Dear PPMB Members (all 3050 of you, currently);
I found and joined this message ‘bored’ in January of 2005. I had spent more than 10 years in punk and punk related scenes but I had never been an active member of a message board. Instead, my time was spent graduating high school, earning a B.A. in Art from the University of Iowa and eventually teaching at Roberto Clemente Community Academy while pursuing a Masters in Special Education at Saint Xavier University. A month prior, in the December of 2004,
I made up my mind about pop punk; it was a music that I could champion for the rest of my life, and I wanted to learn as much about it as possible. To achieve these ends, I scoured my records, books, fliers, and zines for bits and pieces of pop punk. I perused back issues of MRR and other music rags for record reviews. I expanded the search outside my collection and poured over Google searches for “pop punk”. I spent hours in libraries using web-based finding aides for resources and articles. I frequented the book racks at local record stores to find copies of punk books I had seen on
Amazon.com. I made a list of punk rock books and read and collected as many as I could. Yet, as my collection grew, something became increasingly obvious; I could not find one book which dealt exclusively with pop punk. I was surprised, “
How could there be not one book written about pop punk?”
The closest thing I could find to a pop punk book was
Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia even seemed to stem from a kind of punk idea of what an encyclopedia could be. I signed up as a member and assisted with editing the pop punk entry. In the process of editing, I learned about the Pop Punk Message Bored. Within a year, the Wikipedia article had progressed to an acceptable level and I began to focus more on the message bored. I continued gathering information, keeping lists of bands, record labels, articles and books which mentioned pop punk or had covered pop punk artists, but no pop punk book could be found. One book called My So-Called Punk by Matt Diehl seemed promising, but it spent ridiculous numbers of pages fawning over Brody Dalle and focused on a style of punk it called “neo-punk”. Soon it became more apparent than ever,
if I wanted to read a pop punk book, I’d have to write it.
Besides the message board and Wikipedia, there was one other place which I thought would be a good source for pop punk – the website
www.PopPunk.com. Unfortunately, my visits to this site were for the most part disappointing. There was an overall lack of quality and little information about actual pop punk groups. If only this site could be the main pop punk portal I was looking for! Despite this, I kept checking back occasionally to see if anything changed. One day I saw that the site was for sale for a very high price. I decided to write to the email address provided, but there was no response. Still, I checked back from time to time to check for new content and to see if the price went down. I waited until 2009 when all the content on the site disappeared and it seemed that the website was completely defunct. I sent another email to the address and this time I got a response. I negotiated with the owner and we eventually reached a price we both thought was fair. I am now announcing that I am the owner of
PopPunk.com.
Over the past five years, and especially in the past year, some of you have gotten to know me a little through my posts on the bored – some of you have speculated if there is a method to my madness and others, I am sure, are convinced there is none. Either way I invite you to use this thread to discuss the future of
PopPunk.com. As you can see, the site currently contains only the letters “ppdc” above a picture of “PPDC” in the hardcore “X” design made with bubblegum stuck to a piece of wood. In the coming days, more content will begin to appear. My hope is that
PopPunk.com will become a pop punk portal like the one I was looking for. I intend to use this site to help gather and organize the information needed to write a book about pop punk (the website will also be the perfect place to host digital content for the book, once the book is published).
Thanks for reading this letter. I wanted to take this opportunity to make this announcement to the PPMB community before the website truly gets underway. I also would like to say thanks for the company over the years. Here’s to the future of our pop punk camaraderie!
Bradley Adita
08/04/2010
