Turning on the radio these days can be a bit confusing, thinking you tuned into the local modern rock station, and hearing a bizarre techno-like song. Similarly you are looking for some good old-fashioned gangsta rap, and you get this synth-heavy, beat that is a rendition of a Mozart piece, with someone rapping a cover of rock song from the early 1980s.

This has been the current trend in music over the past decade and a half. Bands are beginning to transcend genre borders in order to create a more dynamic sound. Terms like Alternative rock, techno, metal, and R&B are effectively dead. Only to be replaced by vague terms like, college rock, geek rock, or the very specific, house, hyphy, rap-metal.

I would also like to make a note here that emo is not and never has been a genre of music, all music is emotional otherwise it wouldn’t be considered music or art for that matter. It would be random sounds, emotion and feeling is what defines music as music.

This phenomenon really started with the creation of pop punk in the early to middle of the 1990s. Punk is defined as rock music that has very strong political overtones, and pop music is something that is meant for a very broad listening base to enjoy. Intrinsically these two types of music couldn’t possibly be related, punk music, as a rule had a very niche group of followers, and if it didn’t the band was believed to have sold out, and become a mainstream, or pop.

Suddenly this transition to mainstream was okay, punk began to get a wider following, with bands such as Blink-182, Sum 41 and the Offspring. This rift in punk music became the new norm, even though there are still bands that are considered traditional punk, pop punk was the start of the fragmentation of punk music. Eventually punk was broken down into other genres, like the mislabeled emo-which really can be considered a multitude of things; thrash, hardcore, and the other musical misnomer screamo.

This trend of punk rock music being fused with other music has also created folk-punk. Bands like the Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly, managed to produce a type of music that consists of traditional Irish, folk themes, with that hard edgy punk sound to create something new, yet it cannot be easily called, folk music or punk rock.

If I can be so bold, I will go as far as saying that some hip hop artists have even created a form of punk, hip hop. Most of it coming from the underground rap scene, but even a few mainstream rappers have managed to incorporate a strong political message within their music, harkening back to the days of the Clash, Sex Pistols and more modern bands like Minor Threat and Bad Religion.

Punk also began to be associated with alternative, which I will cover in a different piece, because of the sheer magnitude of the changes there.

Punk as a genre still exists but it isn’t as concrete as it used to be, and this is just one genre that has been blurred past recognition. Now when people say they listen to punk, you have to take it with a grain of salt, because punk can mean anything.