Bono’s been publicly referring to U2 as a “punk band” as far back as I can remember. When I was a little bit younger, it used to make me cringe a little bit, because I LOVE punk rock, but I didn’t quite understand it then like I do now. In my teens and twenties, all “punk” meant to me was loud and fast rock music, the sloppier the better. Of course, those characteristics very rarely describe U2, and I used to imagine that kids who were into punk but not U2 would think that the boys in U2 were poseurs. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to recognize that punk is about a lot more than a style of music, how the instruments are played, or even what the instruments are. Punk is about creating based on how you feel inside, as opposed to using creativity as a means to accomplish another unrelated, usually financial, goal. If you make money doing it, all the better, because that frees you up to pursue and follow that muse, but making money shouldn’t be the end goal. Punk is about making art that comes from deep inside you, and it doesn’t matter if your instrument is a guitar, a keyboard, a paint brush, or your own body. Sometimes, punk will fit in with whatever else is going on at the time, some times it won’t. Sometimes, the artists will be experts at their craft, other times they’ll be little more than kids in a garage, trying to bend their cacophony into a sound that fills the holes in their hearts. The only real characteristic that describes punk, as I’ve come to describe it, is that the artist has to have something burning deep inside, and that the music or the painting or the sculpture or the tattoo or the graffiti or the dance is their attempt to get it out. U2 definitely fit that criteria, and it’s just one more reason that I love them.