Punk & Post-Punk - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2012

Whereas the band Joy Division (Unknown Pleasures, 1979; Closer, 1980) is widely recognized as one of the foundations of the style of music known as post-punk, their music speaks also to the nature of contemporary urban life. Melding both cultural analysis and urban theory, this article first unpacks the urban readingof the band presented in the recent underappreciated documentary Joy Division by director Grant Gee (2007) – whose emphasis on the band’s connection to and representation of Manchester has gone relatively unnoticed by critics. Subsequently, following Gee’s urban contextualization of the band (evident in both the documentary’sform and content), the article then approaches Joy Division’s musical productionitself through a range of urban theories (Georg Simmel, Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Friedrich Engels, Andy Merrifield, Marc Augé, Jane Jacobs, David Harvey, Guy Debord/the Situationists, Jacob Riis). In the end, while undoubtedly of interest also for frontman Ian Curtis’s epilepsy and tragic suicide, Joy Division’s music speaks more broadly to the influence the modern city has exercised over contemporary life and cultural production and to future reconciliations of music sociology and urban studies.

This article explores the manner in which the punk generation qualified and then recalibrated its initial vilification of the Beatles, the supreme canonical figures in British pop history. It uses primary and secondary interview sources to contextualize the dialogue, both explicit and implied, between the two camps. In so doing, it attempts to situate the Beatles on the punk landscape and assess their function as totemic anti-heroes within the subculture. The article then examines the underlying influence Lennon-McCartney may have wielded on punk-era songwriting and looks at all four individual Beatles’ responses to punk, attempting to reconcile the mutual negotiation that took place.

The call to arms that was Punk privileged a sense of friction, across cultural and economic activities including publishing, fashion, art, music, theatre, performance and dance. Together a range of artists and activists shared an audacity to search for different ways to explore social and cultural experience, standing against a tide of compliance. In the subsequent creation of the histories of this state of mind, contributions from the realm of dance remain largely under represented. This article contributes a dance-oriented perspective to the discourse, evaluating the early artistic practice of two female dancer choreographers; New York-based Karole Armitage, and Louise Lacavalier of Montreal-based La La La Human Steps. The collective achievement of their early and ongoing work was the impact of their physical athleticism as an integral part of their idiosyncratic practice. For them dancing was about honing the visceral power and skills of communication, jolting free of the constraints of tradition in their own blaze of consciousness. It was about creating dance ready to speak of the world and times in which they lived.

This article will explore The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (Julien Temple) and Rude Boy (Jack Hazan and David Mingay) (both 1980), the two highest-profile films to emerge from and treat cinematically Britain’s first wave of punk rock. Featuring the Sex Pistols and the Clash, respectively, each film attempts to tell its tale in an oppositional manner. Both do so, however, from within dominant industrial and discursive modes of practice. Taking as its keynote Stacy Thompson’s dialectical approach to punk cinema, the article considers these seemingly irreconcilable positions by tracing implied cinematic traditions and questioning the role of the protagonist. It goes on to centre its attention on Rude Boy specifically, analysing the position of the fan as a key figure within the narrative. An in-depth interview with Ray Gange, the novice actor/fan at the heart of the film, concludes the piece.

Punk and anarchism have frequently been linked within the popular imagination. Many of the original punks employed the circle-A symbol for its shock value, but for many bands and individuals who followed, anarchism came to mean more than a symbolic affectation. Inspired by bands such as Crass, an anarcho-punk culture evolved that connected punk’s do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos with anarchism’s perpetual struggle against hierarchies. Today, anarcho-punk continues to be vibrant across the globe, though often outside of the mainstream gaze. Drawing upon extensive global research, this article explores the ways in which anarcho-punk offers its adherents opportunities for political resistance within their daily lives. The article begins with a brief summary of the development of anarcho-punk, then explores how various anarcho-punks conceive of ‘anarchism’. The article contends that anarcho-punks are currently important in reviving and sustaining anarchism as a political way of being. The article then examines some of the ways in which anarcho-punks practice anarchism and resistance in their everyday lives, focusing on squats, youth houses, touring bands, and DIY record labels and distros. The article concludes with a critical examination of the potential of anarcho-punk for a sustained project of political resistance.

White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race,Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay (eds) (2011) Foreword by James Spooner, New York: Verso, 336pp.,ISBN: 978-1844676880, p/bk, £14.99