How Punk Rock Taught me to be Creative

Long before I was leading workshops and speaking at conferences, I stepped upon onto a much different kind of stage. Dark basements, concert venues, and everywhere in between: this was the stage of punk rock. The “stage” (often just a floor) was a gathering place for outcasts. A space where your blood, sweat, and tears counted more than the music you played. And it was here that I learned how to be an artist.

As The Minutemen put it, punk rock changed my life. At age 13 I entered into a rebellious world that was teeming with creativity. The Do-It-Yourself values of punk rock turned us into mini Da Vinci’s, constantly experimenting with new creative ideas. And it was gritty and raw, perfect for a boy willing to go outside his comfort zone and learn from life experience. 

Punk rock was my education. Not only did it teach me about business (after all, both thrive off of disruption), it also shaped my political and religious beliefs. But most of all, punk rock threw me headfirst into the life of an artist. The attitude and work ethic has remained a part of me, yet today my life doesn’t look very punk rock. So, what is punk anyway? And how is it such a great teacher of creativity?

Punk: The Spirit of Independence

What drew me to punk rock is its independent stance. To do things not out of convention, but out of conviction. This is the heartbeat of punk music. But, let’s get briefly metaphysical, because there is also a spirit of punk. It’s everywhere: Dylan goes electric, Cobain kills hair metal, and Tupac delivers street reality to the mainstream. The spirit is subversive, it’s counterculture.

I distinctly remember when I realized as a teen that punks didn’t have a sole claim to counterculture. I’d noticed the many similarities between punks and hippies, and, in my confused despair, wrote a reggae song about it. A sad story on all fronts.

But the spirit of punk is everywhere, it even travels outside of music. It’s in the revolutionaries who overthrow regimes, and scientists who challenge our established truths. I call all of this punk. So punk rock is both a universal spirit of defiance and a particular music genre. Both can be true because, as a punk, I declare it so.

Yet subversion brings all the good, bad, and the ugly. In the wild jungle of punk you’ll find a collection of gang members, political activists, skate bros, militant vegans, entrepreneurs, anarcho-communists, and everything in between. And during my upbringing, punk became more mainstream, and began to include celebrities. 

Free Range Creativity

The explosion of punk in the 90s inspired kids around the world, like myself, with a call to adventure. Punk can maybe best be described as adventure. In it, I had a youth that was radically outside the structure of school activities. Our sport was skateboarding, where we became engineers building our own ramps, and where free time found my friends and I, a band of nomads, wandering city streets in search of new skate spots.  But our main mission was to create and distribute our own music, on our terms. 

Because we were too young to play the bars, finding venues was itself an exercise in creativity. Necessity breeds invention, and many ideas originated in the free soil of punk. VFW halls, skateparks, housing collectives - we’d play wherever. And the folk-punk genre made this easier. With only an acoustic guitar I could play on the sidewalk downtown (until the cops showed up). Hell, at one show in the park a punk played his set up in a tree.

Punk was a giant sandbox, well outside the walls of a traditional music education. Of course punk didn’t teach me certain music skills, like discipline and technique. I’d seek those out later in life. But my foundation was free-range experimentation, and that would remain my north star for later creative journeys in music and business.

DIY or Die 

Long before trad wives were posting DIY projects online, punks built a way of life on it. Yet only a punk would turn the phrase “do it yourself” into a proclamation of “DIY OR DIE.” This was aimed right at the music industry, which had become increasingly parasitic after 70s rock music had fueled the biggest youth-driven economy the world had ever seen.

While musicians have always used DIY to help lead towards a record deal, punks started using it to opt-out of the game. The goal was to maintain artistic integrity and creative independence, without relying on music executives in suits. For punks, it wasn’t DIY until I GET a record deal, it was DIY so I don’t HAVE TO GET a record deal.

By the time I was playing music in the 2000s, it was easier than ever to be DIY. Punk rock had created its own world, with lots of independent record labels that helped bands stay off the majors. Technology helped too. We could record our music in home studios, create our own album art and merch, burn our CDs ourselves, and use the new social spaces on the Internet to connect with other music scenes.

Because if you didn’t embrace doing these things yourself, you would die... or at least, your punk spirit would. Not being DIY was the worst, it meant you had sold out, and gave in to the system. You’d also ceremonially “lose your punk points” or be “kicked out of punk rock” - but we won’t get into that.

Creativity 101 - How Punk Shapes Artists

So there’s usually one person in a band that takes on the lion's share of all these DIY tasks. That person was me. Simply calling myself a “musician” didn’t do my identity justice. I was also graphic designer, manager, songwriter, rehearsal coordinator, creative-director, and attempter-of-preventing-inevitable-bandmate-fights. This was very different from the bandmates who showed up just to play music, and was worlds away from my peers following their music instructors at school.

That list is by no means universal. Each band is unique, the hats one wears are always different. But the distribution of tasks falls into one of two main categories: 

• Creating the music 

• Creating the opportunities for it to be heard 

It’s the difference between making things, and making things happen. School could teach the former through music theory and technique. But punk taught me the latter; how to find opportunities, represent the music, and build connection in social spaces. Punk showed me how to get my music out of the basement and into the world. 

These skills are useful for any kind of creative process. Because of this, punk is very modern. More and more often we are seeing that specialized skills are less important in the workplace than adaptive, broader skill sets. We live in a time of rapid change, and punk has always embraced this.

For example “Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life,” the punk rock yellowpages from the 90s, seemed ancient to us during the Myspace era of 2005, even though just a couple years earlier it was still the gold standard. Punk is improvisation, always on the cutting edge. It is outside the classroom, and avoids sentimentality. Punks don’t just touch grass, they live on it, while holding a middle finger to the safe indoor spaces.

Where Is Your Punk Rock?

All creatives have their own origin story, and I know that the punk spirit dwells in your story too. Creativity is too immense to be limited to instruction manuals, teachers, or formal technique. I imagine when Socrates was challenging the virtues of his fellow Greeks, it was like an incessant, nasally punk voice in their ear. And I know that Beethoven was one of the most punk musicians of all time. Women had few punk role models until Virginia Woolf helped create a new mental landscape for them.

Punk also represents the very American viewpoint of figuring things out for yourself. This is woven into the fabric of our country, and it’s no surprise that American culture is such a huge driver of creativity in film, music, fashion, and much more. Punks aren’t known for being patriotic, but they certainly partake in this creative legacy. 

I encourage you to explore your earlier experiences in creativity or the arts, to seek examples of where subversion and independence were found. Whether through a mentor, a disruptive idea, or simply a longing, the independent stance of punk was somewhere in there. Very often, the seeds of rebellion are found in the passion we have towards a creative idea.

This is because the nature of punk is that of a spark that destroys in order to create something new. If you have counterculture in your roots, you have _______ In the case of punk, its essence cannot be contained in its four letter word. So maybe you call your punk by another name. That’s cool, but also fuck you.