“Born out of lower- and middle-class…angst in the United States and England,” Marc Bayard writes, Punk has always been “at its core…about fighting social norms…and promoting individual expression.” The musical movement is now more than six decades old, and it is easy to forget this wild and rebellious spirit after years and years of its commercialization. “For this very reason, punk remains a fragile experiment even today. Despite its often lofty aims, it is still subject to the stereotypes and prejudices that society heaps on other minority communities.” Writing about his own experiences as well as a new book devoted to Black punk culture, Bayard also considers what it was like to be not just Black and a punk but a Black punk. “While mainstream culture often sees punk as primarily a musical phenomenon,” Bayard writes, it was a social one too, and being a Black punk meant being not only part of “a subculture within a subculture” but outside of the mainstream in two senses as well. For Bayard, this is why Black punk culture has always been “an incubator for radical ideas and forms of expression of which music is only one small (though loud) sliver.” “Punk, at its best,” Bayard concludes, has always been more than “a lifestyle but a life. Not a perfect one, of course, but one that incorporates myriad elements (including music) into a cultural phenomenon that allows for and, in fact, demands the free expression that shatters many preconceived stereotypes and prejudices.” Read “Black Punk Means Liberation”