Punk & Post-Punk - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2018

Punk’s do-it-yourself call to arms led to a widespread adoption of the rhetoric, if not always the practice, of independence from traditional means of production – although it should be acknowledged that do-it-yourself ideals go back a lot further than the punk explosion of the 1970s, from traditional folk music through to the bottleneck rural blues players of the 1930s and 1940s, the 1950s UK skiffle boom and early 1960s US garage bands. The punks may have articulated the do-it-yourself vision most clearly, turning it into a mantra, but they were inheriting a tradition that was established many years earlier. During the early period of punk’s development in the United Kingdom, a distinct division of labour can be seen in the impact of an ‘anyone can do it’ DIY ethos on a range of activities. These range from live performance to the creation and manufacture of punk artefacts (clothes, posters, flyers, fanzines, records). While some of these areas offered new opportunities for amateur producers, within more technical areas of manufacturing, including the physical production of records, do-it-yourself could only have a nominal impact. Many punk groups did not have access to sound recording technologies, and even if they did, they would have to hand over the cutting and pressing of vinyl to a professional outfit. There was certainly a widespread and outspoken desire to take artistic control away from mainstream sources, but in reality the full ownership of the means of production was at best a naive ambition. Similarly, sleeve artwork could be created by untrained designers, but print reproduction was often left to the services of a professional print studio – doing-it-yourself had obvious limitations when it came to large-scale production and distribution.

In order to ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY), one needs to have some idea as to what ‘it’ is, presumably. From the late 1970s punk scene onwards, many took ‘it’ to be releasing a record: some were content to simply perform a gig or several gigs, but actually releasing a vinyl record, or even a flexi or a tape, brought a certain credibility and seriousness to the profile of a band. However, some within the punk scene would appear to have realized early on that releasing records is not necessarily the best way to ensure that ‘anyone can do it’. Latterly, record sales have slumped and yet much of the DIY punk scene, even in its more radical and leftist margins, has critically failed to really explore the necessity and validity of releasing physical copies of musical performance. Should ‘we’ still be making records in the twenty-first century? Perhaps so, the article goes on to argue in the light of Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the on-going value of physical collections. ‘The’ revolution is not yet here and, under a capitalist system, we still may want to make records for some time to come, but a critical stance on pressing records in particular and DIY in general will do the punk scene no harm. Perhaps, indeed, making records is not the best ‘it’ that one can do and other forms of doing it yourself (putting on gigs, designing visual imagery, unrecorded musical performance and so forth) deserve to be valued more highly within the DIY punk scene(s).

In the 1990s United States, an increasing number of punk and punk-inspired bands made their way into the mainstream. This commercial success and popularity provoked profound anxiety within the underground punk scene, which had spent the 1980s building a DIY (do-it-yourself) network of zines, venues and independent record labels and prided itself on its autonomous cultural production. In the pages of punk zines, the overwhelming response to punk’s newfound visibility was to insist that punk remain underground, protect the scene from outsiders and cast out punk bands that signed contracts with major record record labels or even became too popular on independent labels as traitors. So-Cal punk, a style that fused 1980s hardcore with melodic vocals, occasional lead guitar parts, technical precision and more professionalized production, went from being praised for its innovations in the pages of punk zines to being castigated as a generic attempt at commercial success. The debate over DIY versus ‘selling out’ was guided by a fear that the mainstream viability of a few would dilute punk’s ethos of rebellion and compromise its integrity. While much ado has been made of DIY in recent scholarship, the robust discourse within the underground punk scene defending DIY as ideological principle and decrying ‘selling out’ has not yet been adequately chronicled or critically interrogated. This article draws on four prominent punk zines in the 1990s United States – HeartattaCk, MaximumRockNRoll, Profane Existence and Punk Planet – to elucidate the construction of DIY discourse in response to the newfound 1990s popularity of punk. Rather than romanticizing the DIY underground, this article critically evaluates the assumptions underpinning it, such as extolling the autonomous individual and small-scale production, or the notion that distance from the dominant cultural apparatuses automatically portends a praxis of rebellion.

This article explores the relationships between young punk and indie musicians and the merchandise that they produce. Three interlinking analytic distinctions are made in this article of the young musicians’ motivations to make merchandise: building symbolic capital; building economic capital; and serious play. We propose that DIY merchandising entails the construction of an ethical and authentic self through the social gravity of a deeply invested illusio. The research takes place in the DIY music scene of Newcastle, a large regional town on the east coast of Australia. The participants play in punk and indie bands; however, there is a diversity of merchandising practices within the group, highlighting the fluid and complex boundaries of contemporary punk practices. The forms of experimentation, negotiation and strategy encountered illustrate how these meaningful forms of labour are important to struggles about identity and authenticity. Developing and honing merchandise-related skills as a form of ‘serious play’ has facilitated pathways towards self-employment for several of the participants. For this reason, this article draws attention to the diverse applications for expertise in merchandising, manifesting not only in the music scene but in various fields of social life. These circumstances illustrate interesting sociological developments in youth music scenes regarding music-related practices, employment transitions, labour and the transferring of capitals. The social relationships involved in merchandising are analytically explored using a Bourdieusian framework that considers punk as a social practice.

Music scenes are sites of a reciprocal relationship that exists between physical spaces and the bodies that occupy them. Music venues, as centralizing nodes within local punk scenes, are integral spaces of socialization in which scene participants actively produce identity, culture and community. If scene participants and the physical venues that they congregate in are engaged in such an active, inter-dependent relationship, then what happens to those participants and their established communities when music venues are shut down? When faced with the dissolution of these gathering places, punk scene participants utilize various spatial tactics of rebuilding or transforming space, even if only a temporary measure to address the demands of the community at large. These strategies may work within established legal guidelines or outside them in an attempt to escape the threat of surveillance. However, additional difficulties may occur within the scene itself when participants disagree not only on which strategy is best but also what type of space most closely conforms to their understanding of what exactly ‘punk’ is or should be. This article conducts a comparison of such strategies via two case studies located within Vancouver, British Columbia: (1) The Cobalt Hotel; and (2) The Safe Amplification Site Society.

No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984, Matthew Worley (2017) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 404 pp., ISBN: 9781316625606, p/bk, £17.99

C86 & All That: The Creation of Indie in Difficult Times, Neil Taylor (2017) Winchester: Ink Monkey, 525 pp., ISBN: 1909502338, p/bk, £17.99

The Year’s Work in the Punk Bookshelf, Or, Lusty Scripts, Brian James Schill (2017) Indiana: Indiana University Press, p/bk, 382 pp., ISBN: 9780253029300, p/bk, £20.00

And All Around Was Darkness, Mike Dines and Greg Bull (eds) (2017) Itchy Monkey Press, 288 pp., ISBN: 9871291740257, p/bk, £12.00

No Glue. No Glass Bottles: An exhibition celebrating 35 years of The Bunker Collective, Pop Recs, Sunderland, UK, 8 September 2017

Gosport Punkfest, Gosport and Fareham Rugby Club, Gosport, UK, 11–12 August 2017

Penetration, Morgellons and the Ruins, The Hairy Dog, Derby, UK, 11 November 2017