An aesthetic that developed from rebellion against unjust hierarchies in society. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
No but like, using “-punk” as a suffix denotes an aesthetic that is based on imagining a society built around a core aspect, generally an energy source. Like, steampunk is all cooper and big buttons, dieselpunk is all dark steel and plastics, and solarpunk is contemporary utopian urban design with a lot of green space
The relationship to the anarchist punk movement is almost nonexistent remote
If I’m not mistaken btw
Edit : it comes from “cyberpunk” which definitely has punk vibes
dieselpunk is all dark steel and plastics,
I had never heard of this and now all I can think is who the hell conceived of a world even more dependent on petrol. Why bother, just go outside and take pictures.
Most of those are just derivatives of “cyberpunk”, which is very much connected to the anarchist association of punk because it’s about the cyber-lumpenproletariat and such
Yeah, it got its start that way, but at the end of the day, if you picked out 5 self-described punks, you’re liable to get a bunch of really disjointed political beliefs
The punk scene has been divorced from its origins and is mainly just set dressing for a kind of aimless, plaintive rebellion
Not to say that there aren’t any punks out there who aren’t cool, just that like a lot of other movements its been reduced to a commodity
The point I’m trying to make is that you can’t completely disassociate art from the material conditions that created it. I was having a conversation about this with someone else earlier today when we made the observation that He-Man is basically western Sailor Moon, complete with queer identities, similar criticisms of society and even does transformations similarly.
They more or less independently ended up at the same thing, in the same time period, because the conditions in which they were created produced very similar outcomes. Both of them became gay cult icons to their audiences.
You can’t divorce art from the conditions that creates it. We could take the entire aesthetic from either of these shows and port it, then try to remove as much ideology as possible from it to transform it into something else… But the key element grounding the art can’t be removed or you ultimately remove its identity, you turn it into an entirely different “aesthetic”. The gay elements and style are a core part of the dna for these shows, a rebellion component that criticises the conditions in society at the time of their creation. They physically can’t be removed from these shows without transforming the aesthetic feel of them too far for everyone to feel they’re comparable or correct evolutions of the original art.
The suffix -punk usage attempts to do this, but ultimately it continues to maintain a very small and un-removeable element of its core leftist DNA criticising society because it simply can’t be entirely removed without transforming it into something nobody would call -punk anymore. They’d call it SolarFascism or some shit I don’t know. Either way it would look transformatively different to Solar-punk in a way that people would no longer want to describe it as such.
An aesthetic under capitalism is like a culturally distributed type of brand. Punk used to have more common and distinct cultural signifiers, but capitalism forces us to abandon those in favor of aesthetic ones. Aesthetics are easy to recognize, to sell, and to consume. So that’s what survives. This doesn’t change anything about the history of punk and what it used to mean to be punk. It also has a queer history as well as a leftist one.
There is still plenty of DIY underground punk mostly done by leftists and there’s a worldwide network of bands, traveling kids, people operating venues or community centre’s etc. It’s just really underground and inaccessible. Pink belongs to the punks. It still exists, you just aren’t necessarily part of it.
Yeah, I had a folk punk musician crash on my couch after a show at one point but that’s about it.
