Feels good [getting older], every year that goes by I give a shit about less and less. Gray hair is the new green hair.

—Ecksist, “How’s it going older punks?” on Reddit

With its well-known slogan of No Future, made popular by the Sex Pistols’ song “God Save the Queen,” punk envisaged both an end and a beginning. Punk was a reaction, but it was also something proactive. Beneath the apocalyptic shadow of the Cold War—emerging in the United States and United Kingdom across the mid-1970s—punk manifested not just in music but also in artwork, performance, fashion styles, and writing. Today protest targets mostly threats like ecological disaster, a widespread turn toward fascism, and financial austerity. Equally, punk’s urge toward self-creation and autonomy lent itself to a politics of anti-racism, women’s rights, and sexual liberation. Though punk could also appear reactionary (conservative, even), it embraced the deviant and the dispossessed; the prevailing tendency was to be yourself, as in the 1970s Sex Pistols’ song “I Wanna Be Me.”

No wonder, then, that punk has been repeatedly described as a radical youth culture. Often, such an attitude channeled a youthful desire to live in the moment, like in the popular slogan Live Fast and Die Young. But while rebellion is generally linked to adolescence and young adulthood—Sigmund and then Anna Freud, for instance, wrote about it as a psychological precondition for growing up—punk, by contrast, has become embedded in a larger ethos of protest and opposition.

In fact, Matthew Worley, whose history of British punk No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) urged “historians to take youth and youth culture seriously,” defined punk not through its youth but through its practice: a “cultural process of critical engagement” that—in its multiple manifestations—was based on four central tenets: “a stated opposition to a perceived status quo; a disregard for symbols of authority and established hierarchies; claims to provide a voice for the marginalized or disaffected; an emphasis on self-sufficiency.” Punk may indeed be read as “a cult of youthful exuberance,” to quote George Grinnell, within which negation—and, at times, nihilism—may be conjured from angry disaffection. Then again, the notion of a future could not fail to remain. “Cast in the shadow of potential nuclear war, punk-informed responses were sometimes as ugly as the dystopias they envisaged. By engaging, however, they signalled both warnings and alternative possibilities. ‘We’re the future, your future.’”

What happens, after all, when the notion of No Future becomes interwoven with one’s own shrinking biographical horizon?

What happens to the No Future ethos once (former or present) punks get older? This is one question elaborated by the authors of the recently published volume Punk, Ageing and Time, edited by Laura Way and Matt Grimes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). The book contains 13 chapters, including an introduction by the two editors. The authors deal on the one hand with the future of punk itself, a culture that maintains despite media disinterest in its contemporary formulations. More to the point, Way and Grimes vehemently deny the “youth-centric master narrative of popular music subcultures, [… that] dismissed the potential that subculturalists have for utilising those youthful experiences as a component of post-youth forms of identity.” They also reject the punk’s reduction to tired nostalgia, the endless reliving of—and relistening to—the tropes and sounds of a lost youth.

On the other hand, Way and Grimes recognise that any continuity of a punk identity means negotiation and reevaluation of such life events as parenthood, work, illness, and so on. A punk identity needs to retain a link to perceived core values (to a DIY ethos, to questioning and challenging), even as the sartorial motifs and youthful energy of punk may fade, dissolve, and dilute over time. “Ageist cultural pressures are powerful, and while they can be disrupted, it isn’t straightforward,” explains Alison Willmott in her chapter analyzing how her female punk interviewees resist aging stereotypes. “The result is often a time-consuming inner narrative, whereby exhortations to be ‘age-appropriate’ and exhortations to ‘resist conformity’ or ‘be individual’ are pitted against each other.” Indeed, many chapters of Punk, Ageing and Time examine such continuities with the past: appearances, attitudes, values, and whose voices matter for a history of punk.

But though the book keeps the past firmly in focus, less is said about its aging subjects’ change in their stances toward the future. What happens, after all, when the notion of No Future becomes interwoven with one’s own shrinking biographical horizon?

There is, of course, an implicit preoccupation with the future within any analysis that recognizes continuities with the past. “Ageing is an unspoken context,” admits Grinnell, “evident primarily in how these authors remain attached to a social experiment called punk, taking the time and effort to document it and shaping what it can yet become for the future” (emphasis added). More specifically, Grinnell explains that aging also means taking care of the future: “punk is not juvenile anymore. But its maturity is inconsistent … ageing in punk is not just a personal experience; it is a social experience that involves taking responsibility … bringing it closer to many of its stated goals of equality by realizing what it takes to actually transform relations of domination.”

To get older while tied to a punk identity is therefore complex. It necessitates a dialogue with younger selves and negotiations of cultural—and political—meaning. Several times in the book, punk temporalities are described as “strange” and “messy.” Aging, youth, past, present, and future get mingled:

The strange temporality of punk is evident in other ways too, such as the digital mediums in which recordings and zines from another time and place live on in all sorts of unpredictable ways. … To speak about Gonzales as an older punk hardly makes any sense when one can listen to her perpetually youthful drumming on any Spitboy record. … What kind of magical transformation of the past is this?

Thus, the No Future slogan of the late 1970s, according to Owen Morawitz in his chapter (which draws on Franco Berardi and Mark Fisher) captured a major change: namely, that the very perception of “future” was being reassembled via “a mood of grim resignation … a lack of the status quo to change or improve in any meaningful way.”

And yet, this kind of inertia and despair also offers an opportunity. The disruptive creativity of punk, according to Morawitz, offers “vast potential and an unknown future trajectory, a movement that must embrace communal solidarity and the infinite realities of lost futures.”

Ultimately, No Future doesn’t have to mean there is no future. For their part, the anarchist band Crass always insisted that they saw Johnny Rotten’s use of that slogan not as an indictment but rather as a challenge. To recognize, individually and collectively, that things are unfair, a mess, corrupted, defective does not denote an end only. Rather, that recognition brings the present and the future into sharp relief. Because even if there is no future, that prompts an inevitable question (to quote a Small Faces song that the Sex Pistols used to cover): “Whatcha gonna do about it?”