Resurrect Punk Rock
It is indisputably time
Part One: An Oversimplified History
Once upon a time, in the 1970s, 80s, the 90s, and even the 00s, conservatives cultivated a (largely racist, homophobic, and sexist) culture of ‘respectability.’ Based on an extremely rigid criteria of etiquette, conservative culture punished outsiders and defended the status quo through politeness. It worked for them, for a time. It played well with the religious right, with suburban housewives whose biggest nightmare was finding their son smoking weed, and with bigots who wanted to mask their bigotry behind a veneer of good ol’ boy kindness. Their conservatism was one of orthodoxy, based around what you could not say, could not do, the ways in which you should and should not act. Who was more against freedom of speech, liberals or conservatives? Insofar as ‘liberals’ as we now understand them even existed, the answer was indisputable - Of course it was conservatives! No one in their right mind would say otherwise.
And in that time, in that era, this was the voice of the resistance.
And I need us all to bring it the fuck back. Now.
Which means that many of us on the modern left need an attitude adjustment. Many of us might be afraid of this. It might even read as culturally right wing to us, as the Right has so largely adopted this attitude of causticity. So readily embraced being ‘mean.’
What advantage is there in that meanness? Why does attitude help, and what advantage does it offer us in such a broken world?
Why does it pay off to be punk?
Part Two: What Punk is
To talk about why punk died, and how and why to bring it back, we have to talk, first and foremost, about what it is. ‘Punk’ beyond being a genre of music, is a brutally honest and morally righteous rage against everything wrong about the world. This energy exudes off the songs that occupy the punk genre, sure, but it’s also in the surrounding culture. Many songs that aren’t technically ‘genre punk’ have been embraced by punks because of how they have the same scathing-yet-moral energy that punk has made its calling card. The classic example, of course, is Rage Against the Machine.
Examples like this illustrate how ‘punk’ is not just one genre of music, or even just music. Punk is a way of creating art, and by extension it is a way of viewing how we should speak and present ourselves, as well as the media that we should produce and consume. Punks adopt practices that many of us have seen, but few of us understand. The stereotypical punk jacket, covered in patches, is a way of showing individuality, broadcasting the deeply moral and political messages that the wearer believes in, and a demonstration of a Do-it-yourself-ethos. Punk culture believes in self-creation rather than endless consumption of the goods produced by corporations. Punks also typically wear army or military clothes to rob them of their power through imitation that will hopefully hollow out all meaning.
In these ways, and so many others, every expression of ‘Punk’ is one with immense disrespect toward our current polite society, ultimately in the service of and hope for something better. Punks have high rates of veganism, and of course wrote a song about it:
They also, despite being part of a counter-culture, often speak out against drug use:
And when they were infamously infiltrated by far-right imitators, they had a lot to say about it:
What’s most interesting about the demographic makeup of these bands is, well…let’s be blunt. Look at them. The below photo might be black and white, but that isn’t the only lack of color.
That’s right. Punk, in its heyday, was a subculture in which angry young white men were not becoming fascist, but the exact opposite. The Clash, and other white punk bands, spoke out against racism not just because they were trying to be ‘allies,’ but for their own sake. It was about right and wrong, and punk was about screaming your rage at everything that was wrong. Especially screaming at those who masked what was wrong behind respectability.
I don’t need to tell you that that’s not how it is, anymore. We know who is angry, in our society, and we know who has become better at using that anger to win.
So what happened? How did the conservative right so effectively capture anger? And how did they bend this anger to be for a corporate-capitalist-theocratically bigoted status quo, instead of against it?
Part Three: The Presidencies that killed American Punk
I have no interest, right now, in either defending or attacking the legacy of Barack Obama. For all intents and purposes, keep in mind the following: I am going to talk at length about Barack Obama’s image, in and of itself.
Throughout the 00s, unpopular-but-somehow-enduring republican president George W. Bush ran the respectability culture of conservatism into the ground. (It has not come back since!) During the 00s, punk went truly mainstream in a way that it never had before, with ‘pop-punk’ becoming a rising genre. There’s an excellent substack article I read recently that explains how the mainstreaming of punk is particularly odious to it, but I don’t believe that mainstreamification alone is what killed it. Keep in mind that what I am about to say is fairly speculative, but to me, it feels intuitively true.
After Bush, the US elected a center-left President who would define a generation. Barack Obama, not just ‘well-spoken,’ but a legendary orator, preached a message of hope and presented that it was ‘time for a change’ with the kind of affable decency that republicans had once claimed as their own. This is an aspect of Obama that is often overlooked, but those of who remember the failed Presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Al Gore might remember a slight abrasiveness that both possessed. An aggression that definitely would not register as punk, but which allowed the Right to comfortably maintain the illusion that they were the polite and decent ones. This was comparatively easy. Democrats, by the nature of their platform, had massive social issues to speak out against. Republicans only had to say: “Everything is actually quite fine, and these other people are being mean.”
But Obama was optimistic, clean-cut, and genuinely clean. So squeaky clean that he trounced Hillary Clinton, with her image of corruption (another political reputation that I will not get into) in the democratic primary. So incredibly, amazingly clean that right-wing attacks on him tended to be false and racist or absurd. Years later, they are still being both racist and absurd.
Over the course of eight years, under Obama, ‘liberal’ came to mean ‘polite.’ While Obama’s moderate-left policy failed to appease anyone who’d rightfully call themselves ‘punk,’ (some might say it was because he continued Bush’s war crimes and invented some of his own, but I’m not punk enough to get into that) the republican party, drifting further right into fascism, had a cornerstone on criticizing him. Just one presidency before, Green Day had had a lot to say about George W. Bush, but now any criticism of Obama risked feeding into a far right hate machine. In such an environment, what’s a punk to do?
Apparently suffocate, due to lack of oxygen.
And then came Donald Trump.
In 2016, we all learned what the Right would become once it abandoned respectability politics, and the result was horrifying. A nightmare that we are still living through today, even worse and even more unfettered. From 2016-2020, kindness was the resistance. In a world where a notably nasty, aggressive figure had captured the hearts of far too much of the American public, there was no room for a counterculture that promoted being a righteous asshole. Being an asshole was the problem. This continued throughout Biden’s Presidency, as the manosphere became the place for angry and disaffected young men rejecting the status quo. In 2024, those men knew who they wanted to vote for. And, with the support of their increasingly Evangelical, Fox-news-watching parents and grandparents, they were able to unleash this hell upon us.
But in this loss is, perhaps, an opportunity. A year later, those angry young men who voted for Trump see what we all see, and they face a choice: Either double down and support fascism, or join us in rebelling against it. And many of them are natural rebels. That is the only reason they ended up where they did. And now, their turn against Trump is well documented.
It should be noted that much of punk subculture is UK-based. I can’t speak as accurately regarding that side of the pond. What I can say, though, is that the US and the UK have a strange relationship in regard to sharing culture. One often follows where the other leads, even when it makes little sense and when the two countries are facing very different political situations. UK punk continued to exist, and is influential even today, but its energy has had a noticeable chunk bitten out of it. And if someone more familiar with the culture of the UK could explain how it happened, I would be deeply interested.
Part Four: Time to Stop Being Nice
“When they go low, we go high.”
-Michelle Obama, in a speech delivered Summer of 2016, a few months before Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump
“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.”
-Naomi Shulman
I am tired of being told that I need to be nice when talking about bad people. That my art should not include references to the terrible things that bad people do, that my speech should not be crude or rude out of fear that it will be offensive. I am tired of being afraid of the Edge, and I am tired of modern conservatives seemingly owning the Edge now, and making liberal use of it.
Here is a short video I enjoyed, with a lot of jokes that may very well be in poor taste.
This is punk, actually.
It is punk because it aggressively and uncompromisingly tears apart terrible people, refusing to be respectable in the way that it does it, uncaring if it is seen as offensive itself. Did you squirm at the joke about wife beating? I would understand, believe me, but police officers infamously have high rates of spousal abuse, and given how ICE is under less scrutiny and has lower expectations than any respectable police department, I wouldn’t expect it to be better. If that joke made you angry, my advice is: Be angry at ICE.
In that same vein, the now-famous folk singer Jesse Welles is, of course, quite punk.
I often say “Fuck ICE” and I will continue to. And when I do, I use an expletive. When I do, I don’t mean that “ICE sucks.” I don’t mean “I don’t like them! >:(“ I mean exactly what I said.
I mean: Fuck ICE.
I mean: Those masked fucking cowards are the lowest form of scum that has crawled out of American society.
I mean: ICE agents want to throw immigrant women into detention centers so that they can rape them and/or force them into marriage as it becomes the only acceptable way to get a green card. They want this because they correctly fail to imagine any woman ever consenting to love them.
I mean: There is historical evidence that the asswipes of humanity who have nothing good to offer the world love social stratification, because being ‘white men’ is the only thing they will ever have going for them. We are seeing that play out in real time, as the kind of people who cannot understand basic laws, struggle to pass an open-note written exam, and who have never had a stable career before now are joining the private army of a pedophile president who regularly shits himself.
And I have no interest in saying the respectable version of any of those things.
My refusal to say it would not make it untrue. It would only hide my justified rage. Obscure the crimes being committed. And, by extension, defend the very people who I should be condemning with every ounce of power that I have, even if that power is only verbal.
There is power in this culture of rage. Power that fascists have learned to take perfect advantage of. For almost two decades, we have left it on the table so that they can capture all of it. That was never a good idea. But now, more than ever, it is time to be angry again. It is time to be punk.
Conclusion: The Twist is: it’s Already Happening
Last July, Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day led a crowd in chanting Fuck Donald Trump. In the most recent concert, January 22nd as of this writing, they have been consistent.
You may have also heard that this happened.
Here are two things to keep in mind: Brody King (the bearded wrestler in the video) is not just a wrestler, but the singer in a Hardcore band, which is a subgenre of punk. His disapproval of ICE is not just a virtue signal. King sells “Abolish ICE” merch featuring himself, and uses the funds to help immigrant families in Minnesota who are currently being impacted by the horrific ICE surge.
In LA, during an Anti-ICE protest, this happened.
Look at the atmosphere of righteous rage that we are living in, at the yearning for that rage. It’s happened, the world is too broken, and we can no longer be nice. Perhaps the future always belonged to those who were willing to kick and scream and shout and throw mud and show their unbridled and unrestrained humanity. If the Right has taught us anything worth remembering, it’s that.
And I will push it on. I will fan the flames and burn down the house that holds all this ‘respectable decency,’ because it is no longer worth keeping intact. It’s time to be honest. It’s time to be angry. It’s time to be punk rock.