Its being revisited this week as Blink-182s Enema of the State turns 20.This time, we sift through the slush pile to pinpoint the 100 best pop punk bands of all time.
Go all the way back to the Sex Pistols and their theatrical rejection of mainstream culture, and youll find something thats a lot more reactionary than people give it credit for. Malcolm McLaren was a clothes designer who stumbled on a new product and found a new way to package it nothing revolutionary about that.) Sure, punk became a genuine movement with genuine ethics once bands like Crass and Black Flag and Fugazi came around, but the genre as a whole was never the antithesis of pop culture, no matter how many studs and safety pins it stuck in its thrift-store leather jacket. Whatever kind of scene flag youre so intent on waving, get it out of our faces right now. Pop punk is a legitimate (though admittedly very messy) subgenre that has birthed hundreds of bands since it first came into existence. Arriving 15 years or so after punks initial heyday, pop punk owes its existence to the changes that swept across America in the 1980s and necessitated a different kind of rebellion (or pseudo-rebellion, as it were). Malls sprouted across suburbia, skateboard culture gave jocks and weirdos a common reference point, and that capitalist sentiment that ran roughshod over everything in the Reagan era taught corporations the same lesson that McLaren had learned years earlier: Punk sells. ![]() Not every pop punk band participated in corporate culture, with some as adamant about maintaining their DIY ethics as Fugazi and the Dischord crew were in the 80s. Still, its impossible to divorce the genre entirely from its commodification. Is Operation Ivy a pop punk band, despite their obvious debt to ska (Yes, we suppose.) What about Bad Religion, who grew up in the suburbs but maintained close ties to hardcore throughout their long career (No, we guess.) The best we could do was come up with a sort of gut test: If the band seems more pop punk than anything else, they get to stay. This obviously led to a lot of tough cuts (and a lot of arguing), but rest assured that we dont consider Bad Religion the 101st best pop punk band ever.
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