Punk and I

Two things. First, I'm planning to write in this a whole lot more often (which means they're not appearing in Facebook anymore, as I don't feel like spamming your news feed with my notes and because it appears here so having it be there as well is just silly.) This is the newest one because for the other two I had trouble figuring out what I wanted to say, so they were sitting around as drafts for quite a while.

Secondly, my elucidating title says this post is about punk. Specifically about my personal connection to it. For starters, I'm not punk. I don't know all that much good punk, and I'm not part of the culture. I can respect punk culture and its principles, and like some punk music, but that doesn't make me punk. The reason for this post is that I've been listening to a fair bit of punk recently.

Oh, and before I get into this, the people who dress punk, listen to Yellowcard or Switchfoot, or shop at Hot Topic, are not punk. If you dress like you dress and listen to what you do because you want to be different or because it's cool, you're not punk. I believe that punks dress like punks because they don't want society to dictate to them what to wear. If you hate the government because they're corporate lackeys, hate the corporation because they don't care about the people, and hate the police because they do the government's dirty work, you're probably punk. You might just be anti-government. Because the most important part of punk music's not that it's angry, fast, and often offensive, it's that it's like that because it's political, and that's what you're supposed to take away. Which is pretty rare among music genres- emo, techno, rock, and indie don't usually have political messages.

Or so I think. Because I'm not punk, I'm not in the scene and I don't know a lot of music, so I might be misguided. I do listen to the music and can agree with its anticorporate message, for a reason that I should probably have made the focus of every post I've ever written, and that I'll probably write about tomorrow. I don't want to get a piercing, wear a denim jacket with patches from my favourite bands, and I don't hate the police. I'm also not very angry (and I think James is pretty rare as being mellow, from what I can remember of him.) So if it weren't for the fact that I could agree with a lot of what punk music says, and that I don't pretend to be the least bit punk, I'd feel like a huge poser for liking it.