Difficult Fun

Welcome to the first edition of Difficult Fun! Each month, SPIN will spotlight the best punk on the planet and discuss it here, with the ambition of challenging preconceived notions of what the four-letter word actually means and, ideally, entertaining readers in the process. Purists, piss off! Everyone else, enjoy. Enough has been written about what punk is and isn’t in the modern era, and to the point of hypocrisy: dead, alive, working-class, college-educated, anarchistic, nihilistic, nonconformist, fashionable, egg, chain, three chords, the truth (suck it, country—but not really, because that can be punk, too). There are no definitive musical histories, anyway, so surely there’s room for some fun and flexibility in the popular conception of the genre. Punk is punk, might as well embrace...