Hello!

We’re back, baby! This time, with a project that started out in a bit of a different way. We were told we got to pick anything from Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire, and do a project on it.

Anything. For reference, that song lists 106 things. After looking through the lyrics, I settled on Punk Rock. I had to argue why punk rock was significant, and why it deserved to be in the song along side such major things as Watergate and Bob Dylan. So why was it significant?

First of all, the punk movement affected so many people. It started out with the British youth, who were upset with the government and felt ripped off. From there, it soared into America and people really felt connected to it. The upset working class had a way of rising up, after the hippie movement died out.

Secondly, it had political effects. Obviously starting with the left wing punks, and how they were very anti-establishment. The Dead Kennedy’s famously released California Uber Alles, which compares Jerry Brown’s possible presidency to Hitler (read the lyrics, they’re the very definition of punk rock). Then there were the right wing punks, who were impacted by the National Front in England and wound up completely missing the point of what it was to be punk.

And finally, they had such a lasting impact. Punk is still a movement today, and their music lives on in bands like Nirvana and Blondie.

To show the significance of our topic, we had to create an artifact. I wound up dying some shoelaces to show off the punk “shoelace code”

Each colour represents something.

White = white pride

Red = Neo-Nazi

Black = Apolitical

Purple = Anti-Skinhead

Yellow = Anti-Racist

Blue = Cop-Killer

The shoelace code goes to show how politics affected the punks, to the point of them having to wear shoelaces to discern what type of punk they were. No one wants to get mistaken for a nazi, after all.

That’s all, thanks for reading!

Read You Later

Sincerely, Parker