i never usually post anything anywhere for Throwback Thursday. i’m usually too lazy to dig something up. or if i see something perfect, i usually forget that i found it by the time it’s Thursday again. (there’s a constant pop-pop-popping in my head as the brain cells expire, these days.) but, when this came across my email (thanks, Digg) sometime in the past week or so, i threw those tired old brain cells the bird and promised myself to do something with it.
this here, my friends, is a 1977 handbook on How to Look Punk. it features none other than Belinda Carlisle (yes, that Belinda Carlisle) on the cover. it includes gems like “symbolize with saftey pins.” and, yes y’all, it is fabulous.
growing up in NoVa as an angsty teenager in the mid-late 1980s, this totally hits home. while i kind of spanned social circles as a highschooler, one of my main crews was the “alternative crowd,” which consisted of the punk and new wave kids. many of these guys were way into the DC hardcore scene, which was pretty epic at that time, birthing bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat. i might have gone to a handful of shows, but the music wasn’t really my thing. and though i never sported (m)any of them myself, these looks were all around. for the kids i knew, it was way less contrived than putting together a look from a teen magazine. it was about the music and the scene and making art and rebelling against the man and . . . seriously, if you ever got caught dead doing anything but garishly mocking something like this, you’d forever be labeled a total poser.
this is total gold, y’all. i promise. do check it out. and God Save the Queen!