I recall quite clearly the summer evening in 1992 when the Clintons and the Gores took the stage to accept the Democratic nomination- dancing to Fleetwood Mac's 'Don't Stop'. I remember saying out loud 'This is it- this is the death of Rock & Roll.

Congratulations, you are officially an old fart.

This happened the moment you started feeling some particular musical genre or other cultural aspect no longer was legitimate because of some perceived sell out.

I'm only 30, but I've always been a big fan of late 70's - early 80's pop culture.

Are you sure it hasn't just gone to bed?

Yeah, maybe punk is just tired.

It's old. It needs to lie down for a nap every so often.

For those trying to keep up with terms:

Grognards hate new stuff because it's new and everything was better back in the day (because crap like Tarzan Boy isn't still on Golden Oldies stations)

Hipsters hate popular stuff because they use their tastes to feel unique. "I may be a faceless cog in the machine but my shirt has an internet meme and I listen to small bands you've never heard of."

Geeks have an enthusiasm for fandom (different flavors for different geeks, using "fandom" loosely), and notably want to share that enthusiasm with others. In contrast with hipsters, weird niche stuff is not a status symbol but rather a communication device. "Oh man look at this bug I found! It smells like burnt hair when threatened, isn't that cool?"

The Damned remain wonderful and have a spiffy new doco out...

OK, punk is dead.

But which punk?

Punk, the musical genre?

If there's one thing that punks could ever agree on, it was that they could never agree on which bands counted as "punk" or not. I remember being an overly-serious 14 year old twat and getting into actual screaming fights over whether or not "hardcore punk" was a sub-genre of punk or a separate genre of its own. (I mean, come on, it's right there in the name!) Just off the top of my head, by looking back over all the punk albums I've owned at some point, I can think of sloppy pub rock songs, intricately crafted pop gems, straight-up homages to 1950s rock and roll, songs that with slightly different production techniques could have been stadium rock anthems, really fast ska, really white reggae, a live recording with some mumbling followed by a free-jazz saxophone solo with some vague drums and bass behind it, thick, atonal slabs of feedback and profanity, and a guy who could basically make his guitar sound like it was vomiting. In terms of describing what a particular song might actually sound like (within the broader confines of the "rock" meta-genre), "punk" is as an amorphous and useless term as "metal".

Punk, the fashion trend?

Good riddance. 1977-era British punk fashion was all over the map: from kids who literally could't afford clothes that weren't held together by safety pins going "fuck you" and no longer taking pains to hide the safety pins, to rich kids who could afford leather jackets, to white suburban dorks being "shocking" by drawing swastikas on their tee-shirts. Early 80s American hardcore punk fashion was mostly just jeans and punk band tee-shirts rather than the jeans and non-punk band tee-shirts that everyone else was wearing. YouTube any old-school punk band's live performances and you'll find the number of Day-Glo mohawks and spiky leather jackets surprisingly low.

Punk, the philosophy?

Which fucking one!? I can name punk bands who espoused nearly every ideology (other than Reagan-era conservatism) under the sun, from Naziism to Communism, from lefty-hippie anarcho-socialism to "fuck society, let's murder people in the street" anarchism. Many hardcore bands in the mid- to late-80s flirted with or fully embraced Buddhism. I was good friends with a seriously Christian punk band in the early 90s. Punk bands ranged from the hyper-political, to bipartisan social commentary, to the militantly apolitical.

If there was one common thread that stretched across all of the loosely-aligned sub-generes and subcultures that added up to "punk", it was the spirit of DIY. Do It Yourself. Punk rejected the artificial boundary between artist and audience. You went to a punk show and you didn't come away thinking, "Fuck, those guys are so much cooler than me," you came away thinking, "Fuck, I could do that!" And then you did. The classic joke goes that only 50 people showed up at the first Sex Pistols show, but all 50 of them started bands. One of the earliest punk 'zines (amateur magazines crafted by people with nothing more than a passion for their subject and a pocket full of change for the Xerox machine) featured guitar chord diagrams with the caption, "Here's a chord. Here's two more. Now go start a band!"

That spirit lives on. It might not always be called "punk" anymore, and it might not always be related to music, but that spirit of "fuck you, I'll do it myself!" is still with us. It's why we have homebrewed beer. It's why we have open-source software. It's why we have the Internet and why after the Internet was largely taken over by money-grubbing douchebags we still have SE as an alternative to Facebook. Punk the genre, the style, and even the word may be a thing of the past, but punk's not dead.

All good points and well made. Speaking from the melancholy perch of my mid forties I would add that some of the best people I know around my age still carry quite a bit of the punk attitude in their hearts. People have got older and have left the money on the table rather than be cunts. Not many (and not me, to be honest) but some. Just to broaden the punk church a little can i add that Robert Smith appears to still have the ethos, even after all these years of being famous and rich and a bit mad. A recent interview with him sums it up pretty well in my view.

Punk's not dead. It just smells that way.