Found Writings, Part 1

What follows is the introduction that I wrote for what I thought would become a blog focused on punk music.  I wrote a handful of posts, some of which may show up here at some point.  That blog idea grew into this blog and so, here are my initial thoughts on punk rock's appeal for me.

Post 1

I began listening to punk rock at a fairly young age.  When my brother introduced me to the music I didn't even know what it was called but it was fast, it was aggressive, and it engaged in a world that I knew.  I was a privileged kid growing up in the suburb of a major American city, so I was just like a lot of the people who performed this music.  We were angry about a well-being that bred complacency and had an inkling of our own entitlement, including the underlying unfairness.  We never worried about shelter or where our next meal would come from, but we did worry about maintaining a sense of integrity, being true to ourselves, and not losing sight of what we wanted to become.  Punk rock carried a negative connotation in the broader culture for a long time and it has been only relatively recently that it has started to become mainstreamed in a way that rehabilitates that image.  The rest of the world has begun to see that the nihilistic trappings of certain punk icons contained a critical depth that was easy to miss.

In a sense, I missed out on punk rock because the first wave happened before I was even born.  But in a broader sense, this music changed the shape of the culture, influencing multiple generations of young people to investigate the true nature of their surroundings and to investigate themselves.  In this sense, I experienced punk rock in its true essence.  I, and my friends, discovered community and  empathy.  We learned to care about other people's troubles and we learned what it meant to build a family of affiliation.  We learned how to think about the world in a different way.  

What appealed to me as a teenager still resonates for me.  Punk rock still excites me: both the punk that I listened to in my youth and the waves of punk that followed.  While my attraction to punk rock as a teen was more raw, I have come to a different understanding as I have grown older.  Punk is political.  Punk is rhetorical.  Punk is aesthetic.  And punk is visceral.  But most of all, punk is powerful.  Punk is powerful because it helped a multitude of angry young folks to recognize that we were not alone and that we could direct our energy in a positive way.  Punk is powerful because it redirected the lives of many of us and showed us that we could influence the world.  Punk was powerful for me because it showed me that I could embrace this critical, sarcastic attitude and bend it to shape the world around me.  It convinced me that I could be an intellectual and it helped inspire me to become a teacher.

I initially envisioned this blog to be exclusively about punk music, but as I developed the idea I recognized that this might not be sustainable just because my interests are more diverse.  I envision writing about movies, books, philosophy, food, teaching, and whatever else interests me.  I have also thought about engaging some of the ideas that punk rock has introduced me to and writing about the ways that this music has changed my life.  At base, I want to do what punk rock has taught me to do: engage.