What you missed from 80s punk, hardcore, and related inspired disruptions

Punk and hardcore incubated into a powerful hybrid strain that flourished in several major cities, but grew best in California where hope, pretense, beauty, dystopia, potential, and disillusionment fused into an explosive genre of alienation, unrestrained critique, and open dissent that diverged from the happy pacifist movements that preceded it.

These genres became known for a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach that arose from the complete disbelief in existing structures and a broad skepticism of humanity. Instead, self-reliance and hyper-activism were seen as the way forward. When everything around you fails and most people are content to live in a sterile, insular, artificial world, anyone who wants more from life must create it themselves. This same lack of systemic faith is voiced today in other forms, such as home and private schooling that considers the public version a hopeless dead end, organic food as a return to health and alternative to low quality mass chemical farming, or the common desire for personal wealth so people can buy their way out of doomed systems of collective failure.

While everyone else was passively rolling along with whatever happened, punk and hardcore bands were screaming furiously about real problems that most people had become accustomed to and now considered normal. Whether endless bogus wars, society's collapse into incoherency, or the daily grind that drains the human spirit and reduces people to blinking meat, beyond the angry vocals and distorted guitars was a legitimate idea sounded by those who foresaw the looming fate of canaries fluttering in the coalmine.

To speak the forbidden, point out consequential mistakes, and indict leaders who irresponsibly feign solutions is a sure path to ostracism, but also benefits society when legitimate problems are placed on display and can no longer be hidden by distractions and demands for silent tolerance. Though hugely critical and unhopeful about civilization's success, honest critique has always been a positive contribution and necessary counterbalance to projects veering off course. The underlying motives seen in punk and hardcore are the same as those all healthy people have, only there is a more critical eye cast on collateral damage, self-serving approaches, phony politeness, and the cliched lies we are expected to repeat to show we are harmless non-thinkers who comply, never resisting even blatant errors and foolishness.

When alternatives are taken away but are unsuitable for addressing actual needs, nature finds a new path. Punk and hardcore exemplify this process, bursting forth with a vigor appropriate for the urgency of their message and the dangerous despair their articulators recognized.