Epix's Punk docuseries feels contrary to punk rock

Paste Magazine

In watching this week's four-part docuseries from Iggy Pop and John Varvatos on the history of punk rock, Alexis Gunderson says: "I realized many of my frustrations with Punk could be boiled down to the fact that punk rockers reveling in the kind of navel-gazing nostalgia this kind of documentary project requires seems anathema to the whole punk-rock ethos." Gunderson adds: "To be punk rock is to be introspective and self-contextualizing, sure, but more than that, it is to be young, looking hungrily forward; none of the aging punk elders looking back at punk’s origins would disagree. So the fact that they spend so much time basking in retrospection, half of them wearing the same f*ck-you outfits that made them edgy when they were 20 but just make them look caught in amber today, feels like the kind of grown-up bullshit that they would have spit at when they were actual young punks. And that cognitive dissonance is hard to overcome." ALSO: Punk makes it abundantly clear that punk is not dead yet.