<h3>MUSIC / BROOKLYN / SEPTEMBER</h3>
<h1>THE ROOM IS GONE. THE NOISE ISN'T.</h1>
<p>CBGB closed in 2006, which should have made the story simple.</p>
<p>A legendary club existed at 315 Bowery. Patti Smith played there. The Ramones played there. Blondie, Talking Heads, Television and generations of punk, hardcore and alternative bands passed through. The room closed. New York moved on.</p>
<p>Culture rarely agrees to end that neatly.</p>
<p>The CBGB Festival returns in 2026 under the K Bridge in Brooklyn, stretching deliberately across generations: Patti Smith, Interpol, Sex Pistols with Frank Carter, Bikini Kill, Mannequin Pussy, Circle Jerks, Buzzcocks, Agnostic Front and newer bands carrying the same appetite for volume into a different city.</p>
<p>The location matters.</p>
<p>Under the K is not a reconstruction of the old club. It is open air, concrete and infrastructure overhead — a large industrial space in a city where the original punk myth was built in a very small room.</p>
<p>That distance is more interesting than nostalgia.</p>
<p>What survives when a culture loses its architecture?</p>
<p>Songs survive. Stories get exaggerated. Clothes detach from the people who first wore them and return on people born decades later. A battered leather jacket becomes fashion, then cliché, then fashion again.</p>
<p>Punk has always had a complicated relationship with style because anti-fashion becomes fashion almost immediately.</p>
<p>Maybe the only useful rule left is this:</p>
<p>Wear something you are prepared to live in.</p>
<p>The floor is concrete.</p>
<p>The night is long.</p>
<p>The music is the point.</p>
<h3>ISSUE NOTE</h3>
<p><strong>CBGB FEST / SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 / UNDER THE K BRIDGE PARK</strong></p>