Time to put an end to all the safety-pin nostalgia, says John Roderick:

Whenever I say publicly that punk rock is bullshit, I get two types of response. The first is the predictable sneer: “That’s the point!” “Punk rock knows it’s stupid, it’s trying to be stupid, it’s always been stupid.” “Punk is flaming dogshit in a bag!” This mentality accounts for the way punk rock infected us like an Andromeda strain, how it can simultaneously be an industry of cheap, mass-produced mall fashion for suburban “rebel” teen-moms and the governing aesthetic of the smartest middle-aged critics and most discerning skinny-pants fans of music and culture. We are in thrall to a fallacy of irrefutably circular logic: Punk rock only seems like a garbled, negative, ignorant, half-witted worldview because it’s actually an intentional indictment of a garbled, negative, ignorant, half-witted world.