ARE YOU SURE YOU ARE A PUNKER?

Sebuah tulisan polos-kategoris tentang 'pengguna' punk. Sebuah tugas pada mata kuliah Short Essay Writing.

Punk is popularly known as one of genre of music which has specific characteristic. This music is one of the branches of rock music. The beat of punk is usually dense. Its lyrics are critical and explicit. Musically, punk is a kind of music which is really simple because we usually only need to play three chords in the hole song. There are still other characteristic of punk music, but we are not going to talk about them further. However, punk is actually more than just music. Punk is a subculture emerged in Britain as a result of rebellion of working class. Punk phenomenon did not only influence music world, but also influencing fashion and life style. Before becoming popular, punk as the way of dressing used to be something strange and impolite. But nowadays, this way of dressing becomes popular. Even though, there is still big difference between popular and original way of punk-dressing. While punk as the way of dressing changes, punk life style does not. This life style of punk is not as popular as either punk music or fashion of punk. In Indonesia, punk nowadays becomes something popular. It is proven by the more music and fashion of punk which is applied by its teenagers. Considering this phenomenon, we can divide punkers into three biggest parts: ‘punk dresser’, punk musicians, and ‘punk life-styler’.

Punk dressers are those who usually dress like punkers although they have little or no knowledge about punk. Not only not knowing punk history, but worse: not knowing even punk music. Some of them consider the way they dress as ‘fashion only’. Thus, not all of them know how punk music is. Some of them even love melancholic music. For this kind of people, fashion of punk is separated to its music. However the way they dress is much more casual than punker used to be. As an addition, not all of the punk dressers not knowing anything about punk.

We also have punk musicians. These people usually concerned to play punk as the genre of them or their band. They know punk as music and it means they automatically know how to dress as punkers. Nevertheless, not all of them really understand the idea of punk, especially punk as the way to rebel. That is why many punk bands write popular lyrics which focuses on feeling or love. This is not how punkers used to write lyrics because punkers wrote about political, social or even critical global issues. Some bands deciding not to write punk lyrics as it used to be because they are not brave enough to take risk to be not as popular as other bands write popular lyrics.

The last category is ‘punk life-styler’. This is the hardest category of all because to be this category you must live with punk life style. One of it is living in the street. Even though most of this kind of punker do not play music, they know idea about punk well because they understand the idea of punk as the way to rebel, especially the way to rebel to society. If not, they might not want to live in the street with no permanent job, home, and clear prospect of life. Most people in society considering them as scum whereas those punkers might know many things about society better than the society itself. Not all of street punkers live in street in the whole of their life. Some stop and decide to do something better for the changes of society.

If you consider your self as a punker, you better consider which criteria you have and which punker you are. The real punker is actually they who know how to dress, how punk music is, and how punk lives. Above all, that knowledge is nothing if you do not understand any ideas about punk. So now, are you sure you are a punker?