Punk Rock Gets Eaten Up by the Mainstream

Punk Rock Subculture Gets Eaten Up By the Mainstream

by Francesca Olsen

Imagine a counterculture revolution that has been strong enough to last for thirty years, span five generations of young people, and continue to disgust and attack mainstream values while acclimating itself at the same time. Imagine its chief output is music, second fashion, third the model of participation of active members. This counterculture upholds values that might also be seen at Harvard: lifestyles which include no drugs, alcohol or promiscuous sex and pride and value put upon independence and humble success in one’s field. Members are encouraged to start their own projects, even their own businesses, and they are fiercely competitive about it.

This counterculture also can embrace drugs, sex and violence, destruction of public and personal property, even acceptance into mainstream culture. It honors anarchistic ideas and peppers them with plenty of nihilism. Members of this subculture take pride in their disrespect for mainstream culture and its mainstream members.

Welcome to punk rock, the genre-expanding, almost all-encompassing underground journey from 1976 to here, and maybe even before and almost certainly after. Adolescents and young adults have seemed to pick up this subculture and drag it from year to year, passing it on to the younger, and then again. It’s lived in a million different forms, and has been ever-present in underground society — and has been primary in the social subcultural learning of teenagers for years, and years, and years. It’s even been made the occasional phenomena in mainstream society. Punk is the jewel of underground culture, and since it’s been around so long, bits of it come out everywhere if you look hard enough.

Punk is a relevant subculture to study because of two things: it was the first revolution in rock music that was actually against rock music, and because it has been the model for the underground music “scene” ever since; every small musical movement that followed punk was essentially made in its image. Punk was brought to global eye by small groups of passionate individuals in two cities with independent publications and venues that were previously not utilized, and by attracting a group of youth who were desperate to make something their own in a culture quickly being taken over by corporate mechanisms.

From the late 1970’s to today, television and advertising have practically become all the culture we have. The nature of youth is to make one’s own culture, which becomes harder and harder as our popular culture becomes all-encompassing. This can result in subcultures which go violently against norms but burn out quickly for the very same reason.