80's Punk-d: A Bad Hair Decade

When I was a teenager, my mother had some strange ideas about punk rock, namely that it was somehow "evil" or some shit, I don't know exactly WHAT she thought of it, but she was very much against it.

I didn't understand punk rock too well myself, what I did know at the time was that I generally liked punkers, but because my mother was so dead set against it, and because I was deathly afraid of my mother (she hit pretty fucking hard, after all), I didn't explore punk rock much beyond the prefunctory Suicidal Tendencies album, which, after hearing "I Saw Your Mommie (and Your Mommie's Dead) my mother smashed all to shit, along with Motley Crue's "Shout At the Devil."

Now, at the time, the Motley Crue album represented the greater loss to my somewhat limited LP library. Yes, I was a metalhead, no, CDs didn't exist yet, but unlike my metalhead/LP cohorts — many of whom still attempt to live "back in the day" — I grew out of that shit, and now I consider the era to have been one of the worst eras musically that has ever, or is likely to ever, exist. My apologies to Rush, the only exceedingly excellent rock band from "back in the day." Rush, along with AC/DC and the occasional Iron Maiden are the only long-ago favorite bands of mine that I can still listen to today without feeling vaugely stupid for having worshipped them. All of those other bands suck ass, which brings me to my mother's fallicious dislike of punk.

Of course, I can't go off on the subject of punk rock without mentioning politics. I, along with a vast number of my politically apathetic generational age mates, never really understood punk, at least not until after 9/11 and we all suddenly sought to gain deeper understandings of the political processes and dealings that has left the US such a disliked country worldwide.

What I didn't know was that punk rock is intelligent, political, relevant. My age-specific friends admit the same ignorance. I listen to old school punk now and I think, "Jesus, they were trying to tell us something." I listen to punk rock now and I wish I had been listening to it all along because I fucking LOVE it. I wish my mother hadn't been so close-minded regarding punk music and the punk subculture, or I might have gotten into punk a lot sooner, and probably would have been better off for it. I mean, come on, the music I was listening to, what most of us were listening to, was all about promoting a mysogynistic culture dedicated to pointless hedonism., to say nothing of those fucking cornball hair-dos 80's rockers had!

Big Bad Hair bands and shitty mainstream music aside, the 80's brought us punk, and thankfully, today punk is not only witnessing a resurgence among newly political Xers, but is gaining almost mainstream popularity among the younger set as well, and I hope their parents aren't as lame about it as our parents were. From the Dead Kennedys to NoFX, from Black Flag to Anti-Flag, this is one genre of music that most assuredly won't suck twenty-five years down the road.

My only regret now is that I'm too old for a blue mohawk.

Article Author: Melisande Luna

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