The $hape of Art to Come…

In a year where noise is currency and silence is complicity, the punk rock community finds itself at a crossroads. A flame long smoldering beneath the stage lights has burst into something much harder to ignore — and the timing couldn’t be more crucial.

From Punk in the Park’s political fallout to billion-dollar war drones funded by streaming royalties, and now a gutted public media system left reeling from congressional cuts, the question punk fans, musicians, journalists, and citizens must now ask isn’t if we’ve been complicit, but how long we’ve ignored it — and what we do next.

I’ll begin with a discovery. Brandon Alan Lewis, founder of Ohio-based indie label Punkerton Records, was digging through OpenSecrets when he stumbled across something that didn’t sit right. “I was heated because I was like, ‘Who knows about this?’” Lewis says. “I looked it up and nobody knew about that.” Lewis tells Justin Criado of Denvers’ Westword.

What he found: Cameron Collins, owner of California’s Brew Ha Ha Productions — and promoter behind the national Punk in the Park festival — had donated multiple times to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and other far-right causes. The Federal Election Commission records confirmed it: $250 to Trump on May 30, another $104.10 to the Trump National Committee JFC, and $524.29 more across platforms like WinRed and Never Surrender, Inc.

“I was just like, ‘Screw it, it’s the right thing,’” Lewis exclaimed! “I found the whole thing to be hypocritical. It was insane. It was literally the antithesis of everything we’ve ever done in punk rock and learned through punk rock.”

That was three months ago. Lewis posted the receipts to Threads on April 3. Since then, the backlash has snowballed.

An anonymous petition followed, urging not only a boycott of the Denver stop, but a DIY rerouting of bands to local venues — calling out Punk in the Park as a commodified betrayal of punk ethics. “We must send a strong message that we will not support festivals and organizations that do not align with the values and beliefs of our community,” it reads. “It’s time to show that we, the punk rock community, are not just a demographic to be monetized, but a collective force that stands for socio-economic justice. Nazi punks, FUCK OFF!”

Even the Indigenous band 1876, during Punk in the Park’s Portland stop, called out the festival while promoting their own alternative DIY event, Victory Day Fest.

This weekend, as Denver revs up for the festival, Two Denver bands — Destiny Bond and Time X Heist — dropped from the fest entirely. “After learning and reflecting on the fact that the owner of the festival donated to Donald Trump’s campaign for president, we’ve decided playing as planned doesn’t align with our values,” Destiny Bond posted on July 17. “Apologies to anyone who was planning to see us.”

Time X Heist echoed that sentiment in their own statement: “We cannot in good conscience support organizers that put profit over people. We have decided to step away from this fest to stand in solidarity with our trans siblings, immigrants and others negatively affected by the current administration and policies of the day.”

Collins, however, maintains that his events are not political. In a statement on Westword, he said, “My focus has always been on bringing people together — not dividing them. Brew Ha Ha Productions exists to create inclusive, fun and safe spaces where people from all walks of life — regardless of race, sexuality, beliefs or political views — can come together to celebrate music and community.”

He doubled down: “The punk rock scene I fell in love with and have been a part of since I was fourteen years old has always been rooted in individuality, questioning authority and standing up for free expression. That ethos continues to guide everything we do.” He added that his track record — including millions paid in artist guarantees and countless festivals across the U.S. — speaks for itself.

But for Lewis, the issue isn’t just political, it’s moral. “How punk is it to keep quiet about it?” he asks. “It doesn’t matter whether he donated one dollar, $1,000, or $10,000 to me. You get enough $225 donations, well, they’re bankrolling hate. I’d be fine with never selling another record through my label if it meant that I did what I felt like was the right thing to do. I’m not comfortable with supporting something like that.”

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Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death…

The issues don’t stop at the gates of punk festivals. Streaming services, once hailed as liberating tools for independent artists, are now tangled in billion-dollar global warfare.

Earlier this year,  the story of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s latest venture: through his firm Prima Materia, Ek led a $694 million funding round into Helsing, a Munich-based AI defense company that builds autonomous drones and battlefield systems. The company is now valued at $13.8 billion.

This isn’t an isolated startup. This is war-tech, and it’s partially bankrolled by your monthly streaming subscription.

What started as “streaming to support your favorite artists” has now become a shadow finance system for global conflict. Ek’s Helsing-backed weapons are already being used in Ukraine, with a long-term vision for Europe-wide military deployment. That’s not punk. That’s profit with blood on it.

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Silence is the Sound of a Dying Public…

Meanwhile, public media — our final frontier for unfiltered information — is being gutted in broad daylight.

In a sweeping move buried beneath budgetary headlines, Congress has stripped over $1.1 billion in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This comes as part of a larger $9 billion rollback in federal spending. Local PBS and NPR affiliates — especially in rural America — now face imminent collapse. Emergency broadcast systems are threatened. Educational programming, cultural storytelling, and investigative journalism hang by a thread.

The response from public media? A lawsuit — and a warning. Without these institutions, we’re left with nothing but corporate and government pushing media, TikTok algorithms, and political echo chambers.

When your festival dollars fund fascist campaigns…
When your Spotify stream buys a drone…
When your news source vanishes from the airwaves…

Where do we draw the line?

How do we support punk without monetizing oppression? How do we uplift artists, journalists, musicians — the lifeblood of resistance — without fueling the very system trying to shut them down?

The answers are messy, but the urgency is clear.

Demand better from bands, labels, promoters, platforms — and ourselves. There is no neutral. There is no middle. You’re either challenging the machine, or feeding it.

The punk community wasn’t built on comfort. It was built on confrontation — with power, with silence, with ourselves.

It’s not about cancel culture. It’s about conscious culture.

It’s about asking: who gets our money, our energy, our attention? And why?

Support YOUR scene – the artists, musicians and bands YOU listen to.
Start your own – help build something you can be proud of and join a community.
Subscribe to indie journalists and support any way you can.
Turn off your algorithm and turn up your awareness, turn up the music!

We’re not powerless — we’ve just been pacified. It’s time to wake up. The stage is ours. The mic is live. The silence is complicity. So make noise. Real noise.

Punk isn’t dead. Radio isn’t dead…But maybe, just maybe, it’s angry again.

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https://www.PunkertonRecords.com

https://www.westword.com/music/petition-calls-for-punk-in-the-park-denver-boycott-25047112

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-investment-in-defense-startup-helsing.html

https://inthesetimes.com/article/spotify-military-industrial-complex-daniel-ek-prima-materia-helsing

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/nx-s1-5469912/npr-congress-rescission-funding-trump