What is Punk? Zine

"Be the Punk" WHAT IS PUNK? A Punk Podcast and Zine created by students at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and featuring local voices from the punk community.

1

Community

I would say that it is a community first and foremost of people who like the same silly music. I think that by forming that community and those connections with people, that we create something that is really powerful and life-changing for a lot of people. I think that it can have a really – obviously it has an important place in everybody’s heart and it can really change the trajectory of other people’s lives too just being involved with this silly little community. So I think that it is something that will change your life and also has the power to make a really big impact through music and through action, like collective action. Because, again, we claim to be alternative and against the grain of mainstream.

It’s our responsibility to have those conversations and make collective change and that’s where I think those ideas can grow.

-Rosie Richeson [PUNK 031]

What got me into punk was kind of being outcasted from the mainstream culture of, “I am trans, I am Jewish, I’m also a child of immigrant parents,” so I got ostracized a lot. One of the things about punk that I really liked was, yeah, it is for the people that have been outcasted that are different, so that’s kind of one of the things that really connected me to wanting to listen to punk. All different types of punk, I don’t just like love punk rock. I don’t know, that’s one of the things that really attracted to me was being able to connect to the music that I was listening to.

- Joaquín Cordero [PUNK 033]

2

I grew up in a small, rural town called Atmore, Alabama and went through high school in the early [19]90s and in high school, and in Atmore, Alabama, specifically, there were about four people who identified themselves as punks and I found myself gravitating towards them because I certainly didn’t feel comfortable or normal hanging out with anyone else. I wasn’t quite sure what punk stuff was all about. There was just a group of people who were kind of fun and out there and we were all poor.

It was very much like a social class experience for sure and we didn’t have a whole lot of supervision.

We didn’t have a whole lot of family structure and we had very little money and very little to do so we found ourselves sitting around record players and listening to music and sort of running around together and learning how to skate and learning how to play really crappy instruments that people would give us. We just started our lives as little, tiny baby punks -Valerie George [PUNK 025]

3

Individuality

I really liked the attitude [of punk]. I like all of the – I guess that it’s mostly the attitude and the values that come with that. The kind of not just doing whatever you’re told. Not just doing what’s expecting of you, kind of questioning authority, like “stick it to the man”...And I connected, I guess, with the attitudes behind the music, the attitudes that the people in the bands held.

-Eliza Goldstein [PUNK 023]

I think punk it just something that you act out and don’t expect people to call you a punk…

Punk to me has always been just a way to think, it’s a way you see the world and how you interact on it.

You try to really focus on thinking for yourself, you don’t let other people tell you what to think.

-Augustín Fernández [PUNK 041]

4

Punk, for me, is a rejection of the status quo and there’s nothing more normal than racism and sexism and classism.

So, what are we doing? We should absolutely be fighting against all of that normalized bullshit. I think that it’s totally on punk communities to be overtly anti-racist, antisexist, and you have to talk about it, if you’re going to do that. You have to make it clear to people that this venue where you’re booking the show is a safer space. Something I got from the activist community is you can’t just have an open sign, you need a welcome mat. That just means going the extra step to make sure people really do feel comfortable in your space. Maybe that means getting trained by someone in Hollaback to be a safer space. Maybe it means putting up a sign, “No racism, sexism, bullshit tolerated.” It can mean a lot of different things but you have to be just obvious and overt about it. Even when there aren’t any women or black people in the room.

-Shawna Potter [PUNK 004]

5

Politics To me, punk is collective angst towards a revolutionary goal Unpack that how you want to, but those are the two ingredients that you have to have to have punk is revolutionary goals and collective angst, that we all should have because we live in a brutal capitalist, malesupremacist, and racist society.

-Jeremiah Tattersall [PUNK 037]

I googled the Sex Pistols as a twelve-year old and I just saw—what I believe is “God Save the Queen”—and when I saw Johnny Rotten just shitting on the Queen and the monarchy I said “I get that.” Because that’s how I feel with my local government, I felt like that’s how I feel right now I feel like there’s no hope, everything’s going to shit, and I want to say something about it. But nobody takes you seriously until you throw it into their face I think.

-Augustín Fernández [PUNK 041]

6

I think what’s important is we tend to over-idealize minority communities as these perfect idyllic things and not being willing to call out the flaws. I definitely think that people who aren’t in the community shouldn’t be calling out these flaws, like if you’re not queer you shouldn’t be calling out the queer community, if you’re not Latinx you shouldn’t be calling out the Latinx community. But I think that punk, especially for—I can only speak from my experience, and my experience is that punk functioned as an avenue to rebel both at society at large and my cultural community.

In that, I still identified as Latinx and I still grew up in the culture but I was rebelling against things like machismo, I was rebelling against things like Scarface mentality, the whole wanting of nothing more than to just be another coke dealer who’s gonna go to jail before I was twenty-one. So it was both being fuck Bush, fuck white supremacy, fuck the power structures, but also in a weird way like fuck my own neighborhood for falling into these traps that are so historically around us.

-Drake Gonzales [PUNK 059]