Folk-punk and the way it handles the gap between the life the music describes and the life of the audience is something worth thinking about.

A lot of folk-punk music describes experiences of poverty, marginalization, and working-class struggle. The audiences for folk-punk are not exclusively people with these experiences — they include people who are drawn to the music for aesthetic reasons without having the specific life experiences the music is about.

This creates a complexity about what it means to be in the audience for folk-punk. Are you a witness? A fellow traveler? Someone who's borrowed an experience that isn't yours for the duration of a song?

The best folk-punk music navigates this complexity by being specific enough about its subjects that it can't be easily appropriated — the particularity of the experience is part of the point, and that particularity resists being made into a universal that a more comfortable listener can inhabit without friction. The friction is part of the aesthetic.