as I’ll get into—put it best in their song Separation of Church and Skate, with the line:

The kids who used to live for beer and speed now want their fries and coke…

Punk, in my mind, is not compatible with bubble-gum arena Rock. The term Pop Punk itself is an oxymoron. Punk is a statement against Pop, against everything that is mainstream. Punk is not so much defined by any particular instrument or style of songwriting, and I wouldn’t even say it is defined by any particular politics—though that is an essential piece, but we’ll come back to that.

Punk is defined by its antagonist relationship with the mainstream; Punk must run counter to it, Punk must be anti-Pop.

The reason I think this is important as an artistic and cultural statement is because, to put it in scientific terms, it’s the Newtonian balance of modern sociopolitics, the opposing force that pushes back against a culture demanding so much conformity. The greater the pressure to produce, consume, commodify yourself, and form your identity with brand names, the greater the resistance from those who cannot or will not fit in. Punk has been essential inspiration for many different kinds of people in many different situations, but all sharing a need to push back against what is expected of them. Punk is a cultural release valve.

(This is also why Nazi punk, with its inherent fascism, is not legitimate Punk, and I’m not going to dignify it with any more of a comment than that.)

Getting back to the main point, early Punk was a very different animal from the movement that stole the label in the ‘90s and 2000s. Just listen to this Good Charlotte track, a Pop Punk hit from the mid-’00s, vs a Hardcore classic from the early ‘80s:

Not quite the same thing, is it? And I know it’s a nonsense exercise, but can you imagine how Minor Threat fans would react if Good Charlotte went back in time and took the stage? Or how Good Charlotte fans would react to Minor Threat? They are worlds apart, yet their labels indicate they’re the same basic genre.

I concede there is a logical reason for this, it’s easy to trace the direct line of musical evolution from the older to the younger, but my argument is that if the statement of the artist is fundamentally outside the definition of Punk then they should have a different label, especially if we can clearly hear the difference.

It would be like saying that Miles Davis created Bop, and was succeeded by Kenny G playing Pop Bop. Like, there are superficial similarities, and you can trace a direct line of evolution, but it’s a bit of an insult to Miles Davis to put Kenny G under the same umbrella.

So, let me get around to those fundamentals. Punk’s roots come out of a combination of early Hard Rock and experimental Art Rock. You can hear so much of what became the typical Punk sound as far back as Velvet Underground in 1967, and the MC5 in 1969:

These might sound tame compared to what came later, but in their time these were transgressive and boundary-pushing, they were aggressive departures from the mainstream, more invested in their unique statement than in their actual musical appeal. That part is key: they weren’t trying to sound pretty, or even sound ‘good’, they were rebelling against the expectation that music must be beautiful.

These weird experiments inspired the conception of a number of bands across the US and the UK in the ‘70s, an obscure but devoted movement that called itself Punk. One band in particular stands out as the apotheosis of the scene, and in my mind defines what the word Punk actually means: The Sex Pistols.

While only a handful of their songs can really be enjoyed musically, their statement was so extreme and confrontational that it elevated this gang of depraved junkies to legendary status. They were openly anarchistic, anti-Christian, and morally nihilistic. 

I’m tempted to say that anarchism is the defining feature of Punk, although part of me wants to say it’s nihilism, but neither of those hold up to deeper scrutiny. The word anti-authoritarian comes very close. Anti-establishment is closest, but in the end I think the part that really matters is the anti-

Whether anti-government, anti-capitalist, anti-religion, anti-anything, it just needs to be against, and violently so. Perhaps any concrete definition of an ethos would be antithetical to the soul of Punk.

And while The Sex Pistols effectively created and perfected Punk in one fell swoop, a lot of their descendants were even more aggressive and extreme, if less explicit in their politics. Take the opening lines of Last Caress by the Misfits, which came out just a few years later:

Yes, that’s Glenn Danzig singing in a smooth Elvis-y voice about killing a baby and how he doesn’t even care. The Misfits never touched politics, but they nonetheless clearly positioned themselves as against anything society might expect of them.

You think Green Day would ever write a song like that?

(The Misfits, their multiple incarnations, and the Horror Punk sub-genre they gave birth to warrant an entire analysis in themselves, but I’ll have to cover that in a future post.)

The other Hardcore bands of the ‘80s were not so fixated on horror and violence as the Misfits, but many of them were more musically aggressive, and at least a few were openly anarchistic.

In the UK punk had gone a more musical route, with The Clash even verging on a mainstream Rock sound, but their openly anti-establishment statement earn them Punk legitimacy, as well as the hardcore energy thrashing just under the surface of their more cleanly written songs.

In the UK at this time is also where we see the Punk attitude cropping up in non-Rock genres. This is when we learned that Punk is not limited to Rock, that within the legitimate category of Punk we must include groups that squirmed out of Goth and New Wave and other weird subgenres. Joy Division, for instance, sits comfortably under my definition of Punk.

There is even an Electronic side to Punk, specifically a Jungle/ Drum ‘n Bass/Hip Hop group (and one of my personal favorites) The Prodigy. But that was in the ‘90s, and I’m getting ahead of myself.

The corruption of the name Punk began back in the late ‘80s, with a group that unwittingly sewed the seeds of the genre’s destruction.

NOFX is a loud, outspoken anti-establishment Punk group, with an ironic veneer of Pop Rock on top. Their sneering appropriation of Pop was intentionally ugly, at least in my mind, and comes across as a mockery of Pop in general. But their success as a band went on to inspire the first wave of Pop bands appropriating Punk, pretending to be the other way around.

This was the quagmire that birthed Green Day, Blink 182, The Offspring, Sum 41, and more. This is also where my feelings are most conflicted, because I do enjoy a lot of the music here.

Both The Offspring and Sum 41 have some really hard-hitting songs, filled with anti-establishment attitude no less. Those two in particular even get into some direct sociopolitical commentary, and I lean a bit towards including them in legitimate Punk.

Early Green Day, too, was more insolent, more counter to the mainstream. With their first couple of albums you would even think of Green Day as a close follower in NOFX’s footsteps.

But then along came a band that, I’m sorry to put it so harshly but, they shat all over everything. Goddamn Blink 182 came on the scene, seemingly cut from the same cloth as Green Day and Sum 41, except with everything brightened up, everything light and sarcastic. They made an angsty, unfocused statement of mild discontent and boredom, a statement that seemed calculated to attract the lucrative suburban teen market.

I do honestly apologize to any fans of the band, many of my friends still love their music, and I am just one obnoxious music nerd with arbitrary principles, but this is my honest opinion. Blink 182 rubbed me the wrong way from the very first time I heard them. I don’t even know why, something about the whininess and the sort of passive aggressive facade of rebelliousness has always bothered me.

I don’t know if it’s really fair to say they were the turning point, but all of the Pop Punk that followed sounded like Blink 182 imitators, it sounded like there was a factory somewhere cranking them out by the dozen.

Now, I’m sure that even some of the truly depraved bands of original Punk were represented by managers and signed to corporate labels—I don’t consider this disqualifying for legitimate Punk, though it is a mark of honor not to have been—but it’s on the cusp of the 2000s that you can hear the corporations take control.

The sound became standardized, cleaned up, highly produced and focused on catchy melodies. The statements and attitudes got so watered down, it became not just safe enough for mainstream radio, but safe enough for prudish suburban parents to buy CDs for their kids.

This so-called Punk was not played in disgusting basements for gangs of drug-addled teenage miscreants, it was played in huge stadiums under colorful marquee banners for tweens and their begrudging parents.

And that brings us back to Green Day and their magnum opus, American Idiot. This album was such a mainstream smash success, it was as inescapable as any of the mega Top 40 Pop albums of the decade. It’s financial success notwithstanding, what makes this album such a canary in the coalmine is its anti-establishment artifice.

The album communicates a message just barely disaffected enough to qualify as a message at all. It’s a diet, caffeine-free rebelliousness, enough for tweens to think it’s subversive, while quietly winking at their parents that, don’t worry, there’s no real danger here.

I suppose I should give the album some credit for being more or less openly critical of the president and the war, but that wasn’t exactly a shocking position for artists to take at that point, let alone a supposedly Punk artist. But importantly, the album’s statement is vague enough that you could interpret it as targeted at whichever political position you don’t like. It wasn’t anti-establishment, just very vaguely anti-Bush.

I do actually really enjoy a couple of songs from this album. It is certainly not the worst album of its ilk, not by a long shot. But I would argue it should be classified as some variety of Rock, Hard Rock, or Pop Rock. We shouldn’t try to force it into Punk.

I would like to point out that I am not alone in rejecting Pop Punk as being legitimately Punk, because there has continued to this day a Hardcore Underground Punk scene, which is usually played in disgusting basements, and which no upright suburban parent would allow their child to get anywhere near.

This incarnation of Punk is so musically aggressive that at a certain point it blends into the Extreme Metal genres. For instance, this Killing The Dream song, while fundamentally more Punk, sits naturally alongside an essentially Metal-based song like this one from Pig Destroyer:

Furthermore, as I mentioned before, Punk does not have to be Rock-based. One of the most spiritually Punk groups on the scene right now is Death Grips, which is ostensibly Alternative Hip Hop, but which is so musically transgressive and which makes such an intense anti-establishment statement that most listeners agree that it is also legitimately Punk.

I would be remiss not mention what is probably the most politically, tangibly, actively hardcore Punk band of all time, as well as a prime example of Punk spirit transcending genre. The living legends of Pussy Riot, who’ve made such powerful statements that they have literally been imprisoned multiple times, and have become international anti-establishment icons.

Their sound has completely changed over time, from a classic Hardcore Punk Rock sound in their early years, to their current form which I can only describe as Art Pop EDM. But don’t be misled by the Pop aesthetic, it’s immediately clear from a glimpse at their new music videos that they haven’t lost a single drop of Punk spirit…

…I literally can’t show you the videos because most of them are age restricted by YouTube, which blocks me from displaying them here. This is a link to their YouTube page, they are wild as fuck.

In terms of real political statements, Pussy Riot is in a league of their own. Only perhaps Rage Against The Machine can even compare—and I should’ve brought up Rage earlier since they were a ‘90s band, but in summary, their Hard Funk Rap Rock was not only direct in its political statement, but on multiple occasions they weren’t afraid to flagrantly break the law to make that statement. They were anti-establishment to the core, truly Punk at heart.

To suggest that Pussy Riot and Rage Against The Machine ought to the share the Punk honorific with the likes of Blink 182 or Good Charlotte is just downright insulting.

Finally, to bring the genre full circle, we have the modern saviors of the Punk Rock sound, White Lung. A revival of vicious instrumentation, biting anti-establishment attitude, and transgressive experimentation.

But White Lung is better than just an imitation of past glory, they are another evolution. They are more musical than the Hardcore Punk classics, with clear melodies and clean musicianship, but unlike the melodic Pop Punk groups, you can’t put White Lung in a commercial. Those more musical elements come in service of brutal energy, as angry as anything else in Punk, but with an emotional depth that hardly anyone else in the scene has ever reached for.

This is the artist that gives me hope that true Punk Rock will live on, not just as crossover inspiration for other genres, but as its own outlier that still has unique things to say, and still has an important place in the sub-culture.

But what do you think? Is there a such thing as legitimate Punk? Is it hypocritical to gate-keep Punk in the first place? Have I twisted these definitions around to fit my personal tastes? Let me know in the comments, thanks for reading!

Gibbles

P.S. there are plenty of other great Punk Rock bands I would have loved to talk about, but this post is long enough and I couldn’t fit them all into the narrative. Perhaps I will write about some of them in future posts.