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- Volume 2, Issue 2, 2013
Punk & Post-Punk - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2013
Volume 2, Issue 2, 2013
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‘I Tried to Make Him Laugh, He Didn’t Get the Joke…’ – taking punk humour seriously
More LessAbstractPunk. The sound of the streets, the music of protest, the shouts and screams of the disadvantaged and oppressed, the anguished howl of the underdog, the unclean and the unworthy. Political, agitational, provocative, subversive, awkward, uncompromising, angry and aggressive. Descriptions and definitions of punk – the subculture, the music, the fashion, the lifestyle, the language and the politics – inevitably revolve around stereotypes and generalizations. Consensus, where it can be found, tends to exemplify those same regularly repeated clichés, and important elements become further hidden from view. The use of humour in punk – lyrically, within musical phrasing, song construction and live performance and in the graphic language of punk sleeves, fanzines and posters – is often overlooked. This article comprises two parts. This first part seeks to outline the ways in which humour – through rhetorical codes and strategies including satire, pun, metaphor and metonymy, hyperbole, invective, irony, sarcasm, allegory, exaggeration, parody, repetition, self-deprecation, profanity and the embrace of the absurd or ridiculous were and are central to an understanding of punk language and practice. Within part two of this article, to be published in Punk & Post Punk, further emphasis will be placed on the visual identity of punk and hardcore groups, and on the strategies employed by designers to reflect and support punk’s satirical core.
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Dutch punk with eastern connections: Mapping cultural flows between East and West Europe
More LessAbstractThis article provides an understanding of complex cultural flows between Eastern Europe and ‘western’ punk music. This flow is investigated through examples of East–West interactions that take places within the punk subculture in The Netherlands. The article argues that these exchanges complicate the notion of mimesis of ‘the West’ by the rest of the world, whilst highlighting a continued structural inequality in this relationship. In doing so this article builds upon debates that appear in the special edition of Punk and Post-Punk, ‘Punk – but not as we know it: Special issue on punk in post-socialist space’. Drawing on interview data from fieldwork conducted in The Netherlands, the article highlights aspects of cross-cultural exchange: the circulation of political ideas amongst Europe’s left wing, the migration out of Eastern Europe following the fall of communism, and the political economy of punk as illustrated through bands’ touring practices. These aspects are situated within debates around the local/global in a punk scene, centre/periphery inequality in Do It Yourself (DIY) culture, and rhizomic forms of influence within cultural flow.
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Death to Trad Historicism: Futuremania, avant-gardism and Scottish post-Punk 1985–1994
By Pete DaleAbstractThe year 1977, according to certain voices, offered a ‘Year Zero’ in which punk rock was supposed to arrive ex nihilo. However, it did not take long for critical voices to declare that punk rock, in practice, was limited in its ability to so do. Such voices soon demanded a radical post-punk ‘new thing’ which should offer a more genuine avant-garde. Perhaps surprisingly, it took far longer for journalists and other historians of rock to account for this post-punk avant-garde. In the twenty-first century, however, this process has begun in earnest. In some writing related to this topic, a strong faith in the value of novelty for its own sake is apparent, as is a desire to think the development of the first wave of post-punk, c.1978–1984, as a special period with unique importance and self-evident salience. Against such a viewpoint, this article argues that whilst early punk and post-punk music may have involved some discrete eruptions of novelty in which a certain discontinuous ‘time out of joint’ may have been felt to have arrived, to adopt an historicist view that the chronology of such arrivals follows some necessary logic for its stylistic content is to overstate the case. Rather, if one wishes to grasp something of the deeper impetus that often ignites post-punk musicians and other creative individuals’ will to power, one might better engage with the avant-gardist and essentially ‘political’ aspirations that frequently lie behind the development of novel musical approaches. In an attempt to support this argument, the article explores the particular case of post-punk music in Glasgow and Edinburgh from around 1985 onwards, exploring a stylistic development from the Fire Engines, through Dog Faced Hermans, Dawson, the Yummy Fur and others leading up to the mass success of Franz Ferdinand. In several cases within this development, radical political desires are readily identifiable as a supplement to the groups’ musical radicalism. Such can hardly be claimed of the later inheritors of this Scottish scene/style, however, for here the mainstream music industry is embraced in a manner not quite consistent with the scene from which such groups, musically and socially, would appear to have sprung. In the final analysis, the article suggests that the attempt at articulation of music and politics remains of great interest. Perhaps one should hesitate, however, before deciding that this articulation arrived as an accomplished fusion of art and politics or as a moment with some historically verifiable importance: perhaps, if such a fusion is to come, it will require a time out of joint with the logic of historicism.
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Making a scene: The female punk narrative in Lou Adler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains and Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens
By Jimmy WeaverAbstractThis article will examine the ‘female punk narrative’ found in the American cinema of the 1980s. Although a largely unexplored trend, several American narrative films of this period centre on a young, economically marginalized female protagonist who navigates the punk subculture in search of economic, artistic and personal fulfilment. The punk heroine rarely meets any of these goals and often incurs great personal damage along the way. These narratives, with their emphasis on female subjectivity and themes of unattained personal fulfilment, bring to mind the ‘women’s pictures’ and melodramas of the 1950s. This observation raises the question of whether these female punk films are at all transgressive or are simply traditional narratives dressed up in Mohawks and ripped stockings (much like how punk music of the 1970s and 1980s is often castigated for being pop music in disguise as something transgressive). A close reading of Lou Adler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1982), a major studio production, and Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens (1982), an independent feature, will address this question. These films’ differing materialist backgrounds, as well as the presence of punk ‘star personas’ will be addressed. The writings of Richard Dyer, Claire Monk and Dick Hedbridge, along with references to Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (Markey, 1984), Times Square (Moyle, 1980), Breaking Glass (Gibson, 1980) and Light of Day (Schrader, 1987) will supplement the discussion,
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Poly Styrene interview
By Alex OggAbstractA few years ago Punk & Post-Punk editor Alex Ogg interviewed Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex for an American fanzine, which led to subsequent correspondence and meetings. What emerged from those discussions was a woman whose intelligence and sense of perspective was illuminating, despite openly acknowledged bouts of mental illness that led some in the media to ridiculue her. What she had to say also directly related to the female experience of punk from one of its most celebrated exponents, and in particular the way her public image was spun by her one-time manager and boyfriend, whose manipulation extended to the financial arrangements of the band.
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