By 1976, rock and roll had become homework.
Twenty-minute solos. Concept albums about wizards. Orchestras on stage. Music made by professionals, for audiences. Your job was to clap.
Then a broke fanzine editor named Tony Moon had a blank page to fill. He drew three guitar chords in felt pen and wrote: "This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band."
That wasn't advice. That was an attack.
An attack on virtuosity as a velvet rope. On the idea that you audition for the right to make noise.
Fifty years later, software became homework too.
Four years of tuition. Then the bootcamp. Then leetcode. Then six interview rounds to prove you deserve to type. A decade of permission slips to build a to-do app.
Then the machine showed up with a felt pen.
This is a prompt. This is another. Now ship.
The gatekeepers will tell you it isn't real engineering. The critics said punk wasn't real music.
They were right. That was the point.
Punk didn't want a seat at their table. It flipped the table and played on the wreckage. Badly. On purpose. In public.
But don't romanticize the noise and skip the homework punk actually did. Crass pressed their own records and sold them at cost. Bands ran their own labels, their own venues, their own vans. Anger was the sound. Ownership was the strategy.
So run the model on your own box. The open ones, the ones a generation behind. A generation behind is still a guitar.
And know how this ends, because it always ends the same way. The safety pin goes on a runway. The rebellion gets a pricing page. Someone in a very nice office is designing the "punk tier" right now, annual billing, cancel anytime.
Let them.
They could sell the mohawk. They could never sell the basement. The crowded room, the photocopied zine, the kid watching who goes home and starts her own band. That part was never for sale, because it was never a product.
The Ramones were not asked for credentials. Nobody checked their references at CBGB.
Your code will be ugly. The Pistols were out of tune.
Play it loud anyway.