All posts tagged: punk

“Pretty Ugly” resurrects the Lunachicks as Punk Rock’s most underrated revolutionaries

“Pretty Ugly” resurrects the Lunachicks as Punk Rock’s most underrated revolutionaries

Published by Sam Flores

The opening of the new documentary about the loud, hilarious and irreverent ’90’s band the Lunachicks features the same kinds of devices anyone who’s ever watched a music documentary will be familiar with: a shot of an audience, with accompanying excited murmurings, and then, voices making fearless assertions: “Everything was a challenge that needed to be conquered,” “We’re gonna, like, melt people’s fu*king faces off because they expected us to suck,” “We were literally out there with people throwing pint glasses at our heads and pulling their dicks out at us,” and then: “But we have a superpower when we’re together. And it was us against everybody. It was like us against the world.” You see the back of a leather jacket — if you’re a fan, you know it’s Theo Kogan, the band’s formidable lead singer — and you can see her shoulders square as though she’s girding herself for battle. And then there she is, bounding onstage at New York City’s Webster Hall in 2021, for a pair of reunion concerts that were …

Punk in the Park festival’s founder donated to Trump. Fans revolted

Punk in the Park festival’s founder donated to Trump. Fans revolted

Published by Sam Flores

Cameron Collins was sick of Joe Biden. The owner of concert promoter Brew Ha Ha Productions describes himself as a libertarian-leaning conservative who built his career in San Juan Capistrano. He’d kept his personal politics out of his popular SoCal events, like the ska fest OC Super Show and the nationally touring Punk in the Park fest, a staple for bands like Bad Religion and Pennywise. On May 30, 2024, Collins felt dismayed that then-President Biden had pursued reelection. In a fit of anger, he donated $225 to Donald Trump’s campaign. “It was just an impulsive thing,” Collins said in an interview. “Biden had said he was going to run again. I was like, nope. He’d said he wasn’t. It was more about that than anything. I don’t post anything political or talk about anything politically. I’ve never donated to anything like that before.” That donation proved fateful. After a small punk label discovered and decried Collins’ donation, the scene turned on him. Influential bands pulled out of his festivals or said they wouldn’t return. …

Best Harrington Jackets 2026: Preppy, Punk, and Ultra-Functional

Best Harrington Jackets 2026: Preppy, Punk, and Ultra-Functional

Published by Jenni Sidey

Few jackets have managed to cross as many style tribes—and decades—as the Harrington. In fact, if you were to enroll in Classic Menswear 101, the Harrington jacket would be a prerequisite. The transitional season staple—a favorite of Elvis, James Dean, Steve McQueen, and every member of The Clash—is constantly found across lookbooks and style Instagram accounts, because it does so many things so well. For one, it’s incredibly practical: Water-resistant, pocket-forward, lightly insulating, and ever-adaptable to the day’s conditions thanks to its full-zip and collar. But the almost-cropped length—and popped collar, if you so dare—is also a style swerve that makes every wearer feel one dose cooler than they did before. No wonder it’s been embraced over the decades by everyone from golfers to preppies to A-Listers and punks. The original Harrington—a Baracuta G9—is still available almost a century on from its release, and still excellent. But if you’re looking to broaden your horizons, today’s Harrington jackets aren’t resting on their laurels. Below, the standout versions worth adding to your rotation before the season’s over. …

Thomas Zipp, Visionary Artist With a Punk Sensibility, Has Died

Thomas Zipp, Visionary Artist With a Punk Sensibility, Has Died

Published by José Betancourt

Thomas Zipp, the German punk musician, painter, and installation artist with a relentlessly critical eye, has died. His gallery, Berlin’s Galerie Barbara Thumm, announced the news on social media, writing that he “passed away far too soon.” “Our thoughts and deepest sympathies are with his family,” the gallery added. “Dear Thomas Zipp, may you rest in peace.” With a zeal for immersion, Zipp reimagined site-specific art as a kind of psychological theater, filling gallery spaces worldwide with multilayered, scenographic installations. Populated by objects and emptied of people, these environments alluded to fields such as religion, medicine, politics, and history, but viewers were asked to make their own meaning from it all, with each encounter yielding a personal constellation.  Related Articles Handling such weighty concepts, a less deft hand might have lapsed into melodrama. Zipp, however, remained nimble, producing an oeuvre of bizarre institutional satires underpinned by the human compulsion to struggle and create—“the weirdness of mankind”, as he once described it. The same impulse carried him from an intended career in medicine into the wilds of …

This Perfect 2000s Album Just Turned 25

This Perfect 2000s Album Just Turned 25

Published by Jenni Sidey

This is an edition of the newsletter Pulling Weeds With Chris Black, in which the columnist weighs in on hot topics in culture. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday. One of the gifts (and curses) of getting older is celebrating the 20th or 25th anniversary of an album that never feels quite as old to you as it actually is. I’m 43, and this is happening to me constantly. Coming-of-age classics getting reissued in several colorful vinyl variants, tours where most band members look like shit but need the money, and my peers paying for meet-and-greets like 16-year-old girls rushing the barricade at a Gracie Abrams show. It’s weaponized nostalgia that targets adults with disposable income, pleased as punch to spend money on tickets, Ubers, overpriced hazy IPAs, and a babysitter in order to spend 3 hours reliving the 2-to-5-year period when they had fun, before the perils of real life set in, when a 401K was so far off it felt like a mirage. The latest artist celebrating a …

Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola on Their Shared Punk Ethos and What Really Happened After His Perry Ellis Grunge Collection

Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola on Their Shared Punk Ethos and What Really Happened After His Perry Ellis Grunge Collection

Published by Sam Flores

Marc, having followed your career and having seen the documentary, I would consider you to be quite a forward-looking person. What was it like to have to step back and do a kind of retrospective of your own career at this point? Coppola: I do consider you to be a forward-looking person—or present, right? Jacobs: I try to be. It wasn’t intentional, but seeing the movie, I realized, through this last process of the last show, how inspired and how excited I was by the past and how it does come up for me repeatedly in whatever my present is. It was great to see them, especially the ’90s, like the X-Girl show. Coppola: I hadn’t thought about that time, so it was fun to revisit. Jacobs: It just took me back to that moment, how different life was then, and there were no smartphones. Coppola: It was just kind of looser and you’d run into people. Jacobs: Just being reminded of those memories feels kind of nice. Marc, there’s a point in the documentary …

‘Edie Arnold is a Loser’ review: Imagine ‘Juno’ with punk rock and Catholic guilt

‘Edie Arnold is a Loser’ review: Imagine ‘Juno’ with punk rock and Catholic guilt

Published by skeptic

Film festivals are rich terrain for brilliant cinematic discoveries, and among the finest and funkiest finds of SXSW 2026 is Edie Arnold is a Loser. The feature directorial debut of Megan Rico and Kade Atwood, this coming-of-age comedy is as hilarious as it is chaotic and devilishly iconoclastic.  Like Juno, this fresh and funny film centers on a high school weirdo who treads an unconventional path to finding her bliss. Now, Edie Arnold (Adi Madden Cabrera) is not getting preggo out of wedlock. Sure, the scowling nuns at her all-girls Catholic school consider Edie an underachieving delinquent, but she doesn’t drink, and celibacy is practically the only extracurricular activity she’s succeeding at — though not by choice. Like her classmates, she lusts after the only boy in their orbit, altar boy Walter Boyd (Lucas Van Orden), described by Edie’s friends as “like Jesus’s hotter younger brother, who was too hot to die.” But to him, she’s invisible… until she haphazardly starts a punk band called The Nundead.  So begins a wild ride of self-discovery, friendship, …

Dakota Fanning and Jake Johnson on Their New “Punk Rock” Pic at SXSW

Dakota Fanning and Jake Johnson on Their New “Punk Rock” Pic at SXSW

Published by Daniella Wilson

When Jake Johnson and longtime collaborator Joe Swanberg decided to embark on another film together, they knew one thing right away: They did not want to do it in Chicago. “We wanted it to feel different and like we were growing up,” says Johnson, who first starred in Swanberg’s Windy City-set Drinking Buddies in 2013. The result is The Sun Never Sets, an Anchorage, Alaska, dramedy about a woman caught between her divorced-with-children boyfriend (Johnson) and an ex (Cory Michael Smith) who recently moved back to town. They eventually tapped Dakota Fanning for the lead role in what Johnson describes as Swanberg’s “most mature movie yet.” The two stars talk with THR about their new project, which will premiere as a sales title (UTA) at SXSW. What was the first conversation about this movie like? JAKE JOHNSON Joe called me up and said he had an idea based off his real life that could work for a movie. We started fleshing it out, and then my agent at UTA suggested Dakota, and we both freaked …

‘A lot of late 70s bands wore grey. But we were determined to have fun’: the return of the mega-influential Swell Maps after 46 years | Punk

‘A lot of late 70s bands wore grey. But we were determined to have fun’: the return of the mega-influential Swell Maps after 46 years | Punk

Published by Sam Flores

Swell Maps were a punk band, but only because that word meant something different when they started making records in 1977. It didn’t mean bands called Knuckleheadz or Gimp Fist; it meant unfettered freedom, curiosity rather than rage. Theirs was a music that wandered off in unexpected directions, where songs barely hung together before falling apart, punctuated by peculiar sounds made by whatever happened to be around. It was psychedelia and it was prog and it was krautrock, every bit as much as it was punk. Most of all, it was DIY. So Swell Maps’ descendants weren’t the kind to get sleeve tattoos and don leather. They, like Swell Maps, were nerds. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore described them as “part of my upbringing”. Stephen Malkmus noted that Pavement formed, more or less, as a tribute to Swell Maps and their kindred spirits Desperate Bicycles. Now add all the bands who have tried or still try to sound like Pavement or Sonic Youth, bands who may never have heard of Swell Maps. That’s how you map …

Vivienne Westwood continues punk legacy with dramatic Paris Fashion Week show

Vivienne Westwood continues punk legacy with dramatic Paris Fashion Week show

Published by Daniella Wilson

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Vivienne Westwood’s autumn/winter 2026 collection, unveiled during Paris Fashion Week, saw creative director Andreas Kronthaler deliver a theatrical display that continued the house’s legacy of deconstruction and norm-defying style. The runway was dominated by bold stockings, oversized headwear, and 1980s punk tailoring. Singer Chappell Roan joined fellow musicians Lola Young and Paris Jackson among the stars seated front row. Models emerged from dramatic lighting that cast long reflections across the floor, creating a stage-like atmosphere. Such theatricality remains a hallmark of the Westwood house, long known for challenging conventions of class, gender, and historical dress. Since the passing of founder Vivienne Westwood in 2022, Kronthaler, her longtime collaborator and husband, has continued to steer the brand, maintaining the rebellious elements that made Westwood one …