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Claire Minton

Underground Music

Walking west along Reykjavik's Bank Street, or Bankastræti, you'll see an oddly placed railing to your left. Iceland has no subway system, and yet, stairs descend into the earth in the city's center. Between 10 am - 6 pm every day of the week, you'll hear loud bass thumping under the sidewalk and see strobing neon colors reflect on the ice above. Welcome to the Icelandic Punk Museum.


I came to Pönksafn Íslands on a Friday in mid-December with a few friends during our class trip's free day. It was 2:30, otherwise known as dusk, and the concrete steps were beginning to collect a dusting of snow. At the bottom of the poster-plastered hole was a door with scrawled messages regarding ticket sales, and a small desk, behind which sat a man with a wild mohawk and piles of jewelry. He yelled out some sort of greeting and the seven of us squeezed into the narrow room to hand him our entrance fees.



A timeline began at the year 874, most dates followed by a question mark. Every timeline entry was written in both Icelandic and English, so the linguist in me got a kick out of comparing words in both languages. Until the mid-20th century, each torn piece of paper concluded with the same text: "No punk" or "Still no punk." I chuckled at the sarcastic political commentary, as shown below. The tone of this tiny exhibit was so quintessentially punk and made it all the more memorable.



I skimmed the chaotic wallpaper stories while the guitar-smashing noises still blasted from speakers in every corner, and suddenly found myself facing...a toilet? I hadn't realized this when I entered, but this museum had once been a public restroom! The timeline continued to snake around this room, too, interrupted only by a television mounted on the wall that played a technicolor montage of various unknown punk rock groups' early rehearsal days. The toilet itself was labeled "Hippie Hairwash" and reminded its visitors to "Lift lid before use." I'm fairly certain that it's no longer actually usable, but who can say?



And finally, we reached the main room once more, which served as both a grand finale photo booth and a musical waiting room. The photos above show my friends testing out the headphones hanging from the ceiling, each with an album cover attached to the chain to denote what you were getting yourself into. We were cracking ourselves up taking photos of each other behind the drum set in ridiculous poses, and in what I hope was a gesture driven by amusement and not annoyance at our Instagramming, the museum owner offered to take the role of photographer. We all bought postcards from him before climbing back up the stairs into the chilly afternoon. Eventually I'll get around to pasting them into a scrapbook to commemorate this $7 excursion on my trip.

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