Wagner: punk rock lives on sans safety pins

I have found proof that punk rock has not died. While young musicians may have traded their… I have found proof that punk rock has not died. While young musicians may have traded their safety pins and black hair-dye for more a more mainstream look, their songs still convey raw emotion.

During my freshman year, I discovered lo-fi while talking about music with a good friend. Lo-fi is a genre of rock (particularly punk rock) that emphasizes its own folksiness and simplicity as its main attributes. The name lo-fi comes from the low fidelity (less than usual sound quality) that hallmarks the genre’s recordings.

Suspicious of anything labeled vaguely in the same family as the beloved music genre of my adolescence, I listened with apprehension when a friend suggested it. He hit the play button on his laptop and something all too familiar rolled from his speakers, although distorted by its journey.

In No Age’s album Nouns I heard songs that I recognized as fitting a pattern in the celestial cycles of rock ’n’ roll. With raw electric guitar, emotive vocals and punch-you-in-the-teeth drums, it was the truest edge of punk, adding 30 years of musical knowledge to the Ramones’ secret formula with a touch of art-cool that needs a pair of wayfarers to function.

With this new genre of lo-fi, punk rock reinvents itself.

Punk rock’s supposed death is irrelevant to the kids in their garage who are still capable of creating powerful music. The group of artists labeled as lo-fi exposes them as the next group of angry kids with instruments who have ended up the darlings of hipsters and punk rockers alike. A listen to Wavves’ recent King of the Beach could sell the genre’s raw, unpolished sound to anyone with a taste for audible energy that can appreciate the wonders of a fuzzbox and three-chord melodies. It’s blissful in the same way that the country melodies of the Carter Family are — tangible feelings on the pulse of society’s emotion.

This permutation of punk rock is certainly a little different from the last, but it’s no more different from its predecessors than “Batman Begins” was from “Batman and Robin,” and lo-fi’s predecessors were some heavy hitters in the history of alternative rock.

Twenty years ago, the previous wave of punk rock began moving its way out of places like the East Bay in San Francisco, with groups like NOFX and The Offspring not only selling platinum records through traditional media channels but also creating recordings that stand as some of the best of the ’90s. Rancid’s …And Out Come the Wolves should be counted as a masterpiece among them, with Tim Armstrong’s masterful songwriting capturing the rays of California and transporting that sun into the ears of anyone who picks up the record.

Even before these memorable groups committed any of their words and sounds to recordings, countless waves of American, British and world bands slung their instruments around their necks and played the music that came to them even without great musical knowledge.

That natural inspiration is the foundation of what makes great music in the first place. With each generation, we see successive heirs take up the cause of punk rock like a manifesto to teenage living. No matter your age, the striking power of punk transcends time and, whether it’s No Age today, Rancid in the ’90s or the ’77 originality of Richard Hell & The Voidoids, it colors the history of popular music as a distillation of rock’s true spirit.

Whether it’s called punk rock or something completely different, the raw music of youth is always present and  — vitally — always changing.