Politics of a Punk Rock Poser (Part IV)

When I was in middle school, I had difficulty identifying with my peers. Failure to socially acclimate in middle school is a general problem probably facing most middle school students in one way or another, but in my personal case, I found myself keenly aware of the factors that can alienate an individual from the society around him. I was seeing a therapist for family counseling. I was a middle class kid going to a private school that my parents eventually had to stop sending me to because tuition was too expensive. I couldn’t articulate my feelings to my parents or my therapist. I looked to music to express what I couldn’t express. I started listening to punk rock and could identify with the messages of rebellion contained in the lyrics and in the sound. When I discovered hardcore, an offshoot of punk rock, I found a genre of music that seemed to speak directly to me. I also discovered music that would later guide my adult notions of political power and disenfranchisement, my notions of how a genre can have a self-contained history, and my notions of prosody in spoken and written languages.