It feels silly talking about punk rock to people who aren’t familiar with punk rock. It feels silly to even use the term “punk rock” in earnest. Punk rock, as you descend into your thirties, is hard to take seriously. When you’re talking about punk rock to people who are unfamiliar with it, you often find yourself describing it in a way that, somehow, for some reason, echoes all of its most embarrassingly reductive and cringe attributes – the youthful ignorance & adorable passion, liberty spikes, privileged and performative nihilism, its whiteness, thoughtless us vs them fist pumps. You are forced to rely upon tropes to connect points of reference that have long been parodied, leading them along, careful not to delve off into the inroads that anchor it in your identity. The tropes are what open the door for transformation, but the inroads, the “weeds,” are what motivate and secure the transformation.
To talk about punk rock as a genre that helps you make sense of the world you feel alienated from and angry towards, a genre which produced bands like Bad Religion, before then having to mention The Offspring in order to bring their puzzled and drifting gaze back to a shared meeting point; indeed, to be trapped in a reference to Anti-Flag while trying to talk about Propagandhi, produces a feeling similar to unexpectedly walking into your reflection in a mirror. Extreme discomfort and rapid pulses of existential mockery. It feels silly to talk about Blink 182’s toilet humor and its proximity to punk rock; it’s not easy to talk about its cheap fetishization of youth and desperate arrested development. To be sure, these are all elements of the myth and practice that continues to feed us.
Punk rock’s foundational attachment to youth obscures the ways in which it grows with us. It obscures the way it guides us and protects our sanity. Those bands that have enjoyed and earned mainstream success form the tip of the iceberg that obscures the depths of salvation to which it descends.
I know we take it seriously, and I know why we take it seriously. I know why it’s a worthy object of research and a worthy idol – but trying to justify that interest and love while fielding condescending questions about the genre’s many deployments of “anarchy” and having to repeatedly reference Green Day threatens to kneecap you with a trolling hammer.
Various characteristics that form people’s idea of punk rock are easily dismissed. Disaffected suburban kids (a reductive ahistorical framing to be sure), for many people, don’t demand serious consideration. Hell, even punk rock’s own self-aware cynicism, its awareness of its own contradictions, and performative anger contribute to repeated threats of abandonment and elevated proclamations that relegate it to a fond and impotent nostalgia. We used to be into punk rock, but now we listen to Wire, Lucero, Uncle Tupelo, and Queens of the Stone Age. It saves our ego and nourishes our desired complexities. Good soundtracks for jogging.
Punk rock’s stubborn association with youth is an indication of its vitality – and to age out of that vitality creates a discomfort that we must disavow in order to save face. Adulthood is a constricting horizon shaped by a sediment of desperation and exclusion of spirit. Punk rock answers with an aggressive resistance fueled by an interest in provocation to expose our alienation. These provocations often come off as juvenile or futile, and these perceptions create an insecurity that is explicitly counter-revolutionary. Certainly, capitalism thrives on insecurity and the floodlight of “wisdom” that pushes anger into the darkness of sanguine detachment, a Chuck Klosterman commentary that simultaneously underscores and undermines.
Punk rock is a genre pregnant with an exhausting urgency that cannot be assimilated without a salve that legitimizes its legacy at the expense of its teeth. We’re all forced into a rationalization by the threat of poverty, the erred association of “wisdom” with age, alienation, and disillusion. But we’ve found a way to let punk rock ride along in a sidecar because, without it, that connection would finally be severed and sanded. Certainly, all these anxieties are connected with the fear of aging out. Punk rock’s vitality (often regrettable) is set against a conventional wisdom that coerces us to frame our flyers and make sure they are centered on our office wall.
fragile ambition 