When John Joseph returned to New York, in , punk rock was almost dead, and he was determined to help kill it. He had grown up hard in Queens, abandoned by his father and then by his mother. Eventually, he stopped using his last name, which was McGowan. But he liked the mayhem, and he liked the punk-obsessed woman he met a few weeks later, who had a fake English accent and a real heroin addiction. There he discovered something even better than punk.

Street punk sometimes alternatively spelled streetpunk is an urban working class [1] -based subgenre of hardcore punk , partly as a rebellion against the perceived artistic pretensions of the first wave of British punk. A key band in defining the aesthetic was The Exploited. Street punks generally have a much more ostentatious and flamboyant appearance than the working class or skinhead image cultivated by many Oi!