Punk turned 50 this year, and the anniversary pieces write themselves: mohawks, the Pistols, 1977, the death of the record industry. This piece doesn't do that. Instead, the Guardian went and asked the people who are actually playing punk right now — in Wuhan, in Riga, in Soweto, in Mumbai — what the form does for them. The answers are more interesting than any retrospective. The structural thing punk does, across every context here, is identical: it gives people who cannot access legitimate speech a form that doesn't require permission. Nao of Taqbir heard Crass at 13 in Morocco, performed anonymously with her face covered to avoid being recognised and hurt, then moved to Spain and was told she loved Satan for having unusual hair. Wu Wei founded SMZB in Wuhan in 1996, watched the Chinese authorities confiscate his albums and take his work offline, and now records bilingual albums in the UK while commuting back to Wuhan for rehearsals. Andriy Zholob of Beton covered London Calling as Kyiv Calling from a frontline surgery rotation in 2022, raising money for Ukrainian resistance. In each case, the form is the same; the enemy changes. What's striking about the South Africa and India accounts is how the genre's infrastructure — DIY venues, skate parks, online communities — functions as a shadow civic system. Twenty One Children's guitarist Thula built the first DIY skate park in Soweto. Punk on Toast participated in Mumbai's Cockroach protests. Abdula Skink was stopped by police in a historically white Johannesburg area for skating while wearing a Suicidal Tendencies T-shirt; the cop ripped it off him. His band's response was to document it and keep playing charity shows for orphanages. This is not rebellion as aesthetic — it is rebellion as municipal service. The Brazilian thread is the most historically resonant. Henrike Baliu's father was a naval engineer in Southampton in 1977 who walked into a record shop after seeing the Boomtown Rats on Top of the Pops and said 'give me everything you've got.' His daughter eventually discovered that under Brazil's military dictatorship in the 1980s, when people were disappearing and being murdered, kids in São Paulo were wearing fake leather jackets and playing with passion and fury. Bands like Ratos de Porão and Cólera did this with virtually zero news infrastructure and almost no resources. Baliu's Armada now records bilingual albums warning the next generation not to make the same mistake. The Latvian and Ukrainian stories are subtler. Evisa Petrovka of Depustūtes writes about wage inequality and gender norms in Latvian — she notes that singing in her own language makes local political commentary easier, which is a real formal insight about punk and vernacular specificity. Zholob plays two or three shows a month in Ukraine to rooms full of veterans with prosthetics who slam-dance and sing along. He describes it as 'a real moment of punk rock unity' and then says he likes to go to the mountains because sometimes he needs silence. That sentence is doing a lot of work. What this collection documents, without quite stating it, is that punk's 50-year durability comes from a formal property: low barrier to entry, high expressive ceiling. You need three chords, a PA, and something you're angry about. The form democratises speech in contexts where speech is expensive. That is not a nostalgic property. It is a live one, and every one of these bands is proof.
