Punk & Post-Punk - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2019

This article seeks to discuss the work of under-explored vocalist, performance artist and poet Katie Jane Garside, in the attempt to draw out themes in her post-punk performance work that interact with improvisation and popular music in a number of interesting ways. Garside’s approach to popular music performance is particularly distinctive, due to the balancing it enacts between the unpredictable modes of improvised expression, and the structural coherence of popular music form. It will be argued that this approach reflects what Nathaniel Mackey has termed a ‘discrepant engagement’ with popular music, and also represents commonly cited psychological states prevalent in the domain of improvised practice. The article also attempts to introduce aspects of Garside’s philosophical and psychoanalytical self-analysis, to enrich the discussion, and to help explain various misleading assumptions repeatedly disseminated throughout her career. One of the intended outcomes of the article is to highlight the discrepancy between the importance this artist attributes to the role of improvisation, and the (lack of) awareness of improvisation within popular music commentary in general, and punk studies in particular. While popular music studies has given some attention to the role improvisation can play, more expansive and detailed work is needed to articulate the substance of this relationship, especially at the wider edges of popular music culture, including the punk and post-punk field(s).

This article outlines the utility of the term ‘post-punk polymath’ to describe the sustained multi-medium and intertextual artistic practice engaged in by artists of the post-punk scene on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1970s. Through the example of Kembra Pfahler and a detailed analysis of Lydia Lunch, it discusses the unique environment of artistic collaboration in the city that was sustained by the subcultures that occupied the dilapidated neighbourhood of the Lower East Side. In this countercultural interzone, which flourished because of, rather than despite New York’s municipal degradation, Lunch remembers that ‘everyone was doing everything’. As both Lunch and Pfahler are artists whose practices encompass music, visual art, installation, literature and film, it is only by understanding their work across a multitude of artistic mediums that a sense of their wider artistic strategy can be arrived at. As I argue throughout, they are not musicians who also happen to produce film or installation, but post-punk polymaths engaged in a unified practice sustained and encouraged by the subcultural environment that they matured within.

This article investigates the role of excessive drinking in a subcultural scene of Russian punk. Based on an extensive long-term field research, our work demonstrates that the loss of identity and withdrawal from the projects of social identification, usually associated with excessive consumption of alcohol, might not explain The article suggests that in certain situations drinking, disgrace, alcoholic exploits and ‘heroic incompetency’ surrounding the consumption of alcohol cause the opposite effect, through which individuals do not dissolve their identity, but rather construct alternative agency recognized and enacted within a subcultural collective. On the basis of the observations of drinking practices in three geographically defined Russian punk scenes and reflections on these practices produced by the members of the scenes, we conclude that excessive drinking can be seen as a specific response through which members of the subcultural groups construct alternative agencies and reclaim their political subjectivity.

The purpose of this article is to examine the Rebellion Festival that takes place every year in Blackpool, reflecting on its organization and its role as a unified field for the international punk scene. I will proceed with my study in two steps. First, I will present some theoretical approaches concerning festivals, social networks and the punk scene. Next, reflecting on Erving Goffman’s frame analysis, I will investigate ‘what is really happening’ in these festivals. Frames are analytical layers that can enrich our perceptions of economic and socio-political aspects of cultural events. Going through different frames, the activities of participants in Rebellion festivals can be regarded as forms of entertainment, revival rituals, political participation, commerce, etc. Thus, frame analysis allows us to see Rebellion festivals as significant sites that reflect the multiplicity, the complexity and the flexibility of punk, empowering its continuation and offering various options for the artists, the organizers and the fans.

The genres of punk and alternative rock are traditionally associated with male musicians – a trend that remains apparent in the current music industry. This article examines the relationship between gender and alternative music through the lenses of female musicians and their experiences within the Leeds, UK scene by exploring how female musicians experience discrimination, and the ways in which they overcome it. Twelve musicians were interviewed about their experiences in the Leeds scene, and an online content analysis was undertaken in order to provide an objective, unobtrusive perspective of the female experience in the industry. These methods led to the conclusion that this study’s participants experience discrimination in both direct and indirect ways: ranging from subtle patronization to blatant opposition to their presence in the music scene. It was also noted that many participants experienced feelings of discouragement or felt as though they were outsiders or novelties within the scene. Many participants, however, noted the ability for other musicians to provide feelings of encouragement and empowerment to them, including examples of formal groups in Leeds that promote female musicians and create senses of community for women to continue resisting gender discrimination in alternative music.

This article considers the collision of recent attempts to historicize punk’s complicated relationship to race with the personal investments of those ‘who were there’. In recent years, a narrative has taken hold in academic studies and museum exhibitions in which a predominantly Chicana/o punk scene coalesced in East Los Angeles, California, in the late-1970s directly in response to a supposedly closedoff Hollywood punk scene. In turn, participants in the Hollywood scene have taken umbrage at a narrative that they feel unfairly paints their scene as racist, in contrast to their own understandings of the scene as largely egalitarian. In defending their scene – and, crucially, their own legacies – against these supposedly unwarranted accusations, participants such as Brendan Mullen (1949–2009), proprietor of foundational Hollywood punk venue, the Masque, and Alice Bag, lead singer of influential band, the Bags, have employed a rhetoric of colourblindness that equates any discussion of race and racial inequality with actual racism, and that treats racism as primarily an individual character flaw rather than a systemic force. Thus, I argue, in their desire to control the history of the Hollywood punk scene, scene members such as Bag and Mullen, by attempting to discredit those whose remembrances of Los Angeles punk history clash with their own, obfuscate efforts to present a more nuanced understanding of the roles of race and racism within this history.

This article documents the collision of the [email protected] sensibility known as rasquachismo and the punk anti-aesthetics and ethics in independent San Antonio filmmaker Jim Mendiola’s punk films pretty vaCANt (1996) and Speeder Kills (2003). Both mockumentary films use punk dissent to further a [email protected] resistance politics. Through a close examination of both the style and the content of Mendiola’s punk films, the article argues that their strength lies in their aesthetic ability to forge an affinity between rasquache and punk, fully consummated through a bi-cultural consciousness. Focalizing his punk narratives through third-generation Chicana punks from the west side of San Antonio, Mendiola utilizes the local while dramatizing the hybridity between sub-cultural and bi-cultural identities. The rasquache method of ‘making due with what’s at hand’ and Mendiola’s intentional ethical attempt to remain outside the demarcations of approved taste and decorum are perfectly aligned with the punk bricolage do-it-yourself (DIY) style as revolt. Through the use of the mockumentary mode, re-purposed found footage, documentary jamming tactics, cut-and-paste editing and sped-up motion distortion both films deploy the DIY ethic and aesthetics of punk while retrofitting the rasquache raw materials of the original Chicano cinema for the next generation.

Factories Run By Robots, Mike Dines (ed.) (2018) Portsmouth: Itchy Monkey Press, 132 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78926-441-8, p/bk, £6.00

The Sanctity of Rhyme: The Metaphysics of Crying 4 Kafka in Prose and Verse, Erika Blair (2018) California: Asylum 4 Renegade Press, 119 pp., ISBN: 978-0-69209-682-6, p/bk, £9

The Poetry of Punk: The Meaning Behind Punk Rock and Hardcore Lyrics, Gerfried Ambrosch (2018) London: Routledge, 196 pp., ISBN: 978-1-13850-231-4, p/bk, £29.99

Ripped, Torn and Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines from 1976, The Subcultures Network (ed.) (2018) Manchester University Press, 342 pp., ISBN: 978-1-52612-059-5, h/bk, £75

We Are The League (How Deep Do You Want It?), Dir. George Hencken (2018), Los Angeles: Cleopatra Entertainment

Writing the Noise: The Second International Conference of the Subcultures Network, University of Reading, Reading, UK, 6–7 September 2018

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976–1986 Exhibition and Shepard Fairey: Salad Days, 1989–1999 Exhibition, Andrew Blauvelt, Steffi Duarte and Andrew Krivine, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, 16 June–7 October 2018