"Skank or Die" 1984 article from Playboy

I posted an illustration from this June 1984 Playboy article on punk last week, promising to scan the full article in soon. Here it is! There's some good info and quotes in here along with the writer's commentary. Click on the images to get the bigger readable version of each page. I'd love to hear your opinions on it...

Mainstream interpretations of punk in the '80s

While digging around in my piles of old zines and punk flyer archives this weekend, I stumbled upon a folder simply labeled "Clippings and Reviews" that had a hodge podge of article clippings in it. There were old reviews of 10 Things, interviews with me in other zines and papers, letters I'd written to the editors of various papers, articles on punk and other stuff I'm sure I thought was super important at the time. This illustration come from a Playboy magazine article that ran June of 1984... it actually looks like my dad cut out the article and gave it to me, it's his handwriting with the citation and date in the corner of the first page. Awesome. I'll scan in the whole article some time this week, but this is a little teaser, clearly showing a mainstream writer's idea of what punk rock fashion was like circa 1984. It's pretty ridiculous, even if it touches on a lot of real punk fashion, but it seems like a pretty jaded and snide attitude like you'd expect from a yuppie writer looking down at punk rock in the '80s, while still admiring elements of it. The article is actually pretty decent with lots of quotes from Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys' manager Michael Vraney.