How I Grew Into Punk

kelcid self portrait punk portrait sketch

It started all the way back in high school.

Stick with me a second.

Throughout middle school I mostly listened to metal, so it wasn’t until high school that I began to branch out from that genre into others. High school, for instance, gave me a healthy appreciation of hip hop and alternative rock.

In high school the punk I heard was largely pop punk and whatever was popular at Hot Topic at the time – which was YellowCard, Blink 182, and Coheed & Cambria when I came on the scene.

However, I DID like the visual aesthetic of punk. One of my classmates, let’s call him Pete, was a hard core punk and drew album art for bands. Really grotesque stuff, like fat pimpled babies with extra limbs. That made me more aware of art outside of Disney and manga, that’s for sure.

I was intrigued. Eventually I hitched a ride to the Ohio Governor’s Youth Art Exhibition with one of the friends of Pete on a trip to Columbus (our work was in the first round of judging). Well he misread the directions and we ended up in Short North, the artsy district of the city. And there, we stopped at a magnificent record store, called (I shit you not) Magnolia Thunderpussy. Continue reading “How I Grew Into Punk”