The Shape of Punk to Come

“I wanna be stereotyped. I wanna be classified.” These are the words Milo Aukerman sings at the beginning of The Descendents’ song “Suburban Home”. Little did he know that less than thirty years later his wish would be granted; the genre his band helped to create had become classified and punks had become stereotyped.

When most people hear the word “punk”, they instantly think of mohawks, riots and anarchy. Now, while those things have came to be considered “punk”, they do not fit in its definition. While there are countless definitions of punk (and most of them are correct in one way or another), the best definition comes from Greg Graffin’s A Punk Manifesto. In it, he writes: “Punk is a belief that this world is what we make of it, truth comes from our understanding of the way things are, not from the blind adherence to prescriptions about the way things should be.”

Against Me! is the band that most punk fans believe lives up to this definition of punk the most. “They don’t do anything that goes against what they stand for, even if they know it will cause them to lose some of their fans”, says Carah Hall, a big fan of punk music. “And that is what punk is all about.”

While there are plenty of bands out there doing their best to keep the punk scene alive, there are other forces that threaten its existence. The biggest of which is the decline in record sales which, believe it or not, does hurt bands. According to David McWane, frontman of ska/punk band Big D and the Kids Table, records are what bands are “trying to sell” and they put the money that they make off of them “in the band account to make T-shirts, videos and other things of the sort.”

With experts predicting that CD sales will make up less than half of the music market overall by 2013, it’s going to be getting harder and harder for bands to stay successful in the music business, especially in such an underground genre as punk.

Despite these bleak statistics, not everyone believes that the future of punk is bleak. In fact, most people are optimistic about its future and believes, that with a little hard work and fine tuning, that punk will come out stronger than ever.

“A lot of companies and people who didn’t belong in the music industry are finding it hard to survive and (are) switching out right now,” says Eyeball Records manager Mark Debiak. “It’s good to see them go. Within the next few years, only the strongest will be left and the industry can truly rebuild with competent leadership.”

From the looks of things, the shape of punk to come is looking better than ever