Senior Research Paper: Punk Rock Today & Conclusion

The following is from my research paper titled "Another State of Mind". NOTE: I took out the internal citation, which makes this material plagarized.

If the ideas, actions, and philosophies of the aforementioned bands were not still practiced today, it would be easy to believe that punk is dead, but the opposite is true. Bands today are still formnig their own record labels, the most popular one being Fat Wreck Chords, formed by Fat Mike of NoFX. Not only do NoFX anf Fat Wreck Chords prove that DIY is still alive, but they also prove that punk is still political. Fat Wreck Chords has a multi-volume compilation album called "Rock Against Bush," which features countless bands, including Anti-Flag and Decendants, who express their political points of view through their music. Even pop punk bands write political songs; Green Day's 2004 album, "American Idiot", features many anti-establishmen messages. They final proof that punk is in no way dead, is the fact that some of the labels that were created by punk bands in the early eighties are still putting out albums today. Alternative Tentacles, Dischord, and BYO Records are still defiantly producing albums more than twenty years later, and they are run by the same people who founded them. Furthermore, many of the bands from "back in the day" are also still around, like Agent Orange, Circle Jerks, Bad Religion, and the Misfits (to name a few).

To conclude on a more personal note, I would like to add that my own band, The Drafted, plays the '80s hardcore style of punk (including political songs), and that our album was recorded by our friends who formed their own label, Lower Records. From my own experience, I can testify that DIY is easier to accomplish now than it has ever been, due to the internet and affordable recording equipment. Thus, any hope that a critic or loud mouth may have of seeing punk die is quite futile. I leave you with a quote from Shawn Stern, co-founder of the Better Youth Organization and frontman of Youth Brigade: "youth is an attitude, not an age [...] every generation should realize the responsibility to change what they feel is wrong in the world". That is DIY in a nutshell.