The project of resurrecting a living punk rock movement begins with a game of connect the dots. This is where we gather up all the disjointed pieces that have been left for us from before and start to put together the fucked up form of exactly what it is we are trying to shake to life.

We’re already abundantly versed in the stupidest conceptions of what punk rock is and what it represents. On one side, corporations have literally spent millions hacking images into our brains of moody, self-destructive consumer-kids clad in tight pants, tough-guy leather jackets, and porcupine haircuts. On the other side, we have all the nostalgic ramblings of washed-up scenesters that like to peg punk rock as a thing that happened when they were young that either no longer exists or just exists in some bubble around them and their friends like some mythical city in the mist. Clearly for our purposes, both of these stories are total horse shit, but at least they can give us some insight into how our understanding of punk rock must develop along a radically different line than this junk.

On a basic level, to say that a thing is alive is to say that it’s constantly changing and developing into something new. This is the essence of life: constant movement and redefinition. The opposite of life is something static and unchanging. Punk rock cannot be alive and at the same time look or sound like it did years ago. Living punk rock cannot be a product on a shelf, nor can it just be stuck as the social capital of those who’ve “lived it” or “been there.” Our understanding of punk rock must be an understanding of something that can’t be sold, and can’t be owned. It must be a methodology, a movement, or a rough system of ideas that can at any time be honestly taken up by those who need it and applied in ways that constantly reform it into something totally original. Rather than talk about fashion, snotty vocals, or ramble about “punk attitude,” our definition of what punk rock is should begin by mapping out the core concepts that developed within punk that have been and can be bigger than any particular scene or stylistic moment. Beyond simply looking to the past, we are consciously naming parts of punk rock that can be ultimately hijacked and retaken for the creation of punk rock’s future—a future which will respond to where we are standing right now and will be unlike anything any of us have seen before.

What is being put forth here is not a set of commandments about how to be a punk. This is just a description of ideas and methods that have been taken up in punk rock and can be taken up to push punk rock forward. The concepts that I am laying out as a basis for punk rock—nihilism, democracy, revolution, and healing—together frame a coherent punk rock methodology or movement in that each piece by itself is incomplete: a punk rock founded on only one of these concepts is doomed to failure, irrelevance, or co-optation. It will hit walls and not break through. However, while these concepts have been pulled out of real stories of punk rock praxis,(1) they have not and will not always be present in the practice of every moment of every punk, every band, every scene, or every part of a punk movement. These are not rules to be followed, they are instead necessary tools that can be picked up and put down depending on the circumstance: sometimes you need glue, sometimes you need a fucking hammer. Punk rock—if it is to live—must learn to evaluate the problems and situations that it faces, to understand the nature of the enemy it struggles against, to understand what it is struggling for, and consciously respond in the most original, and challenging terms possible. The best moments of punk rock have always done this and by developing these concepts and methods, we will get to move forward again. Realizing punk rock, making punk rock more punk, restoring punk rock as a creative oppositional force, this begins by taking all the brilliant shit that used to be done unconsciously or on the level of instinct, and looking at it, thinking about it, and figuring out what we need to do it better. This process is how we are going to survive. This is how punk rock is going to come to life. This is how we are going to win.(2)

Punk rock is negation. This is one of its purest, most visceral, and most commonly understood meanings. To be engaged in punk rock is to be engaged in something that tears other things apart, that tears itself apart, that rejoices in oblivion like an ejaculatory moment of release. Punk rock accepts no permanent doctrine. Punk rock accepts no higher truth. Punk rock accepts no fashion or established code of conduct. This is punk’s nihilistic moment that rejects, rejects, rejects and cannot be constrained.

The story of punk rock and nihilism begins with the deep experiences of social alienation that punk rock—consciously or unconsciously—struggles to overcome. Wealthy kids grow up isolated in sterile suburbs and hate the path of shallow prosperity laid out before them. Working class kids grow up isolated in working class neighborhoods and hate the path of dehumanizing labor laid out before them. Queer kids grow up isolated and hate being taught that that who they are is wrong. Racialized kids (Black kids, Latino/a kids, Asian kids, Jewish kids depending on the decade and the neighborhood, bi- or multi-racial kids, etc) grow up and hate the toll white supremacy takes on their lives, sanity, and communities. Boys grow up hating to be boys. Girls grow up hating to be girls. Kids from all over grow up hating that they can’t be who they want to be. While those who can pass for “normal” tend to play along to varying degrees, the kids who can’t spend their young lives staring smack into the face of isolation, alienation, and a world that refuses them.

All these kids come up into a society that tells them that their deepest desires are illegal, immoral, or irrelevant, that tells them they are crazy, that they’re ugly, they’re losers, or they’re invisible, and that they should just accept whatever life gives them or do what their families expect from them. They’re trapped alone in a world they can’t touch. They look at their lives and they feel sad, angry, or just totally numb. They look at their intended future and they want to vomit. So they either bury their feelings, they get fucked up, they go insane, or they somehow come to the realization that their needs and desires are not the problem… that somehow their experience can be real and valid. And if against everything they’ve been taught they can start to believe that their experience is real and valid, then as a means of survival they must come to see the rules as hostile bullshit, that the social reality they’ve been taught to respect is just a transparent lie.

Much of the urgency, the primal intensity of punk rock comes from this necessary moment of active refusal of all these layers of self-denial and social indoctrination. In order to live, we must murder everything that denies the painful honesty of our experience. We must destroy our perfect families, our jobs, our schools, our futures, even our bodies.(3) We must rip out every fucking stitch in the fabric of society. In punk rock, kids who have been ritually attacked for their entire life gain the capacity to recompose themselves collectively as a living, breathing, counter-attack… human atom bombs reaching for the deepest annihilation and poetry.

In oblivion, we claw our way towards the closest thing we can find to sanity… to a place where society cannot fuck with us because we recognize society as an arbitrary game other people are playing. In oblivion, we rip off the shiny veneer of “the good life,” and wrench out its deepest pathologies—glorifying all of its violence, cruelty, boredom, poverty, and suicidal impulses as its essential defining characteristics. We glorify this ugliness because it is in this ugliness that we find pieces of ourselves… it’s where we finally feel at home. We embrace the broad dysfunction of humanity because dysfunction is the only humanity we’ve ever been allowed to know. Through nihilism, through the destruction of all sanctified meaning, we find a measure of peace. Through nihilism, we clear a space for the possible realization of our needs and desires.

Where we once lived terrified by our inability to conceal our defects, through punk rock we develop a practice of seizing upon our defects as valuable ammunition against the social order. Through punk rock, we learn to exaggerate our defects, we flaunt them. We become purposefully unfashionable, purposefully apart from society within society. We rip our clothes. We dress like space aliens. We force our longstanding isolation outward from our hearts to the surface of our skin and we parade in it. We proudly wear our loneliness so that others can share the experience. We seek a kind of power in this way.

In practice, we produce art that negates art. Our music defies music. It is broken noise—celebrating confrontation, conflagration, and release. Not to be passively consumed, punk rock seeks to attack the listener and forces a response. Punk rock seeks to produce a situation where the distinct, socially-ordered relationships of performer and audience ignite into a disorderly, spontaneous moment of mutual expression and recognition. The traditional roles of cultural consumption evaporate. The comfortable spectacle of rock and roll is transformed into a shared experience of discomfort where the music is realized only when everyone gives something of themselves to it, when everyone is able to step outside of themselves to create meaning.

Through punk rock, we overthrow all law that governs who we are, how we should function, and how we should try to create. In doing so, we place ourselves and our desires at the center of the universe, reinventing everything so that finally we are recognized and not erased. We kill off our old selves and our terrified experience of society and the world, and are reborn as beings whose fearlessness and naked honesty ultimately becomes terrifying to society and the world. Through nihilism, we transform ourselves from invisible nothings into something greater and more powerful than the laws we grew up with… we become bigger than God.

The necessity of nihilism to punk rock is clear: for self-aware kids that have been choked by the rules of society, nihilistic rejection can be like a sudden gasp of air. It is desperately embraced and it makes living possible. This allure for destruction, negation, and a searing, visceral freedom from social constraints is what draws many to punk rock and for many this practiced negation can often be misunderstood as the be-all and end-all of punk rock. Negation is promoted as the only true moment of punk rock, an image backed up by parades of punk suicide heroes who supposedly “lived the life” and became immortal as the brand-names of our movement.

For our punk rock, however, we must recognize that living purely within negation is neither desirable nor possible. It is not desirable because self-destruction does nothing to challenge society. Kids that were forced to the outside never had a place in the world. In this way, society has always wanted you to kill yourself. You were the one that fought to live. Punk rock, if it is to mean anything, must be based on struggle, not surrender… on celebrating life, not corpses.(4)

It is not possible because personal refusal, or even the refusal of a handful of people, does not actually negate society at large. In fact, the social institutions that surround us today have become very adept at not only tolerating such personal refusals but also co-opting them in ways that obscure all of their original anti-social intent. Anti-fashion becomes a new, corporate-sanctioned brand of “alternative” fashion. Anti-music becomes a new, corporate-sanctioned brand of “alternative” music.(5) Negation is negated itself: the scene takes on the image of what it opposes like a photographic negative. It becomes just a fucked-up copy of the original.

And so kids desperately seeking freedom from the misery or boredom of their lives find themselves pointed towards a cage and are told that that’s where the freedom is… they just have to step inside. The honest truth is that there is no outside towards which to run, there is no total ground of freedom upon which to stand. All choices, all rejections are constrained. The only freedom, the only real negation exists in fleeting moments and situations that come, go, and give us the capacity to get just enough distance from the reality that envelopes us to spit on it. Nihilism has been and can continue to be a powerful concept within punk rock but it is also in many ways simply a mythology. It serves the purposes of a mythology in that it provides us with an ideological vantage point to understand and engage our situation, but like any mythology it has the danger of being confused with the actual state of things.

Real opposition, a real embodiment of living punk rock that actually challenges society must be founded on more than simple nihilism. Its practice and its praxis must be informed by other concepts, and other methods. Standing against everything is hollow without other moments of standing for something. The positive content of punk rock—as opposed to strictly a negative tearing down—is what creates the possible realization of a struggle that can advance past irrelevant or easily contained reactions and towards the collective construction of a life and an art that is better and more human than life and art as it presently exists.

[The next installment, Part II, section 2: "Democracy" aka "Punk rock is dumb fucking music" is available here]

(1) Praxis is a fancy word roughly meaning something like “the process of putting ideas into practice.”

(2) This last bit borrows heavily from US Third World Feminist Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed. This book is pretty hard to read but really valuable in terms of trying to understand what it means to form a oppositional movements in the era of post-modernism. Props to Layne Mullet for helping me understand the connection between what I was trying to say about how to frame an oppositional punk rock and some of the shit Sandoval was saying about differential consciousness and operating strategically through differing methods of resistance.

(3) When I say “our bodies,” I mean the way we’ve come to see them from our interactions with other people. Society makes up a lot of shit about our bodies from assigning gender or race, to deciding whether or not our bodies are attractive or beautiful. These assignments and valuations are often poisonous to our ability to feel alright about ourselves.

(4) This is not meant to condemn those folks who fought personal struggles and who ultimately couldn’t keep going forward. There is a difference, of course, in recognizing those situations as tragedies where something precious was lost, rather than celebrating those events as triumphs of individual or artistic freedom.

(5) The word “alternative” can be understood here in the way that Burger King is an “alternative” to McDonalds. It’s basically the same business with hardly any major difference in substance. Whether one prefers one or the other is mostly just a question of how one likes their meat.