Right now I’m immersed in Jennifer Egan’s novel “Visit from the Goon Squad,” which is structured as a series of flashbacks and flashforwards in the lives of some music industry professionals.  One stunning chapter focuses on a clique of high school punks in the 80’s in San Francisco.  They play in a band called the Flaming Dildos and listen to The Cramps.  The passages describing their look (dog collars, green hair rinse, tattered jeans, “drippy” black eye makeup) sent me reeling back to my own adolescence.  Not because I was a punk (I wasn’t; I was a Catholic-school nerd) but because I remember when it was still startling to see a girl walking down the street with white face makeup and a bull ring in her nose.

Punk-inflected music doesn’t sound as difficult as it once did, maybe because we’ve been listening to it for so long, or maybe because so much popular rap music is similarly sonically aggressive.  But there’s something about the punk image – the head-to-toe black-and-white thing – that’s still terribly dramatic.  The look requires a real disavowal of the body, and the risk of making oneself less attractive than one might naturally be.  It requires a great deal of commitment; it’s something deeper than fashion.