The Buddha Of Suburbia By Hanif Kureishi

In this essay, I will be discussing about a social group that took fashion to the next level and create a huge impact in British history were the punks culture during the late nineteen seventies. The punk cultures were to rebel against the government during the great depression and were all about the attitude of the younger generations. During the late nineteen seventies was the time of unemployment and social unrest, a lot of the young white kids felt outcast from the British culture, foreseeing their lives with little prospect and so called “no future”. It was also a DIY “Do it yourself” movement. Younger generation that adopted the punk look often create their own garment by wearing safety pins,

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.

In order to understand why punk came about the preceding periods will be considered. The baby boom after the war had resulted in a large amount of people being born at the same time. A knock on effect later down the line resulted in mass unemployment for young people. The punk era showed angry,

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.

Both disco and punk “encouraged energetic public action”.[3] Disco entertained people, and punk led youth aggressive. These built the rise of punk and disco in the late

“He [Pearson’s father] would freak out when he read the song titles to the cassettes that my friends and I would shoplift from the mall…He was certain that I’d become a Junkie if I listened to that kind of music. But with an alcoholic wife-beater father who didn’t give a shit about his son I was bound to avoid the cliched, nihilist aspects of punk culture” (Pearson 12).

The Buddha in the Attic is an emotional novel written by Julie Otsuka in 2011. The novel is unique in the sense that it is written in the first person plural in order to tell the story of many characters simultaneously. There isn’t a set plot except for the chronological stories of multiple picture brides coming to America in the early 1900’s. Each chapter serves as a major section in the women’s lives and assimilation into American culture. The first chapter is titled “Come, Japanese”, which focuses on why the women are coming to America. They describe the decision, sometimes forced, and journey to come to America to meet their new husbands. Many did not necessarily want to come, but they were promised a better life by their husbands, and most of the families of each wife received some sort of endowment money. One of the wives’ said that she was forced to go to support her family, while her older sister was working at the local geisha house just to put food on the table. They described the crowded conditions and long journey of the boat ride, as well as the cliques made and friendships formed on the voyage. All they knew of their husbands at this point was from a letter that was usually not written by the husband, as well as a picture, which was usually of a different person. Each woman’s story was different, and they all had different motives for coming to America, whether to seek a better life or better yet, forget about their previous life in Japan. They all had

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.

Nevertheless, punk shouldn’t be held to such high standards of influence. It’s influential; it’s something that made misfits feel as though they had a place, but not something to be held to the unattainably high standards. All things considered, it did do something positive, it provided a home and inclusive environment for those who were frustrated and just plain angry.

     Anti-conformity has always been a prominent thread running through punk. The unofficial creed has always been that to truly define yourself you can’t be like your parents or your friends. You have to be yourself and to cut yourself out of stone. Each punk band you ever encounter will be slightly different from all the others. Some bands are lyrically different for their song lyrics, some for their guitar chords, and some for the theme of their music. But whatever the music is about, you can always be assured that it will be high energy, raw, and honest. The

The reading Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers written by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, is about one finding within, the best of you. Finding your best qualities and acting upon it will improve your spiritual life. Each person is born with unique abilities that distinguish one from the rest. One must believe can be our best selves pushing others and oneself to do well by understanding each other beliefs and impacting each other’s lives. Thus, overcoming the differences in faith, like brothers and sisters, enriching you spiritually; increasing mindfulness, meaning, and peace in this life.

Most of the original rebellion was directed towards the British class structure. They wanted to express their disapproval of the structure that governed their country. In The Jam’s “Eton Rifles”, the band sarcastically attacks the upper class, calling them arrogant and preaching to them that rugby is the only thing making them strong (Punk 68). The Sex Pistols’ album “God Save The Queen” portrays the Queen of England with a safety pin through her nose on their cover. The reaction to this outburst of shocking rebellion from the mainstream society was a strong, displeased one. American writer Greil Marcus defined punk as, “…refusing the future society has planned for you.” Thousands of social misfits attempted just that. Through the many causes for this rebellious political expression: communism, anarchy, feminism, etc., the punks of England had a focus and a reason. It was this that made the “punk” a valid, yet undesired member of society, and the British public got to see this sociological change first hand (Chamberlain par.8). Although this movement was short lived, its impact was a phenomenon, and its effects were long- lasting, which distinguished this group from previous generations.

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…”:

In the book Buddha of Infinite Light by D.T. Suzuki, the nature of Shin’s True Pure Land School is discussed at great length. He speaks of many important concepts found in this sect of Pure Land Buddhism, and explains his interpretations of these ideas. One of the most important ideas found in this sect is the concept of Other-Power, and its relation to that of self-Power. Suzuki spends much of this book going over this concept, and though it may seem constricting and full of paradoxes at first, he explains it as simply as he can. Pure Land, in contradiction to other sects of Buddhism, does not rely on self-Power, in which one must find it within themselves to become awakened, but instead relies on the Other-Power of Amida Buddha. By invoking the Name, namu-amida-butsu, one submits themselves entirely to the power of Amida buddha to in a sense “save them”, or help bring them to enlightenment. It seems, however, that it is not just this Other-Power that one must rely on to get to this state, but in order to realize the presence of the Other-Power in your life, it takes a great deal of self-Power. According to Suzuki then, we cannot reach the Other-Power without using self-Power.

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.