TUBSTACK 4: punks at the end of history
thoughts on punktok, the PMC, 'radlib' punk, neoreactionary punk and Big Hardcore
Punks at the End of History
“We’re punks. Not the punks that are up to no good. The punks that are against the establishment. We want to bring music to every person on the face of the planet.”
Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO
1.
Scrolling through PunkTok is one of my favourite anthropological exercises. In its own way, it reproduces the feeling of first-wave punk: contrarian, degrading, ugly, humiliating. Wandering around Camden Market was always my way of getting this fix. But PunkTok is the logical endpoint of punk commodification. Better still, the content often uses Camden Market as an authenticity signifier, creating a nostalgia loop in which the references are endlessly diluted and regurgitated. And wasn’t that the kind of thing those original Warholian art-school punks were into? Sacrilege, nihilism, nonsense, symbol degradation, meaninglessness etc etc.
Which isn’t to take the piss. There’s something wholesome about these kids lip-syncing to Minor Threat and Iggy Pop in front of the digital mirror. Maybe a pure aesthetic enjoyment is unlocked when something once meaningful reaches rock-bottom. I wouldn’t listen to the music they make. But I still think, in their unknowing way, they’re more subversive than any contemporary hardcore band. Like all TikTok content, their vitality is achieved through a hyperactive tastelessness. PunkTok is a funhouse mirror- all the more fun because of punk’s earnest sense of its own authenticity.
Punk has always been slippery. It can be genre, aesthetic or ‘feeling’. It’s vague, ubiquitous, meaningless, passion-igniting. Like violence and porn, it’s been radically blandified by social media yet is craved as a panacea for that same blandness. As an aesthetic, it’s been the victim of a gothic punishment: the body is revived over and over but looks less human each time. As a feeling, it’s evoked by everyone from Steve Bannon to Brewdog to Spotify’s Daniel Ek.
Any association should have been discredited by now. But as a straight genre, it’s more popular than ever. Traces of it are all over pop music. Hardcore is big business. Turnstile, Knocked Loose and Scowl are as popular as any other guitar bands. In 2025, Outbreak will stage the biggest ever ‘hardcore-led’ festival in Victoria Park. The fairly varied lineup highlights the fact these very popular hardcore bands are increasingly drawing on shoegaze, goth and indie rock both sonically and lyrically. The only thing which seems to distinguish Big Hardcore is the fact there’s still more of a cohesive community baked-in compared to other types of indie music. Maybe there’s still a lot of infighting and punk posturing. But from my vantage point, it seems the Maximum Rock n Roll type scolding has given way to an emphasis on community, riffs and shared aesthetics rather than transgression. As friend of the stack Emma Garland writes: “These are ultimately people who all share the same DNA of DIY ethics, social justice and musical physicality. That’s hardcore.”
‘DNA’ is doing some heavy lifting here. Most of these bands are DIY in spirit rather than practice, which isn’t a criticism really. (I actually realised I used the ‘DNA’ analogy about Ex-Void in an interview recently). Unless you’re rich, it’s difficult to be the latter these days without reducing your band to an after-work hobby. There are fewer punks out there who are going to scold you for securing the bag. In terms of social justice… yes, but that’s the case for a lot of guitar bands these days. Big Hardcore bands are just more likely to shout, rather than talk, about an issue between tunes. I can’t really see how they're, say, more anti-capitalist. They seem to love printing merch more than anyone else. What’s left then, is just musical physicality. So maybe Big Hardcore has boiled the genre down to its core appeal: a community of riff enthusiasts drawing on a rich subcultural history.
I guess the absence of ‘punk feeling’ is just more conspicuous when we’re talking about punk bands. There is still, I assume, a desire among some bands to transmit something of that elusive feeling. Up until recently, the solution for a lot of punks was to get into identity politics. More recently, most of that political energy was directed towards the more urgent, straightforward crisis of a genocide. But punks are hardly alone in that. So it’s worth casting our minds back to the 2010s and thinking about how ‘politics of purity’ briefly gave punk a recognisable shape.
2.
I went to school in a mostly white working class area of Cardiff during the 2000s. The few upwardly mobile kids, whose dads had started buying Land Rovers and drinking with rugby players, were alternately teased and admired. The fact I was the poshest kid there went largely unnoticed. My parents- broke artists who’d been to boarding school- were simply oddities. We’d moved from London to my dad’s homeland of Wales when I was six and I’d assimilated quickly. Despite my accent and house full of folk instruments, I got away with dressing in Mckenzie tracksuits like the rest of my chav mates. Then, at the age of 15, I transformed into the child of my parents. I bought one of those thin ragged scarfs Pete Doherty used to wear and never looked back. I remained friends with the chavs and they’d act as protection whenever someone tried to beat me up for looking like a gay chimney sweep.
I started reading the NME and learnt about politics. I began writing about the bigotry of my chav friends in my Livejournal. I complained about their casual racism, and the lives they were destined to spend ‘drinking wkd in Oceania’. One of these friends also turned mosher and got into bands like Fugazi. I stopped listening to The Kooks and, following his lead, began downloading zip files spanning the history of hardcore, 90s indie rock, post punk, riot grrrl etc. We formed a band in the style of Dinosaur Jr & Garden Variety, and played shows with Revolution Summer/hardcore bands made up of guys older than us.
We left for uni, and my new band Joanna Gruesome started receiving attention outside of the DIY scene. This was aided by the fact that, though the music wasn’t political in content, we had the trappings of riot grrrl and were being vocal about sexism in 2013, just as the new identity politics was rearing its head. The band fell apart pretty quickly and I ended up hanging around in places like Bristol and Brighton, trying to form a new iteration of Joanna Gruesome. My friend joined me and, being one of the upwardly mobile kids, he, like me, was able to borrow money from his parents whenever he had to quit a job to go on tour. We fell in with a group of mostly middle-class girls who played in feminist punk and DIY bands.
It was 2015 and I was good at navigating the new terminology. My friend was hopeless. I was a little androgynous and liked to imply a level of bisexuality or gender-fluidity which was sort of there but negligible. He was straightforwardly masculine. Sometimes his parents’ UKIP voting would come up in conversation with an air of disapproval. He started going out with one of the non-posh girls. She cheated on him, they broke up and he called her a ‘bitch’ in anger. This became the headline and the girl’s friends, most of whom were posh, decided to take revenge. Giggling, they searched through his bedroom drawers, found his university degree and ceremonially burned it. Even the least politically minded among us were a little shocked at how on-the-nose it was.
I can’t even remember who exactly was involved but I’m sure they’d find it regrettable now. Besides, we were all burning the degree to some extent. Looking back, I can think of many examples in which working class musicians were scrutinised along similar, though less outrightly symbolic, lines. Most of it was subconscious, and I probably contributed too. Mark Fisher in his then-infamous Exiting the Vampire’s Castle wrote that the political left of the early 10s, like the punk scene, took part in a “a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender.”
The precedent was Mackaye, or at least the idea of him: austere, Protestant, uncompromising, moralistic. But unlike DC hardcore, our scene was replicating the shifts taking place in mainstream cultural organisations. Mackayes were cropping up in the HR departments of universities, NGOs, blue-chip art galleries and corporations. It’s no coincidence that many of us were also part of these organisations during our day jobs, of what gets termed the Professional Managerial Class (PMC). The PMC refers to educated professionals who work in management and administrative roles in these types of organisations. They don’t own the means of production, but rely on special knowledge, credentials and elite terminology to maintain status. In Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu argues that the PMC uses diversity initiatives and elite terminology as a way of wrong-footing unions and diverting conversation away from genuine wealth distribution. Which isn’t to say that working class people weren’t becoming fluent in the terminology, I’d just venture that growing up with the kind of parents I did was something of a head start.
For many in our scene, there was a sense that their salary jobs were unrelated to their ‘punk lives’. If a punk worked at an NGO, for instance, there might be a sense of continuity but they likely thought of their role as a watered-down liberal expression of their punk ethics. And yet, these same language systems were being applied more stringently in the punk scene. Greater fluency was equated with greater commitment to radical ethics. I would have agreed, and I’m still not fundamentally against sensitivity around language, or the (not very Punk) importance of manners. But Liu and Fisher argue this is ultimately a neoliberal trap for punks and leftists, and a convenient radical fig-leaf for institutions. Convenient, too, for some punks who want to participate in mainstream culture without sacrificing their ethical image. Like I say, these days, selling out is less of an issue. But back then, there was a sense that the classic stigma associated with doing so could be mitigated by ‘using your band as a platform’ i.e taking more extreme or niche identity politics positions.
Most of us have since course-corrected and would probably now agree with the Novara leftist types, about the pitfalls of what is sometimes called ‘radliberalism’. Ash Sarkar’s forthcoming book apparently makes a similar argument on a broader scale. As she said recently: “If you’re coming from a minority position, whether that’s because of an identity characteristic or a minority opinion, you’re better off emphasising the ways you are like somebody else rather than the ways you aren’t…”
I’m sure that seems like common sense for most punks, however politically motivated they are. But being nuanced and reaching across the aisle isn’t exactly ‘punk’ behaviour. However much identity politics was a political blind alley for punks, the tone of it still chimed with some of the traditional punk aesthetics: dogma, intransigence, tribalism. And so, for a while, this distracted from the existential crisis of ‘punk as feeling’.
3.
Today, a small but growing cohort of punks have arrived at the opposite solution: become rightwing. Figures like Adam Lehrer, frontman of ‘Botched Chadification’ and host of System of Systems, are part of that NY Dimes Square ‘chic reactionary’ type movement self-consciously reclaiming transgression, subversion, vulgarity, irony etc. It will probably remain a sort of niche rightwing hipster thing like neofolk. But the New Right is certainly interested in the aesthetics of subversion, and there seems to be a concerted effort by billionaires like Peter Thiel to associate rightwing politics with counterculture. It basically strikes me as a hollow aesthetic attempt to cling onto a transgressive position- being an ‘anti woke leftist’ is no longer suitably dissident. When another alignment inevitably happens, the New Right’s ‘punk’ identity politics will become gauche. As Ashley Frawley writes,
“The contemporary right’s performance of subversion—which gains its momentum from questioning the “progressive moral majority”—rings hollow because it is backward-looking. Unable to create anything new, today’s avant-garde conservatives are nostalgic for a time when things seemed to make sense.”
One thing about punk is it can act as a platform for non-musically talented people like Lehrer to broadcast their annoying opinions. But culture moves and shifts very quickly now, and any frisson of ‘punk feeling’ will be short-lived. Trendy new opinions don’t produce anything, whether they’re right or wrong. The issue is that any abstract notion of ‘punk as philosophy’ is too vague for our atomised, politicised culture.
Throughout its experiments with aesthetics and politics, punk’s real benefit has been what Mackaye calls ‘the free space’ : DIY communities who maintain their own ecosystems outside the influences of capital. In 1989, Ray Oldenberg described ‘third places’ - communal meeting places outside of work and the home- as essential for the spirit: “nothing contributes as much to one's sense of belonging as much as 'membership' in a third place. Without such experience, the individual is reduced to a lesser sense of self.” Free spaces were intended to be even thirder- a remove further from the commercialism of bars and standard venues. Even normie third places are under threat now, and free spaces are mostly impossible to establish. Migrating everything online isn’t a substitute.
Without any of this, punk is something of an empty vessel. It ends up existing solely in the way Big Hardcore does- political like everyone else, community-orientated, a place for genre enthusiasts. A ‘positive outlet for rage’ as drum teachers say to teenagers. Yet the unsettling ghostly presence of punk aesthetics will continue to float about in the digital ether. And there will still be the temptation to use punk as a means of political dogma or subversion-for-subversion’s-sake. All future attempts will probably result in something dumb and flawed. But maybe that was always part of the charm. Punk can take our half-formed beliefs, our contrarianism, our misplaced hopes and elevate them into something briefly meaningful.