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 yourself – DIY. 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.
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.
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.
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