Sent into the mosh pit by Rene Huey-Lipton, Founder & CSO at The DAME Collective
I came to punk late and sideways, the way most outsiders do — not through the right record shops or the right postcodes, but through a person and a feeling.
The person was my late husband…he chose death with dignity last year after 30-years of marriage. When we met, I had two cassette tapes—Billy Joel and the Counting Crows—and he was appalled. This was a guy who grew up in the Valley in LA and spent a lot of his life going to shows. Let’s just say that when he played Sun Ra and then John Cage’s 4′33″ on our first date, I was “unsure”. A month later, we were engaged.
Music was a central part of our life together and he helped me explore and build my own discography, including my punk collection deliberately, almost as if he knew how much I’d need it someday. Last year, as the world started to burn a little hotter and faster and as my husband chose to die, I would find myself building all-women playlists that combined Aretha, L7 and Amyl and the Sniffers, screaming and crying out the songs while hiding in my outside studio…after he died, I didn’t have to hide anymore, so our house became my mosh pit.
In the 9 months since he passed, I’ve read all of the books on grief and I gotta say, fuck that shit. The feeling that something had happened to me and the music being recommended — the stuff that was supposed to help — was all wrong. Too soft. Too resolved. Too busy telling me it was going to be okay.
I didn’t want okay. I wanted something that understood that it was not okay. That it was, in fact, completely fucked.
You know what got me to now? Joan Didion, Nora Ephron and singing particularly angry and naughty songs out loud—particularly Ex-Boyfriend Beat by Skinned Teen and If I had a Dick by So Good, Stiletto Heels by High Tension and Switchblade by LP .
So, having gotten here to this moment, here’s what I’ve worked out, still knee-deep in loss, about how punk handles grief. Not the aesthetic of it. Not the patches and the hair. The actual bones-and-guts philosophy of moving through the worst thing.
Six parts. All of them messy. None of them fixed.
I. RAGE BEFORE RESIGNATION
The first thing grief culture tries to sell you is acceptance. There are stages, apparently. A diagram. As if losing someone is a project you can manage, with milestones and deliverables and a tidy sign-off at the end. The five stages thing wasn’t even meant to work like that — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was writing about people who were dying themselves, not the ones they left behind — but it got copy-pasted into the popular imagination anyway and now everyone with a concerned face asks: have you reached acceptance yet?
No. I have not reached acceptance. I am in the cereal aisle losing my mind. Thank you for asking.
Punk doesn’t start from acceptance. Punk starts from: this is wrong and I am furious about it. The whole tradition — from the Clash to Bikini Kill to every chaotic three-minute blast these women are making right now — is built on the premise that anger is a legitimate response to a world that keeps doing shit it shouldn’t.
All I ever wanted was to walk by the park All I ever wanted was to walk by the river, see the stars Please, stop fucking me up.Amyl and the Sniffers
That. That energy. Grief doesn’t begin with peace. It begins with: how dare this have happened. And you are allowed — you are supposed — to stay there until you’re ready to move. Not because someone else needs you to.
II. MAKE SOMETHING UGLY AND HONEST
The first punk records were not good. Technically. They were recorded in bad rooms with bad gear by people who had been playing for eighteen months. And they were perfect because of it, not despite it. The gap between the feeling and the sound was basically zero.
Grief, when you try to get it out, resists prettiness. It comes out wrong. You’ll write a sentence and it won’t be the sentence. You’ll try to describe what it felt like and you’ll get something lumpy and embarrassing that doesn’t do it justice and you’ll want to scrap it. Don’t scrap it.
Most music I listen to on bad days is chaotic and brilliant and it absolutely doesn’t care if you find it a lot. There’s something about that refusal to smooth things over that maps directly onto grief. The mess is the message. The mess is the most honest thing you can offer.
Shut up
Shut up
Shut up
Don't look down on me!Otoboke BeaverMake the bad poem. Record the terrible voice memo at 3am. Start the zine you have no idea how to finish. Write in your notes app in the car park before you’re ready to go back inside. None of it needs to be good. It needs to be out of your body and into the world, where you can look at it and say: there it is. That’s the thing. I made the thing.
You don’t need craft. You need honesty. Turns out those aren’t the same.
III. REJECT THE TIMELINE
Society gives you, roughly speaking, about three months before people stop asking. Six months before your family starts suggesting therapy in the careful voice that actually means your sadness is making us uncomfortable and we’d like it to stop now please. A year and you get closure. You get what they would have wanted. You get moving on, as if grief is a flat you can vacate when the lease runs up.
I’m calling bullshit on all of it.
It might be surprising to some that punk explores the stuff that keeps coming back, that ambushes you, that lives in your body longer than anyone told you it would. Big Joanie writes about grief and love and history with this patience, this understanding that some things take as long as they take. There is no hurrying it. There is no accelerated processing.
It's been a while
Since I've held
You tight
It's harder in the night time
The city is a fright to me
Tread carefullyBig JoanieDig me out, dig me in
Out of this mess, baby, out of my head
Dig me out, dig me in
Out of my body, out of my skinSleater-KinneyGrief is not linear. You can be absolutely fine and then a smell, a song, a specific quality of afternoon light in October will put you back in the worst week of your life as fast as blinking. That is not a setback. That is what it is.
You don’t owe anyone a recovered self. Take the year. Take ten years. Take the moment in the cereal aisle when it comes for you in year fifteen, and let it come. You’re not behind. There’s no ahead.
IV. COMMUNITY OVER ISOLATION
There’s a myth that punk is fundamentally solitary. The lone individual against the machine, middle finger raised, going it alone. And yes, fine, there’s that. But anyone who’s actually been in a “good” pit knows the other thing: you only stay up because everyone around you agrees, without saying anything, to catch each other. The whole thing only works because of that unspoken contract.
Grief wants to isolate you. It tells you that no one could understand this specific weight, this particular person-shaped hole in your life. And that feeling is real. It’s also a trap.
I have found deep and piercing solace in female punk — there’s something in this whole wave of women making loud music together that is about the radical act of not being alone with your shit.
Love you like a sister always
Soul sister, rebel girl
Come and be my best friend
Will you, rebel girl?
I really like you
I really wanna be your best friend
Be my rebel girlBikini KillFind the people who can sit with you at 2am and not try to fix it. Who let you say the dead person’s name past the point where everyone else has stopped saying it. Who don’t flinch when the answer to how are you is actually honest.
Not the people who need you to be okay. Those people can wait. Right now you need the ones who are fine with you being completely not okay for as long as that takes.
The pit works best when everyone catches each other. Apply this everywhere.
V. HONOR THE PERSON DEFIANTLY
Funerals are for the living. People say that like it’s comforting and I’ve never quite worked out why. The living, in my experience, are often the last people who should be in charge of the proceedings. The living want it to be tasteful. The living want it to be manageable. The living want to be able to eat a small sandwich afterward and feel like something has been resolved.
The punk move is to ask what would actually honor this person, specifically, and then do that even if it’s inconvenient. ( I point to a scene in one of my favorite movies, Love Actually. IYKYK)
Those that might say that this can’t be done
Can get out my way while we’re having fun
Those that might try to put us down
Can get out my way and get out my town
Barking up the wrong treeFirewalkerI know you got a room with a view up there
And you're looking down on me
I know you got a room with a view up there
Please save a spot for meThe InterruptersMaybe it’s a party. A real party, bad lighting, the songs they actually liked, people getting drunk and telling the stories that would’ve made them laugh. Maybe it’s a cause they gave a shit about and you put your grief into that. Maybe it’s twenty people in a field crying and laughing simultaneously, which is the most honest emotional state anyway.
Grief as tribute. Grief as defiance. Grief as a refusal to let them be remembered quietly when they weren’t a quiet person.
VI. DON’T AESTHETICIZE IT TOO SOON
This is the one that took me longest to figure out. And it’s probably the most punk thing in here.
There’s an industry — a whole glossy, wellness-coded, podcast-and-retreat industry — waiting to take your grief and hand it back to you as a growth experience. The healing journey. The gift of loss. What it taught me. The idea that on the other side of grief is a better, deeper, more-yourself you, and the whole point was to get there, and now you can write the book about it.
Punk has always been suspicious of the machine that absorbs genuine feeling and converts it into product. It happened to punk itself — the whole thing got swallowed and spat back out as a fashion aesthetic by the mid-eighties, available at every high street chain if you wanted the look without the inconvenience of the actual anger. That’ll be £49.99. Keep the rage, lose the receipt.
Someday, they’ll cry to survive
They’ll wonder why you’re not alive
They won’t know what went wrong
All is dark if you’re gone
White LungDon’t let them do that with your grief. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Sometimes loss is just brutal and it doesn’t mean anything. It isn’t making you stronger. It isn’t leading anywhere. It’s just an absence where a person used to be and no amount of reframing actually touches that. You’re allowed to refuse the narrative arc. You’re allowed to say this just hurts, that’s the whole story, there is no lesson.
Stay with the rawness as long as it’s raw. Don’t package it before it’s ready to be packaged. Don’t perform the recovered version of yourself until you actually are one.
Let it breathe ugly and unfinished for as long as it needs to be ugly and unfinished. Nobody who actually loves you is timing it.
Punk grief isn’t a program. It’s not a worksheet or a podcast or a five-stage diagram. It’s a refusal — to perform recovery on someone else’s schedule, to be convenient about your pain, to let them sell your loss back to you with a bow on it.
I came to punk through a relationship and I stayed for this: the knowledge that anger is legitimate, that ugly things have value, that community is not weakness, that you don’t have to be tasteful about the people you’ve lost.
Grief is not something you get over. It’s something you carry. It changes shape. Sometimes it gets lighter and sometimes it ambushes you in a supermarket and you have to go and stand in the car park for a bit. None of that is failure.
You’re allowed to do this on your own terms. Loudly if you need to. Badly if that’s what comes out.
That’s the whole thing.
Rene Huey-Lipton is a strategist, the founder of DAME Collective (Daring Authenticity, Meaningful Experience), and the author of My Authentic Voice. She came to punk late and sideways, which she maintains is the correct way to come to anything that matters. She has a Substack, a record collection that doubles as a grief journal, and a working theory that the best way to honor the dead is loudly and slightly inconveniently. She is also, by all accounts, darn fun at dinner parties.
