Recently, I saw a Facebook friend post that they were disheartened by millennials’ lack of appreciation for or interest in looking back on bands that influenced what they love now – such as possessing an undying love for Fireworks and The Wonder Years while completely discounting classic hallmarks of the pop punk genre like The Queers and Buzzcocks (or even Lifetime, the most direct inspiration for the current wave of pop punk). I do think there is some truth to that, which seems counterintuitive since streaming services allow a free-to-almost-free smorgasbord of music past and present, without that Sam Goody $17-an-album barrier that kept people of my era from easily turning our Rancid admiration into The Clash love (it took days of lawn mowing and car washing to accomplish that). But even with all that access, there’s a reason less and less kids are looking back into music history or getting into punk rock. For a scene that prides itself on being more accepting than most, many of the genre’s eldest statesmen try their hardest to be off putting to every interested young person. I meet way too many people my age (early 30s) or older who are stuck on the generalized idea that “good” or “true” punk stopped existing somewhere between 1986 and 1997. It is in no way coincidental that the era in which these people think all the good music came from is also the time in their lives before real world responsibilities crept in – high school.
It reminds me of a masterful takedown of nostalgic Fox News pundits that Jon Oliver did on the Daily Show back in 2010. After a montage of talking heads discussing how much better things were back in “their day,” Oliver pointed out that the world was a “happy, uncomplicated place” when you were a kid and blissfully unaware of the copious racism, sexism and homophobia that ran rampant back then, certainly more than today. What’s good and bad when it comes to music is small potatoes compared to those issues but Oliver’s segment on misplaced nostalgia always comes to mind when discussing newer bands on the internet, where being loud and obnoxious often trumps rational thought. When you’re a kid, you don’t necessarily care who “sold out” or who is “legit.” You liked the music because you liked it, for yourself, and weren’t afraid to express your love with unbridled enthusiasm. You don’t learn to be self-conscious about music until you get older and some jerk makes fun of you for not knowing who Bad Brains is – and ridicule isn’t exactly the greatest way to get you to check something out, is it?
The thing is, having come of age during punk rock’s big mainstream takeover in the mid-90s and later seeing the genre bastardized through manufactured acts appropriating an image of a lifestyle we hold dear for mall cred and big profits, I can understand why people have this flinching reflex, even though that era is more than a decade in the past at this point. A lot of people are drawn to various subcultures, punk included, because of a need to feel like a part of a tight-knit family – and outsiders make people wary. But not every new punk band, or even the majority of new punk bands, has that insincere mall rock sound that you’re afraid of. If you’re a first generation Fat Wreck Chords fan you have bands like Red City Radio and Nothington carrying the torch of fast and melodic punk rock. Lovers of Bad Religion have bands like The Flatliners and Heartsounds keeping those awesome riffs and killer harmonies alive in bars across the country. Descendents? Their pioneering sound lives on in the thousands of bands not afraid to infuse a healthy amount of pop in their punk like Direct Hit! and Iron Chic. Those of us that were sucked into the scene by early Green Day and the rest of the classic Lookout! roster have Mixtapes and Masked Intruder among the bands keeping pop punk simple, witty and fun. And The Clash are well represented in bands like Roll the Tanks and Dead to Me that obviously owe a lot to the band’s musical style while bands like RVIVR bring the antagonistic, political and social justice angle into the modern day. Whatever era is your era, the sound is still alive and trying to thrive.
I get it – as you get older, finding time to discover new bands is difficult, and work, family and other responsibilities take time away from attending shows and finding new bands that way. But let’s put it this way – if you want punk rock to survive, the best way to go about that is for the genre to continue to make new fans to pick up the slack as the older generation retires to their suburban homes. I was lucky when I was younger to have a couple of older classmates who were willing to copy classic bands onto cassette for me, creating mixtapes that opened up my eyes to what punk rock could be, with more of a “if you like this band, then you’ll love this one” edge than just telling me everything I liked sucked. When you see a kid with wide-eyed enthusiasm for punk rock music – pop punk or otherwise – I encourage you to meet that enthusiasm head on and learn from each other. If your knee jerk response is to call someone a poseur and ostracize them from the scene, it’s time to recognize that YOU’RE THE PROBLEM. Young people aren’t going to have the gumption to go backwards on the punk spectrum and pay respect to what came before (or even check out punk rock in the first place) if those era’s biggest voices are so jaded and dismissive. If you want to keep the punk scene alive you can start a band or start a blog, promote bands and shows you like – or just be willing to give new bands a chance – all of which is more productive than shitting on the youth.
-Emily Matview
In order to help bridge the generation gap, I put together two playlists – one with post-2000 songs for the older folks to try out and one with songs from the 1990s and before for young people to sample. The emphasis for both lists is on, but not limited to, pop punk, and even with that fairly targeted focus, it was incredibly hard to narrow it down to a reasonably concise sampling – but I think there should be something for everyone. Check it out:
Post-2000
Pre-2000
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