All the Young Punks

Josh Parsons

Music Editor

This past week, amid the end-of-term scramble, I found myself distracted from school work, choosing instead to dwell upon the details of an age-old philosophical problem: what is ‘punk’?

Punk infatuated me as a kid. In elementary school, I realized I could terrify my teacher by threading safety pins through my t-shirt and swearing. The idea was simple and complete, and I connected with it immediately. I was angry about something and I wanted people to know it.

Today, I now realize the term is so much more complex, elusive and powerful than my pre-teen self could have fathomed. For me, punk is no longer a means of expressing my anger but an entire perspective through which anger can be channeled and dealt with creatively.

It is important to make a distinction between punk rock, a form or music, and punk, an attitude. The ‘ground zero’ of punk rock is often agreed to be north-eastern American in the mid-’70s. But punk, as an attitude, has existed since the first caveman contested an arrogant chieftain.

Punk rock first populated headlines in 1976, after the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten famously said “shit” on live television. Rampantly attempting to snuff punk at its source, media outlets sought to expose the emerging punk scene in Britain, forever tying the attitude to the spiky-haired, safety pin fashion.

But punk attitude is older that Johnny Rotten or Iggy Pop, and has maneuvered under the guise of many other terms throughout history, including rebel, degenerate, outsider or freak. The fundamental cornerstone of punk is a discontent with authority, accentuated by a desire to change things yourself.

Punk found its most forceful manifestation in 20th-century rock music, but there were countless historical predecessors who laid the foundation. Sun Ra, legendary leader of the mystical-Zionist-jazz Arkestra, was a total punk. As was Nietzsche, and the artists who popularized the Dada movement.

But it’s necessary not to confuse punk attitude with revolutionary or counter-cultural desires. At the heart of punk is a feverish dedication to a do-it-yourself ethic and the idea of precipitating seperate subculture within the larger sphere of culture.