Most people have heard of the word– or music genre “Punk” either from an old man declaring teens as “punks” in movies, or maybe you’ve heard music from the more mainstream punk bands like Green Day or Misfits, but the word punk can mean many things. Punk could be music, a way of life, a style, or in some cases– an insult. A well-known punk subculture is “punk-rock” which took all sorts of inspiration from other genres such as Hard rock, Glam rock, Pub rock, etc, and splashed it all together to make it their own unique branch on the tree of musical history.
The punk rock movement started in the early 1970s, sprouting up in the United Kingdom and spreading to Australia and the United States in the Mid-to-late 1970s with the popular bands The Clash, The Ramones, and Sex Pistols. Punk was tremendously popular in Britain, New York City, and Los Angeles.
A well-known punk hangout in Philadelphia was Southstreet. Southstreet was home to the store “Zipperhead”, which sold punk clothes, shoes, magazines, and music. Southstreet also had an abundance of punk bars and music venues. Another popular location was a joint bar and music venue in New York City called “CBGB OMFUG” which hosted different new-wave/punk bands and artists such as Blondie, Talking Heads, B-52s, Pattie Smith, Devo, Joan Jett, and The Ramones. A Popular punk spot that sold primarily punk records was Aron’s Records which was housed on Melrose Ave in West Hollywood- but sadly closed down in 2006 due to more media that wasn’t physical becoming available, causing people not to buy as many CDs and DVDs. Some popular punk bands that arose from Los Angeles are The Runaways, Germs, Red Cross, Suicidal Tendencies, and more.
As claimed earlier, punk isn’t just music, it’s a style. Some common defying features of this style with clothes were, truckloads of leather and flannel, crust pants which are sewn together scrap fabric to make pants they were not washed often for the sake of the stitching so they were a bit dirty and were therefore dubbed “Crusty”, and battle jackets which are Jackets (usually leather) with patches, pins, spikes and everything under the sun sewn/safety pinned on them. Some other defying features were body modifications, such as various piercings, Gages, and tattoos. Some Popular hairstyles to sport while repping this attire were hair dyed in unnatural colors and liberty spikes- which is a hairstyle where you make pointy spikes using product in your hair.
Punk as a lifestyle is best described as underconsumption and a sprinkle of Anti-establishmentism with a do-it-yourself motto and a pungent for non-conformity. Punks were against all things they found irrational or unjust, like sexism, racism, and war. They supported equal rights, feminism and were anti-animal cruelty.
Now- summing that all up, how is the punk-rock movement relevant to us today and is it still alive? The punk rock movement is relevant because it changed and inspired a lot of other things (like the grunge movement) and it paved the way for various alternative genres to flourish. The movement may not still be as thriving and popular as it was before– but it is still present in current media– like in the highly praised 2023 movie “Spider-man: Across the Spider-Verse” with their character “Spider-Punk” or Hobie Brown who played a decently important part in the movie. Punk has been going strong for almost 55 years now and it will definitely be interesting to see what will happen to it in the coming years.
