Punk Ethos Research Articles

‘I am a Punk, I Don’t Give a Damn!’ Chez Narcisse: A Rural Place of Resistance

Chez Narcisse is a bar located on the threshold of the southern Vosges, in the east of France, that has been run by the same family for over 120 years. Its particularity lies in the fact that since the mid 1980s, it has included a concert hall in the garden behind the bar, which punk bands use to play. This place brings together a bar that is anchored in the daily life of the village and these festive events, which always take place on Sunday evenings. Chez Narcisse thus appears as a ‘double’ space that emphasizes the search for independence and culture in a rural environment. An ethnographic research carried out in this place since January 2017 highlights how the DIY ethos is as much a way of doing things as a purpose. The punk ethos of DIY is claimed by the owners, volunteers, musicians and stakeholders of Chez Narcisse in order to build its identity as an ‘alternative’ place well known in the contemporary French punk scene. By taking up James C. Scott’s work, the aim is to understand how Chez Narcisse is a social site of resistance and the role that DIY plays in it. To do this, I will first present the construction of this alternative place which articulates both a local and rural level and a global one (the concerts and the venue attract punks from all over France). A performance upstage testifies to a veiled but very present resistance, based on a family imaginary. The second part aims at highlighting the daily forms of resistance at Chez Narcisse expressed through the use of DIY. Thus, this place would be less ‘punk’ through programmed music than through the use of DIY as a value to defend and a project to share.

Opening up the pit: Negotiating a punk ethos with PUP

What does it mean to be punk within the Canadian music industry? This article offers a close reading of the band PUP’s politics, grassroots partnerships and personal interviews to argue that they not only skew punk in genre terms, but also embody a punk ethos. Furthermore, this article will confront the ambivalent politics of punk as it becomes entangled with cultural nationalism and national identity-building through institutional arts funding and awards. If punk is about resisting the establishment, how might we reconcile PUP’s reputation as a definitively ‘Canadian’ band with their outspokenness around issues ranging from anti-Black racism to police violence to ongoing colonialism? In what ways might PUP’s leftist politics be absorbed into Canada’s national identity through their receipt of institutional recognition, funding and awards? To make sense of these entanglements, we draw on Tavia Nyong’o’s punk or punk’d theory, which responds to the apparent reification of queer theory and calls on scholars to cultivate a punk spirit. Following Nyong’o and other punk scholars, we ask: is PUP punk’ing the Canadian music machine?

We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America by Kevin Mattson

Reviewed by: We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America by Kevin Mattson Andrew J. Salvati (bio) We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America. By Kevin Mattson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 416. $27.95 cloth; $9.99 ebook) There was the apparent end of the "boomer" wave of punk rock in 1979; the conglomeration of the music and entertainment industries; the rise of arena rock, Top-40 radio, new wave, and the "blockbuster" cultural product. There was the great "mellowing out" of the 1960s counterculture and its musical icons. There was the stultifying conformity of suburbia and the disintegration of the nuclear family; the increasing bellicosity of the Carter administration, and the smiling authoritarianism of Ronald Reagan; the worship of wealth and celebrity; the culture of narcissism and Yuppie hedonism; the reinstitution of the Selective Service, Cold War II, Central American adventurism, and the looming threat of World War III and nuclear annihilation. The tensions and anxieties that permeated American society at the dawn of the 1980s are usually concealed by the smooth gloss of nostalgia—by catchy electro-pop tunes, coming-of-age comedies, hip commercialism, and a splash of pastels. But as Kevin Mattson demonstrates [End Page 108] in his richly sourced history, We're Not Here to Entertain, the experience of these cultural and political shifts was intensely important to a new generation of suburban kids—the so-called "teeny punks"—who wanted to rejuvenate the DIY punk ethos of the 1970s, rebel against the conservative-corporatist mainstream, and create a culture of their own. Like previous chroniclers of punk rock (for example, Mark Andersen, Stephen Duncombe, Dawson Barrett, and Dewar MacLeod, among others), Mattson approaches his subject with the care and love of a former participant, opening We're Not Here to Entertain with reflections on his own introduction to what he calls the "punk rock world" as a teenager in the early 1980s: going to shows, discovering MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, and starting a band. But more than just the music, Mattson writes that for him, and for thousands of other kids across the country, punk was an ethos, "a consciousness or vision as much as a movement, fueled by discussions of personal ethics (straight edge, for instance), existentialism, anarchism, and the art of dissent" (p. 287). Mattson's memory of the scene serves as the entry point for what he calls a "history of creativity" that emerged from the punk rock world of the early eighties, and the forms of DIY artistic expression—music, fanzines, movies, fiction, art—that channeled a politics of angst "at a bloated entertainment industry and a president who equated governing with entertaining" (p. xvi). It is this "culture war" between a rebellious youth culture and the entrenched political and industrial powers that at times villainized it (as in anti-punk episodes of network TV shows Quincy and CHiPs, or in Reagan's tendency to interpret dissent, including the punk-infused nuclear freeze movement as communist propaganda), overwhelmed it (the spectacles of the culture industries' synergistic "blockbusters," or increasing police harassment of punk club owners, fans, and performers), or co-opted it (Mattson's prelude charts Blondie's arc from CBGB regular to chart-topping blockbuster) that provides the central conflict of Mattson's narrative. It is a culture war that Reaganism and the entertainment [End Page 109] industry would eventually win. By 1985, and certainly by the success of Nirvana in the early 1990s where Mattson's book begins and ends, punk rock had become just another "style" or "choice" in the corporate buffet. But the strength of We're Not Here to Entertain as a political and cultural history lies not only in its specific argument, but in Mattson's approach to reconstructing the punk rock world. While previous scholarship has focused on DIY cultural expression (for example, Duncombe, Triggs), political activism (Barrett), regional histories (MacLeod), or band biographies, Mattson has integrated each of these approaches in a way that is conscientious of the heterogeneity of punk rock. Rather than a singular narrative, We're Not...

Heritage

Heritage

Learning punk through its products: Combining fashion merchandising practices and pedagogy to develop a subculture of resistance

Punk is a lifestyle, ethos and perspective that deals with social unrest and personal discontent. Learning models are applied as framework in this research to contemplate how punk is learned and enacted as a lifestyle by going through daily fashion merchandising and social practices, such as how punks engage with artefacts and the rules of their scene. The punk subculture uses a pedagogy to their fashion production and consumption, employing the garments of their sartorial style with community interactions to create and symbolize their ethos. The community interacts in unision as newcomers to the scene learn from established participants, take in the knowledge available to them, and shift to self-produced ideas to develop their individualized punk ethos. This study used qualitative online surveys, in-person interviews and social media discussions from self-identified punks in the United States and Canada, as well as archival visits to punk-themed collections in order to analyse the experience of individuals who produce, consume and communicate their punk ethos through their garments.

Screen Circuits: Fear and Paranoia in the Sprawl (circa 1995)

The 1990s was a strange time to be alive: a saxophone playing U.S. president waltzed into a Cold War vacuum left behind by the crumbling of the Soviet Eastern Bloc, while Gulf War 1.0 was the first mediated war, yet one lacking any meaningful optics - Baudrillard's so-called weak event. Meanwhile, technology, culture and information was rapidly beginning to coalesce in unexpected ways. The 1990s was more of a feeling than a knowing, there was certainly change afoot and the clock was ticking on a century of acceleration and shrinking horizons. Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, 2000) and Paul Virilio (Open Sky, 1997) capture this time from the perspective of the machine's lens and big data's gathering torrents. We were only just beginning to stockpile our algorithmic future. There is of course a strong human element to all of this as well, as domesticity was about to be transformed in ways not seen since the automation of white goods in the 1950s. Installing a telephone line in a new rental was a priority as this was not just a communication device but a gateway to a new digital epoch (chat rooms, conspiracy theories, gaming mods and a seemingly limitless archive of music). Australians, who would become the new suitors of the boom in computer peripherals and digital gadgetry, turned the latent ability to send short text messages from their mobile phones into a new form of digital dialectics. Meanwhile, the cinema was signalling a grave warning of what all of this might mean if we could indeed become virtual, if the machine was in fact alive and information networks consciousness itself. From James Bond confronting a Rupert Murdock/Conrad Black-type media demigod in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), to the digital psychedelics of the millennial rush in Strange Days (1995) to Henry Rollins raging against reality in the William Gibson penned Johnny Mnemonic (1995). These mid-nineties films tapped a rich vein of paranoia around the new vanguard of networked information and computer-generated image making while also expressing - in often garish terms - a deep anxiety about a not-to-distant future crackling into view beyond the millennial divide.

Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction

Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction

Floorgasm: Queer(s), solidarity and resilience in punk

This article explores queer(ed) punk scenes, primarily in Australia. Queer ciswomen, transwomen and non-binary people aged 20–30 years are the informants here in a feminist-informed ethnographic study. They were found to engage strategies of resistance against cismale dominance at punk gigs and events in order to claim queer(ed) territory. In brief, they worked collectively to subvert the dominant patriarchal norms in punk spaces. They mobilised community-building through the politics of Do-It-Together (DIT) as a radical reshaping of the traditional punk ethos of DIY (Do-It-Yourself). They also worked to make gigs more queer-affirmative through mobilising the initiative of safe(r) spaces. We map some queer collective resilience in punk to authorise the expression of counter-hegemonic gender identities. The gig outcome was pleasurable queer solidarity enmeshed with music, a kind of metaphysical ‘floorgasm’.

‘Deviants, punks and Pink Fairies’: counter-archaeologies for unreasonable people

ABSTRACTLike any subject, archaeology has its traditions, its conventional practices and guiding principles that ensure it stays true to its original aims. That is why archaeologists still excavate, generating data, and publishing in the latest issues of long-established journals or in expensive monographs that only other archaeologists will read. Archaeologists employed by heritage agencies care for monuments and historic buildings, ensuring they survive, ‘for the benefit of future generations’. For many, this is how archaeology should remain. A similar cultural conservatism lingered in the UK from the end of the Second World War until, arguably, 26 November 1976 when, according to musician Phil Oakey, the Second World War finally came to an end. That was the day punk arrived with the thrashing of guitars and streams of abuse. But punk was about more than just the music. It was an ethos, a philosophy. Conventions were challenged and the old order gradually dismantled. Pre-1976 news footage now has the semblance of ancient history. This semi-autobiographical introduction to a collection of essays that promotes new thinking on counter-archaeologies wonders if that punk ethos could not have similar benefits for archaeology. Or perhaps it exists already, more than we care to realize.

“Computer Cowboys” and “Ass-kicking Techno-babes” Challenging Cyberpunk’s Conventional Representations of Gender and Sexuality in the Futuristic Digital World of Moxyland

SummaryThis article analyses the effects created by Lauren Beukes through her use of the cyberpunk genre in her first novel, Moxyland (2008). Because of its challenge to conventional ideas of embodiment and identity formation, together with its counter-cultural punk ethos, cyberpunk would seem to offer the prospect of transgressive versions of gender and sexuality. However, various critics note that instead of realising this potential, cyberpunk endorses heterosexual masculinity in its narratives, while repressing or marginalising the feminine and homosexual relations. In Moxyland, Beukes actively engages with the conventions of cyberpunk in order to subvert such reactionary reiterations and the conventional gendered power struc-tures that underpin them. Through techniques such as exaggeration, splitting and exploring contrasted forms of masculinity she criticises the cyberpunk genre's conventional treatment of gender, as well as the patriarchal power relations it promotes. Beukes also refutes cyberpunk's tendency to restrict the transgressive potential of its empowered female characters by portraying them in terms of sexualised femininity. She challenges essentialist notions of gender as she depicts women characters in active relation to technology. Her version of the female cyborg conveys a potentially transgressive blending of technology and biology, dramatised outside the conventional lens of the masculine gaze.

Punk, DIY, and Anarchy in Archaeological Thought and Practice

Recent developments in archaeological thought and practice involve a seemingly disparate selection of ideas that can be collected and organized as contributing to an anti-authoritarian, “punk” archaeology. This includes the contemporary archaeology of punk rock, the DIY and punk ethos of archaeological labor practices and community involvement, and a growing interest in anarchist theory as a productive way to understand communities in the past. In this article, I provide a greater context to contemporary punk, DIY, and anarchist thought in academia, unpack these elements in regard to punk archaeology, and propose a practice of punk archaeology as a provocative and productive counter to fast capitalism and structural violence.

Queer punx: young women in the Newcastle hardcore space

This article investigates the ‘becoming’ of queer female punx in the contemporary hardcore scene in a regional Australian city. Twelve young women aged 20–30 years were interviewed about their experiences of queer identity. They emphasized their involvement in the music scene as a key catalyst for the development of a queer punk identity even though the local hardcore scene is male-dominated and homosocial. We find that these young female queer punx assert their identity through collectively summoning and synthesizing the counternormative resources of both queer and punk Do It Yourself (DIY) to configure the space of hardcore differently. Our findings confirm the durability of a playful, subversive punk ethos in constituting challenges to the normative.

Steampunk Poe

Steampunk Poe

Tricky and the Bug: Dub, Punk, and the Abject

In considering the music of two dub-influenced artists based in the United Kingdom, Tricky (Adrian Thaws) and the Bug (Kevin Martin), I explore the ways dub and punk share historical space and affective territory, and particularly the ways a punk ethos has continued to be imbricated into dub and its descendants. I argue that their shared territory is heavily masculinized, and I am interested in the uses of violence in the artists’ works, as a mediating force in the case of the Bug, and as an ambivalent site for Tricky. I focus on Tricky’s posture of abjection, as he uses his concept of “brownpunk” to evoke alternative punk sensibilities, to refer to forms of degradation and social rejection that range from the petty criminal to the sexual nonconformist. Abjection comes through the Bug’s music as the alienated subjects that can survive apocalypse. These evocations open up “punk” as a concept defined by, and useful to, those excluded by more proscriptive uses of the term.

Random Sample

Graffiti drawn on the walls of a London apartment in the mid-1970s by members of the band the Sex Pistols pictorially preserve the band's iconic punk ethos during its seminal years, two British archaeologists say in an article published this month in Antiquity .