Oh fuckoff Dylan Clark. At first punk was something vital and pure (tell Malcolm MacLaren) but then it was co-opted by the maw (so boring) but then unlike all those other subcultures (I think of the cringe-inducing ending of the film Stilyagi where the stilyagi are walking along in 1955 and then they are joined by, like, Russians with dreadlocks and girls in sportswear and maybe a bongo drum because THEY WERE THE FIRST ONES and it is the PERMANENT SUBCULTURAL REVOLUTIONARY CANON ha ha ugh but don't think Dylan Clark's got the answers) they survived and kept an ember in their hearts and everything encouraging that's happened since like freeganing and shit is a credit to punk and not at all complicatedly intertwined with consumer culture too and the Battle in Seattle changed everything man. It takes like 30 pages for him to stop talking vaguely about "the new punks" and reveal that he's talking about interns and shit. I get that this was 2003 and the mainstream media was all on about black blocs and whatever too (or … were they still? Like, post-thenineleven? the "new punks" were in trucker hats and the first "simpler times" $40 Victorian moustache waxes were pending), but Dylan Clark is not supposed to be the mainstream media, he is supposed to be a subcultural expert. What a stupid thing to be supposed to be. Maybe twentieth-century Japan had rebel subcultures (or maybe Stalinist Russia, hi again, the stilyagi); the rest of us have trying to build decent, less-harmful consumer lifestyles from within the maw, and we don't need the added complication of having that truth obscured by putting a bunch of hero shit on people because of their appealing visual aesthetic or laudable purchasing choices or, like, garden. The punks would have spat and pogoed in that garden, so get out of my face Dylan Clark. In David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl (eds.), The Post-Subcultures Reader. ( )