taqbir
The Best Punk of 2021
Welcome to the latest 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. There was hope at the beginning of 2021, and then there was a slap in the face. We have languished; we have endured an ever-mutating and unforgiving plague; we have survived insurrections from domestic terrorists; the Gulf of Mexico caught on fire. I’d say humanity has proven resilient over the course of the last 12 months, but that’s a word utilized to cast meaning on the meaningless, to make suffering some patriotic endeavor. You could call Sex Pistols’ “No Future” a revelan...
Difficult Fun: June 2021’s Best New Punk
Welcome to the third 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. This is a column concerned with contemporary sounds, which means it is ultimately a column about the ways in which music is shaped by the current moment. (Consider this your disclaimer. Skip below to the hot tracks if your brain has smoothed over the last 15 months.) Lately, there’s an obsession with returning to “normalcy” in America: bars, clubs, restaurants, and stores are slowly beginning to reopen, which means “normalcy” is tethered to capital; the idea that the only way t...
