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Guest Editorial: What Do Modern Punks Stand For?

• 28th Jan 2015

Remember when we said we weren’t going to stop talking about our new favourite Australian punks Hellions? Well, true to our word we’ve got a fantastic guest editorial essay today from guitarist and vocalist Matt Gravolin on the subject of what the term punk has come to mean in the 21st century, what it’s exponents stand for (if anything) and whether the term is even still relevant. Super heavy…

Mr Jamie Otsa (the editor of this prestigious publication) recently regaled all of us over at Camp Hellions with a short anecdote about a very cross elderly rocker that he had encountered not too long ago. The incensed old-timer refused to accept that anyone born post-1970s could be a “punk”; Jamie countered the ardent opinion by saying that there is, in fact, still plenty of bite left in many of our young bands and that they still have much to rally against. This brief altercation inspired Jamie to ask us what we think the new generation of punks stand for, perhaps so he can track the elderly enigma down and wail our answers in his or her face, claiming them as his own. We hope so.

I think it’d be fair for one to think of the early punk demographic as a united counter-culture of sorts. It seems that back then there was very much an ‘if it’s aggressive, it’s good’ sort of mentality among punks, happily congregating in order to yield to the most primitive of their troglodyte instincts; flailing their limbs and collectively ‘fucking the man’. Today, punk is divided up into genre-dictated factions and for the most part, isn’t anywhere near as iconoclastic as it seems to have been back then (as contemporary punk takes many more obvious cues from pop culture.)

Comparatively, I can understand why Old Man (or Lady) River had maintained with such remarkable tenacity that punk no longer exists, what with the unification of all of those anarchists in the name of fucking the man?! Imagine living back then and being part of that! By those standards, today’s punk would be a difficult thing to get a grasp on, just as it’s difficult for me to get a true grasp on the fountainhead years of punk when I am so thoroughly accustomed to today’s standard. Punk by its very nature is tailored to the youth of its respective era. It’s generally a young person’s bag. Different eras 30-40 years apart can very seldom be viewed accurately through the same lens, and over the elapsed decades punk has taken on a very esoteric evolution, yielding a borderline ridiculous diversification. Nowadays, you could name any genre off the top of your head and there’s guaranteed to be a band or ten that have derived influence from your chosen genre and blended it with punk stylings.

As far as what we rally against – and our primary question here, what the new generation of punks stand for – there’s a panoply of answers to that, and they are as varied as the aforementioned clusterfuck of genre-mashes.

Admittedly, the vast majority of punk singers write visceral vignettes of lost love and myriad innermost tortures, but you’ve still got your classic anti-governmental, anti-authority and straightedge bands, you’ve got your ever-growing swarm of animal rights activists, environmentalists, conspiracy theorists, spiritualists and of course your religion-based fellas – Christians edifying it, satanists tearing it down, nihilists denying its existence, agnostics proclaiming their indifference and any other stance you can fathom in between.

These mdn and women may each be banging on about a very specific thing, but at the end of the day it’s all coming out of the same vast, musical conduit with a commonality that binds it all together. The underlying message that I believe each of the above share with equal alacrity is one of anti-assimilation, or individualism.

In this day and age, where Christianity is as ubiquitously rejected by the youth as green vegetables by an infant, there aren’t any taboo topics left in punk (with the exception of extreme hypotheticals, like if that piece of shit Ian Watkins were to address his lesser desires via his music, for example). It’s the freedom of speech and choice epitomised. So to wrap this thing up and put it into a sentence: it is my belief that the punks of today stand for individualism.

– Matt Gravolin