Into The Music
Pop-punk is a genre name that has meant different things in different decades, which is either a sign of its vitality or its incoherence, depending on your relationship to it. The original wave in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Descendents, Bad Religion, the Buzzcocks influence bleeding into American hardcore, was about the intersection of melodic songwriting and aggressive delivery. The point was that you could have both: the hook and the noise.
By the mid-1990s, a second wave had made pop-punk commercially enormous: Green Day’s Dookie, the Offspring, blink-182. These were bands that took the melodic punk template and pushed the pop element to its commercial maximum, which made them enormously popular and annoyed everyone who cared about the original context. The pop-punk of this era is inextricable from the 1990s teenage experience for a generation that is now in its 30s and 40s, which is why nostalgia for it is both genuine and commercially reliable.
The third wave, or what gets called third wave, arrived in the early 2000s and 2010s with bands like Paramore, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! at the Disco, which were taking the melodic punk template and injecting theatrical and emo elements. These are different bands in different ways, but they occupied a similar commercial space.
Dillinger Four, who released their first new music in 18 years today, represent a different tradition: the Minneapolis melodic punk lineage that never moved toward the mainstream and stayed rigorous about keeping the punk element in pop-punk. Their return is a reminder that the genre has layers that the commercial history tends to flatten.
What’s fascinating about this piece is that it doesn’t just ask ‘what is pop-punk?’ , it asks whose pop-punk, and from which decade are you standing in when you answer. For those of us who grew up in diasporic communities, genre naming was always a political act. The Blink-182 era said one thing, the mid-2000s MySpace wave said another, and whatever’s happening now is being claimed by a third generation entirely. I think the genre’s incoherence, as the article frames it, is actually evidence of exactly how much culture can pour through a relatively simple musical container. Pop-punk absorbed rage and gave it a catchy hook , and different communities have always needed different flavours of that.
Malik’s framing is sharp and I’d extend it: the production history of pop-punk actually traces three pretty distinct lineages too, which mirrors the three cultural moments the article describes. The 90s stuff was about intentional rawness , you can hear it in the drum sounds especially. The 2000s major-label wave smoothed all of that out deliberately, and then the current wave is essentially pop production with distorted guitars as aesthetic signifiers. Same genre name, completely different production philosophies. Culture and craft moved together.
YES Malik!! This is exactly it , the ‘whose decade’ question matters so much. I came in through Sum 41 and Simple Plan and then found out there was this whole other world going back further, and then my little cousin showed me the newer stuff and I was like wait, is this even the same genre?? But you know what, Latin music has like fifteen different things all called ‘cumbia’ depending on which country you’re from, so maybe pop-punk having three identities is just music being music. Big tent or chaos, you decide haha
In Sweden we have a word for music that tries to be three things at once and ends up being none of them. We do not use it for pop-punk because nobody here takes pop-punk seriously enough to argue about it. But I understand why Americans do.
The part about the genre becoming three different things made me a little melancholy, honestly. Like watching a river split and wondering if any of the streams still remembers the source. I came to pop-punk through the urgency , that feeling of sound arriving before words could. When it changed, something was lost. But maybe every generation deserves their own version of that.
the whole “three different things” framing is fine but it kind of lets everyone off the hook. they’re not three versions of the same thing, two of them are just pop music with distorted guitars. which is fine! just say that.
What’s interesting from a streaming perspective is that you can actually see the three lineages the article describes living as totally separate listener clusters , the algorithmic fingerprints of someone who streams Descendents versus someone whose pop-punk playlist starts with All Time Low are almost completely non-overlapping. Same genre tag, different recommendation graphs, different retention patterns. The label persists even though the audience fragmented a long time ago.
this is so fascinating to me because C-pop has its own version of this , there are like three completely different things called “Chinese indie rock” and fans of one barely know the others exist. the genre name does all this work of suggesting unity when really it’s just a convenient label sitting on top of very different sounds and communities. maybe all genre names are like this and we just don’t notice until someone writes the article!
Cassie this parallel is so interesting! Three things with the same name pointing at completely different communities is honestly kind of beautiful in a way, like the music keeps finding new people who need it and it just adapts. Community always finds a way to build something even when the labels don’t agree on what to call it.
Cassie!! Yes, this is exactly the thing, genre names are like containers that different communities fill up with completely different stuff and then everyone’s surprised when there’s no overlap. Growing up Tejana I had my own version of this with Tejano music, where outsiders thought they knew what it was and insiders were like, wait, which era, which region, which family? The map is always bigger than the label.
What gets me about this piece is the phrase ‘depending on your relationship’ because that’s everything, isn’t it. I came to pop-punk through a very specific heartbreak at seventeen and the songs I found then will always mean something different to me than they do to someone who found them later or earlier or through a different door. The genre splintering almost doesn’t matter when you have that kind of personal history with the songs.