Home » Music » Punk Rock » What is punk?

What is punk?

© Ryan August

In and of themselves, the words- punk rock, have completely lost their context. They're used to describe everything from a band that sells millions of records, playing to thousands of people to bands that slog out a month long tour playing in basements and coffee houses to fifteen people every night. The term is used to describe music, lifestyles, and even, political stances. The over-use and generalization has taken all the meaning and impact from those two, little words.

It's not anything new. Before the British and American tabloids turned the Sex Pistols and punk rock into household names, the word "punk" was used to describe the music of a wide range of artists from The Stooges to Bruce Springsteen to Patti Smith. Punk hadn't become another label to slap on to a band's music. It hadn't become the definition for a youth counter culture. It wasn't a clear cut term then, and it certainly isn't today.

Punk Rock is an ever evolving artistic notion. It flows over into the music that people make, the lifestyle they choose, the clothes they wear, and the attitudes they express to the world at large. It changes. It morphs itself into many different forms. But, there is one underlying notion that holds it all together. Individualism.

Punk Rock is individualism in spite of the society and cultural conditioning that attempts to categorize everything, to make everything safe, and make everything homogenized and easy to swallow. It's not clothes or music or a lifestyle. But, at the same time, it is all those things.

Punk Rock is the great contradiction. It's serious and comedic. It's stoic and irreverent. It's conscious and primeval. Punk Rock is the last great stand against the sameness that lurks through our society, infecting everyone and everything like a parasite of boredom.