But Is It Punk?

Last month, I wrote about a new restaurant that opened in Dallas called Punk Noir. It’s a tasting menu priced at $300 per person before pairings or cocktails, although the owners did decide to offer a $200 version with fewer premium add-ons, and already had an $80 version for the bar only. Any restaurant you cannot get out of for under $100 a person is, quite obviously, not punk in the British sense. I went down a rabbit hole of reading about what punk was and wasn’t, as a refresher, because it’s been some time since I originally read all the oral histories. That took me to some great pieces I’d missed in recent years on the DIY ethos of punk, the very specific point of view John Lydon has on the royal family as an anti-monarchist with a soft spot for the Queen, and a stellar piece of poetry about the way the word punk has been adapted by so many different types and tribes of people.

By the way, I declared that restaurant not punk. There’s the financial angle, which obviously flies in the face of British punk rock politics, but also artistically. The Dallas artist commissioned to create several original works for it, who is a friend of one of the owners, made a graffiti wall that was era-accurate but not actually punk art, and four canvases that just kind of had punk band names and random images on them, including homages to some deeply problematic bands with members who have been credibly accused of sexual assault. There’s also some royal family stuff that you can just read the article to see me parse. My editor described this writing as one continuous Jim from The Office reaction shot, which I found hilarious. There were also robust comments from people doing their own version of “lolwhut.” Someone in the owner’s family posted the image and used a spray-paint font to write “Fuck D Magazine” over it. I guess they disagreed.

I’ve also noticed punk coming up in the discourse around Olivia Rodrigo. The punk rock lineage of her babydoll dresses, over which some people had minor heart attacks and accused her of doing Lolita shit rather than Googling or simply remembering the ‘90s. Her Sex Pistols t-shirt and “punk look,” although she’s the cleanest punk I’ve ever seen. The way she’s moved on from pop-punk to ‘80s new wave influences (I think it’s much more new romantics, but okay). Music writers and critics (and fashion writers) love to invoke the word in conjunction with her because she has so many influences from the widely spanning world of punk-adjacent artists in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But the truly punk rock thing she did involves the Daisy Chain Fields festival.

It’s not the fact that it’s all women, although I love that — no, it’s that all the proceeds are being donated to non-profits that advocate for girls and women. That includes orgs such as Planned Parenthood, which Republicans have been desperately trying to destroy for decades, and orgs that support women’s rights, domestic violence survivors, domestic workers, Black mothers (who face the highest mortality rates in pregnancy of any demographic), focused on Indigenous women’s health, and more. In a post-Roe world, where the government is letting 22-year-olds who work for Elon Musk cut programs they can’t possibly understand the effects of using AI, and not just defunding but deleting any program that has any relationship to DEI or advancing studies on and benefits for women, this is a radical move for a pop star. Especially when the world’s biggest pop star, Taylor Swift, won’t even call Trump out publicly for using her music in one of his gross White House TikToks, let alone come out in support of something as controversial as abortion access. If punk was anything, as a movement, it was revolutionary, anarchistic, and working-class. Almost nothing that a global pop star is going to do in the capitalist times of 2026 will fit any of those rubrics, but this is certainly a step in the punk direction.

In the course of jotting these seemingly disconnected thoughts down, another form of discourse about it landed on Threads that beautifully highlights the rhetorical and, some might say (in fact, someone in the comments section did say), authoritarian nature of deciding what is and isn’t punk.

The responses to this flit between argumentative and hilarious, as you’d expect. The OG poster reveals that it was prompted by seeing “too many people on Threads say their favorite emo band is Dashboard Confessional.” Objectively hilarious and accurate, yet insulting to many. I detailed the sub- and related genres to punk in my Punk Noir story as part of the scene setting, and there are so many — emo is one. The big takeaway from this discourse for me was once again reinforcing the idea that genres and having firm lines around them is a leftover from when radio and record labels did it to separate artists and listeners by color (and later, by gender). It is… kind of bullshit to purity test music or stick it in the box of a genre.

So what does that mean for punk today? The genre has a broad legacy, but what people think it is has gotten bigger and bigger as years go by, and this is true for a lot of genres of music, as time passes and it influences new music. I propose that considering yourself punk today has to be political more than musical. That’s the only thing about punk that feels at all radical anymore.

If you’re in the mood to be punk now, I very quickly threw together a playlist of some punk songs I like. There are a lot of women, because when people look back at this genre, they tend to lionize men. If your favorite band isn’t on there, it’s probably because I hate them. Sorry!

If you’re so over punk, here’s something with no lyrics and a lot of vibes you might enjoy instead.