Punks Not Dead
It is Punk to steal the tools of the oppressor and use them to prevail against him.
Steam Punk. Cyber Punk. Desert Punk. ...Hope Punk?!
In a truly bizarre and ironic (but not unexpected) development of art imitating art, the variously-descried subgenres of fiction have adopted the oft-maligned suffixes of categorical music. Wherever you look, there is someone daringly slapping "-punk" on the end of a genre like a sticker on a bus-stop. Then there's cottage-core. I can only imagine we will one day uncover the book version of trve kvlt blackened death-core.
Categorization is necessary. We must have the tools with which to outline for each other what something can be expected to sound like, or topically address, and what kinds of aesthetics it might leverage. These categories need to be somewhat standardized and roughly universal so that their meaning is transferable from person to person. But there is a pitfall in getting too specific, or misapplying the label of one thing to another enough times that the label's meaning becomes confused and worthless.
Punk is one of those suffix labels. It might be considered a meaningless, dead descriptor in the year 2026, signifying a stand-in for a blank syllable. If you erase "-punk" from any of these genres, is anything lost? How did we get to that state?
I would argue that we have to first go back to describe what "punk" is. In my estimation, the conceptual meaning of "punk" is the expectation that the story will feature outsiders or outcasts, but this alone is not enough to earn the sticker. It has to kick-flip its way across banned terrain. Most importantly to the archetype, these outsider protagonists must use the tools of the oppressor against them in order to prevail. In the case of Cyber Punk, this is leveraging technology to turn the tables on a malevolent state or corporate monarchy's surveillance and control apparatus. In the case of Steam Punk, it could be that the outcasts refuse the capitalist march of limited product lifecycle and discarding of useful things, instead fighting back against their society by repairing and inventing from the scrap heap superior tools and machines.
What then, is "Hope Punk"? How does one use hope against an oppressor? How does one use "Solar" against the oppressor? In the case of Solar, I believe the intent is to signify the story features renewable resources centering on solar energy, but this alone is not punk. It confuses the meaning of punk to include stories about anything and slapping a punk sticker on the end. And yet, irreverently sticker-bombing the establishment is indeed what Punk does. One could attempt to draw an analog to Desert Punk (not the titular anime, but sure let's include that as well) like Herbert's Dune, wherein the Fremen and Paul Atreides use their local knowledge of the environment to turn the tables on the Harkonnen government. Maybe crying foul at this misapplications of "punk" is like music critics on Metal Archives bickering over whether a band fits in this micro-subgenre or that one, when each category contains at most one other group. The undertaking seems fruitless.
Still, I feel something is lost when Punk's use of the oppressor's weapon against him is left behind. There is power in that intended meaning, in what it brings to stories and identifies in them and what they ask of their readers. I feel this is more significant a hill to fight on than whether a given subgenre of electro-pop warrants a band's inclusion, as the social and civil ramifications in that context are by comparison nonexistent in most cases.
In a recent discussion with my partner, we likened what's happened to "punk" to what's happened to "woke". Woke, a term initially conceived to indicate being aware of oppression and systemic injustice around you, being in tune to your community and actively working against the inequity, was stolen and re-sleeved by the far-right to indicate any engagement with social or civil issues at all, whether executed in media well or poorly. In so doing, the wider public adoption of this mangled version of what "woke" means has done incredible damage to how the public talk about media that engages social and civic issues. Rather than assessing the quality of the story, the term is simply applied whether the story was amazing or phoned-in with token representation and ham-fisted themes that don't align with the presented characters or setting. In so doing, the good is thrown out with the bad and we all suffer for it. Instead of calling those bad executions "woke", simply term them bad writing. Instead of appending punk to everything under the sun, maybe we could consider once more the tools of the oppressor and how they can be turned so the pointy-end faces their former masters.
