I want… no, I need to talk about punk rock right now, in September of 2026. Have you ever tried to talk about something that’s fundamental to who you try to be in the world, something that’s so dear to you that it’s best expressed in songs and poems and images rather than words? I’ve been trying to figure out how to do that, and it’s taken me awhile to find the words to say what I hope to say. Still not sure I’ve got them right, but here we go.
Do What You Must, Do All You Can, Break All the Fuckin Rules & Die Like a Champion
I don’t exactly remember the first time I listened to Bad Religion or the Ramones or Social Distortion or any of the other bands that would come to mean so much to me. I know it was around age 14 or so, around the time when most of us start experimenting with who we’re going to be. I know I have my friends to thank, and I am forever grateful. If I’ve changed any part of the world for the better, the friends I had at that age can rightly claim some credit. I loved and trusted them, and because of that they were able to bring me the music and the ideas and the energy that would then bring me to more friends, more music, more ideas, and more energy that I never would’ve found otherwise.
Growing up in a rural farming town in southern Illinois before Al Gore invented the internet, finding more of the world took some real work. The world only came to you through the TV shows, movies, books, magazines, and music you could access. Access was limited at best, and coloring too far outside the lines was definitely not encouraged. But of course some of us can’t help ourselves when we’re 14 or so. In a small town, you know who those kids are. You’ve probably been warned about them as being bad influences or being downright dangerous. Some of those kids that would become my friends *were* dangerous. Several haven’t survived to see 2026, and I bet some of them would have been completely unsurprised if they’d known that back in 1990.
The kids who were into punk rock were easy to spot. As the fat nerdy kid who followed every rule and who adults just loved because I seemed kind of like a little adult already, I was simultaneously scared of and intrigued by the punks. What happens when you don’t do what’s expected of you or what you’re told to do? I kinda wanted to find out. When friends of mine started hanging out with the punk kids, I was allowed to hang out too because being a misfit was how you fit in. Music was a uniting cultural force for us much more than books or magazines or movies. You might have a hard time getting ahold of the latest copy of Thrasher or NME, but cassette tapes were easy to make and share, and there was always music playing when we were together. The music was loud and fast and abrasive and said “fuck” a lot. We loved it because it made a lot of people in our small Midwestern town wince.
But we loved the music even more because it made us think. The first time I listened to the Bad Religion album “Against the Grain” I had to have a dictionary on hand because there were words in those songs I didn’t know. It was a first for me to be out-vocabularied by a song, and it was a first for me to not feel self-conscious about being smart and thinking about big things. We loved the music because it made us feel powerful – we *did* have things worth saying, we *should* say them, we should *do* as well as talk, and we should do it together. No one was coming to help us, so we’d help each other. The music itself was like that. The famous quote from the Ramones’ manager – “Every place we went to, there were bands that did not exist when the Ramones first played there, and when they came back, they did” – is spot on. Don’t just listen to music, make your own and make it loud. Don’t just think what you’re told, think your own thoughts and speak them loud. Write your own poems and songs and articles. Call out bullshit and insist on better. Think. Be awake and aware.
And we did that stuff, we really did.
Those values got inside of us. I remember the moment I realized it wasn’t just about loud guitars and kids trying to piss off their parents. I don’t remember where I’d told my parents I was going to be that night, but it definitely wasn’t where I ended up. I drove over to the house where a bunch of the punk kids lived, in the next town over from mine. I rolled up at about midnight, and even if cell phones had existed I wouldn’t have called ahead because that’s not how it worked. If you were supposed to be there, you knew to just show up and someone would be up and let you in. The house was divided up into four apartments, and you just listened at the doors and knocked on whichever one was liveliest.
I was looking for my closest friend who lived there, but he was unavailable due to having chosen tequila and dextromethorphan instead of food for dinner. I must’ve looked a bit lost as to what to do next, because one of the guys who lived in one of the other apartments and who I only knew a little bit said, “C’mon over and hang.” So I did, and we drank beer and Mr. Pibb and talked about mathematics and philosophy and economics until sunrise. Every teacher this dude had ever had in school would’ve keeled over from surprise to hear him talking about this stuff and being really fired up about it. He was smart. He was *awake* and thinking. He just wasn’t going to be told what defined learning or success for him.
That was a random evening over 30 years ago, and it changed me permanently. It became clear to me that we weren’t just messing with people or looking for the next high or trying to lessen the pain of being scared and weird by embracing it. We were doing all of that, and that was okay, but there was more going on. There was a work ethic that was both physical and intellectual, a ferocious rejection of the default and a ferocious reliance on your tribe and your chosen family, a readiness to fight hard for what’s right, and just enough of a dash of nihilism to let us laugh or sneer at anything so that we didn’t lose hope. That stuff in the songs we loved wasn’t just talk. It was a plan.
Some of us didn’t make it. One friend died from pneumonia a few years ago after having fallen off the grid and having lived out of his car after hallucinogens kind of broke his mind. The friend whose porch was the eternal gathering spot died from esophageal cancer a few years ago, having spent his life from age 15 as a 4-pack-per-day smoker. The friend who wouldn’t have called himself a punk (he preferred ragtime to power chords and tailored suits to leather and spikes) but who absolutely embodied the ethos died while saving his wife from drowning. A few friends died and I don’t even know how or why.
But there are a lot of us still here. Some of us are in positions of real power and authority. And a whole hell of a lot of us remember where we came from and what we’re about.
What’s Your Plan For Tomorrow? Are You a Leader, Or Will You Follow?
“These are punk rock times.”
“People need a little more punk rock in ‘em right about now.”
“What happened to counterculture? Where’s punk rock?!”
These are quotes from three separate conversations I’ve had in the last few months with three different friends around my own age (Gen X, all of us). Each conversation started out with the usual “How are you doing? Weeeelllll, I’m pretty good, y’know, considering.” That naturally led to at least a brief discussion of our experiences of the United States and the world in 2026, punctuated by the most recent outrage or injustice to show up in our feeds. This is pretty standard, similar to dozens of conversations I’ve had and dozens of conversations that I think many of us have had.
Punk rock came up unprompted in each case. It was meant as both the music and all that comes with it, all those things that I finally understood on the dirty floor of a cheap apartment in southern Illinois 30 years ago drinking warm soda and talking about integral calculus. And these more recent conversations have become a second moment of realization for me, one that I think will stay with me for another 30 years. The invocation of punk rock was shorthand for the recognition of the need to resist, the need to act, the need to remember what we’re about and to get serious about being about it. We weren’t talking about fighting “The Man” because that doesn’t exactly make sense now. In some ways, we *are* “The Man” now. But in some vitally important ways, we’re not and never have been.
We’ve always known that we would have to wrest control of society from our parents when the time came, just as surely as we’d have to wrest the car keys from them when the time came. We’ve always known that we’d have to help each other to do it. We’ve always known that the best case scenario would probably be that we fix the biggest bits that are broken and then turn things over as quickly as possible to the generations coming after us. We’ve always known that our time is limited, and it’s *supposed* to be limited because that’s partly what makes it matter. And we’ve always known that anyone in our own cohort who tried to screw other people over for the sake of thrills or bucks or just being an asshole would face the harshest backlash of all if we had anything at all to say about it.
In talking with my friends, one more thing became clear. We were all worried that the generations coming after us might not be ready and might not’ve gotten the message. Where are today’s punks? Sure they’ll probably look different and talk different and listen to different stuff and all that, but sometimes I don’t know if I can really see them or not. I have to be a little careful here, because I don’t have children. I haven’t contributed nearly as much to the coming generations as many of my friends have. I guess maybe that’s why it has felt important to write this, to try to put into words why I care so much.
I think I still have some punk rock left in me. I hope I do. And so, to my mates and our children: It’s cool to work really fucking hard to do what’s right. It’s cool to hold ourselves to a higher standard of thought, of morals, and of justice and inclusion. It’s cool to get fired up and to take the reins. It’s cool to care about people and what happens to them. It’s cool to step up. It was then, and it is now, more than ever. Don’t wait for permission.
To anyone who’s trying to step on someone else’s neck to get up a little higher, who’s trying to peddle death and exploitation as progress: We see you. We don’t like you. Remember that we’re the people who slammed bodily into one another in sweaty swirling maelstroms of humanity and called it dancing.
And to my parents’ generation? It’s time to hand over the car keys, or we’ll take them.
That’s Dr. Greg Graffin, taking time out from his job as a professor to be the lead singer for Bad Religion, the band he co-founded in 1980. This was on the opening night of their world tour with Social Distortion in 2024.
This is my dry erase board in my office. The Bad Religion quote is in my dissertation, and the photo from the 2024 concert was taken during the song “I Want To Conquer the World”.
Punk rock is timeless.
OMG. I love this essay so much!!!!