Punks from the Sunshine State
Why Florida is a punk-producing, emo-ecosystem
Last week, Skatune Network, aka JER, tweeted some love towards Florida’s emo scene partly due to the upcoming Pool Kids release (which is an awesome album and you should listen to it). Sometimes little things like this speak to me and it got my mind rolling about Florida and why I think it’s the perfect ecosystem for blossoming punk/emo/indie bands. I spent 15 years living in Florida and can only really speak on why Florida influenced my love for the genre, so don’t expect a full-blown research paper.
Looking back, I lived a pretty idyllic childhood as an only-child living on a ranch surrounded by nature. But I was only a limestone's throw (there are no natural stones in Florida) away from suburbia. I like to describe my childhood home as where cows met culdesacs. Nestled about 45 minutes northwest of Orlando, I lived in the part of central FL, as people liked to say, is only rednecks and old people. And they aren’t wrong.
The Villages, a massive retirement community, technically is in my backyard now that it’s grown like cancer across the state. However, expressions like, “This used to be orange groves as far as the eye could see,” weren’t just relegated to old people. There were parts of Clermont and surrounding areas I saw go from literal orange groves into massive cookie-cutter neighborhoods and strip malls.
But somewhere in the middle of all that was the 500 acres of cowland bordering my home. It was owned by a real Florida cowboy we affectionally called Mr. Bob. He gave my family permission to be out there in exchange for access to the easement and old-fashioned neighborliness (watch my herd and make sure they ain’t dead fir me). I fell in love with nature and animals, specifically the “creepy crawlies” no one else seemed to appreciate. I’d catch frogs and lake shrimp in the ponds, beetles and lizards in the woods and occasionally snakes and turtles if I ever got lucky.
Just a quick interjection here: I’m sorry if all this boyhood nostalgia is grating and not at all why you clicked on this story but I promise I’m going somewhere with this so bear with me.
Anyway, I became attached to the land. I had very few neighbors and even fewer neighbors to be my friend back then. So I’d spend a lot of time alone hunting for bugs, peaking across I-75 to the suburban developments. That was until a family moved into the trailer next door with all the kids an isolated only-child could want.
They were an unusual family to me as a kid. Firstly, they weren’t all related. The adults in the situation were the aunt, uncle or just godparents. There were (usually) five kids of varying ages and blood. Three of those “kids” were well into middle and even high school, while two were my age (about 10). They were also all Latin Americans of different ethnicities, so I got exposed to some cultures that way but that’s for a different story.
The younger kids and I would hang out a ton, especially over the summers. We’d spend the night at each other’s places almost every other day and go out in those pastures to build forts, do dumb shit and of course catch bugs.
But meanwhile, Mr. Bob had to liquidate his land due to the massive losses his orange company was taking due to a bad freeze. He ultimately sold it to a contractor with plans to destroy the land and turn it into a retirement golfing community. It was my first time seeing the ecosystem directly around me threatened. But, and let me know if you’ve heard this before, the 2008 housing recession hit.
Luckily, the housing market crash saved my childhood paradise by forcing the contractors to sell their land to the bank. I was entering middle school and discovering social media by this point. My life was moving away from my old neighbor friends. But then I learned their home was being foreclosed. It’s a weird kind of guilt to take for granted your friends and watch them leave your life. But now, they were being forced out of their homes.
It made me stop and think. The people and nature that inspired so much joy in my life were all at the mercy of big invisible boogymen. Contractors and bankers were the real-world supervillains. I was angry.
All teens are a little fucking angry, I think. Punk and teenage angst go hand in hand. Somewhere in those pre-teen years, you learn how cruel the world can be. And all the while, hormones and social currency creep in as the dominant factors shaping your well-being. And so, we seek relatable people and things to better define and understand our problems. For many, that takes shape in the media we consume. Three Days Grace and Green Day defined my emotions, Star Wars and Halo captured my imagination and the internet allowed me to branch out of my geographical constrictions at home and within Florida.
I asked people on Twitter how they were drawn to punk/DIY music while living in Florida and most of them had the same answer (Check out that thread for more responses). It’s the people you know and the places you live. In other words, you meet punks that lead you into the scene. But why does any punk scene exist anyway?
In Florida, I think it’s a lot of the same reasons why punk came to exist in London, NY or LA circa ‘76. But some uniquely Florida things make underground and punk music like this necessary.
Firstly, Florida isn’t built for young people. It’s where Americans go to die, not raise their kids. The land of endless summer, much like California and the music from that supposed paradise, Florida’s underground grew out of the suppression palm trees and golf carts create. Death Metal, punk, ska, emo all started popping up and proliferating over the decades between the 1980s and now. Kind of like mangroves for baby fish, the underground provided shelter for little scenesters growing up and inspired them to start their own big fish bands.
Estuaries would form in cities all along South Beach, Orlando, Gainesville, St. Augustine, Tallahassee, Pensacola, Tampa and spotty scenes in other cities. It created opportunities for bands to tour in state, but if you were a kid in high school, your options were limited by geography. Most of Florida today, especially central Florida, sprung out of the swamps and farmland 30 years prior. This created a bit of an island effect in the peninsula state.
There are no real “cities” in Florida beyond Miami. It’s mostly just loosely connected suburbs that run together like one mega culdesac, especially within the I-4 corridor. Disney, beaches, and perfect retirement weather turned Florida into a flash-pan of land development and all the dysfunction of suburban sprawl. In my neck of the woods, the greater Orlando area, there was no youth culture outside the city beyond sports, religion and school. If there was a music scene, I wasn’t cool enough to know about it, much less stumble into it.
So for me, loneliness was always a cure I saught fixing. Music sometimes provided that. Even though I didn’t understand or have the vocabulary to explain what I was seeing, young me could see the effects of capitalism and American culture on my community. Florida is built for old people and tourists. You can’t go anywhere unless you have a car (or a golf cart sometimes). Money comes from old folks slowly dying, golf courses and Mickey Mouse.
Starting your life in a world built for the end of life has a way of changing your outlook on life as well. People work 40+ year careers just to rot away in some strange state filled with equally old, equally out of place people. This is where it all winds up.
Finding a sense of belonging was difficult as a broke high schooler with no notable talents or cool guy charm. So I would turn to music, the internet or the cow pastures. It was an escape from the sky-choking fast food signs and anti-abortion billboards.
I felt like I lived multiple lives sometimes. I had my school life where I was told I had potential by adults but never lived up to it. Then I had the country boy life where I felt connected to my family and more respected. But I felt the most myself in online spaces playing video games and discovering new music outside my narrow lane in life.
When high school finally ended and I could choose my own life, I decided to flee Florida for good. For context, I’d go to college in south Georgia at an agriculture school where I could explore the thing that made me feel valued. But there, I discovered my passion for writing, my political awakening and the secret scene that Florida always had but wasn’t available to me.
I fell in love with punk music and eventually with Fest. In high school, I thought Gainesville sucked. Now, I think it sucks much less. After college, I was able to get involved in a DIY scene on the Florida-Georgia border and found the secret there too. Florida’s always had an amazing scene of underground artists making anti-capitalist, pro-environmental, forward-thinking music. But much greater than that, it allowed kids like me to have something where there is nothing.
Although I never got to experience the youth culture I think I needed, I’m happy it’s alive and well in so much of the state. And so long as Florida remains the land of death and Disney, punk and emo will continue bubbling up like little creatures from the Black Lagoon.
Orbiting Punk Playlist
I made a Florida Emo playlist featuring some extras from some favorite Florida bands of mine that aren’t exactly emo but you should check out! Hope you enjoy (YouTube link for non-Spotify folks)
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