Updated on June 27, 2026.

The relentless museumification of punk continues unabated, half a century after punk crawled out of the swamp and learned to walk upright. The latest institution attempting to trap your past in amber is the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, presenting Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos: Punk Culture 1976–86. A mouthful of a title that only an MFA could have written.

The Skirball is a Jewish cultural institution, so they are approaching punk from that angle, which is kind of a new take I guess, but the existence of Jewish punks shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone. Whatever angle it’s being approached from, the exhibit is just that, an exhibit. Something to line up for, point at, stare at. Dead flowers wrapped around mannequins and expertly hung on museum walls. In other words, the opposite of punk, which was very much alive, screaming, sweating, and bleeding all over you and your institutions.

These museum exhibits can’t help you feel what punk was like, any more than John Varvatos’s attempt to recreate the CBGBs stage in the back of his expensive yuppie rag boutique can give you any sense of what that particular stinkbox was really like. (I’m sure there are more modern terms than yuppie, but none of them are as wonderfully dismissive.) Everyone trying to museumify punk will fail to capture anything genuine or vital because punk was ephemeral, it was of the moment, and that moment has long since passed.

I can listen to the songs Woody Guthrie wrote when the US government commissioned him to write songs about some public works dams being constructed on the Columbia River, but I can’t know what it was like to stand next to him while he sang Grand Coulee Dam in 1941. Or what those songs meant to the people who did hear them in the moment. Because that moment has passed. Seeing his shirt or guitar or underpants in a museum somewhere won’t bring that moment back.

But Woody’s dam songs still stand on their own, as any punk music worth remembering should. A young person today listening to Ramones or Radio Ethiopia or Marquee Moon or Germfree Adolescents or Give ‘Em Enough Rope or Cut can never know how those records sounded to the kids playing them when they were new. But the songs are still the songs, and any young person who cares to listen will have their own impressions and form their own ideas and memories around them related to their lives and times.

The music and what it brings out in us are eternal. All the stuff surrounding it is not, and was never meant to be. No one ever formed a punk band thinking they’d be pinned to a museum wall one day like a stinky little butterfly with a bad attitude. Putting together a roomful of punk costumes, show posters, and fliers is, at best, a curiosity. The tangible feel of the thing, the smell and taste of it – those are moments that have passed.

If you’re young and an older person tricked you into reading this blog, I have good news for you: you didn’t miss anything. In fact, if you’re dissatisfied, disgruntled, or disenchanted with the world you’re living in, you can create your own underground scene, and it will be better than the 1970s punk scene because you made it yourself. Don’t tell me about it, though. I’m old, and old people will just ruin it, or tell you it’s too loud or something.

Because, say it with me: punk is an attitude. And you can attach it to anything you create that sticks a finger in the eye of the status quo. You certainly have a more vile and reprehensible status quo to finger than we did, and ours was pretty bleak. So the raw materials for revolution are there and ripe for the picking. What are you going to do with them?

Forward ever, backward never.

WRITTEN BY A HUMAN