Sunday, July 20, 2008

PUNK - THE MOVEMENT, THE LEGACY


Popular music has always been associated with the alternative, yet the question remains, what exactly is the alternative that is implied here? Has popular music actually helped to foster an alternative way of thinking? If so, how?
Started in continental Europe in the 1910s, Futurism and Dadaism were avant-garde performance movements that sought to capture a modernist critical theory about art and use them to construct new and radical change in oppressive social and political systems. Over the last century, avant garde has come to be associated with any type of art that is anti-traditional or anti-conventional in form. Futurists and Dadaists exemplified the modernist avant-garde: provocative, often outrageous, contemptuous with tradition and respectability, self-promoting through their manifestos and staged public events. Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci saw [them] as cultural revolutionaries, praising their destruction of rigid traditions and values (Tiddall & Bozzolla, 1993 in Murphy and Potts 2003:46).
While the movement itself failed to make meaningful political progress, it did have significant impact on music and culture. Their alternative values were echoed decades later in punk subculture that express youthful rebellion and rejection of mainstream culture. Their celebration of youth and danger was revived in the Hope I die before I get old (The Who) ethos of punk rock and youth culture. This essay will analyse how punk rock as a genre of music and as an anti-establishment movement may have done to undermine the dominant, hegemonic cultural context when it emerged in the mid-1970s. It will also examine how punk rock becomes the alternative when it is associated with popular music and how popular music actually helps to foster an alternative way of thinking. These issues will be discussed in turn in this essay.
Early punk rockers, like the 60s hippie movement, the Situasionist International, the anarchists, the Beats, Fluxists, Surrealists, Dadaists, Futurists, and any number of disaffected visionaries, represented an age-old spirit of spontaneous defiance toward the established order. What punk rockers and all of them have in common – beside a belligerent attitude toward authority – is willingness to take big risks, and a commitment to pursue small, spontaneous moment of truth. Opportunities to act boldly – which often means not the way you would normally, reflexively act – present themselves everyday and maybe even every hour. Authentic acts tend to get noticed among the correctness on which postmodern culture thrives. Punk as Savage puts it (1991:440) was a total cultural revolt. It was a hardcore confrontation with the black side of history and culture, right-wing imaginary, sexual taboos, a delving into it that had never been done before by any generation in such a thorough way.
The message punk movement was sending out was one of rebellion, individuality, and do it yourselfDIY. In his book Lipstick Traces, American cultural critic Greil Marcus fixes The Sex Pistols Johnny Rotten squarely in the tradition of the rebel seer. Rotten was a gleeful anarchist who used the word FUCK on television and sang like he meant to change the world – or at least explode the dreamy, Beatles – fuelled optimism of the day, and stick a fork into classic rock. It was the Situasionists who first applied that spirit of anarchy to modern media culture. As Lasn (1999:101) puts it They [the Situationists] were interested only in freedom, …The creativity of everyday people, which consumer capitalism and communism had weakened but not killed, desperately needed to find expression. In other words bureaucracies, hierarchies and ideologies have stifled spontaneity and free will. To the Situationists, everyone is a creator of situations, a performance artist, and the performance – of course – is our lives, lived in our own way.







The Sex Pistol and the SI were most definitely on the same page, philosophically. Their song Anarchy in the UK encouraged, in crudely poetic form, the philosophy of the SI movement. As Marcus (1989:13) puts it The Pistols wanted to live not as an object but as a subject of the story.



What emerged became what is now known as punk as the result of social and political climate back in 1970s especially in Britain when it was in recession. Unemployment figures were the worst since World War II, with school leavers least likely to find work. Public spending had risen to 45% of national income and the optimism of the 1960s had faded away. (Punk Music in Britain, BBC.co.uk, 2002) This social and political condition in which they had been growing up resulted in a feeling that was a mixture of frustration, boredom and poorly focused anger. Marcus recalls watching Johnny rotten shouting madly over the band’s guitars in front of the Berlin Wall and understanding that his aim… was to take all the rage, intelligence and strength in his being and then fling them back at the world; to make the world notice; to make the world doubt its most cherished and unexamined beliefs. (Marcus, 1989:7). They were the first to feel nihilism and to rail against a world that offered no future and for a few years their rage shook the world.



The associated punk subculture was not only expressed by youthful rebellion and a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies, but also through distinctive clothing styles e.g. military boots, Brothel creepers, Dr. Martens boots, tapered jeans, tight leather pants, bondage trousers, fishnet stockings, spike bands, other studded or spiked jewelry, safety pins in clothes or as body piercings, brightly-colored or white and black dress shirts randomly covered in slogans, deliberately offensive word and anarchy symbols, hair was often dyed bright unnatural colours with liberty spike and mohawk or bihawk hairstyles. These fashion were originally an expression of nonconformity with mainstream culture, as well as that of hippie counter-culture. Many female punks rebelled against the stereotypical image of a woman by combining clothes that were delicate or pretty with clothes that were considered masculine, such as combining a Ballet tutu with big, clunky boots.


Distinctive clothing styles of punk subculture was not only representing punk fashion and lifestyle but also representing its message and ideology. Through a change in basic terminology of Saussure concept of signs where the signified becomes the content and the signifier becomes the expression. (Nattiez, 1990:4), we then could analyse the meaning behind punk fashion in relation with its ideology. In other words punk fashion displays many of the things that punk music expresses: aggression, rebellion, and individualism. This use of fashion to shock may also have been partly influenced by the Futurist art movement.

John Holmstrom – Punk Magazine founder in Punk Celebrates 30 Years of Subversion states I felt punk rock had to come along because the rock scene had become so tame that bands like Billy Joel and Simon and Garfunkel were being called rock and roll, when to me and other fans, rock and roll meant this wild and rebellious music. (McLaren, 2006). Punk rock bands avoiding the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock. In any event, some of punk rock's leading figures made a show of rejecting not only mainstream rock and the broader culture it was associated with, but their own most celebrated predecessors: No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977, declared The Clash. (Harris 2004: 202). What makes punk rock bands different from the mainstream 70s rock was they created short, fast, hard music, with political and often nihilistic lyrics. The vocal sometimes sound nasal, and often shouted instead of sung in a conventional sense like what we usually hear in popular music.

According to Holmstrom in Punk Celebrates 30 Years of Subversion – BBC News [punk rock was] rock and roll by people who didn't have very much skills as musicians but still felt the need to express themselves through music. (McLaren, 2006). The music is famous for being based around three or four chords. In the fanzine Sideburns in December 1976, the guitar chords A, E and G were displayed, along with the words This is a chord... this is another... this is a third... Now form a band. (in Punk Music in Britain, BBC.co.uk, 2002). This demonstrates that a large part of the appeal of punk music was its accessibility, the feeling that anyone could have a go. This also challenges the traditional way of thinking that only a truly gifted and skilled person can be an artist or musician and can create major works and become phenomenal.

Because anti-establishment attitudes are such an important part of punk ideologies, punk demystified that their music was the product of small level independent record and distribution. Thus a network of independent music labels, venues, and distributors has developed. The message that anyone can do it was applied. The DIY ethic promotes the ability of the ordinary person to learn to do more than they thought were possible. You just did it yourself. You did not wait for someone to come and discover you. That was the most important thing that came out of punk.

Punk rock movement has inspired many bands on independent record labels that did not fit into the mainstream genres of the time. They applied its spirit and DIY ethics to very different kinds of music and created a new musical genre called alternative rock. Alternative rock consists of various subgenres that have emerged from the independent music scene since the 1980s, such as grunge, Britpop, gothic rock, and indie pop. These subgenres are unified by their collective debt to the style and/or ethos of punk. Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing, and playing what you want. (Kurt Cobain in Azzerad, 2001:205).


However the effect of DYI ethics has been an amazing expansion of local music making. As the result its development has been a cultural version of consumerism. According to Frith (1997:169) This consumerism has led to the creation of an alternative production system that both parallels the established industry (alternative shops sell record made by alternative record companies and featured in the Alternative Charts) and is integrated into it. Independent records, made by do-it-yourself companies, remain commodities. In other words in economic terms punk is basically petit-bourgeois that lies between the workingmen and the capitalists. This makes them betrayed their anti-consumerism ideology. The punk aspiration was to make everyone a star. This could be represented in an untrue way by the process of commercial production, but only if this process was in the wrong hands of multinational corporation.

In conclusion, it appears that punk rock as an anti-establishment rock music genre and movement may have done to undermine the dominant, hegemonic cultural context through their rebellion and belligerent attitude toward authority. The message they wanted people to learn and do was that everyone has ability to create something vital for other people and the world. Their music, fashion and style were a representation of their ideology against the dominant, hegemonic culture planted in our society. They have challenged the traditional notion of making music and how to live ourlives in the world that half full of clubland’s evil empire of commercialism, and the creeping corporate capitalism.



REFERENCE


Azerrad, M (2001) Our Band Could Be Your Life, New York: Little Brown.


Frith, S (1997) Formalism, Realism and Leisure: The Case of Punk (1980) in
Gelder, K and Thornton, S (eds) The Subcultures Reader, London and New York:
Routledge.


Harris, J (2004) Britpop!: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English
Rock
, Cambridge : Da Capo.


Lasn, K (1999) Culture Jam: the Uncooling of America™, New York: Eagle Brook.


Marcus, G (1989) Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.


McLaren, M Punk Celebrates 30 Years of Subversion, BBC News, August 18,
2006. Retrieved on September 27, 2007.
Available at :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5263364.stm

Murphie, A & John Potts (2003) Culture & Technology. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.


Nattiez, J (1999) A Theory of Semiology in Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.


Punk Music in Britain, BBC.co.uk., October 7, 2002. Retrieved on September 27, 2007. Available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A791336

Savage, J (1991). England's Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, London: Faber
and Faber).

Friday, July 18, 2008

MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM




What is the relationship between modernism and postmodernism? Is the distinction between them valid?
The concepts of modernism and postmodernism refer to cultural experience, artistic style or aesthetic forms, and philosophical position. Both terms are used in a variety of context to describe movements in the arts, economic and social conditions, and scholarship. Modernism is a tendency based on the idea that the traditional form of art, literature, social organisation, and daily life had become outdated. Since the traditional forms were believed to be static, monotonous, and believed that they would not improve society and human condition, therefore they needed to be changed or even to be got rid of. For many historians and scholars postmodernism is a movement of ideas arising from, but also critical elements of modernism. This essay will discuss the relationship between modernism and postmodernism. It also will explore the validity of the distinction between them and will be explain in turn in this essay.

Modernism and postmodernism are cultural and epistemological concepts. The relationship between modernism and postmodernism is the concepts of the two concern cultural formations and cultural experience. For example modernism as the cultural experience of modernity and postmodernism as the cultural experience and formation of postmodernity. Both concepts also concern artistic and architectural styles and movements. For instance modernism as a style of architecture (Le Corbusier) or writing (Kafka, Brecht) and postmodernism in film (Blade Runner, Kill Bill, The Matrix 1,2,3), photography (Cindy Sherman) or the novel (E.L. Doctorow, Salman Rusdhie). Finally the concepts of modernism and postmodernism concern a philosophical position that asserts the character of knowledge and truth. Modernism is associated with the enlightenment philosophy of Rousseau, Marx, Weber, and others, whereas postmodernism in philosophy has been associated with thinkers such as Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault, and others.
It was the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Europe that set the ground-work for artistic modernism. The Enlightenment philosophers believe that through the application of reason they could create a new society unrivalled in its fairness and equality. Progress promised a more just society, liberated from the tyrannies of the past: monarchy, religion, superstition, fixed social hierarchy.” (Murphy & Potts, 2003 : 41). In other words the enlightenment philosophers believe that reason and rationality form the basis for human progress. Reason is the source of progress in knowledge and society that will improve human condition. According to Marx (1995 : 20 in Murphy & Potts 2003 : 41) the Enlightenment idea of progress was absorbed into the new inflection of technological progress, whose aim was “the continuing improvement of technology’ itself.” It means that better technology would produce a better world.
The central cultural experience of modernism marked not only by change, innovation and dynamism, but also ambiguity, doubt, risk, uncertainty, and fragmentation. These characteristics underpinned by the social and cultural processes of individualisation, urbanisation, rationalisation, commodification, and bureaucratisation. It happened as the result of industrialism, capitalism, surveillance (control of information and social supervision), and military power (control of the means of violence through the industrialisation of war). As industry, technology and communications systems have transformed the human world at a breathless pace, which celebrate technological speed, dynamism, and innovation, so they have also dissolved the beliefs of tradition. Thus cultural modernism is an experience in which, to paraphrase Marx, ‘All that is solid melts into air’, which suggests change, uncertainty and risk. Here, for example, is Berman’s (1982 : 15) description:To be modern is to find ourselves in environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology; in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity; it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’
Many artists at that period of time have responded enthusiastically to these technological and social transformations. The avant-garde movements such The Futurists, The Constructivists, The Dadaists, The Surrealists, and others were group of modernists who represented and emphasised the notion of technological speed, dynamism, innovation, newness, and contemptuous of tradition in their piece of arts. Modernism reject the idea that it is possible to adequately represent the ‘real’ so that representation is not an act of mimesis or copying but an aesthetic expression or conventionalised construction of the ‘real’. It means that modernism emphasised the creativity of individualism, originality and uniqueness of every piece of arts. These are the representation of the ‘real’.
As Jameson puts it
The great modernisms were predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body…the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style. (Foster 1983 : 112).
In contrast postmodernism asserts that originality is no longer possible. All possible styles have been done. Art now consists of creative arrangement of diverse style. As a cultural style postmodernism marked by what according to Jameson one of the most significant features in postmodernism is pastiche. Jameson in Foster (1983 : 115) defines:Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor: pastiche is to parody what that curious thing, the modern practice of a kind of blank irony.In this sense pastiche is the act of copying a piece of style from somewhere else then mix it with other different styles to recreate and reuse the original one. Pastiche is found in both literary and non-literary works include art and music. Many DJs and musicians often engage in the practice of pastiche. Adagio For Strings by DJ Tiesto for instance is a pastiche of American composer Samuel Barber. The films of Quentin Tarantino are often described as pastiches, as they often imitate pulp novels, blaxploitation (the films were made to attract the urban African American audience) e.g. Pulp Fiction and Chinese Kung Fu films e.g. Kill Bill.


Postmodern culture is also marked by an indication of hyperrealism. Baudrillard (1984 : 2) defines hyperreality as following: Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” In other words the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Our consciousness has lost its ability to distinguish reality from fantasy. We begin to engage with fantacy without understanding what it is doing.What we think as the real world has shifted into the world of the hyperreal. Hyperreality is best illustrated in The Trilogy of Matrix.


Wag The Dog is another example of how the mass media creates hyperreality by showing that the idea of war as a creation of the media.

As Baudrillard (1984 : 3) puts itThe real is produced from miniaturised units, from matrices, memory banks and command models – and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.The development of technology has given the world a massive progression of machines, gadgets, and/or any computer based-technology that we would have never thought decades ago. Such massive development of technology has allowed the world to create another world that seems exist only in a fantasy world. The ‘real’, the originality is no longer real. Reality has been swept aside by simulation, artificial, imitation, that is to say hyperreality.
As a philosophical movement, postmodernism rejects ‘grand-narrative’ (that is, universal explanations of human history and activity) in favour of irony and forms of local knowledge. As Lyotard (1984 : xxiv) puts it I define post-modern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” Postmodernism rejects the Enlightenment philosophy of universal reason and progress. In postmodernism concept knowledge is not a question of discovering that which already exists, rather it involves the construction of interpretation about the world that are taken to be true. The truth is the consequence of power, that is, of whose interpretations count as truth. Therefore the postmodern condition is said to involve a loss of faith in grand narrative or metanarrative.
In conclusion, it appears that the relationship between modernism and postmodernism is the concepts of the two concern cultural experience, artistic style and a philosophical position that emphasises knowledge and the truth. Modernism as a cultural experience marked by change, innovation and dynamism, ambiguity, doubt, risk, uncertainty, and fragmentation. These characteristics occurred as a result of industrialism, capitalism, surveillance, and military power. Postmodernism as a cultural experience marked by one of the most significant practices in postmodern era, pastiche. Postmodernism also marked by a sign of hyperrealism and the loss of faith in metanarrative or grand-narrative. It seems that there is a valid distinction between modernism and postmodernism, through the exploration of these characteristics that marked both terms of cultural and epistemological concepts.

REFERENCE

Baudrillard, J., Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1984.

Berman, M., All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London:
Verso, 1983.

Jameson, F., “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”. In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essay On
Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983

Lyotard, JF., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University
Press, 1984.

Murphy, A. & John Potts, Culture and Technology. London: Palgrave, 2003.