Punk Thing Analyze

Zhuoxian(Parry) Yu

September 19 2016

Professor Diana Cage

Fall 2016

Punk Thing Analyze

Punk Thing is an article published on September 10th, 2015 written by Brandon Brown. Through the title, one can easily guess that the article is about punk music and its culture. Growing up as a punk fan, the author tried to use this article as an opportunity to clarify some of the misunderstanding people have towards punk music. In the article, the author first talked about his relationship with punk music as a child and how punk music positively affected him on many levels. Then the author talked about punk’s vitality and endurance, which he use to transit into the main point, punk anger. Some people may be misled by the author and mistreat the article as an informative punk music introduction, however, it is also about punk attitude and it’s emotion and how punk music can be a way for people to express anger in music.

 At the beginning of the article, he introduced to the reader Poly Styrene, an iconic punk singer. And then he goes into detail to talk about one of his favorite song called Oh Bondage Up Yours, and how it uses a rhetorical device called Primal which was used in Sappho poem. And then the writer begin to tell his own experience related to punk and how he became a punk and starts to listen to punk music.  The author tries to convey the idea that Punk not only changed his fashion idea at the time but also help him shaped his political position by introducing his terms like communism that he never heard of before.  “The punk scene taught me the key terms and discourses that shaped my first sense of politics outside of and beneath the spectacular nonsense of America’s electoral conflicts.”(Brown 1) After that, the author talks about a trip he and his wife had and how punk music is not easily forgotten by people- even though those Iconic punk star would die. Then the author goes on to talk about the difference between punk and other types of rock and pop music, in his eyes, punk is not as extreme as many people thought, on the other hand, it is rather ”conservative” and that a lot of similar music had derived from the origin so it should not count as punk music. The next thing the author talks about is how punk music is notoriously noticed for it permissiveness, however, it did not do a good job on being creative and innovative so that eventually caused punk to become something as ”heat of the moment”. Still, the author believed that there is something special about punk that “While many eventually hang up their spikes, the sounds and sights of punk from this era are remarkably hardy: every day, some young person becomes a punk. There is some alchemical quality that punk nourishes, keeps alive, or at least not dead. This quality did not disappear after the first declarations of punk’s death; instead, it can be accessed and revived, over and over.”(Brown 3)  The last thing, which is also the author’s main point, is the relationship between punk music and anger. First, the author tried to defend anger by telling the reader that anger is not necessarily a bad thing. “Aristotle, for instance, considered anger at the right things and at the right people one of the noble emotional means between two extremes.”(Brown 3) By two extreme, he is talking about irascibility, which is the quality of getting angry easily, and the other extreme in the writer’s opinion is the quality of not getting angry at all. Then the author also tried to defend punk anger by saying that violence activity that happens in relation to punk music by not be actually caused by anger since:”Punk negativity sublimates injury, to be sure, but punk rage is vague.”(Brown 4) I believe the author is trying to convey the idea that anger is not as easily understood as we think and that there are different forms of anger, and the author tries to give the credit of punks vitality to punk anger. In the next paragraph, which is also one of the most important paragraphs, the author tried to explain punk anger in his own perception. He quoted: “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is changed.”(Lorde 4)  he emphasized grief of distortions, which in my own understanding, the author is trying to convey that punk anger is caused by all the people that do not share the same vision as those who listen to punk music. It’s kind of like struggling to break free. “That being said, it’s actually a (racist) mistake to consider punk a lily white enterprise, even as a critique, as such a critique simply ignores the fact that even in its highly racialized, apartheid capitals of London and New York, many artists and practitioners of color made punk scenes what they were.”(Brown 4)The author express the feeling that punk is not a racist music at all. People who think punk is racist misunderstood punk music due to its conservativeness. In the last few paragraph, the author concludes that punk music is a way for people to contain and express their anger: “Punk’s contribution to the history of anger has been to try and reimagine how we might express grief and hatred in new chords and threads.”(Brown 4)