What does it mean to be “punk”? The powers at be would have you believe to be a punk is to be a miscreant. They’d tell you that to be punk is to be deviant, to go renegade against society, to destroy everything good and accentuate the bad. To dress aberrantly, to disrespect authority, to scream and curse at the top of your lungs against “THE MAN”, and to overall be a nuisance to society.

They’d be only partially correct with that assessment.

To be punk is, in practice, the act of denying society as it stands. In involves all the screaming, and cussing, and musing, and fashion you’d come to imagine upon first hearing the word “punk”. But it is not just pointless contrarianism that marks a punk. Punks are those who dream of a better tomorrow. Punks allow themselves to imagine a world not bound to the neoliberal system that turns all men into machines of profit. Punks are those who intend to keep the flame of creativity burning through collective action and encouragement of self-creation. Punks are those that evade control, those that fight to revolutionize society, those that take whatever little power they have and throw it in the faces of the powers at be to open a new pathway for the world.

To be punk is to carry a torch of freedom against the raging tide of society.

And New York was its birthplace. Why not stay a while, enjoy the sights, learn a thing or two about the Big Apple’s involvement in punk, and then get ready to stage your own revolution against the powers at be?