At various times throughout history, music has reflected established culture, rejected the status quo, and created cultural phenomena that went far beyond melodies and lyrics. The folk music of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, represented a sea change in attitudes about everything from the Vietnam War to premarital sex. Rock ‘n’ roll was, at its heart, a rebellion against the staid and sedate post-World War II era. Heavy metal kicked music up a notch in the late 1960s and early 1970s with its emphasis on sound distortion, volume, and the central role of guitars and drums. These anti-establishment roots took hold and formed the foundation of punk rock’s popularity in the mid-1970s. Like the musical genres that came before it, punk rock generated a subculture and spawned several other sub-genres of music.
Today, punk rock T-shirts, Oi! gothic clothing, and emo bondage clothing are still widely worn, each reflecting the more encompassing punk rock attitude or the more specific sub-genre. Punk rock songs are characterized by bare instrumentation, hard-hitting lyrics with themes that are nihilistic or extremely political, and fast tempos. Punk rockers...