Punk Rock

Where I went to school in upstate New York there were a lot of kids into metal in the surrounding town and it was really kind of weird. It was like that town in Lost Boys that was filled with metal kids except Bill from Bill and Ted wasn't there. Århus in this same way seems to have a disproportionate amount of punk kids. I think I see more here on a daily basis than I ever did in New York (though New York has very much made the move to hipsters from punks).
I don't particularly think of this as a punk city. I don't see many posters for shows or anything and I guess I just assumed it was a fashion issue. However, I was looking through scans of old punk zines today and it seemed that 'scene reports' were often coming in from New York, London, and Denmark one of which is posted below.


There was also a zine called "No Arhus" which was produced in Mundelstrup which is a town maybe 20 minutes from the center of Århus as best I can guess. It was put out by a guy called Johnny Concrete which is a pretty awesome name, Danish or not. Here is a link to another page in a Danish zine presumably put out by the same person since the Denmark graphic is the same. What is interesting about this one is first that it is in English. This came out in 1985 and I guess I'm surprised English was as prevalent back then (though it was only 22 years ago). 1985 is also when punk as a whole kind of started to deteriorate and I wonder just how much of a scene there could still really be here so many years later, but what do I know. Second is one of the last sentences on the first page, "We have a pretty serious problem with skinheads here, especially in our town of Aarhus. And there are some problems with some German punx." I suppose I always thought of the skinhead thing having German origins but it never occurred to me (despite how obvious it may seem) that it would be prevalent in Denmark. I'm rather jaded by how quiet and clean the city is I'm afraid, and I bet I have a lot more to learn about it. Lesson learned!

This is unrelated but funny I thought. Check out this other scan of "The Hollywood Individual" and compare to modern day hipsters. Also: it looks a whole lot like me. Same earrings and everything. If I had Final Fantasy VII hair, this would be a pretty good portrait.