Punk Politics: The Evolution of Rebellion

Punk Historiography and Introduction

           Before jumping into the discussion of how punk has altered over time, it is important to look at how the study of punk has also changed. While the approaches vary, the two most common methods study punk as either a regional phenomenon or a grassroots individual movement. Although they share characteristics, how they make their claims differ as does where the emphasis is placed within the studies. The first of these two approaches was popularized by Dick Hebdige. In his 1979 study, he cites the economic struggles in England and the crumbling of society as the primary symptoms that led to the creation of punk in 1976.[1] Other scholars, looking at 1980s United States Punk, also stress the significance of regional context. Dewar MacLeod focuses on how suburban life influenced and shaped the existence of punk in California in the 1980s. Many California punks wrote about their family conflicts and the failures in suburbia.[2] He argues that the punk scene remained fractured stylistically and ideologically throughout states, cities, and neighborhoods.[3] Daniel Traber, looking at Los Angeles, argues that punks were largely members of the middle-class but chose to rebel in a way that emulated culturally dominant ideas of what it meant to be an outcast.[4] The approach emphasizing local context is useful for understanding how punk came to be formed in 1980s America, but it has its limits for explaining larger national trends in punk especially in the era of the Internet in the 2000s. Yet this sort of study often cited lyrics of punk bands as pieces of evidence or referred to the punk music as proof of its political nature.
            The other popular methodology for studying punk does not see punk bands as the best representation of punk. Instead, these scholars take a grassroots approach and shift the focus to the people who make up the punk movements and communities. While this does not necessarily mean avoiding a discussion of punk bands, it instead emphasizes the importance of individual people and their contribution to the creation of local punk communities in the 1980s. John Goshert’s study of punk focuses on two independent music punk record labels that operated on do-it-yourself (DIY) ethics.[5] DIY as a punk ethos is a way of denouncing the establishment by escaping the consumerist culture that follows. DIY in punk is noted by nearly every scholar but scholars such as Goshert see it as essential to the authenticity of punk. His discussion of these record labels and punks within local scenes is used as evidence for his argument that punk must “be localized and transient performance rather than subcultural opposition.”[6] If punk became larger than this, it would lose what made it authentic in the first place.
             This grassroots type of study then places the actions of multiple punks at the center of their importance. Dawson Barrett notes that placing major bands as the primary representations of punk politics is essentially disingenuous to the reality of punk.[7] This complaint is primarily directed at the scholarship that uses bands as the representative of all punk thought and like Goshert, Barrett fears this puts too much emphasis on consumerism.[8] Barrett instead argues that the true meaning of punk is defined by the collectives they created like 924 Gilman in Berkeley.[9] Barrett’s discussion of these collectives is to support the overall argument of these spaces being political active and being youth-run.[10] Another scholar that takes this grassroots approach is Teal Triggs who focuses on the creation of Fanzines as one of the critical defining aspects of punk. Fanzines were used by punk, Triggs argues, as the alternative to popular culture and mainstream communication methods that punks denounced.[11]
            However, these definitions become less viable with the emergence of the Internet as local community approaches could be applied nationally with the lowering of barriers. They also don’t account for nationally occurring trends in punk movements such as the 1980s disdain for Ronald Reagan. In 2010, communications scholars Lars J. Kristiansen, Joseph R. Blaney, Philip J. Chidester, and Brent K. Simonds, tried to address the varying approaches to punk in the 2010 book Screaming for Change. They aimed to define punk as a specific perspective to the world and a mentality of how to create a change in it.[12] This approach incorporates parts of both the regional and grassroots methods and can be used to understand the new era of punk.
            While not all punk scholars agree with basing their studies on punk music, this website aims to show the value in doing so. By looking at nationally occurring similarities and differences between punk bands and the lyrics they create, this will illustrate how the changes in music also helped punk become more acceptable within the mainstream. The point is not to argue that this is the best way to understand all of punk but instead illustrate how a digital format and seamless inclusion of media allows for the best way to study how punk music fits into a greater understanding of the topic as a whole.
 
[1] Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, (London: Methuen, 1979), 87.
[2] Dewar MacLeod, Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 102-103.
[3] Ibid., 132-133.
[4] Daniel S. Traber, “L. A.’s ‘White Minority”: Punk and the Contradictions of Self-Marginalization,” Cultural Critique, No. 48 Spring 2001, 40.
[5] John Charles Goshert, “‘Punk’ after the Pistols: American Music, Economics, and Politics in the 1980s and 1990s,” Popular Music and Society Vol. 24, 2000, 89.
[6] Ibid., 101.
[7] Dawson Barrett, “DIY Democracy: The Direct Action Politics of U.S. Punk Collectives,” American Studies 52, no. 2 (2013), 24.
[8] Ibid., 24.
[9] Ibid., 32.
[10] Ibid., 37-38.
[11] Teal Triggs, “Scissors and Glue: Punk Fanzines and the Creation of a DIY Aesthetic,” Journal of Design History 19, no. 1 (2006), 70.
[12] Lars J. Kristiansen, Joseph R. Blaney, Philip J. Chidester, and Brent K. Simonds, Screaming for Change: Articulating a Unifying Philosophy of Punk Rock. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 9.

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