The New Punk — Why Hopepunk and Noblebright are the SFF Genres of 2019

When I think of punk, I think of rebellion. Rejection of the status quo.

In the 70s and 80s, the rise of conservative values throughout the Western World pushed down people who didn’t fit in. Society struggled to maintain a hold of the nuclear family. The Hippie Movement of love and peace didn’t pan out all the way, giving rise to an angry counter-culture who resented and hated the world that desperately didn’t want outsiders to exist.

Punk was a place where outsiders in society — people who did not conform to gender or societal roles — could overtly mock and reject conservative values, from dress code to standards of beauty to what it meant to be a person. Concepts like hetero-normativity were questioned, as was the structure of society. Why did things have to be the way they were?

This is an over-simplification, of course. It’s impossible to go into all the details of the punk movement and all its subcultures in the introduction to an essay that really isn’t about that punk movement.

Rather, it’s about the new punk. Because the punk movement of the 70s and 80s no longer really exists. The 70s and 80s no longer really exists. The world of today is very different.