Punk Now!!: Contemporary Perspectives on Punk

Punk Now!! brings together papers from the second incarnation of the Punk Scholars Network International Conference and Postgraduate Symposium, with contributions from revered academics and new voices alike in the field of punk studies. The collection ruminates on contemporary and non-Anglophone punk, as well as its most anti-establishment tendencies. It exposes not only modern punk, but also punk at the margins: areas that have previously been poorly served in studies on the cultural phenomenon. By compiling these chapters, Matt Grimes and Mike Dines offer a critical contribution to a field that has been saturated with nostalgic and retrospective research. The range and depth of these chapters encapsulates the diverse nature of the punk subculture – and the adjacent academic study of punk – today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Feb 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789381764

Book preview

Introduction

Mike Dines and Matt Grimes

The origins of Punk Now!! reside in the Second Annual Punk Scholars Conference and Postgraduate Symposium held at Birmingham City University in 2015. Organized primarily by Matt Grimes and Russ Bestley, the conference, by its very name, was part of a series of events held by the Punk Scholars Network (PSN). Now in its sixth year, the Annual Punk Scholars Network Conference and Postgraduate Symposium has grown to an international stature, whilst the PSN itself has many international affiliates across the world, including America, Australasia, Indonesia, Mexico, France, Iberia and Colombia.

As outlined in Dines (2017), the PSN was formed in 2012 and has since continued to heighten its presence through conferences, publications, talks and exhibitions whilst, at the same time, maintaining its original aim as an international forum for scholarly debate. In the symposium booklet, the conference organizers note how the theme of the conference was situated around the critical space of ‘Punk now!!’, with panels:

themed around a range of contemporary issues related to the subculture. Postgraduate student panels are loosely thematic, including Brave New Worlds: European Punk Scenes – exploring recent and contemporary developments across the continent, More than Safety Pins and Spit: Punk Creativity – DIY and punk aesthetics, Oi Oi! There’s a Riot (Grrrl) Going On – local scenes and punk sub-genres, and Punk Attitude!: Internal/External Manifestations/Legacy – contemporary punk discourse, particularly in the age of new media and communications. Post-doctoral and academic panels situate punk subcultures historically and contemporaneously, with some reflections on what the future may bring: ‘I Wanna be Me!’: Pedagogy and Punk Identity, ‘Safe European Home’?: Punk Scenes in Europe and Punk Past and Present.

This volume, therefore, in part, emerges from some of the papers presented at the Punk Scholars Network conference at Birmingham City University, and partly a continuation of academic writing that has been affiliated in some way with the PSN and the theme of ‘Punk now!!’. For instance, the book begins with Pete Dale’s chapter entitled ‘Punk rock: Radical politics, radical aesthetics or just the same old game?’. In his chapter, Dale situates punk within a political, aesthetic and historic framework, raising questions over punk’s origins. By widening the debate around the ‘radical’, Dale asks his reader whether punk was indeed something ‘new’, or whether it was on a continuum that one could trace to the countercultural movement of the late 1960s. Alastair ‘Gords’ Gordon’s chapter follows, offering up an ethnographical and semiotic analysis of the 1979 Crass record, Reality Asylum. As the proud owner of 45 copies of the single, Gordon situates the record in terms of its production difficulties, examining the theoretical significance of explaining why this is an important record in terms of select examples of historical and cultural theory. He also uses a personal lens, especially of that around record collecting, to illustrate many of his ideas.

The next chapter, Alex Hay’s ‘What about a future?: Punk as history and document’, explores the importance of the artefact in unpacking punk historicity. Pulling upon the work of punk bands the Exploited and Chaos UK, Hay looks at how punk (and punk memorabilia) can be seen in terms of social commentary and as historical primary texts. For example, he argues that, while songs such as ‘War’ and ‘What about a Future’, by The Exploited and Chaos UK respectively, refer to contemporary events and concerns, the author asks whether they can be seen as reliable sources, offering a more nuanced perspective of punk itself. Following Hay’s thoughts on the artefact, the next chapter, ‘A Graphic Representation of Mutual Influence in Contemporary Punk Rock’, is written by Michael Blaß. Here, Blaß attempts the mapping of musical influence via interactive graphs, and through the complex correlation of personal influence (in particular, of band members) and self-reported influence (evidence expressed in written or oral form by the band members). The graphs are compiled through data firstly being organized as a matrix, with rows representing the bands and the columns the individual musicians. From here, the author then treats each musician as Boolean variables and the bands as cases. Each variable is true for each case in which there is a known influence from a person to a band, and false otherwise. As examples, Blaß highlights American and German punk scenes. This interesting and somewhat scientific approach to data clearly shows how punk rock has found its way into so many, but seemingly unrelated fields of academia.

From Boolean variables, the volume moves onto a social and musical analysis of the hardcore scene in Geneva, Switzerland. Here, Bastien Piguet and Mike Dines provide a historical and musical contextualization that is termed as the ‘hardcore scene’, tracing the origins from the seminal American scene to Geneva in the early 2000s. Analysis is framed within an ethnographical approach, and it is obvious that Piquet, in particular, has a thorough knowledge of the hardcore scene in Switzerland. As such, personal experience is placed alongside interviews with participants and social analysis, including the importance of the squatting scene at that time. Chapter 6, Charlotte Bedford’s ‘Radioactive: DIY Punk Networks and the Evolution of Radio in the Digital Age’, looks at the growing trends around Internet radio, looking specifically at the Dublin-based Radioactive International, an online radio station that provides 1750 hours of free, on demand, alternative radio to its listeners. Bedford looks at the correlation between punk and radio, highlighting the complexities around production methods, DIY, punk and radio.

Chapter 7 takes a photo-documentary approach to an examination of the contemporary UK Oi! scene. Here photographer and Ph.D. candidate Bethany Kane explores the dichotomy of left-wing and right-wing politics within the UK Oi! scene, and how that has demonized the ‘fence-sitters’ who denounce the place of politics within the scene. Using images and fan voices, she explores the problematic nature of scene politics and divisions and questions what the future holds for the UK Oi! scene. Raphael Kösters’ chapter, ‘Exploring social capital in youth cultures: A study of the punk and hardcore scene in a German major city’, explores the sociological concept of social capital and its application to the hardcore punk scene of Cologne, Germany. Here, Kösters uses a qualitative approach to the study of youth cultures, to explore two key areas: first, uncovering the characteristics of social capital in youth cultural scenes, and second, looking at how social capital in youth culture can foster individual and/or collective benefits.

Notions of ‘scene’ continue with Roy Wallace’s chapter, ‘Bloody bloody Belgium: Reflections on a unique international punk scene’. Here, Wallace looks at what he believes to be a unique model structure of DIY collaboration in Belgium from the late 1970s to 2010. He notes how the anarcho-punk scene, in particular, mobilized against left- and right-wing sensibilities, thus emerging as a dominant force in the underground music scene at this time. Wallace’s chapter is followed by Michael Mary Murphy’s chapter on Irish punk. Entitled ‘Special stew: Punk and Irish’, Murphy looks at the complexities around notions of ‘punk’ and of being ‘Irish’, pulling upon Celtic punk as a means of exploring the combination of these two contested labels. In other words, he raises questions on how punk was deployed by the Irish, framing punk within the contexts of punk music and the practice of punk DIY (do-it-yourself) culture.

Amy Corcoran’s chapter ‘All punks hate bastards: Investigating punk’s anti-police engagement’ explores the many incidences of anti-police messages and iconography in punk. Corcoran uses evidence from both lyrical content and from the scene itself, using her findings to unpack and explore the complex relationship between punk and the police in the sociopolitical environment of respective scenes. Cocoran’s chapter is followed by a challenging philosophical view of punk rocks predilection with the self-conscious emotion of shame. This is explored through Lacanian philosophy and Lacan’s concept of hontology – the suturing of shame and ontology – in Brian Schill’s chapter ‘I think I’m dumb: Or, Punk’s productive shame’. Here, Schill suggests that from the very beginning of punk rock it has articulated, contemplated and internalized its own shame and the shame of its participation in late capitalism. One solution to this is the way that some punks have embodied their shame as a way of working through it. This interesting and insightful chapter ends with a suggestion from Schill that, within neo-liberal western society, perhaps punk and post-punk are likely to experience a renaissance in terms of sound tracking the dehumanization and humiliation of the individual, which is potentially looming on the horizon.

Chapter 13 by Tony McMahon examines the artistry of songwriter David McComb of the Australian punk band The Triffids. In doing so McMahon argues that not only is McComb one of Australia’s greatest songwriters, but also has a place among some of Australia’s lauded literary writers, due to his ability to capture and combine the essence of the lack or loss of love and the trope of the Australian outback’s lack of landscape in his songwriting. Taking a broadly historiographical approach to documenting anarcho punk, in Chapter 14 Matt Grimes argues that filmmaker Alexander Oey’s documentary on seminal anarcho-punk band Crass challenges the canonical ‘rockumentary’ format often employed in documenting popular music and popular music histories on celluloid. Grimes suggests that Oey has no interest in historicizing Crass through the processes generally associated with canon formation, but to reflect more accurately the aesthetics and DIY ideologies of Crass through his documentary production values.

Lastly this edited collection of writings on punk rock is tail ended by graphic designer, artist and academic Russ Bestley’s reflections on curating and presenting the substantial and meaningful exhibition of punk rock artefacts, which accompanied the Punk Scholars Network conference at Birmingham City University. Whereas most discussions focus on the analysis of the art work itself, Bestley’s approach offers an insightful window into the practicalities, problems and logistics of designing and delivering an exhibition that encompasses meaningful explorations of local punk history through to global punk aesthetics, whilst relating notions of DIY praxis in relation to the design profession and wider professional music industries.

As with any edited collection, there can be no claim that this is a definitive look at punk rock, especially given the vast ways in which punk has been, and continues to be, examined across a number of academic disciplines and cultural perspectives. What this volume serves to do is present a snapshot of some of the contemporaneous areas of research interests in the field of punk studies. We hope it serves the purpose of opening up some new lines of enquiry as well as adding to existing ones. It would be fair to say that the acceptance of punk, as a serious cultural and political form worthy of academic investigation and analysis, has come a long way since Dick Hebdige’s seminal work on punk aesthetics and Dave Laing’s groundbreaking book One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock.

REFERENCE

Dines, Mike (2017), ‘Academia as subversion: The birth of the Punk Scholars Network’, in M. Dines and L. Way (eds), Postgraduate Voices in Punk Studies: Your Wisdom Our Youth, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 157–62.

Punk Rock: Radical Politics, Radical Aesthetics or Just the Same Old Game?

Pete Dale

Introduction

‘Punk rock, year zero’ – not many people still adhere to this idea in the twenty-first century, allegedly.¹ Today, we tend to be much more aware that punk grew from a range of forces: some musical, some sociopolitical, some historic. There certainly had been punk-sounding music prior to 1976, and a song like ‘Sick On You’ by Hollywood Brats may not have sold many copies when issued in 1973 but it certainly gives the lie to the idea that punk was music of a type, which had previously been inconceivable. Aesthetically, punk did not come from nowhere, then.

In sociopolitical terms, meanwhile, 1970s punk arose at a time when the left was firmly moving in to a long period of decline and, perhaps as a result, anarchistic political ideas were coming to the fore. This was not the first time that interest in anarchism had grown in the United Kingdom and beyond; however, nor was it the last time. Historically, meanwhile, it was probably important that the leading bands of the 1960s had been born during the war and often had parents who had fought in the war. The members of groups like the Sex Pistols, the Damned and so forth, by contrast, were born well after 1945 and very few of their parents (if any) will have seen active service in the early 1940s (although quite a few Dads will have done ‘National Service’, one assumes). However, if the 1970s punks were the first generation to have a certain critical distance from the war, this is not suggestive of a year zero perspective. On the contrary, explaining the tendencies and attitudes of a set of people through reference to historical data is quite the opposite of any idea that those young people did what they did through a divorce from history.

Looked at seriously, then, it is rather ludicrous to suggest that punk came from nowhere in a year zero, either sociopolitically or aesthetically: indeed, retrospective comments from participants in UK 1970s punk seem to have always included numerous suggestions that ‘you could feel something coming’.² A true year zero would not be something which one could feel coming, needless to say: it would have to break all ties and come from nowhere. Most people today, including most punks, will readily acknowledge that punk was not anything like a year zero.³ Nevertheless, the year zero idea retains a certain degree of currency amongst punks. For example, it remains fairly common to hear dismissive and hostile comments in regards to ‘hippies’ and ‘prog rock’; and this can even be heard from punks who can be caught enjoying a ‘toke’ (smoking cannabis, that is) and listening to trance-y, repetitive forms of punk (Amebix spring to mind, for example, but there are innumerable similar examples).

What was the problem with the hippies, from the 1970s punks’ perspective? Supposedly, that the hippies had become ‘complacent’: once radical, in a 1960s context, the radical edge had dissipated to the point where long hair was far from indicative of bohemianism; rather, long hair was de rigueur by the mid-1970s and more indicative of conformity than radical dissent. This attitude is interesting. What if we consider cropped and somewhat spiky hair, facial piercings, tattoos and tight clothing with provocative slogans to have been indicative of a radical disposition at a certain point (i.e. the 1970s): are these punk-ish ‘signs’ still radical today? It would be hard to deny that such signifiers have become comparably de rigueur in the twenty-first century, as compared with the popularity of long hair and flares in the 1970s, I think. Is punk now just as defunct, as a radical movement, as ‘hippy’ was by 1976?

I am inclined to think otherwise, and yet I think it is worth at least considering the possibility that punk is no longer radical in any meaningful way and, as a result, that punk may even be as much part of the problem as it is part of the solution. How would those who retain faith in the value of punk best rebut such an argument? I would suggest that the best rebuttal will be that which engages properly with the critical idea that punk is no longer radical today. If punk is still radical, is this a political radicalism, an aesthetic radicalism or a blend of the two? Alternatively, perhaps punk is not and has never been either politically or aesthetically radical – on the contrary, perhaps punk was nothing more or less than the ‘same old game’ dressed up in fancy bondage trousers. Too much punk scholarship is uncritically affirmative in regards to punk’s power and importance, I am inclined to think. My aspiration here, therefore, is to think critically about punk’s radicalism (or perhaps its lack thereof) and to pay special attention to the question of aesthetic radicalism, political radicalism and the extent to which these can be mutually supportive or, alternatively, mutually contradictory. Was the ‘new sense’ of 1970s punk (see below for more on my concept of the new sense) really as much of a nuisance as many punks seem to think it was? Could a new punk new sense be much of a nuisance today? These are core questions within what follows. I begin with some further criticism of the year zero idea.

What comes out of a vacuum?

Bill Drummond has argued that ‘every generation of artists needs […] to smash the yoke of pop, art, literary history and have their very own Year Zero, their own small-press revolution, their punk revolt and their Marcel Duchamp’ (Drummond 2000: 188). Drummond may be correct but, if he is, then don’t we risk repeating history as farce? If every generation wants to ‘smash the yoke’ in question (and behind each item in Drummond’s list lies capitalism itself, I would assert) but each generation fails, isn’t it perhaps wise to try a differing strategy?

Nothing comes from a vacuum and, in musical, historical, political, social and cultural senses, 1970s punk didn’t arrive from nowhere.⁴ Musically, I have already mentioned the case (selected almost at random) of Hollywood Brats but precedents for punk avant la lettre are too numerous to satisfactorily cover here: in short, you had a lot of punky stuff before people started talking about ‘punk rock’, even given that this couplet was being used as early as 1971.⁵ Historically, I have mentioned the importance of the Second World War to the so-called ‘punk generation’ but doubtless we also need to consider ‘May ’68’, the various union strikes in the United Kingdom of the 1970s, even the fact of the long, hot summer of 1976. Politically, the rise of Margaret Thatcher within the period in question and the proliferation of far-right groups such as the National Front also need to be borne in mind, as does the influence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and other anarchist groups.⁶ Socially and culturally, we often hear of the shocking appearance of punks in regard to the dominant sociocultural trends of the day: one doesn’t need to read a great deal of Hegel to see that this shock is unbreakably linked to the ‘norms’ that it transgresses.

UK punk rock in the 1970s, then, was as much a response to its musical, historical, political, social and cultural situation as it was a denial of it; or, at least, it arose within a context that unavoidably conditioned its impact, rendering the year zero idea as hopelessly naïve. That said, punk did shock in 1976 and 1977, and it continued being shocking thereafter in a range of ways. Indeed, a colleague of mine was recently faced with a student complaint when he offered up, for their consideration, the famous image, which Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood placed on a T-shirt in the mid-1970s, of two cowboys facing each other with almost-touching penises. Clearly, then, some elements of the shock of punk remain rather shocking today. UK punk in the 1970s context, furthermore, was burgeoning with shock-value; simply wearing tight trousers marked the punks out as signs of a certain closure vis-à-vis ‘the sixties’, as everyone knows, but a safety pin pierced through a cheek will be a shocking sight to almost anyone at almost any time.

Punk woke up British society with a start: the evidence to support this is overwhelming. The startling sights and sounds of punk (and smells too, if Viv Albertine is to be believed [Albertine 2014: 114–15]) were readily apparent. There are a fairly large number of ways in reading significance in to punk, some of which semi-contradict each other. Dick Hebdige sees punk as a somewhat incoherent mess of bricolage, for example, whereas Greil Marcus proposes that punk in general and the Sex Pistols in particular were torch-bearers for a long tradition of more coherent oppositional ideas within which he prioritizes the Situationists (Hebdige 1979; Marcus 2001). Both of these writers have had their work criticized by ‘punk scholars’ in recent years, for good reasons: 1970s punk was less incoherent and more conscious than Hebdige credits it as, it is fair to say, and if there are correspondences between Situationism and punk then they are less strong than Marcus implies, I think.

In my view, the most interesting and persuasive implication of ‘where punk comes from’ (beyond musical traces, which are actually too varied to satisfactorily map, for the precise reason that 1970s UK punk was actually a highly varied dis-unity in musical terms) is that drawn by George McKay in Senseless Acts of Beauty. For McKay, 1960s ‘hippy’ begets the free festival scene that begets both the ‘New Age Traveller’ scene and, also, key elements within punk (e.g. Crass). In turn, this leads on to ‘Rave’-based protests such as Reclaim the Streets, the whole ‘free party’ movement of the 1990s and, one could argue (although McKay couldn’t, in 1996), paves the way towards something like Occupy eventually. My use of the word ‘beget’ may be misplaced, here: perhaps the thread (or ‘trace’, as a Derridean thinker could put it) is more resilient/continuous/necessary and less cumulative/contingent than such a word would imply. Either way, though, I am strongly inclined to view favourably McKay’s idea (never put quite as explicitly as this in the text itself, but implied by the overall work) that punk extends the 1960s counterculture rather than making some kind of break with it.

If we take that view, does punk in the 1970s, and in all its various iterations and re-iterations since then, become merely a historical curiosity – a moment of interest, perhaps, but nothing for the radical left to seriously consider, given the more sizeable ‘fish in the sea’? I am inclined to think, at least to some extent, that such a valuation would be to under-estimate what is/was going on in punk. Punk never really threatened the establishment all that much, let us be frank about that. However, it gave (has given and still gives) people a sense of radical possibility, which sometimes spills into radical action of differing kinds, up to a point at least. Certainly it is not the ‘be all and end all’ of a revolution – as teleology, in other words, punk is decidedly ill-conceived, as I have shown elsewhere (Dale 2012: 220–21) – but the empowerment that punk makes participants feel is nevertheless worth something. What is the variable that makes punk seem more empowering and exciting in one part of a decade and less significant at another point in that ‘era’? It is to the question of this variable – which I link to a property I call ‘novelty’ – that I turn in the next section.

The new sense of punk

Why did the Sex Pistols ‘arrive’ in 1976 and not 1974 or 1972? Why were Crass ‘best before 1984’ and why was 1991 ‘the year punk broke’? Why do Indonesian and Chinese and Russian kids turn to punk in the twenty-first century for a thrill of possibility? Looked at ‘objectively’, after all, aren’t they just re-hashing the poses of a bygone era from an Imperialist nation (or set of nations, arguably, if we respect the contributions of continental European and American punk rock, as I’m sure we should)? Why would punk give young people a sense of excitement in such differing times and places – and why does it keep coming back a little different each time?

My theory is that punk brought an important new sense with the ‘first wave’ in 1976–78, with anarcho-punk in the early 1980s, with the ‘cutie’ scene in the mid-to-late 1980s, with riot grrrl in the early 1990s and even with ‘math rock’ (or, as I sometimes call it, ‘math punk’) later in the 1990s – as well as other moments in the last 40 years. In my monograph Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground, I theorized that punk’s new sense – a felt-novelty, essentially – is important particularly because it gives participants a feeling of ‘our time now’. This empowerment can be a nuisance to ‘the powers that be’ but has not been able to go much beyond a ‘new sense as nuisance’ trajectory: punk tends to stall at provocation, that is, and punks rarely get involved in explicit political action in any sustained way, I would maintain. Although I focused in Anyone Can Do It on the above-mentioned novel eruptions in or around punk (anarcho-punk, cutie, riot grrrl and math rock), I suggested that there were plenty of other micro-eruptions within the tradition(s) of punk that were based around the arrival of a new sense. None, however, has seriously threatened the status quo to anything like the organized extent that actual revolutionary change would require.

The closest thing to an exception to this rule is anarcho-punk in general and the anarcho-pacifist collective Crass in particular. Between 1977 and 1984, Crass heavily emphasized the need for radical change in society but, moreover, they encouraged a range of direct actions that raised the ire of the establishment in a range of differing ways, as can be recognized in any account of the band.⁷ For example, a Crass fan was taken to court for singing some of their lyrics ‘at’ a priest (Berger 2006: 120), the band are credited with massively re-invigorating the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Savage 1991: 598), their name was mentioned in the Houses of Parliament on more than one occasion (including a direct enquiry as to whether then-Prime Minister Thatcher might take time off to listen to the Crass song ‘How Does It Feel to be the Mother of a Thousand Dead?’) and so forth. The interested reader can consult any account of the band to see several more examples of successful provocation of the authorities. Crass’ success at rattling the establishment rivals that of, say, Paul McCartney’s public declaration that he had taken LSD in the late 1960s – and given the relative obscurity of Crass (being rather less well known than McCartney and the Beatles), the audaciousness of their ‘success’ as enemies of ‘the system’ is decidedly notable.

I spoke with Penny Rimbaud of Crass on Saturday 17th May 2007 with a specific interest in exploring the band’s anti-establishment activities. I was intrigued, therefore, when Penny suggested that Arthur Scargill ‘probably realised the social responsibility of saying,