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- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
Punk & Post-Punk - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
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Striving for authenticity: Punk in China
By Jian XiaoAbstractThis article explores issues of authenticity arising from an ethnographic study of punks in China. Through examining how participants articulate their punk lives, it focuses on one prominent aspect – pursuing authenticity in punk performance through deliberately choosing where and how to perform. Using the concepts of authenticity, I explore how punk musicians claim their own authenticity and perceive others within the punk group as inauthentic. I also examine how Chinese punks as a group attempt to establish certain performance-related norms regarding themes and styles, with the aim of challenging mainstream norms, the power of authorities and social morals in Chinese society. By unpacking the intragroup debates among punk musicians and their interpretations of punk practices as members of the punk group, I highlight various paths to striving for punk authenticity and the social implications of the punk phenomenon existing in China.
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‘Laughter is a Harlequin’: Laughter and identity in a close reading of a Cuban punk band
By Tom AstleyAbstractAs Punk and Post-Punk have pointed out in previous issues (2.2 and 2.3), humour might be said to be at the heart of a variety of punk aesthetics, incorporating elements of satire, parody, shock and subversion as weapons against host cultures (and yet, paradoxically, often cementing those punk manifestations within and as constituent part of those same cultures). Rather than reassert the place (and types) of humour in punk, this article examines one of its symptoms, laughter, outlining the ‘dual face’ of laughter and its role in delineating both exclusionary and inclusionary identity spaces. By offering a close reading of several recorded bouts of laughter – some performed, manic and distinctly humourless, others apparently natural and spontaneous (though nonetheless deliberate parts of the recording) – in the work of controversial Cuban punk band Porno Para Ricardo, this article examines specifically the role laughter plays in the band’s work, but also suggests, more broadly, that laughter might constitute not only a telling identity marker for its audiences but also an important facet of the punk soundworld.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Kirsty Lohman and Pete DaleAbstractSOME OF US SCREAM, SOME OF US SHOUT, GREGORY BULL AND MIKE DINES (EDS) (2016) Portsmouth: Itchy Monkey Press, 270 pp., ISBN number: 9781523264223, p/bk £12.00
CRASS REFLECTIONS, ALASTAIR GORDON (2016) London: Active Distribution and Portsmouth: Itchy Monkey Press. ISBN 978-1-909798-22-9. Hardback £4.84 and paperback £4.44
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Si se puede!: Chicas Rockeras and punk music education in South East Los Angeles
More LessAbstractIn 1986, Lawrence Grossberg argued that rock ‘n’ roll empowered disillusioned post-war youth in their everyday lives. Rock ‘n’ roll offered a historical complex that hid in the crevasses from hegemonic power structure replication. Youth felt the pleasures of rock affectively, corporeally. Punk transformed ‘no future’ to ‘the time is now’, and this is the case with the discursive constructions of South East Los Angeles (SELA) as ‘dis-empowered’ and without a future or well-funded educational means to imagine that future. Chicas Rockeras utilizes punk feminist pedagogy, with a mestiza consciousness, to remind students of their past and present power, and also give them a space for their affective empowerment musically. At a time when arts education in the United States, and in this case, California, continues to be underfunded, punk pedagogies, inclusive of feminism and other ideologies, give music education a future. In conversation with recently published work on punk pedagogy and punk scholarship, this article considers how punk feminist pedagogy is well-suited to query western epistemological orientations and encourage girls’ and women’s agency through a decentring of patriarchal power, colonial power, and human-environmental labor-resource exploitation. Chicas Rockeras practices a punk feminist pedagogy that promotes institutional and social change through classroom activities and community-based activism that exposes the conditionality of inequalities, and as such, can help educators break down the walls of neatly defined ‘core’ and ‘elective’ subject matter and create critical connections.
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Towards a field theory of punk
More LessAbstractThis article draws on a growing number of studies of punk that use Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field. It is argued that this approach has considerable advantages over the concept of subculture because of its emphasis on the diversity of punk practices. The concept of subculture tends to assume a shared culture and a consensus about punk values. The article argues that punk should be considered as practice within a field. This research strategy is illustrated by interviews with two contemporary bands.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Gareth Dylan Smith and Lars J. KristiansenAbstractTALES FROM THE PUNKSIDE, MIKE DINES AND GREGORY BULL (EDS) (2015) London: Active Distribution and Portsmouth: Itchy Monkey Press. ISBN 978-1-909798-07-6, p/bk, £5.00
NOFX: THE HEPATITIS BATHTUB AND OTHER STORIES, NOFX AND JEFF ALULIS (2016) Boston, MA: DaCapo Press, 357 pp., ISBN: 9780306824777, p/bk, $22.99/£15.99
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