Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground

Pete Dale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409444329
• eBook ISBN: 9781317180241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

For more than three decades, a punk underground has repeatedly insisted that 'anyone can do it'. This underground punk movement has evolved via several micro-traditions, each offering distinct and novel presentations of what punk is, isn't, or should be. Underlying all these punk micro-traditions is a politics of empowerment that claims to be anarchistic in character, in the sense that it is contingent upon a spontaneous will to liberty (anyone can do it - in theory). How valid, though, is punk's faith in anarchistic empowerment? Exploring theories from Derrida and Marx, Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground examines the cultural history and politics of punk. In its political resistance, punk bears an ideological relationship to the folk movement, but punk's faith in novelty and spontaneous liberty distinguish it from folk: where punk's traditions, from the 1970s onwards, have tended to search for an anarchistic 'new-sense', folk singers have more often been socialist/Marxist traditionalists, especially during the 1950s and 60s. Detailed case studies show the continuities and differences between four micro-traditions of punk: anarcho-punk, cutie/'C86', riot grrrl and math rock, thus surveying UK and US punk-related scenes of the 1980s, 1990s and beyond.

PART I
Anyone Can Do — What?

Chapter 1
What is Punk?

Together the band and their fans settled the issue and the louts were effectively neutralized. The show continued, the music pounded and screeched. Over and over I kept thinking to myself: ‘Now this is punk’, and for once I didn’t mean it as an insult. It was [as] though I were witnessing the re-incarnation of Darby Crash and the Germs, not in style, but in substance.¹

The year is 1994 and the writer, a notable figure in the US underground music scene of the day, is watching punk begin again, not in style, it seems, but in ‘substance’. The paragraph is rich in clues as to what might constitute this substance: punks are different from louts; punk music pounds and screeches; in punk, band and fans work together; the label ‘punk’, even when applied by someone involved in ‘punk’ (and particularly when that someone’s involvement has been long-held, it often seems), can be an insult. But, as can frequently be found in this ‘movement’, the heart of substance is produced through negation – punk, whatever it may be, is certainly not a style (or, at least, not when it amounts to more than a label of ‘insult’).

The writer’s tidy distinction between style and substance is too neat to be accepted by the critical reader. Indeed, the substance of ‘punk’, as far as many casual observers are concerned is (or, as is often presumed, was) precisely that of a fashion and music style. Yet the possibility opened in the paragraph reproduced above – that punk could have a substance beyond fashion, music or historicity (the last of these is gestured at by the mention of ‘re-incarnation’) – is intriguing. If (or rather when, for I wish to argue that it has been and continues to be done) punk moves beyond spiky hair, aggressive music and the canonization of a moment or event which, it seems, happened in the UK in the late 1970s, what is left? Further to this question, how much can the style change before the substance disappears? Is punk’s politics part of its style, or is there something politically substantial in punk?

These questions are impossible to even approach without attempting to tame, for discursive purposes, the semantic implication of the word ‘punk’. For the purpose of this book, the easiest and most appropriate way to do this is to use a distinction between underground and mainstream. This distinction is commonly made in the underground itself: the less prominent scene[s] of bands for which punk is often claimed to be a matter of substance more than of style. Fans of mainstream punk, by contrast, may not perceive themselves as fans of a type of punk music but rather as fans of the punk music, generally speaking: The Clash and The Damned at one time, or perhaps Green Day or Blink 182 more recently. The names of the bands aren’t so important to what I want to say here. What is significant for my present purpose, is that the audience of such mainstream bands, in bulk, often seem to perceive these acts as punk because of the way they dress, the way they sound and such like.² On the same criteria (music and dress style), bands perceived as canonical in the underground punk scene, such as Beat Happening or the later Fugazi, might be appraised by a fan of mainstream punk with the classic put down: ‘that’s not punk’.

The underground punk scene, then, is something which a majority of people would be unaware of; by definition, it is known to only a few. Within the scene’s own discourse, meanwhile, to speak of the punk underground as the diametric opposite of the mainstream is normal. Necessarily, therefore, this diametric opposition is to some extent conditioned by the thing that it opposes. This general (essentially Hegelian) point has been hinted at by David Brackett: ‘It is always important to remember the relational nature of the mainstream: a concept of the mainstream depends on an equally strong concept of the “margins” – one cannot exist without the other.’³ Brackett’s point here is principally an extension of, and response to, Jason Toynbee’s work on ‘mainstreaming’.⁴ Usefully, Toynbee points out the heterogeneity of ‘the’ mainstream, precisely the plurality which agents of the underground often ignore in their eagerness to complain of a supposedly monolithic dominant culture. In the 1980s it was more common to talk of ‘alternative music’ or the ‘indie scene’, admittedly, but the more recent discursive construction, ‘the punk underground’, essentially encapsulates the same crucial idea: us and them. ‘They’ think punk is all about wearing leather jackets and jumping about on Top of the Pops, but ‘we’ know punks are vegetarians who don’t sign to major labels.

A quick clarification may be helpful here as to the tensions and similarities between ‘indie’ and ‘punk’. Consider, then, Kaya Oakes’s work on the evolution of ‘indie culture’ in which she professes amazement that her students who ‘identified as indie rock fans’ were unfamiliar with ‘Minor Threat, Black Flag, the Minutemen, or Hüsker Dü’.⁵ Since these bands are usually known as punk bands, one can see here how closely ‘indie’ is associated with punk, at least in the US. The same compound is produced when she refers to Tim Yohannan, editor of the punk bible Maximum Rock’n’Roll fanzine, as ‘an indie Renaissance man’.⁶ I would argue that Oakes’s linkage of indie and punk is well founded, although subcultural antagonisms are certainly sometimes observable between punks and ‘indie kids’ (especially in the UK, where indie is more often taken to connote a style of music).

Returning to the us-and-them conception under discussion, we can summarize that the underground’s ‘we’ would perceive punk as an attitude, as a ‘substance’ rather than a style, ostensibly at least. It would be erroneous, however, to state that all agents (‘fans’, band members and so on) within the underground conceive of punk as an ideological modus operandi more than as a style of music. Certainly there are many within the scene who ‘just like the records’ (and these, we should note, are probably as likely as mainstream fans are to complain ‘that’s not punk’ with regard to musical style). Yet a large constituency within the punk underground considers there to be certain fundamental operational principles at stake; indeed, the majority probably consider this underground punk to be about something more than music, I suggest. It is this constituency, in whose eyes punk is supposed to have a political and perhaps even ideological character, which I intend to identify as ‘underground’ for the purposes of this book.

What, for this constituency, is punk? Any answer to this can only be general, for it is certain that not all those who would call themselves ‘underground punk rockers’ will in fact share the same views on all things (‘the’ underground, in other words, is as plural as the mainstream). Yet be it the anarcho-punks of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the UK’s ‘cutie indie kids’ of the mid- to late 1980s (see Part III), or the riot grrrls and US math rockers of the 1990s (see Part IV), or any other tradition of underground punk, there is a certain general sense of what punk is. This sense is primarily constructed on a sense of alterity from the mainstream (including mainstream punk), as noted. This is built upon five principal presumptions:

1. Mainstream punk music is released by major labels; underground punk has been instigated and maintained as an independent network.

2. Mainstream punk is hierarchical in the sense that it replicates the kind of competitiveness (for record sales, for ‘billing’ in performance and so on) of the music industry’s conventional rock and pop systems; underground punk calls for no heroes and no leaders.⁷ This can be attempted on a variety of levels, such as: printing the names of bands in a similar size of lettering on posters; ‘trading’ records instead of selling them;⁸ allowing ‘out-of-town’ bands top-billing at a gig where the local bands have in fact drawn most of the crowd; and so on. By contrast, competitiveness is overwhelmingly presumed to be normal and necessary in the mainstream.

3. Mainstream punk bands have achieved enough musical competence to attain record sales sufficient to allow them to be described as ‘mainstream’; underground punk bands often pride themselves on the very ‘uncommerciality’ of their ‘difficult’ music and may seem as if they ‘cannot play’ or sound ‘unprofessional’ or too ‘lo-fi’ to the mainstream music-consumer. In a nutshell, the fact that most people walk out of a gig performance might be deemed, by some underground bands, as some form of evidence of success; the same could not apply to a band which aspires to assimilation into the mainstream.

4. Mainstream punk music follows familiar patterns of musical content, for commercial reasons; underground punk disturbs convention and provides a ‘cutting edge’, and therefore is inherently uncommercial.

5. Mainstream punk bands merely gesture at radicalism and politicization (if they show any overt interest in politics at all); underground punk articulates extreme political views with action, within performance and sometimes more broadly.

These five elements of difference from the mainstream would not necessarily all be adhered to by the full range of individuals and sub-groups which identify themselves as part of an ‘underground’, as noted. Most agents within the scene[s], nevertheless, can be found to echo most or all of the sentiments typified above. As is well known, punk has often associated itself with anarchy and anarchism. The five points listed here reflect a desire within this self-identified underground to put anarchist rhetoric into practice. To what extent, we ought to ask, can the five points of alleged difference hold up against critical scrutiny? Let us scrutinize them point by point, with some supporting evidence here in anticipation of the extended case studies of Parts III and IV:

1. Given that independent labels, so central to the history of punk after its first wave, have never disappeared and still exist today, there can be little argument over this element. Indeed, despite increasing economic adversity for both larger and smaller independent labels during the 1990s, in the twenty-first century technology has made it easier than ever for a ‘punk’ or, for that matter, any other music-maker to record, package, promote and release their own CDs. If a music-maker is content to sell a small quantity of a release, as has been long-accepted practice in the underground, it has probably never been easier than it is today. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that many labels which appear to be independent, and which are often described as ‘indie’ in vernacular discourse, are in fact connected to major labels through production and distribution arrangements (‘p & d deals’), funding via shareholding and other covert forms of economic support. Such labels are sometimes called ‘schmindie’ labels.⁹

2. Although it is true that the underground scene is, in general but discernible ways, less hierarchical than the mainstream music industry, hierarchy inevitably lingers. For example, when each band on a poster has its name printed in the same-sized font, one must still appear at the top; the top-of-the-bill slot, even if given, for example, to an ‘out-of-town’ band (which might not be awarded such a privilege in a mainstream gig where the audience ‘draw’ is always the decisive billing factor) remains a hierarchically desirable position (otherwise it could not be a privilege, obviously). Nevertheless, hierarchy in the gig setting is an interesting inevitability, for the dynamic of the audience-performer relationship is notably different in the underground: an audience member might call out words of encouragement, or indeed might ‘heckle’, with greater influence on the flow of the event than could be achieved by an attendee of, for example, a stadium rock gig. Overall, though, if punk’s presumed ability to ‘break down the barrier between the audience and the band’ were achieved in any absolute sense, there could no longer be an audience; indeed, even if all present were holding instruments, absolute removal of hierarchy would also, presumably, require the individuals in the room to stand in some form of carefully measured circle, to play at the same volume, to play for the same duration and so on. Elements of hierarchy will always be residual in a musical performance, in other words, but it remains fair to say that undergrou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Musical Examples
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: ANYONE CAN DO – WHAT?
• PART II: CAN ANY ONE DO ‘IT’?
• PART III: THE BEGINNING OF A CONTINUATION
• PART IV: THE CONTINUATION OF A BEGINNING
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index