Punk Rock Gets Eaten Up by the Mainstream

Emo music also grew out of the 1980’s hardcore movement. Disenchanted members of that group saw an opportunity to change the culture and the music in a fundamental way and leave the politics the way they were. Emo in its first stages was a group of activist youth who were tired of appearing masculine and macho in hardcore culture — they switched paradigms by singing about their own feelings, their own relationships with intangible experiences. The musical stylings were more traditional to the rock genre but had a quick, simple punk feel to them; the earliest emo music sounds like hardcore punk with sensitive lyrics.

Emo kept the activism and the refusal to sign to major labels. But since youth culture is always growing and changing, the view of success whether or not it was mainstream grew more prevalent (Greenwald p.85) as did a demand for this type of music (p. 11). Emo eventually met popular punk halfway and a sort of smear between the two was created and adopted by major labels and thus mainstream music, and that smear has been adapted on by both the youth and then the music industry more quickly that ever before — scores of new bands now appear yearly touting new sounds and fade back into obscurity just as quickly, for the most part. This opens the door for a more scattered social hierarchy in youth culture; if you were around the year before, you have more relevance than someone who has only been around for six months. This is the concept of “scene points”, which are rhetorical markers that show other counterculture members where one’s countercultural ties and interests lie; sort of a costume that reads like a biography. Additionally, there is much more emphasis on commercial success in music, which gives the music industry more access to young people belonging to subcultures, the subcultures themselves, and the interpretation of values.

Young people need to perceive an in-group, to be with other young people, and to exercise their social needs by building community within the already established community. As a subculture is brought through the years, like punk has been, it is shaped and folded differently by each new sub genre that is made, which leads to its weaknesses becoming more pronounced and growing rapidly. It is harder to retain individualism in a media-obsessed culture and in a profit-obsessed culture, which makes subculture easier to adopt.

Punk has gone from a small movement nurtured by a few to a building block of youth culture and popular culture. Without punk, music would sound very different today, and more importantly, without punk, youth would know less about how to interact communally. The model punk provided, although it is flawed and susceptible, is a fine example of how to assemble a social movement and then inject it into the mainstream: make it mean, make it young, make it fast., and most importantly, make it so adaptable it’s always accessible.