Commercial Recuperation Essay

The attitude common in the subculture is the resistance to selling out, which means abandoning one’s values and changing in musical style toward pop to embrace anything that’s mainstream capitalist culture in the exchange for money, status, or power. Punk rocks’ common thinking wasn’t only anti-authoritarism, and not selling out but also non-conformity, direct action, and a DIY ethic. The DIY attitude was pointed towards stepping forward and speaking without any restraint. To fight with warrior qualities to achieve what you were striving for. The kind of thinking and motives for punk rock subjects was to not settle for what society made acceptable and standard but to think and work outside of the box that was holding them in.

In Justin Pearson's memoir, From the Graveyard of the arousal Industry, he recounts the events that occured from his early years of adolesence to the latter years of his adulthood telling the story of his unforgiving and candid life. Set in the late 1970s "Punk" rock era, From the Graveyard of the Arousal Industry offers a valuable perspective about the role culture takes in our lives, how we interact with it and how it differs from ideology.

     The punk subculture is often seen as a rebellious group of misguided youngsters who often come from lower class dwellings and haven’t gotten the attention that they needed so they dye their hair, dress differently, and act differently. In Facing The Music edited by Simon Frith, Mary Harron reduced the meaning of punk to “the spectacle of middle-class children dressing up in a fantasy of proletarian aggression and lying desperately about their backgrounds” (History). The flipside to that is that maybe these youths are expressing their individualism and choose to stray away from

More properly it was a transitional era seeing revolutionary changes in the home, the workplace and the nation. These changes were motivated by Rock and folk musicians who unlocked the Pandora’s Box of youth counterculture, “a mood of rebellious releasing its quintessential fears of unbridled sexuality, unabashed vulgarity, the release of primitive, and the breaking of all cultural taboos” (Auslander,

This argumentative essay will focus on an English punk-rock band called the Sex Pistols. Julien Temple’s documentary, The Filth and the Fury portrays the Sex Pistols as a rebellious band who generated from the hardships the working class faced in England after the Second World War. Such hardships included jobs being very difficult to get, especially for working class teenagers who were looking for their first job (123 anarchy). As a result, “everyone was on the dole” (Temple chp 1). The working class had little hope was told by everyone that they didn’t “stand a chance.” Basically if you weren’t born into a riches you were doomed. The hardships resulted in social chaos, rioting and strikes. (documentary). “It seemed there was little hope of a future in 1975 if you were young and working class” (Anarachy Pop 124). Therefore, the Sex Pistols formed to “propose an alternative social system (youth domination) and alternative politics.” (Anarchy pop 124)

When the Punk Movement emerged in the mid-1970s in both the United States and United Kingdom, it spanned into such areas as fashion, music, as well as youth mentality and thus became its own type of subculture. However, this movement can also be considered a form of social deviance when viewed through the lens of Robert Merton’s theory of anomie. This deviance stems from the anti-social and anti-conventional nature of the movement’s members in response to lower and middle class socio-economic strain. Therefore, the Punk Movement can be categorized as a combination of two of Merton’s types of adaptation to strain, including retreatism and rebellion, due to the subculture’s rejection of capitalist values, withdrawal from the workforce and

Secondly, Punk Rock artists were rebels with a cause, their motive, destruction and rebellion through their ideology. “In its original nature, the punk culture has been primarily concerned with individual freedom, which

Name:__________ Date: ______________________ Per. ____ The 1960’s in the U.S. 1. Identify and explain the main social and cultural effects of the youth counterculture movement in the U.S. in the 1960’s: The youth counterculture movement

With the economic decline and availability of jobs with upward movement, a culture of youths formed in Britain that challenged the ideals and cultural norms of the generations that came before them. A consistent movement from traditional society through youth subcultures brings light through the eyes of the musicians that describe their generation’s feelings of homelessness in an era filled with unemployment, low wages, and violence. The insurgence of the counterculture movement, poor economic conditions, and the commercialization of previous Rock and Roll music in Britain directly led to the punk subculture because it allowed youths to speak up about their conditions and frustrations through an easily understood and accessible medium while maintaining a different stance than their predecessors.

Rather, these postmodernists focus on the fragmented and heterogeneous nature of our culture, to suggest that punks are not so much engaging in resistance but ironically reflecting the culture, they putatively oppose themselves. That "television, radio, magazines, pamphlets, virtual media such as the Internet" (Stahl, 1999) helps to create and prolong subculture. Instead, for postmodernists, this intense codependence of subculture members of the media indicates how closely punks embody our present, media-obsessed moment. A structuralist neo-Marxist account of punks was that they were enacting genuine resistance and disaffection of society. But, as refigured by postmodern theorists as a form of "subcultural capital," an "alternative hierarchy in which the axes of age, gender, sexuality and race are all employed in order to keep the determinations of class, income and occupation at bay" (Stahl, 1999).

The message that Dada and Punk tried to achieve through their work in the context of desired reality is very similar as both of them bore from a social outburst. Punk was a form of artistic anarchy against system control and specific pattern of society, whereas Dada was an ‘Anti-War movement’. However, very interesting is the fact that they were relatively unrelated and occurred around 50 years apart. Although the vocalist of a very controversial punk rock band “Sex Pistols”, Johnny Rotten said he had never heard about ‘Dada’ there can be found the same themes of inspirations as in Dadaism. Therefore assuming that the group ‘Sex Pistols’ did not model on Dadaism and any other movements or trends, this might be associated with a human nature. The nature, that does not like to be manipulated, controlled or skipped as a microscopic minority.

Nearly thirty years later, We experience one of the most talk about re-births of the movement, It started to take form in a remote part of the United States, more precisely in the city of Seattle during the late 80’s and early 90’s and It was a desperate attempt to rebel against a society that felt corrupted by the overconsumption to which people were bombarded during those years through fashion, advertising and specially the media industry, and go back to the roots of the punk movement. The Grunge movement or Sub-Culture, their looks and music engraved in bands like Alice in Chains, Nirvana or Soundgarden although They were politically against consumerism and

Perhaps the rejection of the term is to shed the negative connotations previously associated with subculture, as an aggressive and disruptive force within society. Which raises the interesting point, off subculture being difficult to clearly identify in relation to the mainstream, once the disruptive element has been pacified and also because of the reinvention of existing culture. The idea that culture has stagnated due to nostalgia, explains why it is difficult for some social and cultural commentators to recognise emerging contemporary subcultures. Petridis (2014) and Moss (2015) both say it is impossible to tell someone’s identity by clothing and there have been no recent new subcultures. Petridis does discuss Haul Girls and Seapunks, but addresses the similarities between Haul Girls and Mods, and likens Seapunks to 1990s Grunge. So, it is not that subculture is no longer a relevant term, but that these contemporary subcultures are a revitalisation of what has gone before, and pose little challenge to society because of their familiarity. However, the binary of Haul Girls and Seapunks still

The Sex Pistols are a very important starting point in the punk rock revolution and the changed the movement advocated to happen. Even though they only lasted two years, they “never really faded away.” (Dougan, 413) According to Dougan, they are always present, “when the words punk-rock are uttered.” (413) The Sex Pistols not only instilled a love of punk rock, but also imagined a world where “a crud could become a king.” (Dougan, 414-415) Hence, the Sex Pistols advocated for the English

The punk subculture was one of the influential revolutions on the 20th century, which originated in in the 1970s and spread across countries that included the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Australia. This subculture was based on a loud, aggressive genre of music called punk rock, and it intended to gain individual freedom for the working class. This essay explains the journey from the evolution and widespread of the punk subculture in the UK in 1980s. As the title suggests, punk fashion has been ruptured, tweaked and re interpreted by individuals and fashion designers over and over again, and its style has been re adapted to juxtapose on contemporary trends.