Musical protagonism: Beyond participation in punk and post-punk

This article applies the notion of participation in artworks to the phenomenon of punk and post-punk. Participation has been championed as a means of describing the activity of art moving on from a static sense of art/audience reception. The punk DIY call seems to be an expression of that move, that is, from passive audiences to active audience members turning into band members. Carol Bishop is a key theorist in the analysis of participation. However, Bishop moved from a positive position of promoting the value of participation to a much more negative reading of attempts at artistic engagement. It is significant that both positive and negative readings of these activities occurred a considerable amount of time after similar debates were worked through in practice in the arenas of punk and post-punk. The article uses personal testimony in terms of the motives and drives for people in 1977 and those looking back to that time. This testimony points to something qualitatively different from participation, in fact the activity of newly empowered musical protagonists using simple means of production to develop new contexts outside of the norm. The ‘bridge’ of the article draws on Wire’s ‘It’s So Obvious’ and the Au Pairs’ ‘It’s Obvious’ to argue that it is the expectation of creative/personal expression that marks punk and post-punk out from other musical forms – what can be termed musical protagonism. This article draws on the author’s Ph.D. research and the author’s contemporaneous experience as a member of a post-punk band. It is argued that subsequent academic/creative practices of the author, and many others, stem back to experiences of punk and post-punk. The article concludes with the suggestion of applying the concept of musical protagonists to the present day.