steampunk cyberpunk diesel Punk Deco Punk solar Punk splatter Punk some of these you
have almost definitely heard of the majority of them probably not there are a lot of these
things it's kind of a thing to do take a word add hyphen Punk to it and call that your genre
and there is a sort of an undeniable punch to that isn't there you can imagine the aesthetic of the
world the story takes place in almost immediately but then at the same time not really much else
you know in steampunk there'll be plenty of anachronistic steam powered technology you
know cyberpunk will be full of advanced body modifications and smog choked neon mega cities
even if you've never seen it before you can probably at least guess that splatter Punk is
gonna be uh messy but what do all these writers and artists mean by attaching Punk to these words
we can understand the first half pretty easily the subject the aesthetic that registers right
away but what does Punk do why add this appendage why genre Punk and not just genre
well in order to answer that we have to go back a bit back to the origin of punk itself
[Music]
one of the best things in life is learning which is probably why you're here to begin
with unfortunately a good education is ridiculously expensive but it doesn't
have to be learn all your fundamentals maths Sciences computer programming and more with
our sponsor brilliant visit brilliant.org tale Foundry to get 30 days for free and
20 off a Year's subscription seriously this is the most fun you'll ever have
learning this stuff try it out for free and be as brilliant as I know you can be
it's easy to jump to a conclusion when you hear someone call their work Punk at this point we
know what Punk is intuitively right we've definitely been exposed to it enough well you
might be surprised how different it looks across all the different flavors of genre punk out there
cyberpunk is pretty recognizable as punk in a general sense right social outcasts dystopian
institutions genre busting sci-fi experimentation but what about something like steampunk
I guess you often have your Plucky band of Rogues there but then what's so Punk about a world that
just happens to be full of zany steam engines and solar Punk most of the punk there actually
illustrates a positive change in the world where renewable energy has altered things dramatically
Punk only in the sense that it defies real world conventions afropunk is pretty similar
in that it challenges the dominant social defaults in conventions especially within
the sphere of fiction writing splatter Punk is just uh real grotesque and weird
punk in that it doesn't give a [ __ ] and it's proud so okay obviously this is not a monolith
it's more of a diaspora a starting place people don't mean just one thing by Punk
so if it's so nebulous why use it what does it mean what can it possibly indicate about the work
the truth is that punk is actually a surprisingly powerful word all by itself yes it conjures images
of black leather jackets angry teenagers colored hair and weirdly named hardcore bands like
the Circle Jerks but just like the machines of Steampunk and the Uber Gore of splatter Punk those
are only the things that live inside the genre they don't actually describe it Punk is a big
word now but it started small go far enough back and you find one of its first uses in Shakespeare
in the playing measure for measure the term Punk is used in a few places to mean female prostitute
the history is a bit fuzzy after that but with such a clear use case it's not hard to imagine
how conventional thinkers in the time between could see a word used in this way grab hold of it
and transform it into a more generalized term for deviant degenerate undesirable which is exactly
what happened in his article High Times greats one of the pioneers of the punk music genre journalist
legs McNeil describes how that very thinking is what made them want to adopt the term to describe
themselves they wanted to make a magazine that targeted the disaffected Youth of the time and
all those children at heart who see that the sanitized corporate conventionality of the
society they occupy when it came time to name the publication he settled almost immediately on Punk
I had heard the word used for a quarter of a century on every cop show he says after a
grueling chase scene they'd always tell the juvenile delinquent or young criminal what a
punk he was how he heard his parents you punk look what you've done everyone in America knew what a
punk was he was the bad guy the unrelenting young prick who made his parents cry and didn't care we
intended to turn around the word make it palatable even acceptable but no matter how hard we tried
Punk would always be a four-letter word it was as if we had put out a magazine called [ __ ]
it frightened me that the policemen in the shows could use that word but we couldn't
it was the perfect word for the moment it's derogatory unsavory Nature Made it exactly
what the people in the scene were looking for adopting it was a way of saying yeah I know
what you think of me and I'm proud of it proud to disgust you in your conventions yeah I'm a punk
a reclaimed word not unlike the word queer which was originally a slur but is now a proud
descriptor within the lgbtq plus community so strip away the fashion strip away the
drugs even strip away the defining music of the scene and this is punk the act of wearing your
disaffection as a badge of honor especially when it comes to the individual versus the institution
okay we have a working definition for Punk fabulous but what do people mean by attaching
that to words like Steam and splatter and afro and calling that their genre well that started
shortly after the term was popularized back in the 80s with the emergence of cyberpunk
we'll have to make a whole video on the history of cyberpunk as a genre sometime because it is
very interesting but I want to focus on that punk aspect here this was a genre emerging on
the heels of the new wave era of sci-fi the Golden Age was in the rear view The Shining
retrofuturist utopia's long since abandoned for pithier darker more challenging landscapes
in the eyes of some writers the future was metamorphosing from chrome spaceships to silicon
and drugs so that's what they started to put into their fiction high-tech low life some called it a
more honest cynical presaging of the world they sought to come a genre that pulled no punches
looking at what was likely to happen on the world's current technological trajectory instead
of just illustrating their shining unblemished hopes for it as so many writers had done before
William Gibson perhaps the best known author in the genre gave it the first real jolt of
electrochemistry that would send it careering off into the genre we know now with his beloved novel
Neuromancer but it was actually another writer who coined the term in 1983 Bruce Bethke published a
story called cyberpunk which played in the same sandbox as Neuromancer and why did Bethke choose
this word this adoption of the term Punk it was by his own admission his attempt to tap
into the Zeitgeist of the time to Target the disaffected Youth of that generation to marry
the Allure of emerging computer technology with the emerging discontent in the hearts of the kids
sounds familiar doesn't it a lot like why legs McNeil chose the term Punk for his magazine in the
first place despite the neon lights and fancy body modifications cyberpunk was an ugly thing full of
visceral sex and violence crumbling Urban jungles and smog choked Skies it was not pretty it was not
inviting it was a middle finger to sanitize media and perhaps for all of these reasons it was also
incredibly resonant Punk at its very core of course the name stuck and this convention the
appendage of punk began to catch on but there's a paradox in Punk when something adopted for the
purpose of making a punk statement I'm glad you don't approve becomes a convention it sort of
stops being Punk a gritty fashion statement a novel package for your story is not quite the
same thing as a genuine Pride that you aren't what the institutions around you expect you to be is it
steampunk is a genre is really interesting as well and phew we've been sleeping on making that
video for almost half a decade now but it's kind of hard to determine how exactly it is
punk what it means by that sure the people who are writing it when it emerged were being sort
of Counter Culture e in that they were a bunch of weird londinophiles writing anachronistic Bizarro
fiction about Victorian technology but as far as I can tell none of them were really doing it in
spite of anybody that wasn't part of the identity of the work in fact when he coined the term author
KW Jeter was just kind of being tongue-in-cheek riffing on the term cyberpunk I don't think he
really meant to say that this Gonzo historical fiction as he called it was Punk at all actually
I think he summed up the ethos behind his usage of the term really well in an introduction to his own
novel Infernal Devices creation and promotion of literary genres and sub-genres is nearly always
a matter of self-promotion writers are essentially telling readers hey look at me I'm doing something
new and different not like those slobs over there at the other end of the bookstore shelf or just
doing the same old thing my coining back in 1987 of the word steampunk originally might have been
more of a humorous jab at a tendency going around in those days of labeling any two genre writers
with more in common than bipedal locomotion as the insert word here punk movement so unlike cyberpunk
which was unmistakably Punk at its roots steampunk just came from a need for a Punchy term and punk
does have that punch as legs McNeil described it will always be a four-letter word in its own way
I think this describes a lot of the newer genre Punk categories steampunk decopunk diesel Punk
Stone Punk myth Punk on and on a descriptive word with hyphen Punk attached to indicate to the world
that this isn't like the other genres it's not just sci-fi or fantasy it's subversive and new and
okay I totally understand the desire to express that but as we've established that's not really
what the word Punk means don't mistake me here this isn't about gatekeeping I don't think any
genre becomes better or worse just because it can or can't properly be considered Punk but calling a
lot of these genres Punk feels like a loss to me like it's missing the point of both the working
question and the word itself if the beautiful thing about your work is that it isn't like others
then go call it something unlike others Gaslamp fantasy diesel tech romance prehistoric sci-fi
in these contexts the punk appendage describes so little about the work itself I genuinely believe
you're better off without I think for the most part a term like decopunk just gives an impression
of false gravitas leaves people scratching their head about what the word means Beyond just
involving art deco Aesthetics and I don't know aggression characters who happen to be punks Maybe
on the other hand there are examples of genre Punk that pull no punches where the punk comes
through at full force and leaves you dazed with its passionate frustration afropunk makes so
much sense as a punk genre because it speaks to a flawed and imbalanced institution and is happy
to look like too much to the people who would take issue with it splatter Punk 2 with all
those Clive barkers and Kath koja's happy to be reviled for the amount of red they paint into the
pages of their stories solar Punk is a revolt against the dystopian Prophecies of its dark
cousin cyberpunk unashamedly optimistic in a way that I'm sure many artists would consider naive
Punk is a powerful word with a powerful effect if used properly it can signal so much more than a
little genre subversiveness but okay what's done is done right many of these terms are established
steampunk has weight as a word and that's hard to argue with if it makes your work easier to
find I'm certainly not going to tell you not to use it even if the punk element gets a bit lost I
think the most important thing in all of this is seeing through the haze of content to the power
of this word that people have chosen to use for this purpose over and over again yes punk in a
colloquial sense can be a simple aesthetic it can be a Punchy word you attach to a noun to make sure
people know that your work should be thought of as kind of different from the others but it also has
a pretty incredible history this reclaimed piece of language that means such a specific thing that
identifies you as proud to be looked down on by the institutions you despise what a use of four
letters for artists some of the most introspective Divergent thinkers in the world it seems like a
pretty useful one of course what it means to be an artist is sort of changing isn't it with the
Advent of AI generated art it's becoming harder and harder for us creatives to understand our
place in the world it's honestly a little scary it can feel like the future of art is about to leave
you behind which is why I've been so fascinated lately with our sponsor brilliant.org for a robot
I'm not exactly what you would consider math or science oriented I spend all my time immersed in
fiction which is a fabulous education in its own way but I mean there is so much I've been missing
out on brilliant has been helping me to broaden my horizons I can always go to the site click
into a class pick up where I left off and take in a bite-sized piece of the fundamentals I've been
missing whether it's math science physics anything and everything stem brilliant has something for
you this computer science course has really opened up a new world to me that I had almost no idea was
there before slowly but surely as I educate myself in this way the AI Revolution isn't looking quite
so intimidating anymore it doesn't even feel like studying either a lot of what you do on brilliant
might be better classified as mini games look how interactive and fun these are this one even has
robots I won't lie I've historically struggled a lot with my maths and Sciences which I think
is something a lot of us creatives can relate to but because brilliant is so simple moves at
your pace and starts with the very fundamentals this is actually something that's really sticking
for me almost like a personal tutor or coach a legitimate accessible affordable easy education
and a way to keep ahead of the changing landscape so you don't get left behind and miss out on all
the new emerging ways to be creative and the best part you can start for free visit brilliant.org
tail Foundry or click the link in the description to get your first 30 days for free and as if that
weren't enough the first 200 hail Foundry fans to sign up for a yearly subscription
to brilliant will get a whole 20 off again visit brilliant.org Hale Foundry to get your first 30
days for free and 20 off a year subscription don't let something as simple as a lack of Education
hold you back try this out and be as brilliant as I know that you can be anyway that's all for
this one thanks for watching and keep making stuff up I'll see you next week bye [Music]
foreign
[Music]
foreign [Music]