‘It won’t be the witches that are burning this time’: The anarchist temporalities of folk punk

Abstract

This article is an exploration of the temporal politics of folk punk. Folk punk is a subgenre of punk played with predominantly acoustic instruments that emerged in the 1980s but developed a more concrete form in the late 1990s. This article compares the temporal politics of two scenes within folk punk. First, it looks at an early scene centred on the record label Plan-It-X. Second, ‘traditional folk punk’ is examined. In this latter scene, artists utilize an increasing range of instruments and musical resources associated with various types of traditional music. This musical change is also reflected lyrically; the second scene has much broader temporal references in comparison with the narrowly defined presentism of the Plan-It-X scene. The central argument of this article is that these musical and lyrical differences are politically and theoretically important. The dynamics within the folk punk scene complicate understandings of prefigurative politics, challenging the forms of presentism and individualism that this concept is associated with. The implications of these dynamics are lastly elaborated upon with reference to Gustav Landauer’s mystical anarchism.