For all its scholarly rigor, the history of punk is often far too earnest for its own good. It tends to miss the movement’s greatest strength: its sense of humor, gleeful anarchy, and refusal to take itself too seriously. A look back at how teen magazines once portrayed colorful hair, leather jackets, and safety pins offers the perfect antidote to that reverence. A quick check in at a world of punk-themed photo love stories, read with a lot of wink emojis.
Back in the analog days of the late 1970s and early 1980s, magazines played a crucial role in spreading punk. If the battle cry from London—London Calling, quite literally—was going to make it across the English Channel, radio and television could only do so much. Print magazines did the rest. Publishers eagerly embraced punk’s loud, visual appeal. Bright hair! Torn clothes! Leather jackets! Safety pins! It looked fantastic on a magazine page. Understanding what any of it actually meant, however, was another matter entirely. Many newspapers saw only the outrageous gestures and bizarre fashion, with little clue how to interpret them. The accompanying music? Mostly just an unpleasant racket. As a result, punk’s reputation as respectable society’s favorite bogeyman wasn’t forged only in teachers’ lounges or at PTA meetings. Sensational headlines in major publications like Stern and Bild happily amplified the panic.
Teen magazines, however, took a different approach. Publications such as Bravo, Popcorn, and Pop Rocky sensed that punk wasn’t simply something to warn readers about—it was something readers might actually find exciting. Their understanding of the scene wasn’t necessarily any deeper than that of the mainstream press, but they approached it with considerably more enthusiasm. Looking back today, their coverage is a glorious treasure trove of oddities, misunderstandings, and unintentionally hilarious prose.
One of the most famous and unexpectedly influential punk sightings in the history of German teen magazines went something like this:
Toward the end of 1986, Hamburg punk band Die Goldenen Zitronen released a song titled Am Tag als Thomas Anders starb (The Day Thomas Anders Died). The title worked on two levels. First, it referenced Juliane Werding’s 1972 anti-heroin hit Am Tag als Conny Kramer starb / The Day Conny Kramer Died. Second—and much more mischievously—it poked fun at Modern Talking, the chart-dominating pop duo behind inescapable hits like You’re My Heart, You’re My Soul. The song was designed to provoke. But it was Bravo that accidentally turned a cheeky jab into a full-blown scandal. The magazine published an article about the band (somehow even managing to assign the wrong names to the faces in the accompanying photograph) and the calculated scandal fueled a media outrage. Bild picked up the story, other outlets followed, and suddenly Die Goldenen Zitronen were notorious in teenage bedrooms across Germany. Which, in punk terms, counted as excellent publicity. The band is still around nearly forty years later. Whether that infamous Bravo article deserves credit for their longevity is debatable, but it unquestionably became one of the key moments in the band’s rise and in bringing fun punk to a much wider audience.
Throughout the 1980s, Bravo, Popcorn, and Pop Rocky regularly featured punk bands. The writers’ unfamiliarity with the scene practically leaked off the page. So why bother reporting on real punks at all? Much easier to invent your own. Luckily, the magazines already had the perfect fictional playground: the beloved photo love story. Here, punk could finally become everything the real bands stubbornly refused to be. Instead of chaotic, unpredictable people, punks became romantic archetypes: exciting outsiders, dangerous enough to be thrilling, rebellious enough to be sexy—but, if you looked closely, perfectly capable of settling down into respectable middle-class life. Bravo captured this formula beautifully:
Like Romeo and Juliet, the lovers must meet in secret. Only this time, it isn’t feuding families standing in their way. It’s youth subcultures. Although, judging by the cast, these “punks” look considerably less like they’d spent the weekend sleeping on the sticky floor of a punk venue and considerably more like they just returned from an school trip to Washington. The magazines always introduced their casts with a group portrait before the story began:
And there they are. Punks. Apparently. One has blue hair. Another’s sticks up just a little. That’ll do. For this bedroom-safe version of punk, it’s apparently enough. And honestly—why not? Leather jackets, cigarettes, safety pins, and spectacular drunkenness are stereotypes, too. At least the young man sitting in the upper-left corner avoids those clichés. Instead, his defining personality trait is... his taste in music. Unfortunately, the music he likes is about as un-punk as it gets. Even the editors in Bravo’s Munich offices, about as far detached from the scene as geographically possible, might have noticed that:
A somewhat more convincing specimen appears in an early-1990s Pop Rocky photo love story. His name is Börger. At first glance, he actually looks the part. Then you read his character description. Suddenly it’s painfully obvious that this punk exists almost entirely in the imagination of adults. Words like boss, rules, and having a say dominate his profile. Instead of sounding like someone surviving on squats, cheap beer, and three-chord anthems, he comes across like a parent-teacher meeting in leather boots or an intern at an insurance company:
Ironically, it was only by disarming—and quietly rewriting—their punk characters that these magazines could transform them into romantic leads. The photo love stories almost always begin with maximum punk attitude. Then, almost without fail, they end in the most traditional way imaginable. Conservative. Comforting. Domesticated. The magazines never failed to tame the punks they had invented. As a reward, everyone gets the obligatory happy ending, complete with bright prospects for the future. “No Future?” Not in these magazines. The only concession to punk authenticity might be a pet rat watching from the sidelines as the happy couple finally seals their love with a kiss as in this late-1980s Bravo story. Incidentally, in this case, the punk is the girl. But honestly? We’re all far too distracted by the rat—and by that unforgettable speech bubble floating above the guy’s head—to notice much else...
