Chapter 2

Hannon, Sharon M, Chapter Seven “Punk in the New Century” in Punks: A Guide to an American Subculture (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 106-111.

(EBook, ML3918.R63 -- H35 2010eb)

Punks: A Guide to an American Subculture eBook 

The chapter, “Punk in the New Century” in the book, “Punks: A Guide to an American Subculture” by Sharon Hannon talks about how punk lives on, and always will.  However, it is hard to find a dominant subculture that just relates to punk, as throughout the past thirty years or so many smaller subcultures have emerged out of the original punk scene.  Hannon goes on to discuss Punk on the Web, and how the changes in technology, including web magazines and online radio stations, have been vital to the development of the punk community online and offline.  The next topic in this chapters talks about how punk rock was for and made by young people and discusses how the majority of the older fans and musicians slowly move away from the scene and begin to focus on other aspects of life.  The remainder of the chapter discusses the question of ‘what is punk?’ and what it really means for a band or a person to be punk.  Punk is alive and well.  The subculture will be around forever, with new bands always creating new sounds with punk influences.  In relation to my first blog on Ryan Moore’s article, punk bands have kept their authenticity and identity as a punk band by using alternative media they have created themselves to move away from the mainstream, which could relate to current times and include online magazines.  Therefore this confirms a way in which the web has helped develop the subculture.  In relation to blog 3 and how punk is a widely used influence and many bands are becoming commercialized and through this they may lose the title of punk.  The internet is causing this to happen, although I don’t believe it changes what punk is, it changes how people view it and makes it more accessible to more people.   

Article 2

Matula, Theodore. “Pow! To the People: The Make-up’s Reorganization of Punk Rhetoric.”Popular Music and Society 30.1 (2007). Accessed 8 May 2011

Theodore Matula talks about Punk Rock in the 1990’s and how it started to become more commercialized.  More and more people started to get into punk and during this time many bands became successful.  Therefore Matula describes this as a downside due to the hyper-commercializing and mainstreaming of punk.  Overall, the main focus of this article was how the band, The Make-up, reorganized the Punk rhetoric.  Matula also explains how they used social implications of the genres that they were influenced by to alter the punk sound and the idea of what the punk musical truth might be.  Matula uses Barry Brummetts’ definition of rhetoric, which is when something influences how social meanings are created, maintained or opposed.  Amongst all this, the question of authenticity comes in, to decide whether or not the Make-up keep their punk identity, or whether they start to move away and towards the gospel or funk identity, to become mainstream.  This relates to Ryan Moore’s article on cultures of authenticity, but not so much deconstruction.  In regards to the cultures of authenticity in relation to the Make-up, they are in a way authentic due to the dominating fast punk sound and with the gospel and funk influences, they created something individual and therefore retained their authenticity.  In relation to Chapter One of Malott and Pena’s, Punk Rockers Revolution The Make-up confirm that Punk was a social movement, as they could be considered to be a band that is a part of a new smaller subculture that emerged out of Punk Rock.  This also made way for more subcultures to emerge and punk to be used as an influence in many more genres to be formed in the following years. 

Chapter 1

Malott, Curry and Milagros Pena, Punk Rockers Revolution: A Pedagogy of Race, Class and Gender (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004), 1-13.  (Call Number: ML3918.R63 M35 2004)

Punk Rockers' Revolution

Throughout the first chapter of ‘Punk Rockers’ Revolution’, The Bias in Our Study: Who We Are, Where We Come from, and This Study, the authors Curry Malott and Milagros Pena talk about exactly that.  They talk about their upbringing and how they were living in a predominately white capitalist society, being stereotyped and cast out of the mainstream community.  Malott and Pena created their own communities of resistance in a response to this.  A lot of the opinions behind these communities related to destructiveness and I believe there was a lot of this going on within the subculture although it was partly viewed the wrong way, as the outsiders were stereotyping them as criminals; they were anything but.  However, according to the Classic Subculture Theory, the punk communities drew attention to the laws of society by breaking them and this then causes the stereotypes to emerge from outside.  This chapter relates to the previous article on ‘Postmodernism and Punk Subculture’ in the way that they both talk about punk as being a culture of destruction and involving views that go against the mainstream views of society.  However, I personally believe that the people within this community were and still are standing up for their own beliefs and not those of others.  Malott also discusses how he was taught to live his life not for but with the Other and this allowed him to rid his life of the oppressive ideas of mainstream society, and then permitted himself to be a complete part of the community of punk rock.  In the end the two authors were trying to decide whether or not Punk could be considered a social movement, while also being a protest community and I definitely believe it was a social movement as it allowed many other subcultures to branch out from it with the same, as well as new, beliefs.

Article 1

Moore, Ryan. “Postmodernism and Punk Subculture: Cultures of Authenticity and

Deconstruction.” The Communication Review 7.3 (2004). Accessed 27 April 2011

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714420490492238

In this article Ryan Moore talks about postmodernism in relation to the punk subculture in the 1970s and 1980s just as punk was beginning to emerge and through to when several other cultures began to branch out from punk, such as hardcore and straightedge.  Moore also largely explains the responses that the bands, along with their fans, had to postmodernism, which comes under the two prominent categories of cultures of authenticity and deconstruction.  He talks about how there is a group of punk bands who use certain aspects of culture in general to shock and cause disruption to society, resulting in deconstruction.  The response of cultures of authenticity relates more to the hardcore and straightedge punk subcultures, where bands have attempted to separate themselves from mainstream culture to move underground by using alternative media they have created themselves.  To start with, I was unaware that punk bands even had a slightest response to postmodernism, although when Moore describes postmodernism in relation to culture and art in regards to how boundaries are broken down and aspects from the past are recycled and recreated in a different way for a different use, it became clear how this would work in the punk subculture.  Music subculture theory has two terms, bricolage and homology, which I believe are used to define this within this particular subculture.  However, it would be more bricolage than homology, where aspects from mainstream culture are used in a way unique to punk.

Introduction

My blog is about the subculture of Punk.  I will be writing about the emergence of Punk as a subculture, the various opinions surrounding it and particular aspects of music subcultural theory.