- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Punk & Post-Punk
- Previous Issues
- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014
Punk & Post-Punk - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014
-
-
‘Hey little rich boy, take a good look at me’: Punk, class and British Oi!
More LessAbstractThis article looks at the controversial music genre Oi! in relation to youth cultural identity in late 1970s and early 1980s Britain. By examining the six compilation albums released to promote Oi! as a distinct strand of punk, it seeks to challenge prevailing dismissals of the genre as inherently racist or bound to the politics of the far right. Rather, Oi! – like punk more generally – was a contested cultural form. It was, moreover, centred primarily on questions of class and locality. To this end, Oi! sought to realize the working-class rebellion of punk’s early aesthetic; to give substance to its street-level pretentions and offer a genuine ‘song from the streets’.
-
-
-
‘Stop flexing your roots, man’: Reconversion strategies, consecrated heretics and the violence of UK first-wave punk
More LessAbstractThe article assesses how the reshaping of the habitus of UK punk’s original working-class and lower-middle-class practitioners framed their investment in this heavily mediated popular music culture. A reshaping that facilitated an increased reflexivity in these more socially mobile subjects. This is achieved by drawing on both published testimonies and the author’s own empirical research into how former first-wave punks now read their earlier practice. In recognizing first-wave punk’s initial status as a heterodox cultural formation, discursively defined by the modernist aesthetic it laid claim to and by the violence attributed to it in media representations, the article examines the degree to which its practitioners challenged orthodoxy in their desire to consecrate a new field of cultural practice, with its attendant forms of capital. By drawing on a Bourdieusian conceptual framework, the article demonstrates how first-wave punk derived its affective energy from working-class cultures and predicated this modernist aesthetic on the symbolic value it selectively extracted from them. In undertaking such an account, the article suggests that the violence of first-wave punk, symbolic and physical in form, was symptomatic of the divergent classed habitus of its practitioners. It concludes by arguing that in this respect, punk’s opening up of radical space might be read in a more ambivalent light than has hitherto been the case.
-
-
-
Children of a lesser guild: An anarcho A–Z
By Alex OggAbstractOne of the fallacies concerning the anarcho-punk movement, diligently dispelled by the recent work of Ian Glasper and others, is that it was a self-limiting oeuvre, peopled by the non-descript and musically unadventurous. While there was unarguably some sheep farming north of the Falklands latterly, that was far from the case originally; specifically in terms of the output of Crass Records, whose symbolically attired monochrome 45s surveyed an astonishing breadth of musical styles and ideas. Approximately three decades down the line we have a chance to look at new ‘product’ from two supposedly ‘anarcho’ bands who were equally innovative but sounded as distinct from each other in musical ethos as it is possible to imagine. Originally recording for the Subhumans’ Spiderleg imprint, Amebix’s thunderous early EPs and Arise album (Alternative Tentacles) still sound as if souls were being cheese-grated live in the studio and were hugely influential in bridging punk to dark metal, crust and beyond. Conversely Zounds’ winsome charms were rooted in a neo-folk musical vernacular that had trace elements of 1960s pop. Alex Ogg spoke first to Amebix’s Rob aka the Baron and subsequently to Steve Lake, whose The Redemption of Zounds is out now through Overground Records. The interviews were undertaken in 2011 and a small number of quotes from these exchanges were published in an article for commercial magazine Vive Le Rock.
-
-
-
Punk and Post-Punk in the Republic of Ireland: Networks, migration and the social history of the Irish music industry
More LessAbstractWas the early punk movement a more geographically and ethnically diverse milieu that some accounts indicate? A number of key figures in the early punk movement were originally from Ireland including the founders of both Chiswick and Stiff Records. This invites the question: how did the Republic of Ireland’s music scene, which included ‘non-punk’ acts like Thin Lizzy, Horslips and Chris de Burgh interface with the punk and post-punk movement? This article aims to identify the under-acknowledged contributions of people working behind the scenes in the industry. Specifically it examines the links between individuals, bands and cities. How did these links help artists? I particularly wish to identify how some of the early bands of the punk and post-punk movement received assistance from established acts. The early business of punk indicates a two-way cultural process: Irish entrepreneurs in London helped to advance the punk movement, while Irish acts, including the Radiators from Space and the Boomtown Rats, benefitted from that punk movement.
-
-
-
‘Prole Art Threat’: The Fall, the Blue Orchids and the politics of the post-punk working-class autodidact
More LessAbstractIn much of the writing that exists on The Fall, a persistent myth is perpetuated of the inscrutable character of Mark E. Smith. One of the contributing factors to this myth concerns Smith’s politics, commonly seen as ambiguous yet so far not analysed in detail. Here I shed some light on this issue. Furthermore, I wish to open up academic discussion on the work of The Blue Orchids, an outgrowth of The Fall, which developed an outlook inchoate in the original line-up, one which was lost when Smith became its driving force. There is a fascinating comparison to be made between the Fall and Blue Orchids on the basis of working-class negotiations of leftist post-punk at the dawn of Thatcherism. I examine how the two bands’ cultural production and political attitudes towards freedom and pleasure were shaped by residual countercultural and class-based influences. I then consider the divergent outcomes of Smith’s affinities with Thatcherism (which nevertheless retained oppositional elements) and The Blue Orchids’ mystical rejection of both the New Right and New Pop in favour of an oppositional ethos of fulfilment that was part G. I. Gurdjieff and part Worker’s Educational Association.
-
-
-
Book Review
More LessAbstractOn the Periphery: David Sylvian – A Biography (The Solo Years), Christopher E. Young (2012) Heswall: Malin, 384 pp., ISBN: 9780992722807, h/bk, £24.99
-