Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2006, pp. 383–393

Haunted by the Spirit of ’77: Punk

Studies and the Persistence of Politics
Michelle Phillipov
The contemporary punk scene(s) are today comprised of an enormous spectrum of
musical, subcultural, institutional and political practices, many of them only
tangentially linked to one another by historical and geographical antecedents. Yet
despite some attempts to acknowledge and explore this musical and subcultural
diversity, academic accounts of the movement have remained largely unchanged since
the advent of punk scholarship in the late 1970s. While frequently structured as a
rejection of earlier approaches, punk scholars since the 1980s have continued to
reiterate many of the same assumptions which characterized the initial work in the
field: assumptions about resistance, subversion and political radicalism.
Punk, remarks Roger Sabin (1999, p. 2) in a recent anthology on the movement, is a
‘notoriously amorphous concept’ to define. Acknowledging the unresolvedness of
certain debates about punk—whether it originated in the United Kingdom or the
United States, for example, or whether it ‘died’ in 1979 or continues to live on in a
variety of current musical trajectories—he ultimately settles on the following working
definition:
At a very basic level, we can say that punk was/is a subculture best characterized as
part youth rebellion, part artistic statement. It had its high point from 1976 to 1979,
and was most visible in Britain and America. It had its primary manifestation in
music—and specifically in the disaffected rock and roll bands like the Sex Pistols and
the Clash. (Sabin, 1999, p. 2)
Interestingly, although punk may have its primary manifestation in music, Sabin
defines it primarily as ‘youth rebellion’ and ‘artistic statement’ rather than ‘musical
genre’. That is, while punk remains a clearly identifiable musical style—one
characterized by high energy, three-chord compositions featuring ‘stiff rhythm
sections, overamplified guitar and harsh, almost characterless vocals’ (Savage, 1991,
p. 295)—Sabin’s anthology approaches it more as a social and cultural movement than
a musical one. In fact, the essays in the volume frequently sidestep the question of
music altogether in favour of explorations of punk’s influence on film, literature,
comics, and everyday behaviour. Punk Rock: So What? is conceived as a radical

Michelle Phillipov is a PhD candidate in the discipline of English at the University of Adelaide, Australia.
Correspondence to: Michelle Phillipov, English DP105, School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, Adelaide
SA 5005, Australia. E-mail: michelle.phillipov@adelaide.edu.au

ISSN 1030-4312 (print)/ISSN 1469-3666 (online)/06/030383-11 q 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/10304310600814326
384 M. Phillipov
departure from ‘orthodox’ punk scholarship (which focuses primarily on music and
fashion) towards a more comprehensive location of punk in cultural history. The wide
variety of media explored in the one volume is certainly uncommon to punk
scholarship, but an approach which situates punk primarily as a cultural movement
rather than as a musical genre has more in common with existing orthodoxies than
Sabin and others acknowledge. In fact, their focus on the cultural and political ‘impact’
(Sabin, 1999, p. 5) of the movement rather than on the textures of punk as music has
been the characteristic approach of most punk scholars, especially those working
broadly under the banner of cultural studies. In much of this work, punk’s musical
conventions are firmly anchored to questions of politics: that is, punk is often
approached principally as an expression of youth rebellion and disenfranchisement,
rather than as music per se (cf. Savage, 1991, p. xvii). However, understanding punk
primarily in cultural or political terms rather than in musical ones means that
questions of musical pleasure often tend to be treated as merely subsidiary to wider
political investments—and, in some cases, effaced altogether.
For the purposes of this paper, I am not concerned with delineating the nuances of the
various punk scenes or ‘moments’ in terms of era, subgenre, or geographical location.
While such differences clearly do exist—American punk, for example, had a more
suburban focus and incorporated a more self-consciously ‘pop’ sensibility than its British
counterpart (see Osgerby, 1999)—and despite a profusion of punk subgenres and ‘post-
punk’ trajectories (including hardcore, grunge, riot grrrl and Oi, among others), I am
generally less interested in demarcating what might ‘really’ count as punk than I am with
what the scholarly literature has counted as punk, and, in turn, with what the placement of
these generic parameters reveals about the assumptions of this body of scholarship.
Much of the early literature on British punk focused explicitly on the political
dimensions of working-class youth culture. Prior to punk, popular music had rarely been
a matter of theoretical concern, but within a few months of its public emergence in 1977
virtually every radical commentator in Britain agreed that punk was a Good Thing (Frith,
1980/1997). Punk was a watershed of sorts in that it seemed to transform popular music,
raising new questions about audience, commodity production and musical meaning: it
seemed to be different from previous mass musics in terms of ‘how it was made and how it
was used and how it meant’ [emphaisis in original] (Frith, 1980/1997, p. 167). Punk’s
musical amateurism seemed to promote an egalitarian, non-hierarchical social structure.
It was access music: acts like the Sex Pistols may have been headline material, but there was
no distance between them and the people who regularly supported them—you could even
stand next to Johnny Rotten in the urinal! (Marsh, 1982). Moreover, punk’s do-it-yourself
approach to musical production was seen as a subversion of the capitalist control of music
practice, while its musical sounds and lyrical themes appeared to express a kind of class-
based political resistance to the economic decline of 1970s Britain.
Punk found particular compatibility with the broadly Marxist principles fundamental
to the development of cultural studies, values which, to a certain extent, continue to
remain central to the discipline. Rejecting the implicit functionalism of previous
approaches to youth culture, early cultural studies scholarship positively re-evaluated
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 385

subcultures as collective solutions to structurally imposed problems, and the terrain of

music, style and argot was theorized as the sphere where the political battleground
between classes was played out symbolically. Such were the terms in which British punk
was typically studied during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Subsequent work on popular music identified several problems with this approach.
With the primary function of subculture conceived as a ‘magical’ resolution of class
contradictions in the parent culture (Cohen, 1980, p. 82), early cultural studies theorists
often seemed to treat all working-class subcultures as essentially equivalent. For later
scholars like Gary Clarke this often raised more problems than it solved. He questions, for
example, the analytical leap needed from the desire for a solution to the adoption of a
particular subcultural style. That is, how is it that punks, skins, teds and mods each sought
to ‘resolve’ the problem of class, but through different styles? (Clarke, 1981/1997).
Moreover, while punk across both sides of the Atlantic may have been closely linked
via shared musical influences and visual styles, the strict structural analyses of this
early work were often inapplicable to North American punk, a movement that was
characteristically more suburban and middle class than its British counterpart (Baron,
1989). However, several scholars have nonetheless attempted to utilize traditional
class-based approaches in the study of American punk. Susan Willis (1993), for
example, describes hardcore as an expression of the cultural and economic
contradictions faced by America’s ‘new working class’: young people working ‘dead-
end jobs’ in the growing service sector. Echoing many of the sentiments of the
Birmingham School nearly two decades earlier, she writes:
Daily life in late twentieth-century capitalism is a terrain of struggle, whose rich
outpourings of cultural inventiveness marks the intensity of unresolved
contradictions. The development of hardcore as a subculture is one way that
teens express the contradictions of a system that degrades them as workers and
flaunts them as consumers. The problematic of hardcore is the problem of
capitalism. (Willis, 1993, p. 381)

Another concern raised by post-Birmingham punk scholarship stemmed from the

premium placed on musical ‘realism’ in many of the early studies. The idea that punk
music somehow ‘reflected’ the lives of its participants (cf. Marsh, 1982) had always
been considered problematic by some critics. As Simon Frith notes in an early article
on punk:
The pioneering punk rockers themselves were a self-conscious, artful lot with a good
understanding of both rock tradition and populist cliché; the music no more
reflected directly back onto the conditions of the dole-queue than it emerged
spontaneously from them. (Frith, 1980/1997, p. 167)

However, Dave Laing’s (1985) book-length study helped to challenge more fully the
dominance of early ‘reflectionist’ accounts. In One Chord Wonders, it is Laing’s
contention that rather than mirroring the lives of its fans, even ‘realist’ musical
conventions like ‘ordinary’ working-class accents had paradoxical effects when
committed to music. For popular music in the 1970s, the ‘ordinary’ was actually the
386 M. Phillipov
mainstream American or ‘non-accented’ (sometimes called ‘mid-Atlantic’) accent
associated with singers like Abba and Queen’s Freddie Mercury. Working-class accents
which may have signified the ordinary and mundane in everyday life actually took on
an exotic and colourful resonance when heard on record or on radio. Thus Laing
argues that the radicalism of punk was not to be located in any ability to represent its
audience but in the way it frustrated identification between fan and performer through
the use of ‘shock effects’. For Laing, shock effects like ‘unpleasing’ vocal tones, obscene
language and unconventional mixing techniques were key to the development of
radical listening positions and subjectivities among the punk audience.
Writing over a decade later, Jude Davies (1996) further pursues the question of
representation and identification in punk music. Dividing the punk movement into
two distinct waves (the first between 1976 and 1978, and the second post-1978),
Davies characterizes the first wave (exemplified by bands like the Sex Pistols and the
Clash) not as the authentic expression of working-class life but as nihilistic and
shocking; pure, existential revolt devoid of all meaning. But, unlike Tillman (1980),
Davies does not view this as indicative of punk’s essentially apolitical nature: on the
contrary, Davies sees the political ‘emptiness’ of the first wave as an essential
precondition of the greater politicization of punk after 1978. By destroying traditional
audience/star relationships of hero worship and identification during this initial phase,
punk was more readily able to construct different listening positions for its audience
during the post-1978 period. Although second-wave bands often expressed explicitly
political viewpoints in their lyrics, Davies locates punk’s true radicalism in its refusal
to speak with an authoritative voice for or on behalf of its audience. Through an
examination of the way that the vocalist addresses—or does not address—the
audience, she argues that many of the most ‘political’ punk bands are those who, like
the Stiff Little Fingers, used certain kinds of language (especially pronouns like ‘I’ or
‘you’) to constitute the listener as a discrete individual with whom communication
must be established. The singer had no special status, no mandate to be spokesperson,
so the song could succeed only by an act of agreement, rather than identification, on
the part of the listener. For Davies, such a listening position destabilizes conventional
modes of subjectivity, in turn facilitating the construction of a communality based on
communication—the first step in a truly democratic engagement with progressive
politics.
On the face of it, the work of Davies and Laing might seem to contradict that of
earlier punk scholars, indicating a shift from the idea that punk’s radicalism was in its
ability to authentically represent the lives of its fans to the notion that it is when punk
is unable to represent its audience that it is at its most radical. However, although they
might seem to oppose one another, the fundamental point of both arguments
ultimately remains the same: both see punk as an essentially progressive movement
articulating egalitarian, community-based, broadly leftist politics. The only thing they
disagree on is how punk’s radicalism is manifest.
Almost from the start, punk scholars have tended to assume that the genre’s politics
are definitionally progressive and emancipatory. Despite enormous changes to the
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 387

demographic make-up of the punk fanbase and significant generic and subcultural
developments within the movement, academic approaches to punk have changed very
little in over two decades of scholarship. Even with the visible presence of right-wing
punks, conservative hardcore kids and avowedly apolitical ‘drunk’ punks in many
contemporary scenes, cultural studies has rarely interrogated the continued validity of
viewing punk as necessarily politically radical. Even obvious ideological contradic-
tions, like the persistent sexism in a scene supposedly based on egalitarianism, seem to
be reabsorbed into a framework which assumes that the overall predisposition of punk
is at least ‘vaguely, if not always specifically, left’ (Ward, 1996, p. 161). For example,
while the ‘riot grrrl’ movement of the 1990s has been theorized as a response to sexism
within the punk scene, scholars still tend to situate the movement as part of the punk
tradition—despite the fact that many of the riot grrrls themselves reject the ‘punk’
label, preferring instead to place their project within a variety of other musical and
non-musical trajectories. Punk’s ethos of DIY production and musical amateurism—
conventions that critics erroneously imply to be both unique to punk and
definitionally ‘progressive’—is seen as offering a particularly valuable site for women
to participate in music making (Leonard, 1997). Thus, despite any political
contradictions, punk is nonetheless understood to be the genre with which those
traditionally marginalized from rock music can most productively engage.1
Few punk studies begin by asking under what conditions punk culture might become
articulated to radical politics. This is especially true of many American studies which
tend to take punk’s progressiveness, as established by the earlier British work, as the
starting point of analysis. The few studies which explore the movement’s more ‘non-
progressive’ aspects, like right-wing and fascist imagery, tend to play down the
importance of these ideologies within the punk scene. For example, despite its
suggestive subtitle, James Ward’s (1996) article ‘Appropriations and constructions of
fascism in New York punk/hardcore in the 1980s’ actually has very little at all to say
about fascism. The ‘constructions of fascism’ refer not to any fascist aesthetics within
the music itself but to the way many punk bands constructed local authorities as ‘fascist’
during skirmishes over housing and the free use of public space. Ward’s discussion of
other, possibly more ‘authentic’, uses of fascist imagery remains quite limited. He either
re-assimilates such reactionary imagery back into a progressive framework (echoing
Hebdige’s (1979) earlier pronouncements about a strategic play with taboo in order to
unhinge established hierarchies of meaning and value) or distances it from the ‘true’
punk movement. For instance, while he notes an increasing visibility of Nazi punk
bands, he argues that these groups constitute only a tiny minority of the scene and
dismisses them as ‘spuriously punk at best, [with] whatever creativity they can muster
. . . quickly exhausted in a few racist rants’ (Ward, 1996, p. 162).
In this way, many punk scholars display a distinct unwillingness to engage with the
‘darker side’ of punk’s politics, instead presenting right-wing and fascist ideologies as
merely an insignificant aberration within an otherwise left-wing movement. But in his
study of heavy metal, Harris Berger (1999) talks quite unselfconsciously about the
predominance of right-affiliated punk/hardcore bands within the Akron, Ohio scene
388 M. Phillipov
where he conducted his fieldwork. In fact, he presents the division between left- and
right-wing bands as one of the most significant structuring elements within the
contemporary punk/hardcore scene. The fact that Berger—a musicologist whose work
is methodologically atypical of most cultural studies—is prepared to acknowledge
what most punk scholars tend to avoid suggests that current cultural studies
approaches to music and politics still leave many issues unexplored.
As a social process, music is deeply embedded in the web of practices through which
social life is produced, and thus music’s relation to social meanings is heavily context
dependent. However, the contexts in which punk music becomes meaningful as a site
of political protest—and, relatedly, the processes through which punk might come to
take on entirely different meanings—remain largely unexamined by an approach
which takes ‘politics’ as the starting point of analysis. Much contemporary analysis of
punk frequently identifies a self-consciously political band or scene (e.g. Fugazi or the
D.C. Scene) and then works backwards to determine the relationship between music
and politics: that is, given that we already know that this scene/band/etc. is politically
inclined, how are their political dispositions expressed in the music?
The result is a particularly strange gap in the scholarship which raises some thorny
questions about how the music of punk is dealt with in these accounts. The cultural
study of popular music has been regularly criticized for centring analyses too heavily
on lyrics or subcultural style, rather than on musical meanings (e.g. McClary & Walser,
1990). However, I would suggest that the problem is not so much one of too few close
readings of individual musical texts but one of subordinating musical meanings to
wider concerns about political investments. Too often music is treated as subsidiary to
other institutional and ideological practices, as simply a vehicle for the expression of
politics rather than something which is embedded in a variety of meanings and affects
in its own right and interplays with politics in complex ways. In Davies’ and Laing’s
studies, for instance, punk music is merely a mechanism which works to transform the
outlook of the audience in order to establish democracy or inculcate radical
subjectivities. The specific pleasures of snotty vocals, heavily distorted guitars, or
rapid-fire, three-chord structures are simply streamlined into one-dimensional
platitudes about ‘politics’, ‘resistance’ and ‘subversion’.
Kevin Mattson’s recent retrospective of American punk in the 1980s reads as a
similar attempt to position musical and subcultural practices as expressions of an
oppositional political agenda. That is, by situating punk in the 1980s as a response to
economic deregulation and corporate expansion during the Reagan era, Mattson
(2001) ideologically aligns punk’s DIY, anti-corporate music-making practices with
radical politics. However, these were not merely economic questions related only to
the distribution of punk cultural products but musical ones as well. For example, he
describes the abrasive sounds—‘blitz-like speed and shotgun lyrics’—of hardcore as a
deliberate attempt to be unpalatable to the mainstream music industry in order to
avoid corporate co-optation (Mattson, 2001, p. 89). In this way, he attempts to link
punk’s economic and musical conventions with the rise of a New Left culture in
Reagan’s America.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 389

John Goshert’s article, ‘“Punk” after the Pistols’, is also interesting to consider in this
context. Presented as a direct challenge to the existing body of cultural studies scholarship
on punk, his article is, paradoxically, both atypical and exemplary of much of this work.
Focusing on the intersections of music, politics and economics in the San Francisco Bay
Area and Washington, DC scenes, Goshert (2000) argues against conventional
understandings of punk, asserting instead that it is punk’s inability to be defined as a
subculture or as a musical genre that is its defining characteristic. As he writes:

To focus a study of punk on . . . clearly commercially successful supergroups,

whether to repeat Hebdige’s proclamation of punk’s demise in 1978 with the
breakup of the Sex Pistols, or to point to the continuing influence of punk on youth
culture, consumer culture, or the music industry since that time, is to miss what is
perhaps the most crucial point about punk: that its tendency is a resistance to
working within the usual terms of commercial success and visibility. In other words,
it is precisely when punk becomes popular culture that it ceases to be punk; thus is
remains to be argued whether there is anything ‘punk’ about the way in which it has
been defined and described for the last twenty years of academic treatments of the
subject. (Goshert, 2000, p. 85)

While Mattson presents the culture of Reaganism as an important context in which to

understand the political imperative of American punk, Goshert situates the movement’s
most radical impulses firmly in the years of the subsequent Bush administration. With the
end of the Reagan years at the close of the 1980s, there was no longer a clearly identifiable
enemy against whom the punks could position themselves. While the policies of the
Reagan administration did not disappear with the Bush administration, the process of
normalization that such social and economic policies underwent made them increasingly
difficult to address in an oppositional manner (Goshert, 2000). For Mattson, this marked
the end of the political era of punk and signalled its absorption into the ‘mainstream’, but
for Goshert the absence of a clear-cut adversary in fact allowed the movement to articulate
new social identities and envision new forms of radical politics.
These were as much aesthetic and institutional questions as political ones. For
Goshert, punk’s politics were as manifest in generic and performance practices as they
were in more explicit strategies like political graffiti. Punk’s politics are thus mapped as
part of a shift towards an avant-garde musical approach, achieved via spontaneous and
transient punk performances, as well as through the dissolution of traditional genre
boundaries. During the 1990s, punk was no longer a style of music; it was simply what
was performed at ‘punk’ shows, with funk, rap, heavy metal and country groups all
heard on various ‘punk’ bills (Goshert, 2000). In many other cases, individual bands
incorporated a myriad of different musical influences into their song writing, thereby
making them almost impossible to categorize in generic terms (Fairchild, 1995).
A response to power’s ability to transform and accommodate opposition through
incorporation, the aim of these musical and performance tactics was to promote
constant mutation and unrecognizability within the punk scene. If punk could not be
defined and made comprehensible—either in subcultural or generic terms—then the
scenes would continue to evade models of production and consumption otherwise
390 M. Phillipov
omnipresent in the entertainment industry, and thereby articulate an oppositionality
impossible to incorporate within the existing hegemony (Goshert, 2000).
It might seem odd to use Goshert’s study as an example of the way in which cultural
studies often presents punk’s musical conventions as an expression of an overarching
political agenda, because he is ultimately arguing that punk has no musical
conventions since it is not a musical style but an approach to musical and political
practice. However, although he criticizes most existing punk scholarship, Goshert
ultimately upholds many of its central tenets. Like most punk scholars, he argues that a
DIYapproach to musical production and the elimination of hierarchies between bands
and fans are unique features of punk which work to facilitate egalitarianism. Similarly,
he also maintains that the propagation of dissenting, counter-hegemonic values and
politics is a defining characteristic of the movement. Often it seems that it is not so
much the conventional definitions of punk that Goshert is disputing; rather, he seems
to be questioning whether these ‘punk’ characteristics are in fact present—or even
possible—in the practices of bands frequently used as exemplary examples within
many academic studies. In fact, in demonstrating how aesthetic and economic choices
are connected to political outcomes, Goshert’s article is perhaps one of the clearest
examples of the wider trend within cultural studies to link musical conventions and
business practices to the articulation of a broadly leftist politics.
But, in the end, Goshert’s article essentially effaces the question of music altogether.
For him, punk is not a genre but an attitude, merely a musical/cultural site for
articulating radical politics. In fact, such an approach to punk has often been quite
effective for those critics wishing to marginalize all non-left and/or apolitical punk as
not ‘true’ punk—like Goshert and Mattson who lament the loss of ‘politics’ in more
mainstream punk forms (which they don’t consider to be punk at all but ‘alternative’
music), or Ward who lambastes right-wing punk as only ‘spuriously’ punk. It is only
by disengaging punk music from the specificities of genre that such critics are able to
present the movement as definitionally radical, and thus neatly sidestep the other
investments that punk might resonate with. By centring studies on the political
orientation of punk, music is subordinated to a function of these politics, rather than
something which generates pleasures and meanings in its own right. These are not
merely questions of identity and social location and resistance; these are things cultural
studies already has a sophisticated vocabulary for talking about. It is the ‘other stuff ’ of
music, the specific pleasures of the sounds and textures of the music itself, that we have
much more difficulty finding the language to express.
Even expressive attempts within the punk scene itself to engage with punk music as
music are often flattened and contained within this rigid framework of ‘politics’. For
example, the possibility that slamdancing and moshing may be affective, physical
responses to the emotional quality of punk music is overlooked by scholars searching
for wider political agendas in all subcultural practices. For instance, Willis’s (1993)
attempt to politicize moshing results in a somewhat bizarre suggestion of the activity
as a response to safe sex: that is, moshing as a sublimation of the desire for intimate
physical contact otherwise impossible in the era of AIDS. In a much more detailed
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 391

account of the punk dancing styles, and of the specific differences between
slamdancing and moshing, William Tsitsos (1999) sees the two dancing styles as
physical embodiments of differing ideological principles. The faster, more chaotic
slamdancing styles favoured by apolitical (‘drunk’) punks contrasts with the more
controlled and aggressive moshing of the straight edgers, thus mirroring the ideologies
of rebellion of the two different groups (the desire for complete freedom and anarchy,
and the need for control and strength in maintaining lifestyle choices, respectively).
As he writes:
While there are drunk punk slamdancers who, like moshers, dance to release
aggression, their dancing is not as violent as moshing because the primary object of
aggression for drunk punks is the mainstream, an entity not identified with the pit.
However, for straight edge moshers, the object of aggression is disorder and chaos
symbolized in part by the pit itself, and this disorder must be purged. (Tsitsos, 1999,
p. 413)
Tsitsos theorizes slamdancing and moshing primarily as a physical ‘acting out’ of
ideological principles. However, the distinction between slamdancing and moshing
which is so integral to his study is rarely upheld so rigidly within the punk scenes he is
discussing—a fact which is highlighted particularly clearly by his own interview
material. What becomes evident from his participants’ responses is that the real
difference between the dance styles is not the presence or absence of specific dance
moves which serve as physical manifestations of certain ideological positions; instead,
the real difference is one of interpretation, the way in which political orientation serves
as a lens which structures fans’ understanding of their own involvement in subcultural
practices. For example, political punks emphasize the communal aspects of
slamdancing, while apolitical punks, engaging in the same dance stress the importance
of individual expression and release (Tsitsos, 1999).
This is important because it demonstrates that musical, institutional or subcultural
conventions in no way deliver participants to certain political positions in the way that
punk scholars have traditionally implied. Certainly, a good deal of punk scholarship
has demonstrated how political ideologies inevitably have aesthetic consequences, but
it does not automatically follow that aesthetic practices straightforwardly embody
political agendas. After all, there is nothing about punk’s musical and subcultural
conventions that are inherently—or even typically—leftist. Under some conditions,
punk’s amateurism (the fact that anyone can ‘have a go’) or the desire to eliminate
hierarchies between fans and performers may well facilitate the building of an
egalitarian, proto-socialist community, but the same techniques might also be
employed equally effectively to decidedly non-progressive ends. The rawness of
‘amateurish’ compositions may instead lend intensity and urgency to right-wing
political messages. Or non-hierarchical relations between bands and fans may help to
increase group solidarity and thereby contribute to more clearly articulated political
goals and agendas within these more reactionary scenes. Equally so, a DIY approach to
musical production and a circulation of materials through the independent and
‘underground’ channels favoured by many Oi and Nazi punk bands may result less
392 M. Phillipov
from the desire to subvert corporate control of music practice than from a more
practical need to remain hidden from public view.
Consequently, a more sophisticated vocabulary for theorizing the relationship
between aesthetics and politics is needed within punk scholarship. Specifically, we
need to find ways of talking about musical and other aesthetic and subcultural
practices that do not merely subordinate them as subsidiary to wider political
concerns. Of course punk, like many forms of popular music, is often highly political
in so far as it is deeply bound to questions of resistance, social location and
commodification. However, it is necessary to develop a vocabulary for talking about
punk that can theorize its moments of political engagement without flattening the
affective specificities of the music into a predetermined framework of radicalism.
We need to find ways of talking about punk that take into account the pleasures and
emotional investments the music evokes. Pleasures that are not clearly articulated to
‘politics’ are often viewed with suspicion by a discipline searching for popular forms of
resistance to the dominant hegemony. While it is important to stress that music fans
are not merely ‘dupes’ to the culture industries, that music is one site where people
‘make do’ with what resources they have and resist the power structures that oppress
them, music isn’t just about the politics of resistance. To say that is not to diminish
music’s political effects but to warn that a blindness to everything but music’s political
effects can lead to an elision of the other investments that it also resonates with.
As critics, we need to be careful and realistic, as well as politically engaged.
Music is never ‘just’ music, but the politics of music are rarely present in any ‘pure’
form either. For every punk band or fan who refuses to limit the definition of punk to a
musical genre, preferring to see punk music as merely a complement to the wider
political impulses of the culture, there are many more for whom punk is primarily
about the music, and any political engagement they may—or may not—have is
subsidiary to the enjoyment of the music itself. Does this make the engagement of these
fans less authentic? Does it make them a less interesting object of study? Or perhaps
most importantly, does it make them less ‘punk’? At this time, cultural studies offers us
few tools with which to come to terms with musical engagements that fall outside the
more conventional ‘political’ analyses that have characterized most of the existing work
on punk. The specific pleasures of musical experience continue to remain unexplored.

Note
[1] It should, of course, be stressed that early British and American punk offered women unique
(and, at the time, unprecedented) opportunities to eschew the ‘peripheral’ or ‘decorative’ roles
conventionally assigned to them by most other music scenes and actively serve as lead singers,
drummers, bassists and guitarists in punk bands. Ultimately, though, punk was and remains a
male-dominated youth subculture, both numerically and ideologically: ‘Even within . . . the
most rhetorically egalitarian and oppositional of youth subcultures’, notes Lauraine LeBlanc
(1999, p. 64), ‘girls are still on the outside’.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 393

References
Baron, S. W. (1989) ‘Resistance and its consequences: the street culture of punks’, Youth & Society,
vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 207– 237.
Berger, H. M. (1999) Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience,
Wesleyan University Press, London.
Clarke, G. (1981/1997) ‘Defending ski-jumpers: a critique of theories of youth subcultures’, in The
Subcultures Reader, eds K. Gelder & S. Thornton, Routledge, London, pp. 175– 180.
Cohen, P. (1980) ‘Subcultural conflict and working-class community’, in Culture, Media, Language:
Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972 – 79, ed. S. Hall, Hutchinson, London, pp. 78– 87.
Davies, J. (1996) ‘The future of “no future”: punk rock and postmodern theory’’ Journal of Popular
Culture, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 3– 25.
Fairchild, C. (1995) ‘“Alternative” music and the politics of cultural autonomy: the case of Fugazi
and the D.C. Scene’, Popular Music and Society, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 17– 35.
Frith, S. (1980/1997) ‘Formalism, realism and leisure: the case of punk’, in The Subcultures Reader,
eds K. Gelder & S. Thornton, Routledge, London, pp. 163– 174.
Goshert, J. C. (2000) ‘“Punk” after the Pistols: American music, economics, and politics in the 1980s
and 1990s’, Popular Music and Society, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 85 – 106.
Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Methuen, London.
Laing, D. (1985) One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock, Open University Press,
Philadelphia, PA.
LeBlanc, L. (1999) Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture, Rutgers University
Press, New Brunswick, NJ.
Leonard, M. (1997) ‘“Rebel girl, you are the queen of my world”: feminism, “subculture” and grrrl
power’, in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. S. Whiteley, Routledge, London,
pp. 230– 255.
Marsh, P. (1982) ‘Dole-queue rock’, in The Other Britain, ed. P. Barker, Routledge & Kegan, London,
pp. 156– 166.
Mattson, K. (2001) ‘Did punk matter? Analyzing the practices of a youth subculture during the
1980s’, American Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 69– 97.
McClary, S. & Walser, R. (1990) ‘Start making sense! Musicology wrestles with rock’, in On Record: Rock,
Pop and the Written Word, eds S. Frith & A. Goodwin, Pantheon, New York, pp. 277– 292.
Osgerby, B. (1999) ‘Chewing out a rhythm on my bubble-gum: the teenage aesthetic and genealogies
of American punk’, in Punk Rock: So What?, ed. R. Sabin, Routledge, London, pp. 154 –169.
Sabin, R. (ed.) (1999) Punk Rock: So What?, Routledge, London.
Savage, J. (1991) England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, Faber & Faber, London.
Tillman, R. H. (1980) ‘Punk rock and the construction of “pseudo-political” movements’, Popular
Music and Society, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 165– 175.
Tsitsos, W. (1999) ‘Rules of rebellion: slamdancing, moshing, and the American alternative scene’,
Popular Music, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 397– 414.
Ward, J. J. (1996) ‘“This is Germany! It’s 1933!” Appropriations and constructions of fascism in
New York punk/hardcore in the 1980s’, Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 155– 185.
Willis, S. (1993) ‘Hardcore: subculture American style’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 365– 384.