Punk Rock and the Politics of Place

Building a Better Tomorrow

Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415793476
• eBook ISBN: 9781135022266
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Punk Music
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is an ethnographic investigation of punk subculture as well as a treatise on the importance of place: a location with both physical form and cultural meaning. Rather than examining punk as a "sound" or a "style" as many previous works have done, it investigates the places that the subculture occupies and the cultural practices tied to those spaces. Since social groups need spaces of their own to practice their way of life, this work relates punk values and practices to the forms of their built environments. As not all social groups have an equal ability to secure their own spaces, the book also explores the strategies punks use to maintain space and what happens when they fail to do so.

Part I

Introduction

1 A Place for Punk

On a cold December night, somewhere in the American Midwest, I found myself in the dark basement of a house. I was surrounded by strangers, and could barely make out their faces as they crowded around me in the poor light. Their forms surged with a restless energy to the primitive rhythm of a drum set, the shrilling cries of an electric guitar, and the guttural screams coming out of the PA system. The crowd wasn’t much less loud itself; voices were raised to sing along with the noisy performance or to simply be heard over it. Through the murk, I could glimpse the walls of this subterranean festival, covered with crudely painted words and images, covered with a profusion of flyers and stickers, equally crude in their execution and haphazardly scattered across every available surface with no apparent rhyme or reason. It was admittedly a strange affair, but despite all of this—the strangers, the darkness, and the noise—I was not completely uncomfortable nor was the situation threatening. The faces of the strangers were friendly and they mostly smiled. The darkness sheltered as much as it obscured. The noise was music to my ears. These individuals had come together to celebrate an alternative identity, a shared perspective on life and society, and a love of music. They had come to celebrate punk rock in the 21^st century.

The image of the punk rocker is firmly ensconced in popular culture. Use of the term ‘punk’ evokes images of angst-ridden teenagers in leather jackets with brightly-colored Mohawks, tattoos, and piercings, laden down with a generous helping of spikes and chains. It calls to mind spray paint in dark alleys, illicit drug-use, and barbaric sounds that few other than punks themselves would be expected to interpret as music. From Hollywood films to tourist souvenirs (see Figure 1.1), the term ‘punk’ and an accompanying image of this sort is often used lightly in popular culture. It represents a hooligan, an adolescent, someone not to be taken too seriously. Just as often it represents an anachronism; a creature of past generations and a trend long since dead. Like the hippies, the mods, and the beatniks before it, the punk movement is relegated to an earlier time and considered explicable only in terms of the follies of that bygone generation. From this perspective, to speak of a “modern punk” is to speak of an oxymoron or, at the very least, a somewhat sad, nostalgic attempt to hold on to something that has passed. Yet claims that punk is dead are almost as old as punk itself. Self-appointed cultural coroners have called the time on it many times over since its inception (Clark 2003), while counterclaims—that punk is still alive and kicking—have been around for nearly as long (e.g. Pareles 1986). The popularity of bands like Green Day, Rancid, and The Off spring suggest that, indeed, punk is still with us and is thriving. Even the traditional image of the punk rocker is alive. One music journalist, for example, described Lars Frederiksen of Rancid as sporting “‘liberty-spiked’ hair (shellacked into vertical points that resemble those of the Statue of Liberty’s tiara), studded belts, drainpipe-straight black trousers, and thick-soled ‘creeper’ shoes” (Diehl 2007, 1). Truly, the popular image of punk made flesh for the contemporary world.

Figure 1.1 Souvenir pin portraying the pop culture image of punk (Source: Unknown).

Yet, this popular image of punk, with its ostentatious glitz and crude glamour, is by no means universal. It is certainly not the image held in mind by all of those who continue to embrace a punk identity in modern times. Moreover, it is not the image presented by many punks themselves. Rather, it is only one face of punk: perhaps the best known, but still only a single face.

WHAT IS ‘PUNK’?

This study, like many efforts before it, is an attempt to answer this question. However, the attempt is here made in a way that differs significantly from these previous efforts. Rather than examining punk as a ‘sound’ or a ‘style,’ I investigate the spaces punk occupies and the cultural practices tied to those spaces. To understand this approach some explanation is needed.

Since the late 1990s, I have attended punk rock shows. I have never identified myself as a punk, but rather considered myself somewhere between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ in status (Lofland and Lofland 1995): a sympathetic observer or partial participant. It struck me early on that most punks didn’t seem to look anything like the punks portrayed on television or in popular culture more generally, nor did most punks seem to be excessively interested in fashion. At most shows, inevitably, a contingent of punks would be present who sported the “classic” look, but they were almost always in the minority. Rather, most of the “kids”—as they called themselves regardless of their absolute age—would probably have been indistinguishable from anyone else. It was an interesting incongruity, but one I wouldn’t be equipped to investigate at first nor indeed did I have any interest or plan to do so at the time.

Some years later I began to read the scholarly literature on punk and subculture¹ more generally. While much of the work was fascinating and went a long way toward explaining youth cultural phenomena like punk rock, it also seemed in many cases to dwell inexplicably on fashion and style. It seemed to paint an image of punk drawn directly from mainstream cultural representations, not from the punks themselves, or at least not from the majority of punks who did not live for fashion. Perhaps this treatment of the subculture was appropriate for the punk rock of the 1970s, but it certainly didn’t reflect the contemporary subculture I had become familiar with. Worse still, much of the scholarly work seemed to be based on a tradition of inquiry that simply did not take youth culture seriously, that assumed an irrational or pathological basis and then looked for proof to buttress, rather than test, that assumption.

Meanwhile, I continued to occasionally and sporadically attend punk shows. Mostly, I did so because I found them to be an interesting contrast to most other performances I had attended from other types of music, including those of other allegedly music-based subcultures like heavy metal, goth, or indie rock. For some time I was really more of a cultural tourist than anything else. I still had no intention of studying these punk shows—the thought simply had not occurred to me—but attending these took me to a number of interesting places where the music was performed. Concert halls and clubs were certainly among the places where shows were held, but frequently conventional venues like these seemed to be shunned and disdained by the punks. They didn’t invoke the same level of excitement as shows held in a bewildering array of unconventional venues: basements or squatted storage spaces, rented park buildings and church halls, or just somewhere outdoors with the open sky above. My own level of excitement often approximated theirs, but I often found myself at least as interested in the spaces where performances were held as in the music being performed, as interested in the people there and their interactions as in the sounds they had come together to appreciate. These places seemed to be deeply meaningful to punks, they would often name them, treat them like “true” venues, and build a scene around them. Moreover, the experience of these alternative venues was vastly different from that of a club or concert hall. They were more informal, more personal, more a product of the subculture than an outside force that made the subculture into a product. There was something about these spaces that clearly mattered to the people that used them.

Increasingly, it seemed to me that an understanding of punk subculture—or of any group—could be gained from understanding those places closely linked to that group’s way of life. It is this simple observation that motivated this study, an observation that is likely all the more important for groups like punk that are so poorly understood and that exist in the popular mind only as caricatures, as style without substance and with little fair representation.

Whereas punks have arguably received little serious attention, scholarship on physical and cultural space has developed at a steady pace and supports the idea that the concept can provide sound insights into the way people live and structure their lives. Much research has indicated that specific places and the social groups that use them are intimately linked in that each expresses the characteristics and concerns of the other (Castells 1983, Gregory 1978, Simmel 1997b). More specifically, it has been argued that every social group must establish a unique place or set of places with which to facilitate and perpetuate its way of life and social organization (Lefebvre 1991). Thus, for any intended set of social relations or ideas to persist, a group must maintain an environment conducive to those intentions (cf. Buttimer 1976).

However, the physical environment is predominantly designed to facilitate the needs of mainstream society. In a capitalist society like our own, this in large part means the facilitation of the economy, the needs of exchange and capital accumulation. We have stores and restaurants, strip plazas and shopping malls, factories and warehouses, all interconnected by a vast infrastructure of roads, rails, airports, telecommunication networks, and the worldwide web. Each of these places and connective mechanisms are designed and constructed with the requirements of the exchange economy in mind: they facilitate and support the statuses, interactions, and behaviors upon which the economic logic of the market depends for its perpetuation. Our built environment is not always so well-suited to meet the needs of people who must live in it nor for those whose needs are otherwise at odds with this dominant spatial order (Harvey 1985a, 1985b; Logan and Molotch 1987). Worse still, those who benefit the least from this situation are also those who are least able to do anything about it (Logan and Molotch 1987): the poor, the powerless, and the marginal, are forced to make do with what they can as are those who explicitly seek to practice an alternative way of living. Nonetheless, regular people often attempt to resist the forces that assail them and carve out a comfortable niche of space in which to live according to a set of priorities relatively different from those of the dominant economy in which they are embedded (e.g. Castells 1983, Chatterton and Hollands 2002, Petzen 2004). Such places can be used to either “reinforce or undermine ideologies, and enable and promote some practices over others” (Tickamyer 2000, 806).

The current study was constructed with dual purposes in mind; each as important as the other, each building on and reinforcing the other. It was designed to investigate punk subculture, but it is also an exploration of the relationship between space and society. As such, readers may choose to look at it either way they choose. Specifically, it is an inquiry into the importance of ‘place’ for unconventional² social groups and their way of life. It was therefore necessary to identify such an unconventional group to research as a case-study through which to understand these issues. In addition to my personal interest in the subculture, punk was selected for several reasons. First, some three decades of research have continuously identified punk as an unconventional subculture (e.g. Andes 1998, Davis 2006, Moore 2000). As such, punks were expected to vary considerably in terms of culture and, therefore, space-use from the dominant cultural modes. Second, despite claims to the contrary, punk has survived throughout this duration (Clark 2003), making it a subculture with persisting relevance. Third, punk has distinguished itself in many ways as a group of particular interest in both the scholarly literature and in lay accounts. As Hebdige described it: “No subculture has sought with more grim determination than the punks to detach itself from the taken-for-granted landscape of normalized forms, nor to bring down upon itself such vehement disapproval” (Hebdige 1979, 19).

Using punk subculture as a case-study for these reasons, in this study I explore how such an unconventional and marginalized group manages ‘place’ to maintain its survival and to facilitate its way of life despite the relatively few resources of its members and despite being positioned in a relatively incompatible social and physical environment. To this end, two intentionally broad research questions are investigated: (1) What is punk and what are its general concerns or interests?, and (2) Does ‘place’ matter to punk and, if so, how (i.e. which places matter and in what ways)?

The first research question focuses on exploring punk subculture. Having identified punk as a suitable case-study, it is first necessary to investigate the subculture to understand its general characteristics and concerns before attempting to understand its relationship with the places it occupies. Much of the existing research in this regard has been based on questionable assumptions or methodologies and, following from this, produced dubious portrayals of punk subculture and subcultures more generally (Greener and Hollands 2006, Hesmondhalgh 2005). Thus, rather than relying solely on previous research and theory of punk and subculture, I take an empirical, largely inductive approach to better understand it.

Following this general exploration of the subculture, it is then possible to address the second research question: how does ‘place’ matter to punk, which places, and in what ways? Having been trivialized and understudied for many years (Soja 1989), researchers are increasingly devoting attention to the ways in which our environment in closely related to everyday life. Place is a composite concept and consists not only of the physical characteristics of a place, but also the subjective meanings that people attribute to these features (Lefebvre 1991, Tuan 2001). I systematically investigate both of these aspects of place.

RESEARCHING PUNK, RESEARCHING SPACE

During the course of this study, I found it necessary to gather information from a variety of sources. These included in-depth interviews with punk informants, field observations of music spaces, and content analysis of punk texts. Comparing and contrasting the information gleaned from these three sources allowed me to strengthen the validity of my conclusions as I was able to determine whether they held up across contexts (Fielding and Fielding 1986, Lather 1986). It is important to briefly describe some of the methods I used here before moving on to the study itself, but readers interested in the full details of my methodology should refer to Appendix A.

Interviews

Interviewees were recruited by posting a call for research participants on a series of punk websites and also by asking a few punks (or former punks) I knew if they would like to participate. Following an interview, I also asked participants if they could recommend anyone else they thought might be interested in talking about the subculture. In total, I talked to 25 individuals, ranging in age from 18 to 56 years old (mean = 26.04) who had, at one time or another, participated in punk. The majority of participants were men (17), and all but three identified as being white or Caucasian. This is consistent with demographic estimations of the subculture suggested by previous studies (e.g. LeBlanc 2006, Moore 2007). The participants represented a diverse range of regions from across the United States (with one participant from Canada) and represented a variety of educational backgrounds (further details on participants are also included in Appendix A).

I conducted open-ended, semi-structured interviews either in person, via telephone or on two occasions via email according to each respondent’s preference and to feasibility. The first question I always asked (“What does ‘punk’ mean to you?”) was intended to allow respondents to describe their subculture and its meaningful aspects on their own terms with minimal imposition of my own ideas. Following this, I asked a wide range of questions including several design to gauge the ways participants were involved in punk. Generally, the interviews were relatively informal, much like a conversation, and focused primarily on what the participants felt was important or interesting from their respective points of view (see Appendix B).

Field Observations

Both music and music venues are central features of punk identity—an observation supported by prior researc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Punk Subculture
• Part III Punk and Place
• Part IV Conclusion
• Appendix A Researching Punk and Place
• Appendix B Interview Schedule
• Appendix C Internet Forums Used in Recruiting Participants
• Appendix D Overview of Observed Music Spaces
• Appendix E Texts Analyzed
• References
• Index