1970s fashion punk

music pushed beyond its limits, absolutely shatters. every revolution invents its own terms, music does the same. to live in a different world, we must discover the sounds that describe it. if the term revolution seems ludicrous, think about accepting life the way it is, music is the language.

--peter plate

When attempting to discuss punk rock as a subculture, as movements in musical or fashion styles, or as simply the next phase in popular music production, critics have invariably looked to the most notable (or noticeable) "punk" bands from which to draw their examples and form their conclusions. Dick Hebdige's Subculture (1985) may be the source of much of this phenomenon, as it set the tone and strategy for defining subculture movements in Great Britain. Most studies of punk since then have taken their cue, whether they support or refute his findings, from his work, and thus appear to center around such bands as the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Stiff Little Fingers in the United Kingdom, or Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine in the United States. To focus a study of punk on such 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 it 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.

It is in Jude Davies's 1996 article, "The Future of `No Future,'" that the possibility for such a reading may be opened, as she not only sets out to redefine the academic task of writing about punk but also points to the continuing life of the punk scene after the British scene of the 1970s. Davies attempts to write about punk without recourse to the "discourses of mastery" which drive both Hebdige and his critics (3), and to discuss the problematizing of such grounding terms as "community" in these studies. Her overt awareness of punk's potential for being recuperated into mainstream politics (5), in turn, would problematize those terms on which definitions of subcultures have been dependent (Hebdige, for instance, circumscribes the punk scene in strict ethnic and class terms which are not applicable to punk in the United States, either in the 1970s or today). However, Davies falls back on the usual exemplary bands, again ending her discussion with those in the British scene of the early 1980s, and again mostly focusing on those that became commercially successful: Siouxsie and the Banshees, X-Ray Spex, the Slits (22). Only citing two bands as current examples in her notes, Davies simply states in her conclusion that "The punk subculture remains very healthy at gigs and in the fanzines of a D.I.Y. [do it yourself] music scene" (23). The general linkage of such a clearly antiindustry economic ethic as "doing it yourself" with the aforementioned bands could only be the most blatant contradiction in terms of study, for those bands are the very antithesis of a punk business ethic centered around independent production and independent control of music.

While Davies's choices of exemplary punk bands reflect similar tendencies that I would critique in other work on punk, her initial move to problematize the grounding terms of (sub)cultural analysis is a necessary one if we are to be able to continue the discussion beyond Hebdige. Following her work into the context of the music industry in the United States at this time, how are we to speak of alternative culture at a time in which words such as "alternative," "independent," and "punk" have themselves become the blue-chip terms of marketing popular culture in the 1990s?(1) Certainly, the tendency in academic discussions has been to take whatever is defined by mass media outlets as punk, then to describe it as (or as not) a subculture, or as effectively (or ineffectively) counter-cultural, without questioning the very label of punk, or at least the source of that label. Most notably, the inherent problem in this approach is that such bands must already have the ability to be recognized and legitimated as part of a national commercial culture, despite those labels of "alternative" that are applied to them. The ability for bands such as Green Day, Offspring, and Bad Religion to be first noticed and then marked as the exemplars of punk is necessarily problematic, for their renown arises from MTV, Spin magazine, Alternative Press, or other similar industry outlets.

Despite the problems in doing so, in this essay I will argue that it may be possible to discuss punk, but in limited terms that work without dependence on examples from the national culture industry. Despite the attempted cooption of the terms on which alternative music and culture have presented themselves as integral parts of mainstream marketing strategies, we may yet see the potential in punk to signal new social movements with economic, social, and political impact. First, to speak of punk at all, it must be defined and applied in strictly local terms, as Susan Willis pointed out, "regardless of the homogenizing influence of the media and mass market commodities" (366). While the mass media label of punk may be applied indiscriminately to many bands as a catchall generic reference, it is precisely because of punk's local production and consumption, as well as the geographic specificities in musical forms, style of dress, and political practice that are present across the country, that it cannot be reduced simply to a musical or otherwise stylistic genre. Continuing in her essay "Hardcore: Subculture American Style," Willis states that it may not be possible to define punk as a subculture either in Hebdige's, or I would add, in any unifying terms (367). In fact, it is in punk's inability to be defined as a subculture, as a political movement, as a genre, that we see the possibilities for the articulation of social identities which cannot be captured by the standardizing and reductive terms of ethnography and much current cultural studies.

With considerable success, Willis grounds her study in her daughter's local experience in the Raleigh-Chapel Hill, North Carolina, "hardcore" scene in order to avoid those problems which have plagued discussions of punk when they are framed by nationally successful examples. In one of the clearest arguments against trends in cultural studies to valorize cultural production for its own sake, Willis states that a criticism "which celebrates the making of cultural meanings in and of itself, as a radical form of politics," allows for a separation of culture from economy, and for a vision of autonomous culture to be formed "where dominant and subordinate groups clash on a far more equal footing than they do in the economic sector" (365). Through this reduction of cultural space to one in which all forms of production can compete equally and in possibly oppositional relationships with each other, critics enable themselves to discuss punk as an alternative or subculture in generic terms which are the very naturalized products of an entertainment industry that punk seeks to disrupt.

Additionally, it is because of the tendency in studies of the punk or hardcore scenes in the United States to reduce those names to generic constants that the foundational logic of punk's definition--a logic to which even Willis's admirable study is subject--must be questioned. Indeed, Willis may provide the most glaring academic misconception of the scene by equating its cosmetic appearance with a cohesive subculture when she unquestioningly collapses the social, political, and ethical distinctions between punks and skinheads under the blanket term "hardcore." Such reductions take place as well on economic terms, for Willis and others almost invariably identify, either centrally or solely, as punk those bands that have become international success stories on the same major labels which, from the critics' own accounts, punk would work against.