Fast, cheap and out of control: The graphic symbol in hardcore punk

Extremely simple graphic symbols were central to the visual culture of the first wave of American hardcore punk. Simple enough to be easily drawn by hand, their accessibility was important to the lived experience of hardcore values of participation and collectivity and contributed to the spread of the subculture outside of commercial channels in the early 1980s. While early British punk had provided models for the critical appropriation of graphic symbols of power, the use of symbols in hardcore was played out between conflicting approaches - the negation and critique of symbols of power as modelled by UK collective Crass and the invention of original, enigmatic branding marks as modelled by the US punk band Germs.