In the 1970s, punk rock was a brash interloper into popular culture. The genre's self-image was wrapped aroudn not just questioning authority, but mocking it. It played a role - an often overrated one, but a role - in helping define how the 1980s, and the GenX generation that the decade spawned, turned out.
The flap at Glastonbury last week showed how sclerotic the genre has become.
But we'll come back to that. First, let's talk free speech:
Robert Samuelson, writing a decade ago in the WaPo, said:
Free speech is not speech you agree with, uttered by someone you admire. It’s speech that you find stupid, selfish, dangerous, uninformed or threatening, spoken and sponsored by someone you despise, fear or ridicule. Free speech is unpopular, contentious and sometimes ugly. It reflects a tolerance for differences. If everyone agreed on all things, we wouldn’t need it
In the interest of defending free speech, I'll pile on: "Bob Vylan's" antisemitic outburst at the Glastonbury festival last week was, indeed, stupid, selfish, dangerous, uninformed, ugly, and in a society as full of deranged people with dubious senses of consequences and who worship the likes of Luigi Mangione, a definite threat; be advised, I don't "fear" the group; if my ridicule isn't clear in context, I'll clear that up soon.
For those who've not seen it, I'll plug my nose and give the group a smidgen of the publicity they seek, one last time:
“Death, death to the IDF” chanted from the stage by Bob Vylan in front of 200k people at @glastonbury.
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) June 28, 2025
Tens of thousands singing happily along.
This is coming to NYC #ZohranForMayor pic.twitter.com/t6vtHVhNQa
Speaking of ridicule - let's go back to talking about punk. I've been a musician in one form or another most of my life. I've done a little bit of everything, from playing cello to guitar in punk bands to a slightly incongruous stretch as a rap DJ. Which I say to set up my belief that there are few expressions of free speech quite as useless as popular music critics. Not all of them, of course - just the tens of thousands who ruin it for the few good ones by swerving themselves and their dim cognitive skills into social criticism:
Bob Vylan didn’t just play Glastonbury 2025—they detonated it. The London punk-rap duo took the West Holts Stage by storm in a set that fused fury, rhythm, and radical politics into one of the most talked-about performances in the festival’s recent history. Known for their unapologetic activism and explosive genre-crossing sound, Bobby and Bobbie Vylan gave the Glastonbury crowd a show they’ll never forget—and one that’s currently echoing far beyond the festival grounds.
As the beat dropped and the mosh pits erupted, frontman Bobby Vylan grabbed the mic not just to perform, but to provoke. Against a backdrop of distorted riffs and breakneck drumming, he led the audience in chants of “Free, free Palestine,” quickly escalating into the now-infamous “Death, death to the IDF!” Projected visuals referenced the UN’s labeling of the Gaza conflict as genocide and took direct aim at media outlets, particularly the BBC, accusing them of minimizing atrocities. A Palestinian flag fluttered behind the band, making it clear that this wasn’t just a concert—it was a statement.
Yep. It was a statement, all right.
And statements are certainly not without consequences: while the Mangione Army and the Mamdani voter base may be intrigued by the Brit duo, they won't be slaking their demand live; as Ed noted, the State Department took a dim view of the performance, revoking the visas for the group's 20-date US tour.
Free speech: I'll defend Bob Vylan's right to it. And to its consequences.
But how about the environment from which it springs; not just "punk", or at least the febrile, inbred thing that punk as evolved into over the past fifty years?
Let's talk about festival culture. Daniel Jupp at The Conservative Woman, noting that Glastonbury has become more like "Davos for the rich hippies and hypocrites", adds:
Tickets to Glastonbury are, for many ordinary people, eye-wateringly expensive. I can take my family of four on a week-long cheap holiday for the same price as a single Glasto ticket. Once you add in travel costs and the money spent on booze and drugs, the people who attend Glastonbury are overwhelmingly of a middle-class and affluent background. If working-class people sneak in, it’s primarily the kind of ‘working class’ who also have large disposable incomes to waste on two or three days of self-indulgence. In other words, drug dealers and other criminals who service the needs of the other festival attendees.
But this doesn’t get to the heart of the social problem Glasto represents, and some strange similarities are evident in other Western nations.
Look at the districts of New York that voted for and against Zohran Mamdani in the Democrat primary for New York Mayor and you see the same phenomenon displayed at Glastonbury. All the poorer New York districts, the still working-class ones, voted for other candidates. All the very richest districts voted for Mamdani. He of course is a very recently naturalised immigrant who is also a Jew-hating Communist, although plenty of leftist New York Jews are so heavily indoctrinated that they voted for him.
What happened in Glastonbury is a trailing edge behind things that've been happening at Ivy League schools, in the streets of Europe, and ultimately in the New York Democratic Primary last week.
"Punk" doesn't mock the "establishment", especially the white progressive establishment that controls academia, the NGO/Industrial complex and much of left-wing politics. It now reflects them.
