Punk Rock Is Bullshit Summary

Punk rock music has been used for decades to express dissatisfaction with society, government, or any idea common in mainstream media. Yet punk rock is not simply a tangent of the mainstream, it is a dynamic and fluid genre with many distinct songs. Don Letts, a mainstay in the London punk scene during the 70’s and 80’s, went as far to say that hip-hop was essentially “black” punk. While punk and hip-hop music are stylistically different, the fundamental tone of the two genres is the same. Even throughout the decades, hip-hop has sang the same issues as punk, including the plight of the lower class, police brutality, and gang violence.

Influenced by this punk subcultural capital, the punks distinguished themselves from the mainstream code of behavior. The subcultural capital not only differentiated from the widely accepted ‘popular culture’, but also discriminated themselves from the ‘high culture’ as well. Hebdige (1976) has argued that subcultural knowledge often include class consciousness. As a matter of fact, the assertion of subcultural distinction partly bases on the ideal of classlessness (Thornton, 1995). Storey also points out that the class divides indeed exist between the subculture and the elite culture (Forgan, 2002). Opposite from the high culture, which is often appeal to the taste of the elite class, the subcultural capital is always less class-bound and concerned more about the interests of lower class. Therefore, it shapes people’s dispositions against the dominate stereotypes, such as class, gender and religion. As an illustration, the punks can come from all works of life and the diversity help to develop the punk tastes and contributes to the accumulation of subcultural capital, these tastes may give a guide to punks preference. In this way, the subcultural capital assists to develop its uniqueness.

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.

Music, in the past, has often spelled bad news to society at large. It can challenge norms and invoke a sense of hype in places that modern culture may be uncomfortable with, such as sex, sexuality, and drugs. Personally, when I think of punk music, I see a genre that stands to be individualistic, aggressive, and rebellious. Phrases such as ‘anti-establishment’ also come up. This notion comes from many aspects of punk subculture, including dress, music, performance, and my interpretations.

     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

Our world is full of propaganda and unique activities of every sort. There are countless methods of entertainment pushed towards us in an effort to capture our undivided attention. These forms of entertainment are available through the freedoms Americans have - the freedoms derived from our Constitution. Americans enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” more than arguably every other country; moreover, they will be the first to say so. Americans have little restrictions on expressions and, therefore, many groups feel the need to do just that – express themselves. However, these expressions by such a plethora of actors also is the very reason none of them succeed in holding one’s attention for great lengths. When analyzing “punk” rock as an expression or propaganda, it actually is one of the few which has been able to capture the attention and live through the people for a long period of time – over 30 years.

Punk has always been about more than just the sound of the music people were making during that era, although the sound was a huge factor and played an interwoven part of the entire ordeal. Punk split itself from the traditional rock of its time, sonically, by deciding that clean guitar riffs, processed vocals, and any sound product that didn’t come straight out of the instrument/artist wasn’t “real enough”. Hanner stated in “Unpopular Culture…”: “Musically, punk and hardcore are characterized by short, strident, up-tempo songs performed with consistent, straightforward instrumentation, meaning a lack of synthesizers, guitar effects, or post-production audio modification.“ As a result Punk became the gritty, noisy, dirty and unique sound that everyone can instantly recognize. Punk was also an ideology. It was something people lived by and something that had a very blatant and in your face message of being anti-government, anti-establishment, and basically anti-authority all together. This exact sentiment is described in the same article by Nathan Hanner in “Unpopular Culture…”:

As a teenager growing up in 1970s Washington D.C. one might rise out of bed in the morning, squeeze into their bell bottoms and skin-tight t-shirts, not expecting that that would be the day they ran into a group of kids dawned in black with clothes pins in their shirts, who called themselves punks and were looking to make a change in DC music history. In a time where the country was divided by political beliefs, a raging war, and racial tensions, smack dab in the center of Washington D.C. came the punk scene. It was said that the hippie scene majorly influenced the punk scene, some would say that the hippies were “the real punks”(Punk: Attitude, 3:12). The punk scene consisted of kids who opposed hippies, so in retrospect the hippies are what

Punk, at the beginning of it's, was a modest thing including of a couple of musicians who played with small sites having a little crowd. Disenfranchised

During 1970s Britain, life was a picture of austerity and hardship for many members of the public. The country was facing the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s and large numbers of the electorate were quickly beginning to grow tired of the failing policies being touted by both Labour and Conservative minority governments. The experience of Britain for many in the 1970s was one of drawn out decline and decay, the consensus politics of the 1960's was falling apart and Harold Macmillan’s notion of ‘You’ve never had it so good’ couldn’t have been further from the truth. It could be argued that the aforementioned factors played a role of importance when assessing the largely spontaneous emergence of the punk

In both the United States and Great Britain, a genre of music, now known as punk rock was developing in the late 1960s and 1970s that would provide an outlet for the emotions young adults were feeling at that time. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus on the development of punk in the United States, however punk rock “arose at the same time” in both the US and Great Britain, “and had what one might describe as a symbiotic, yet adversarial relationship” (Stalcup). Therefore, one cannot completely disregard the development of punk rock in Great Britain while discussing the development of punk rock in America. In the US, punk rock arose on the east coast, mostly

(GREIL MARCUS CITE) The punk rock movement was clearly a counter-politics and counterculture movement uncontained by specific political ideologies. The majority of punk bands were left-wing due to their working class roots. Rebelling against society deemed them outsiders, and they embraced this alienation which was demonstrated in their clothing, music and aloofness emphasized on stage. Punk was embraced by youth culture, turning into a fashion trend which led to clashes between the “real” punks and those who followed trends.

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

One of the reasons punk was so appealing to youth was because it gave power to the powerless. There was high youth unemployment in England during the 1970s, and the class system meant that what opportunities there were went to people who were of high class, and not necessarily high ability. When the sex pistols appeared on Today, they annihilated the status quo by being so vulgar on live television. They shocked the older generations, who thought that their antics were outrageous, that their music was bad, and that they had been terribly disrespectful to the ever-lovely Bill Grundy. On top of that, their attitudes were horrifying. They were always looking to disturb the peace by challenging the older generations’ traditional values, such as their reverence for the royal family with anti-monarchy anthems like ‘God Save the Queen’. All these things made the sex pistols, and punk music in general, more attractive to disaffected youth, who the status quo wasn’t working for. Youth saw them as being a lot more connected to what was happening on the street than a lot of other rock bands at the time, like Queen or the

Punk is a genre that was typically aimed towards the angry middle-class white male. But today there is a wider acceptance towards women in the punk scene. As Lauren Langman, in her paper presents, “angrier working-class youth were more likely to wear black