Punk Views On Class

       Class discrimination and Punk music have always been joined at the hip. Punk was born from an extreme teen angst in New York and London in the late seventies. These teenagers were mostly children of working class men and women who struggled to put food on the table. These kids took to the streets and found a way to to express their frustration through clothes, hair and really angry music. This music has always had it's roots in politics. Particularly politics involving class. This is the very discrimination that was causing their angst.
       Bands like The Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat and Bad Religion changed punk from a fairly sloppy, drunken rage and turned it into what could only be called a political movement in the eighties. These bands gave a voice to the thousands of kids who felt voiceless. No one in America cared about poor white kids. They now had a voice and they wanted everyone to know who we were. If you turned away from a punk they would get in front of you to give you the middle finger. These kids who were ignored for so long were now going to force reality on your eyeballs and eardrums whether you liked it or not.
        What ends up happening is these kids get together and sweat and bleed together, then talk about politics and how fucked up shit was. This leads to reading about politics in books by Noam Chomsky and philosophy by Nietzsche. The political views of punks were turning from "drink more beer, anarchy!" into a clear direction of socialism, or social anarchy as some preferred to call it. The thought process of the average Punk was evolving. Changing in to a thoughtful , articulate, and well read monster. These kids were no longer just scary to look at, but were scary to debate as well.
        Drawing from the experiences of growing up poor and often neglected punk kids were developing radical ideologies. The idea of socialist government was enticing when you believe and witness that rich capitalists want to "kill the poor". As the kids grow up and realize they cannot change the world with just a middle finger; they turned to the voting booth. Well, some of them did. In the early to mid two-thousands these kids were now adults. A campaign was started called Punkvoter. The idea was to get punk rock icons like Al Jourgensen, Jello Biafra and Fat Mike to get more of the former anarchists in to the booths to effect change the old fashioned way.
       Convincing a group of people who have railed against the system their entire lives to now be a part of it was not a simple feat. One thing that helped was something all punks could agree on. George W. Bush sucked. Voters came out from under every little rock in this country. Change was in the air. Whether that change was positive is a little less clear. One thing that was clear was that the average punk kid from the poor neighborhoods all around the country had come around full circle. From the circle pit to the voting booth. Conformists? That debate is for another blog.

Works cited

Jones, Kristin V. "WHO LET THE PUNKS OUT? (Cover Story)." Nation 278.22 (2004): 11-16.                 Academic Search Complete. Web.2015.