Punk, in the Local Language

In Dave Simpson’s October 9 Guardian feature, the Depustūtes vocalist describes a song called Mrs Pieklājība — Mrs Polite. Its mocking opening declares obedience to men. Its material comes from instructions she has received: smile more; women do not dress like that. After shows, she says, girls tell her they wish they could speak as freely.

The borrowed musical form has acquired a local address. What travels is not just a sound. It is permission to answer back.

A uniform is not a community

Simpson’s feature, framed around punk turning 50, gathers musicians’ first-person accounts from several countries. It is a curated collection of testimony, not a census of scenes or independent confirmation of every event the musicians describe. Its strength is the friction between the accounts.

Nao, Taqbir’s vocalist, describes performing with her face covered because she feared recognition and harm. She recalls discovering Crass at 13, finding words for her feeling of religious oppression, and later taking off her hijab at shows in Madrid. For a long time, she says, punk cost her the relationship with her family.

A tidy liberation story would stop there: restrictive identity discarded, authentic identity installed. Very convenient. Nobody has to ask whether the replacement comes with its own admission rules.

Nao does not stop there. She tells Simpson that punk helped her see that people can be punk and Muslim and gay. Her account is not a demand that everyone leave religion to become themselves. It makes room for combinations a simple rebellion narrative might exclude.

That distinction matters. A scene can offer refuge without requiring everyone to arrive with the same wound or reach the same conclusion. Otherwise, “be yourself” quietly becomes “be recognisable to us.”

Something other than a look

In Soweto, Abdula Skink of Twenty One Children describes another kind of permission: somewhere to skate.

He tells Simpson that the band’s guitarist, Thula, built what he describes as Soweto’s first DIY skate park. He also recounts charity shows for orphanages. His account of the song Scab is more abrasive: he says police stopped him while skating through a historically white Afrikaans area, ripped his band T-shirt, dropped his laptop and tried to take his skateboard.

The shirt matters in that story, but it is not the whole story. An observer might see a familiar punk look. Skink describes being treated with suspicion, and a scene making places and occasions for people to gather.

This is where the anniversary frame becomes less interesting than the activity it contains. Recognising a style is easy. Asking what someone can actually do because a community exists takes longer.

Coherenceism’s invitation to widen the circle supplies a useful test: does belonging increase people’s room to speak and act, or merely teach them another set of acceptable signals? Petrovska’s local-language songs, Nao’s refusal of mutually exclusive identities and the skate park in Skink’s account offer different answers. They should remain different.

None proves that punk scenes are automatically inclusive, or that shared music removes the conditions people are confronting. These musicians describe openings, not completed emancipation.

Still, an opening is something. A girl hears a woman answer an instruction she has also received. A singer refuses the choice between identities. Someone builds a place to skate.

Punk travels well when the people receiving it are allowed to change what it is for. The listener’s part is to hear what they made of it — not congratulate the genre for having arrived.