Fear of a Punk Planet

The Chicago-based magazine Punk Planet--nominated for the past two years in Utne Reader's Alternate Press Awards for "General Excellence," along with such better-heeled competition as The Nation, Mother Jones and The Ecologist--recently celebrated its fiftieth issue and the publication of a well-received collection of interviews: We Owe You Nothing (Akashic Books). The magazine's name poses a question--what exactly would a punk planet look like?--that its contents answer in ways that will surprise any reader for whom punk inspires visions only of loud guitars and torn leather jackets.

I asked the magazine's editor, Daniel Sinker, about his operating definition of the term as he took a break from moving offices to a new space three times as large: that is, with room for three human beings at once, rather than just one at a time. "At this point the definition of punk matters very little to me. It's a means to an end more than anything else. A way of filtering the world." He adds ruefully, "Of course, punk is one of those things where everyone believes their own definition is the right one."

Punk is, of course, a musical and subcultural tradition established around 1976 by bands like the Ramones in New York and the Sex Pistols in London. But punk has also evolved, for some, into a much broader category: a lifestyle, an ethic, a worldview. Reading through We Owe You Nothing and recent issues of Punk Planet, you encounter repeated references to punk as, above all, a principle of countercultural openness, heterogeneity and action. For poster designer Frank Kozik, responsible for some of the most memorable graphic design of the 1990s underground, punk was originally a salon des refusés: "What I remember from the early days of punk [in Austin, Texas] is that you'd go to a show and everybody would be there. Every outcast got to go: the fags, weird leftover hippies, new wavers, confused jocks, proto-punk rockers, bikers, skinheads, Mexicans--all these freaks would go to these shows."

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