How the Hell Did I Get Here: Punk + Business Part I

I recently met another “creative professional", a Director of UX at a respectable and sizable firm, for whom punk was the catalyst for pretty much the whole of her professional path. While where we ended up is different, our timelines lined up almost exactly.

[HEADLINE IMAGE CREDIT: Susie Horgan, Punk Love]

For both of us, zine publication, show organization, band accommodation and overall outlook and attitude all opened doors to where and how we developed. It set me on a path of thinking through all the ways that punk touched or shaped my professional development (and, on occasion, lack-thereof).

Yesterday I spent half the day in a Minneapolis library reading books about various scenes, and almost everybody says the same sort of thing. As a kid I felt alienated by my circumstances and this thing gave me meaning and took me seriously.

I reached out to a friend through whom I came into hardcore as a kid and he said something that resonated at an elemental level:

"Ultimately I was a white trash kid who wanted something to be more than white trash, but I didn't have any reason to believe that was possible. The hardcore that I was into—youth crew—was all about losers like me who wanted to get out of the loser spots we were in.”

Resonant.

He would become a lawyer after graduating from Columbia Law.

And in the forward to Punk Love, a collection of Susie Horgan's photos of the D.C. hardcore scene, Henry Rollins writes something that resonates especially for those in a pre-Internet adolescence:

“With the music came an attitude and direction that was so liberating and life changing that many of us never looked back. Just doing something different with your hair or writing something on your t-short was a huge personal statement at that time; with that came a lot of strength and self-definition... those times, over twenty five years ago, define who we are now... It was not something we turned off and on it was a part of our lives then and now.”

None of these are yet formed thoughts, but the beginning of my unpacking something that has been extraordinarily meaningful to me in a way I have never fully considered.