The incorrigible punk rock kid of the new millennium is vastly different from that of the old – millennium, that is – although I have little working knowledge of the old. Just a hunch. I know the new though: the dyed black hair, the black plastic rimmed glasses, the girl who you can’t pick out in a group of guys – or vice versa – the awkward limbs, the ear gauges, the de-gauged earlobes hanging like a tit sucked dry. (“There’s so much more to it man, you just don’t get it.”) I can’t not get it. We all get it.

There’s an evolution that occurs in the life of a punk rock kid. Not every kid makes it up the entire ladder, but those who do follow a specified path with little variance. I watched the evolution of a punk rock kid in growing fascination, then fell into the cycle as well. We both came out the other side: she who I watched, and I, the once proud-to-be-unique teenager. Nothing is more unique as a teenager than to be unique like a bunch of people you are curious about. This is a record of the process through which punk rock kids go, if not everywhere, then in the dense state of New Jersey.

Starting off with emo, she said she was straight edge. She was younger than me, looking for a group to join in high school, and she’d happened to date a kid who was in a punk rock band. Thus, her entrance exams passed, she went to the shows, collected the ideals, and hung them up for us all to see. She drew “sXe” all over her notebooks and wouldn’t even drink caffeine for months. (“Sexy, sexy. You’re not sexy.”) Straight edge means no drinking, no drugs, and no promiscuous sex. (“Emphasis on promiscuous.”) Holidays came and went with her refusal to join in our round of Diet Coke until she moved up a rung and aged a bit. Straight-edge only works for underage kids, a convenient excuse, perhaps, for not breaking drinking laws, or a way to be unique. Once 21 hits, I watched her drink every night and gorge on caffeine pills during college finals. (“Good thing you didn’t get that straight-edge tattoo, huh?”)

In emo punk the lead singers whined about the girls that chose a football player over them and their wide, tear-brimmed eyes. The bands all sounded the same to me, their nasal voices moaning to three chord guitar riffs and intermediate drumming. She went to shows with her new, greasy-haired friends and brought back new bands that she played at full volume in her room. Eventually I could make out one moan from another and even grew to like a slow song here and there, but her mix CDs were all written in the hands of boys, and the emo ended before I could indulge.

She moved on to ppp punk, the bands that were just beginning to get play on television and rock radio. I suppose this happened somewhat at the same time as emo as they overlap to a certain degree, but it was a vague progression nonetheless. This rung of the ladder ended when I heard “Sellout!” shouted at the television screen. I tried to get a definition, wondering how my bands fit into this new category. If they change their music to get more money, that’s a sellout, she explained. (“How am I supposed to find bands that aren’t sellouts then?”) After condemning all the music she’d been through thus far, she started listening to real punk, the music influenced by old-school groups from the 70’s who created the genre. There were modern bands that mimicked the old school style, as though bringing validity to the resurgence of the sound. She downloaded these bands and clogged up the computer with MP3s before burning them onto white disks marked with Sharpies.

I wasn’t sure how the progression advanced so quickly after that, but I soon heard screaming from her room. (“Doesn’t that hurt their throats? How do they sing like that?”) Screamo, hardcore, this music shook the house and woke everyone on Saturday mornings. With this peak in music evolution she wrote only in black, jammed gauges into her ears and pierced loose skin across her body. Show after show, her CD rack grew cramped and bloated, and the collection of boys in her life added up with each new band.

One night she invited me to go along with her to a local show. Her friend was playing in one of the bands, but instead of bringing just me along, two boys piled into the back of her car and I sighed and stared out the passenger window. She spoke to them through the rear-view mirror and we got lost in towns we only knew through a computer printout in my hands.

The local show was in a small “café” between two condemned buildings. Pot smoke reached through the air and pulled at us, grappling with cigarette smoke and sweating teenage bodies. The lights were dim. Lining the walls were couches that looked like they once sat in the front of a neighborhood house waiting for the garbage truck to come. Kids dressed in black and three stud belts sucked each other’s faces and necks or groped within the black tapestry. On the left, band tables sold stickers, pins, patches, t-shirts, and CDs. We went into the room adjacent to this one and the stage faced him. A window in the back sold drinks and junk food for double the price of what they should be. This room was almost completely black, and the bands were jumping around stage, swinging the microphones, screaming their lyrics. Every band seemed incapable of melodic rhythm. Facing everyone’s backs, I was unsure of what to do with my hands and wished I had worn a black band t-shirt.

The band that had played when we walked in finished their set and the lead singer held the microphone to his lips. They thanked some guy from Philly for putting them up last night and said they didn’t have anywhere to stay on their tour. If anyone wanted to lend them a floor, they’d be grateful.

She decided her floor was good as any and invited them back to her house. (”Mom’s gonna kill you.”) Their van pulled up at one in the morning. I sat on the counter, my hands under my legs while listening to them talk. The band recounted the months they spent playing Warped Tour and said they personally knew all of her favorite bands. Apparently they’re all great guys. Her mom came down and flirted nonstop and made them pancakes in the morning.

With nowhere to go in her punk rock evolution, she threw away the old stuff and only kept the hardest punk rock she knew of, music that was more metal than punk. She then took a great, nearly unfathomable leap to rap and hip hop that boxed my ears and made me dizzy. She had come out the other side, dove off the punk rock ladder into an oblivion I cared not to imagine.

As she fell away from the music, I jumped onto the punk rock ladder and climbed the rungs in the same order as she had, only faster. Soon I looked away from her because I saw what she had once been in my own mirror. I look back fondly on the time I spent evolving in the punk rock world, but my ear gauges were pink and I was destined to climb back down the ladder once I reached the top. I could never throw myself from the ledge, but silently retraced my steps with ears covered, and picked up the sellouts I had known as a kid.

I took up skateboarding, flipping the board under my feet on the grass until she shook her head at me and told me to practice on rocks. I left old-school CDs on my passenger seat just in case someone walking by looked in. Those CDs would attest to how legitimate I was, even though I hated the bands and had borrowed them from her. The skateboard sat in the backseat, underside up, to evoke the same illusion. I wore the band shirts, I bragged about the shows I saw until I realized what I was doing. Then I saw other do it, everyone else do it, and started crawling back the way I had come.

This world became so jumbled and nauseating in the span of months: throaty screams overtaking musicality, even though that’s not what punk rock was about in the first place. Sellouts overtook the market so that the bands that stuck with me threatened to dethrone themselves from the platform I erected just for them. Even though I had proved myself a poser, one hardcore show gave me a feel for what punk was all about. The band sang for the country, sang for what they believed in, sang about their hatred of the government, and a hundred other things I barely made out as the singer pounded his voice to the tempo of the instruments stomping behind him. The air felt like it had blown off boiling water. Everyone in the pit lifted up their fists and the lead singer held the microphone above their raised faces. Afterward I walked outside into the streets of Philadelphia. The cold air felt like an inflated balloon in my lungs, and I felt as though I had just been born. It was only ten o’clock, but the darkness was as thick as the ringing in my ears. All the pushing in the pit left my arms achy and I loathed the thought of driving home. But on the way, my friend and I discussed war, politics, government, and the coming election, things hardcore kids do. We agreed on everything except who to vote for, then agreed that there’s little hope for America, but damn that show was sweet.