Talking About Egg Punk

Around 2018 there was a meme on the punk internet. Egg punk and chain punk. That was the meme. Basically the idea was to make fun of the obscure esotericism of musical subgenre nerdery. How complicated it is to keep up with what’s technically what. Trying to understand the infinite corners of every music subculture would drive you insane. Once you grasped it all, trying to talk about it with anyone anywhere outside the deepest sanctums you would look as mad as you were. Unhinged, incoherent, babbling, pointing at a web of yarn tied to pins across the wall.

The funny thing is that, in the end, the egg punk/chain punk dichotomy did end up becoming a pretty clear articulation of the two main movements in the modern punk underground. Basically every current punk band with any credibility falls somewhere definable on that spectrum. On the egg side you have any band who can trace their lineage back to Devo or Talking Heads, and on the other a band that follows in the footsteps of the Ramones or 80s hardcore. Egg/chain. Weird/hard. It makes perfect sense, and I love it. It’s stuck in my head like an engorged deer tick.

I want to talk to everyone about it whenever I’m out somewhere. I want other people to understand it. And most importantly, I want to apply it to other genres. What are egg country and chain country? Egg hip hop and chain hip hop? Can there possibly be such a thing as egg pop or chain pop? The key is that it only works for the music that exists somewhat on the outside of things. A half step to the left of the mainstream, at least one inch underground. Like, Blake Shelton can’t be egg country or chain country (although, I guess I have to admit Ol’ Red is sort of a chain country song if you think about it). Chain country is Waylon Jennings. Egg country is John Prine or Roger Miller. Townes Van Zandt looked like egg country but he lived a chain country lifestyle. Taylor Swift can’t be egg pop, as much as she sometimes wishes. Charli XCX is probably egg pop. But is there chain pop? There must be. Someone help me out. Sky Ferreira, that’s some fucking chain pop. Right? I love this.

This can be applied directly and endlessly to hip hop. You’ve got the egg side of things with Danny Brown, JPEGMAFIA, Odd Future (especially Tyler and Earl), and more recently stuff like Tierra Whack and ZelooperZ. On the chain side it’s obviously the entire Griselda crew, and stuff like Boldy James or maybe Rapsody. And of course an incredible landscape of music between the two. I wonder where billy woods thinks he is on the spectrum.

Look, I’ll say it: Oppenheimer is a chain movie and Barbie is an egg movie.

The meme is mostly gone, but the metric can still be applied. One of the best albums of the year so far, the first full length release by Snõõper, is egg punk and was even correctly identified as such by none other than Pitchfork dot com. All the new punk music I hear can be categorized using it. You know, sometimes there’s an egg punk band that gets a little chain-y. And god knows I love some good egg-y chain punk. I did not make this playlist: