The late 90s were marked by the emergence of popular punk and emo, two sub genres which helped tremendously to amalgamate punk into mainstream music and culture. Both existed mostly under the radar of major labels for most of their golden ages, however, the genres which were formulated after them and mostly in their image are the best examples available of the surrender to popular music in punk subculture.
Popular punk's music sounds almost like a revival of the original movement; the songs are fast and melodic, short in length and simple both lyrically and musically. Many of the members of this new scene were former members of the earlier hardcore punk scene (“Epitaph Records” 2005), and a majority of these bands were signed to labels owned by other band members. Bad Religion's Greg Graffin founded the label Epitaph in order for these bands to gain popularity; NOFX's Fat Mike founded the label Fat Wreck Chords.
Unlike movements before it, this facet of punk encouraged younger people to listen to this music as the founders of the sub genre got older. When those younger members started bands of their own, they might even be signed to Epitaph or Fat Wreck Chords (“Epitaph Records” 2005). This was the thing that led to the mainstreaming of the music. The sound, which essentially sounded like the earliest punk, exploded with popularity due to the big break of a few artists (Green Day, the Offspring). When major labels found the music profitable, “punk” bands were produced for major label use -- and owners of labels like Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords began to seek out other bands in order to do the same thing. Because of this transition of personal politics from preserving music for a small crowd of dedicated individuals to spreading and eventually profiting from the culture, punk was given willingly to mainstream music:
Never has the DIY thing been so readily accessible. Like we said -- there's no more hazing process in punk. You get a crash course in it by who you go out on tour with. You can plug into that network so much quicker now, and therefore reach more kids, which means you're going to have some semblance of a career. And I don't see any downside to that. (Greenwald p. 85)
The music in this genre grew softer and more commercial as years went by, and eventually fell to the wayside. Formerly independent labels were given plenty of recognition and funds to develop different kinds of talent as well. Organized music fests like Vans Warped Tour introduced corporate sponsorship to a subculture originally full of nihilism and resentment for mainstream society.
It is also important to mention that by the late 1990s, the popular culture was one of heavy interaction and quick assimilation; a youth that has been marketed to more than any other in history is more likely to surrender their youth culture earlier. At this time in history, the rate of advertising was higher than ever before and teenagers were the main target due to their disposable income (“Demographics and Media” 2005). With repeated messages defining the mainstream as cool, youthful and trendy, and with many different facets of this mainstream to become assimilated into, it is easier to assimilate an entire underground lifestyle, especially when considering the wide potential for communication. By this time, the internet is available to the majority of the United States, and any young person can research and automatically absorb the ideas of a subculture. For this reason, subcultures grow and split faster than ever before from the 1990s on
Emo music also grew out of the 1980's hardcore movement. Disenchanted members of that group saw an opportunity to change the culture and the music in a fundamental way and leave the politics the way they were. Emo in its first stages was a group of activist youth who were tired of appearing masculine and macho in hardcore culture -- they switched paradigms by singing about their own feelings, their own relationships with intangible experiences. The musical stylings were more traditional to the rock genre but had a quick, simple punk feel to them; the earliest emo music sounds like hardcore punk with sensitive lyrics.
Emo kept the activism and the refusal to sign to major labels. But since youth culture is always growing and changing, the view of success whether or not it was mainstream grew more prevalent (Greenwald p.85) as did a demand for this type of music (p. 11). Emo eventually met popular punk halfway and a sort of smear between the two was created and adopted by major labels and thus mainstream music, and that smear has been adapted on by both the youth and then the music industry more quickly that ever before -- scores of new bands now appear yearly touting new sounds and fade back into obscurity just as quickly, for the most part. This opens the door for a more scattered social hierarchy in youth culture; if you were around the year before, you have more relevance than someone who has only been around for six months. This is the concept of “scene points”, which are rhetorical markers that show other counterculture members where one's countercultural ties and interests lie; sort of a costume that reads like a biography. Additionally, there is much more emphasis on commercial success in music, which gives the music industry more access to young people belonging to subcultures, the subcultures themselves, and the interpretation of values.
Young people need to perceive an in-group, to be with other young people, and to exercise their social needs by building community within the already established community. As a subculture is brought through the years, like punk has been, it is shaped and folded differently by each new sub genre that is made, which leads to its weaknesses becoming more pronounced and growing rapidly. It is harder to retain individualism in a media-obsessed culture and in a profit-obsessed culture, which makes subculture easier to adopt.
Punk has gone from a small movement nurtured by a few to a building block of youth culture and popular culture. Without punk, music would sound very different today, and more importantly, without punk, youth would know less about how to interact communally. The model punk provided, although it is flawed and susceptible, is a fine example of how to assemble a social movement and then inject it into the mainstream: make it mean, make it young, make it fast., and most importantly, make it so adaptable it's always accessible.
