Almost thirty years ago now, driving around on a hot summer day with a couple of friends. One guy puts a punk mix tape in the player, and the guy with a college music scholarship was aesthetically offended. "Anyone could make this music," he complained.
The other guy nodded in agreement and replied, "that's the point."
The other thing about punk is that it's really more an attitude. Some punks are really skilled musicians and lyricists that bring a lot of outside influence into their music.
A beautiful sentiment :) I believe this should apply to tech as well – it shouldn't be an exclusive field and building logical apps should be simple. That's kind of why I chose to brand my freelance business as Punk Rock Dev.
Ok, I'm old and got into punk in the late 70s. Never lived in a place with a really big active scene until Seattle in the late 80s / early 90s, but honestly that wasn't punk per se, it was something different. More rock than punk, I would say. Feel free to disagree. The Bellingham Bash in 1990 or 91 had a good vibe, though, and I saw Nirvana at Squid Row for a dollar before they got famous.
I think the point is that punk is accessible and relateable for a lot of people. The punk people I've known were the most open-minded of any crowd, whether that was built around music or something else. I think it's true that it still unites people who otherwise would probably not mix. They are also the most open to different styles of music.
And as for connecting people across space and time, I can't help but think of The Fall's "Telephone Thing" every time I remember the douchebags at Google have all my data as I type HN comments. How dare you assume I want to parlez-vous with you.
I saw Nirvana kind of before they were famous too (first British tour). Am I right in thinking they were kind of unmemorable, or was it just that I had other things on my mind at that gig?
One of the interesting thing about these underground music movements from hip hop to punk is the DIY ethos for the creation of music, publications, performance spaces, and more. Adults and respectable companies aren't helping (for the most part) so the kids have to direct and make things on their own.
I think it's not a coincidence that many people who get involved in underground music movements later start successful careers in creative endeavors - fashion, cuisine, publishing, design, programming, etc. There was a documentary a few years ago tracing the lives of people who had been active in the 1980s music scenes and so many of them ended up in these professions.
And you don't have to look far to find more famous examples - Kira Roessler (Black Flag bassist) won an Oscar for sound editing for Mad Max: Fury Road, Damond John's fashion label coming out of the late 80s/early 90s NYC hip hop scene, and Anthony Bourdain's coming of age as a young chef and NYC punk fan in the late 70s.
There's a difference between consumption and creation that is easily seen and displayed in aesthetic and cultural choices. It also seems to affect attitude towards employment and economics.
McKenna summed up the evolution from passive, introspective subcultures when he observed that "we're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over".
I don't think I've yet to experience anything as incredible as the DIY punk scene in my teenage years. People from multiple communities around Chicago would show up at an abandoned transmission gallery and renovate enough of it to make it inhabitable for a show that night. The dedication was purely out of love for the scene itself and it's a shame I haven't found a parallel in modern adulthood.
Not modern adulthood, but electronic dance culture in the 1990s probably (from my point of view) was possibly close. Of course, I really don't know the early punk scene firsthand, which I heard was way more DIY in say the early 1980s, kind of like what you are talking about, vs when I played in a punk band in the 2000s (this is the impression I get when I talked to some guys who were in relatively known local bands in the 1980s).
I also don't know mmuch about the 1960s hippie culture firsthand, of course.
But my "impression" of the 1990s rave scene was that indeed it was in between the punk ethos (DIY, warehouse takeovers, some aggressive music styles like gabber/hardcore) and the hippie ethos (bohemian, some psychedelic influence, etc.) At any rate you did get that sense of "for the scene" with the rave community, something that is indeed special when you can find it.
For all I know there are some scenes similar to that still, but it's hard to keep up with this sort of thing -- it's hard to reconcile a late-hours youth culture with responsible 9-5 job culture. :( It would be interesting to know for sure what has taken its place.
Soundsystem/free tekno culture is certainly keeping the mentality alive. My friends that build speakers and play heavy drum and bass and tekno all used to play in punk, hardcore and ska bands in their teens.
I have a lot of respect for Henry Rollins. From working at an ice cream store to front man for the world's biggest punk act, to poet and actor. If you get a chance, watch him in He Never Died
Quite possibly the most abused punk logo in history. I've seen it used on everything from "Employee's Must Wash Hands" stickers to a t-shirt that read "Beach Boys"
"Punk's not dead, it just deserves to die when it becomes another stale cartoon."
Dead Kennedys was on constant repeat on my walkman or home stereo as a 14-year-old in the late 80's. Every Friday was spent at the tiny all-ages punk club in our east-coast college town. Government Issue, Fugazi, Das Damen, Black Flag, Jello Biafra, even They Might Be Giants came through.
Even now, 30 years later, I load up Frankenchrist or any other DK album on YouTube at work and that's my intense-focus music. The music is still strong as hell, Jello's words and delivery are ruthless and scathing and hilarious, and the whole thing just works.
I wish there was a DK today. Rage had it. Some Run The Jewels tracks have it, but not quite.
I feel like live music in general is at a low point right now that I've never seen it at since I started paying attention in the '80s.
I'm in England at the moment, and for the last several years all the band listings I see at bars are for one of the ten thousand "Tribute to the Mildly Popular Band from the 70s/80s". So if I want the Thin Lizzy experience or the Foreigner/Journey experience or the genuine-in-case-you-missed-it-the-first-time Ratt experience, you can get it six nights out of the week because that's all that's playing at every bar in town.
But there are no bands with stupid names playing their own crappy stuff. Even on a Tuesday night. And that's what I miss.
Older people are still going to gigs, they have plenty of disposable income and they want to see the stuff they grew up with. Younger people have many more options for making and sharing music.
If you were born in 2000, starting a rock band seems a bit retro - you might do it if you're into that sort of thing, but you might prefer to play solo gigs with a looper or do weird ambient stuff with modular synths on YouTube. There's no shortage of talented young musicians, they're just doing things differently.
Good piece... I feel the underground dance music world has a greater arc of history and continuity to it as it evolves, where punk was more a moment in time that lots of people cherish, and a very specific genre and subculture.
Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?
One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death.
It's an interesting piece, but it seems like sorts of things people would say when we actually had subcultures.
I often wrack my brain trying to think, what changed...
Was it the Internet sucking a lot of the money out of the music industry?
Was it the aging out of GenX?
Was it the long term structural effects of the GFC, with the shrinking of the middle class and the subsequent capital booms that QE created?
Was it a change in perspective in a generation coming up with a lot of economic and global turmoil happening? (no time for culture, time to get to work, economic security is fragile)
Was it the growth of online dating platforms and social media? (Was all of this just an incredibly complex system of mating calls?)
Was it the death of place? Did these cultures lose their luster when anyone could just read all about them online, consume them, and move on? Or perhaps a sort of centralization and homogenization of culture as a result of trends happening in the digital world (where everybody is reading the same things, thinking the same things, doing the same things, in any city)?
Was it the growth of burning man? A sort of Wal-Mart of subculture.
Was it rising real estate prices and the gentrification of cities globally? (Was this new global interest in urban living driven by the Internet in some way?)
Was it the fetishizing of Internet business? (Why do pop stars have Internet startups now, anyhow?)
...but yes, it is super interesting. American cities these days seem to be full steam ahead away from the weird and into the terrifyingly boring, and they have long been fertile grounds for the germination and growth of subcultures.
Which is why the (really) underground post-rock “scene” in Brisbane is still going; no one knows it exists except the bands and about 100 people who go to the gigs! There’s even a distinctive sound to it.
When you have that spirit, you enjoy connecting with other punks. I was a guitar player in a punk band in my twenties and we self-published our music. When I had the idea to create a company at the end of the nineties, I had that punk attitude to move forward and create a company even if the business around it was new and full of question marks. All my friends recommended not to create that startup, and in a true punk spirit I didn't care and moved forward, I can now say 25 years later that it was a great decision. Even today I keep that punk spirit when I make my decisions, if you feel you're doing something right you should just trust yourself even if you are alone on the market, avoid beeing a follower.
Pink/hardcore has an appeal to a certain type of person. I went to my first hardcore show when I was 15. I still go to shows once in a while (I’m 47 now). Kinda funny, when I was in a band, we played shows in Boyle heights, at a House called the dust bowl, where dust got kicked up when people were slam dancing.
Cool story and interesting read, makes me want to go fucking rock out instead of being a code bro shelled up inside all day. been about 3 months since last big rock show, much too long.
Reading this with no clue what punk is. The article doesn't do a good job of explaining it or answering the question the title poses to someone not already part of it.
First kid asks, "What's punk?"
Second kid kicks over a trash can, points at it, and says, "That's punk." First kid kicks over another trash can and asks, "Is that punk?" Second kid says, "No, that's trendy."
Back when I first got into the punk scene I ended up asking this semi-infamous old-timer at my local punk dive "Just what the hell is punk, anyway?"
"Something you don't want to be in prison."
Really, it's whatever the fuck you want it to be and fuck anyone who tells you otherwise because they're definitely wrong, and that includes me right now telling you this.
Well, it has a lot of definitions. I still think of it as a reaction to overproduced rock and disco from the 70s, but it has evolved a lot since then.
Surely someone has put together an introductory listening list that is searchable. No idea if there's a scene anywhere these days. I rather doubt it, but you never know.
I’ve been listening a lot to Tim Armstrong’s solo work over the last few years. It’s great! A lot of it is acoustic guitar and many folk/country covers. They way he plays them though is still punk to me. I’m impressed.
For those that don’t know, Tim was part of Operation Ivy and later Rancid.
Vans warped tour hasn't had much to do with punk culture for like 15 years, unless you consider using it as a marketing tool as what punk really is. I saw anti-flag and face to face at a free show in Montreal this summer and punk rock certainly felt alive. The US has punk in drublic fest going on which is probably quite authentic considering it's thrown by fat wreck chords.
Punk connecting people across space and time is pretty much the theme of the movie "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" (adapted from a novel by Neil Gaiman, I would recommend it).
To an outsider like me Punk's attractiveness is that it can be serious, but also not. Beyond that it is kinda anything you want it to be and that's ok.
[+] [-] darkandbrooding|7 years ago|reply
The other guy nodded in agreement and replied, "that's the point."
[+] [-] tnecniv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metakermit|7 years ago|reply
https://punkrockdev.com/
[+] [-] realandreskytt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sverige|7 years ago|reply
I think the point is that punk is accessible and relateable for a lot of people. The punk people I've known were the most open-minded of any crowd, whether that was built around music or something else. I think it's true that it still unites people who otherwise would probably not mix. They are also the most open to different styles of music.
And as for connecting people across space and time, I can't help but think of The Fall's "Telephone Thing" every time I remember the douchebags at Google have all my data as I type HN comments. How dare you assume I want to parlez-vous with you.
[+] [-] singingfish|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rusk|7 years ago|reply
Grunge?
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|7 years ago|reply
I think it's not a coincidence that many people who get involved in underground music movements later start successful careers in creative endeavors - fashion, cuisine, publishing, design, programming, etc. There was a documentary a few years ago tracing the lives of people who had been active in the 1980s music scenes and so many of them ended up in these professions.
And you don't have to look far to find more famous examples - Kira Roessler (Black Flag bassist) won an Oscar for sound editing for Mad Max: Fury Road, Damond John's fashion label coming out of the late 80s/early 90s NYC hip hop scene, and Anthony Bourdain's coming of age as a young chef and NYC punk fan in the late 70s.
[+] [-] neilharbinger|7 years ago|reply
McKenna summed up the evolution from passive, introspective subcultures when he observed that "we're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over".
[+] [-] pjmorris|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pssflops|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soundwave106|7 years ago|reply
I also don't know mmuch about the 1960s hippie culture firsthand, of course.
But my "impression" of the 1990s rave scene was that indeed it was in between the punk ethos (DIY, warehouse takeovers, some aggressive music styles like gabber/hardcore) and the hippie ethos (bohemian, some psychedelic influence, etc.) At any rate you did get that sense of "for the scene" with the rave community, something that is indeed special when you can find it.
For all I know there are some scenes similar to that still, but it's hard to keep up with this sort of thing -- it's hard to reconcile a late-hours youth culture with responsible 9-5 job culture. :( It would be interesting to know for sure what has taken its place.
[+] [-] dpc59|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRoEdcBgH2Q
[+] [-] neurobashing|7 years ago|reply
about the widely disparate groups of people who sport "The Bars" of Black Flag. (I've got mine next to The Zen Of Python on my arm)
[+] [-] chiph|7 years ago|reply
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2386404/?ref_=nv_sr_1
[+] [-] mieseratte|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minikomi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khazhou|7 years ago|reply
Dead Kennedys was on constant repeat on my walkman or home stereo as a 14-year-old in the late 80's. Every Friday was spent at the tiny all-ages punk club in our east-coast college town. Government Issue, Fugazi, Das Damen, Black Flag, Jello Biafra, even They Might Be Giants came through.
Even now, 30 years later, I load up Frankenchrist or any other DK album on YouTube at work and that's my intense-focus music. The music is still strong as hell, Jello's words and delivery are ruthless and scathing and hilarious, and the whole thing just works.
I wish there was a DK today. Rage had it. Some Run The Jewels tracks have it, but not quite.
[+] [-] skyyler|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterburkimsher|7 years ago|reply
Taiwanese: 滅火器 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOgNLY8nDxQ
http://www.chthonic.tw
Mongolian: 九大圣器 Nine Treasures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa7PfYfmoEo
杭盖乐队 Hanggai https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nf1HKQNuQQ
Norwegian: http://www.folk-metal.nl
Celtic: https://celticfolkpunk.blogspot.tw
[+] [-] convivialdingo|7 years ago|reply
https://archive.org/details/Les_Asynchrones_Archives
[+] [-] dovik|7 years ago|reply
Spanish : Soziedad Alkoholika http://www.soziedadalkoholika.com
French : La Dent Noire https://ladentnoire.org/ (<- my band !)
[+] [-] v-erne|7 years ago|reply
Bosnian: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NZOf47Iv2Zo (Its actually more ska/rap but still three is some punk in it if you listen carefully :))
[+] [-] singingfish|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt_the_bass|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonkester|7 years ago|reply
I'm in England at the moment, and for the last several years all the band listings I see at bars are for one of the ten thousand "Tribute to the Mildly Popular Band from the 70s/80s". So if I want the Thin Lizzy experience or the Foreigner/Journey experience or the genuine-in-case-you-missed-it-the-first-time Ratt experience, you can get it six nights out of the week because that's all that's playing at every bar in town.
But there are no bands with stupid names playing their own crappy stuff. Even on a Tuesday night. And that's what I miss.
[+] [-] jdietrich|7 years ago|reply
If you were born in 2000, starting a rock band seems a bit retro - you might do it if you're into that sort of thing, but you might prefer to play solo gigs with a looper or do weird ambient stuff with modular synths on YouTube. There's no shortage of talented young musicians, they're just doing things differently.
[+] [-] olivermarks|7 years ago|reply
Great book from 99 somewhat in the style of this punk article https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18756.Last_Night_a_DJ_Sa...
[+] [-] andyidsinga|7 years ago|reply
excerpt:
Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?
One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death.
[+] [-] a-dub|7 years ago|reply
I often wrack my brain trying to think, what changed...
Was it the Internet sucking a lot of the money out of the music industry?
Was it the aging out of GenX?
Was it the long term structural effects of the GFC, with the shrinking of the middle class and the subsequent capital booms that QE created?
Was it a change in perspective in a generation coming up with a lot of economic and global turmoil happening? (no time for culture, time to get to work, economic security is fragile)
Was it the growth of online dating platforms and social media? (Was all of this just an incredibly complex system of mating calls?)
Was it the death of place? Did these cultures lose their luster when anyone could just read all about them online, consume them, and move on? Or perhaps a sort of centralization and homogenization of culture as a result of trends happening in the digital world (where everybody is reading the same things, thinking the same things, doing the same things, in any city)?
Was it the growth of burning man? A sort of Wal-Mart of subculture.
Was it rising real estate prices and the gentrification of cities globally? (Was this new global interest in urban living driven by the Internet in some way?)
Was it the fetishizing of Internet business? (Why do pop stars have Internet startups now, anyhow?)
...but yes, it is super interesting. American cities these days seem to be full steam ahead away from the weird and into the terrifyingly boring, and they have long been fertile grounds for the germination and growth of subcultures.
Does it really just all come down to $?
[+] [-] girvo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaycebasques|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] FraKtus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vondur|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathankoren|7 years ago|reply
(Honestly, you don't even need the guitars.)
[+] [-] brootstrap|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ikeboy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcgraham|7 years ago|reply
First kid asks, "What's punk?" Second kid kicks over a trash can, points at it, and says, "That's punk." First kid kicks over another trash can and asks, "Is that punk?" Second kid says, "No, that's trendy."
[+] [-] mieseratte|7 years ago|reply
"Something you don't want to be in prison."
Really, it's whatever the fuck you want it to be and fuck anyone who tells you otherwise because they're definitely wrong, and that includes me right now telling you this.
What is punk? Punk isn't.
[+] [-] sverige|7 years ago|reply
Surely someone has put together an introductory listening list that is searchable. No idea if there's a scene anywhere these days. I rather doubt it, but you never know.
[+] [-] 627467|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt_the_bass|7 years ago|reply
For those that don’t know, Tim was part of Operation Ivy and later Rancid.
[+] [-] rb808|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpc59|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nestorD|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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