Punk & Post-Punk - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020

At their 2018 headlining appearance at the annual Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival in downtown Las Vegas, NV, California skate punk stalwarts NOFX generated widespread controversy after band members quipped about the mass shooting that occurred eight months prior during the Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival in neighbouring Paradise, NV. After days of censorious media coverage, which prompted Stone Brewing to summarily terminate the band’s sponsorship contract in a widely circulated news release, the band issued a statement in which members collectively expressed remorse and apologized for the offending comments. Four decades of punk history notwithstanding, NOFX’s decision to apologize and offer mea culpas is something of a unicum. Punks, after all, are not typically in the business of extending olive branches or tendering requests for forgiveness. Accordingly, punk apologia is an understudied and undertheorized area of research. Utilizing Benoit’s Theory of Image Repair, this article adds to the limited stock of available research by critically evaluating the apologetic discourse following NOFX’s comments in Las Vegas through a systematic examination of the band’s letter of apology as well as audiences’ responses to that statement.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that Zarathustra ‘the godless’, whose students ‘remain faithful to the earth, and […] not believe those who speak […] of otherwordly hopes’, was a proponent of a life fulfilled with meaning and creativity, in spite of all the abominable suffering and unavoidable hardships it entails. Ultimately, he wanted to ‘see as beautiful what is necessary in things’ and ‘to be only a Yes-sayer’. This article looks at how the lyrics of one of the most respected and well-known punk rock bands worldwide, Bad Religion, encapsulate the above-mentioned ideas of the German philosopher. Lyrics from several songs of the band’s discography, ranging from 1982 to 2013, are briefly discussed. The themes explored in these songs, examined in parallel with Nietzsche’s ideas, revolve around suffering, nihilism, the afterlife, amor fati, and, finally, affirming life by creating a personal sense of purpose. Whilst Bad Religion’s work is not moralistic (most thoroughly echoed in the line ‘no Bad Religion song can make your life complete’ from the song ‘No Direction’), the lyrics analysed nevertheless demonstrate that the band actively assumes a stance towards life, one which is characterized by creating a sense of purpose through personal expression, emblematized both in the punk attitude per se, as well as in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Increasing attention to the prevalence of sexual harassment at live music events has led to the adoption of safer spaces policies by venues and promoters. Punk’s politics of inclusion and equality suggest that such policies would be welcome as a means to promote access for marginalized groups. However, safer spaces policies are sometimes controversial and their content and implementation patchy. Such policies therefore bear closer examination in order to understand their value and meaning for punk politics. Here we examine the use of safer spaces policies in punk and DIY music spaces asking, how is safety conceptualized, for what purpose, and who benefits from them? We draw on a discourse analysis of safer spaces policies and interviews with punks about sexual violence at gigs. We argue that safer spaces policies can be a valuable tool for promoting access to pleasurable experiences whilst lessening the fear of discrimination, harassment and violence. However, safer spaces can also continue to privilege already privileged punks. We conclude that when safer spaces policies are implemented they must go hand in hand with practical measures to enable inclusion. In doing so the needs of marginalized groups must be prioritized.

While some scholars suggest that subcultures are a thing of the past, that we are living in a post-subcultural era, an ethnographic exploration of psychobilly shows that subcultures still play a meaningful role in contemporary society. Since its development in the early 1980s, psychobilly has uniquely blended punk, rockabilly and horror to express countercultural values and aesthetics. Like the groups studied by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, the psychobilly subculture is characterized by consistent and distinct values and tastes, a shared sense of collective identity, committed involvement over a long period of time, and relative independence from the culture industry. By participating in this obscure but strongly defined subculture, psychobillies not only express their resistance to mainstream culture but also find strategies to manage and improve their lived experience. As a result of their committed subcultural involvement, psychobillies feel alive, or, rather, ‘undead’, a metaphor made all the more symbolic because of the subculture’s interest in a host of undead creatures. This article thus argues for continued application of subcultural theory to understand the significant meaning and impact of participation in non-conformist communities today.