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Every generation has its punk, they form as a reaction to different material conditions.
The labor movement were the anarcho punks
The flappers/suffragettes were the original riot grrrls
The beat movement
The original counter culture movement
77s punk
American Hardcore/Chicago house music
There’s a million examples but saying punk is dead is minimizing the importance of resistance to conditions, and confining it to just one example. I love crass, but they were referring to the death of punk as resistance, and it’s commercialization. Which is ironic because chumbawamba was originally on crass records.
Punk isn’t dead, it’s just different.
This actually proves the whole "punk is dead" point. The labor movement in much of the world has been deradicalized and brought to heel by multinational corporations. There are no flappers in 2021. The beat movement was a flash in the pan. The Chicago house scene is mostly felt in terms of its influence in other forms of music and its radical roots in queer culture are largely unknown to most people who appreciate the music it influenced. First-wave punk was subsumed and commodified by major labels as "new wave", leading to the post-punk and hardcore scenes, which were largely critical of first-wave punk from an ideological standpoint. Modern day "77 punk" pantomimes an era that had already passed before most of its participants were even born, which is the sort of cheap nostalgia punk rock rebelled against in the first place.
The so-called "punk ethos" was never specific to punk and in fact demonstrably predates punk, so defining all of those social phenomena in relation to punk reflects an aesthetic preference for punk rock more than it does the (illusory) reality of a living punk movement. Punk is dead, if it ever even lived in the first place.
I actually agree with this, but I still don't see how that makes punk "dead". "Punk" is so vague and, as we all seem to agree on, is a lot different than it used to be. If your point is that the ethics associated with punk aren't specific to the actual music, then sure, that's true. But that doesn't mean that's not happening. You can make similar points about hip hop: a once countercultural movement that has now largely been commodified by popular media. But that doesn't mean its DIY origins aren't still present, and it certainly doesn't mean it no longer carries relevant social topics. Will it be dead when it is no longer as popular? As long as there are still people pushing it even a micro level, hell no.
I'd answer this by saying that punk rock was not artistically successful in surviving the attempts to mainstream it, whereas hip-hop was very different in that some of the best hip-hop artists also wound up being quite successful, commercially. (Why is this? Perhaps punk being made by potential "insiders"--white, often middle-class bohemians--who were disposed to accept mainstream approval, as opposed to hip-hop, which was a product of the perpetually marginalized, who rightly mistrusted mainstream culture, has something to do with it.) There are extremely few artistic and commercial successes in punk, if any, to the point that commercial involvement in punk seems to have led to the original scene dying off and giving rise to more uncompromisingly aggressive or experimental music like hardcore and post-punk in an effort to preserve the ideals of free expression and independence that people read into early punk.
So the "spirit of punk" or whatever might have lived on through those scenes, but only in aesthetically and ideologically distinct forms. In that way, the comparison between post-punk and punk or hardcore and punk is probably closer to the comparison between punk and 60s counterculture, in that they might have certain affinities, but they're not exactly in continuity with each other. Nothing that came out of punk really even sounded like early punk for most of the 80s, until there was a sort of revival in the 90s and 00s which has continued and gotten richer to this day, which suggests that it wasn't particularly lively for most of that time.
I apologize, I don’t think I was concise on my post. For the sake of conversation I was correlating different radical movements/periods of time to show that it wasn’t a the only instance of rebellion that embraced relatively subversive (for the times) values. Regardless of my opinion on the life and death of punk, I appreciate your post. Would gnar if I could.
No apologies necessary, dude, and thanks for the kind word. I'm a huge music and politics dork, so this type of discussion is a lot of fun for me.