Academic literature on the topic 'Punk culture. Punk rock music. Alternative rock music'

Music has a powerful indexical ability to evoke particular times and places. Such an ability has been exploited at length by the often-elaborate soundscapes of period films, which regularly utilise incidental scores and featured period songs to help root their narrative action in past times, and to immerse their audiences in the sensibilities of a different age. However, this article will begin to examine the ways in which period film soundtracks can also be used to complicate a narrative sense of time and place through the use of ‘musical anachronism’: music conspicuously ‘out of time’ with the temporality depicted on screen. Through the analysis of a sequence from the film W.E. (Madonna, 2011) and the consideration of existing critical and conceptual contexts, this article will explore how anachronistic soundtracks can function beyond ‘postmodern novelty’ or ‘nuisance’ to historical verisimilitude, instead offering alternative modes of engagement with story and history.

AbstractThis article discusses the phenomenon of punk in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, from its beginnings in the early 1970s to its heyday in early 1980s and its subsequent differentiation and dissolution in a wider alternative scene. The subject is thereby being treated primarily as a genre of protest music and as a youth subculture. A special focus is given to the harsh reactions on part of the communist regime, in particular the 1981 “Nazi punk affair,” and the strong political significance punk thus came to possess—albeit to a large extent unintentionally. Excerpts of lyrics from Ljubljana punk rock bands are also presented, pointing to the attitudes of the punk youth towards their social environment and political situation and revealing how they came to be seen as a threat to the socialist order. In the conclusion, the sociopolitical legacy of punk and certain controversies surrounding it are shortly touched upon.

The article analyses the lyrics of Polish punk rock songs showing their relationship with urban culture. By considering punk culture as an urban culture it interprets an impact of architecture and its materiality on the character of music and texts.

Punk rock performance consciously draws on popular theatre forms such as music hall and stand-up comedy – as was exemplified on the occasion when Max Wall appeared with Ian Dury at the Hammersmith Odeon. Oliver Double traces the historical and stylistic connections between punk, music hall and stand-up, and argues that punk shows can be considered a form of popular theatre in their own right. He examines a wide range of punk bands and performers – including The Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Devo, Spizz, The Ramones, The Clash, and Dead Kennedys – to consider how they use costume, staging, personae, characterization, and audience–performer relationships, arguing that these are as important and carefully considered as the music they play. Art movements such as Dada and Futurism were important influences on the early punk scene, and Double shows how, as with early twentieth-century cabaret, punk performance manages to include avant-garde elements within popular theatre forms. Oliver Double started his career performing a comedy act alongside anarchist punk bands in Exeter, going on to spend ten years on the alternative comedy circuit. Currently, he lectures in Drama at the University of Kent, and he is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005).

The author presents poetry by Kamila Janiak in the context of avant-guard pop-culture. She deals mainly with punk and cyber-punk motifs of this poetry, which alow to understand them as a feminist, post-human and anty-capitalist project. She shows how Janiak for her purposes uses d.tournements: she takes on the one hand principles, which rule in the “controlled societies” and on the other hand pop-culture aesthetics and psychodelic rock music.

This essay analyzes the political and cultural significance of confrontations between country music fans and punk rockers in the suburban community of Costa Mesa, California, in the early 1980s. During this time, Orange County was defined by paradox. On one hand, the region proved historically influential to leading conservative politics and the rise of Ronald Reagan, and bore a legacy of a country music and cowboy culture that well complemented such conservatism. And yet, the area also served as the breeding ground where right-wing politics and suburbanism’s sonic resistance, hardcore punk rock, took root. More than a simple culture clash, the conflict between country music fans and punk rockers represented a moment when two uniquely suburban and Southern California sounds collided at a significant point of transition in American politics and culture, and at heart revealed a conflict over the merits of suburban life. This struggle over space was one in which country music fans emerged victorious, as their efforts to violently quash the local punk scene worked in conjunction with city leaders who forcibly closed the region’s leading punk venue, the Cuckoo’s Nest, in 1981 and revealed a solidarity between country music fans, local police, and local politicians.

This paper argues that crosstown traffic in the East and West German punk subculture was an essential aspect of how popular music helped to challenge the political legitimacy of the East German government. West German punks frequently crossed the border to attend Eastern punk concerts, meet with friends and trade stories and experiences, connections that helped to foster a transnational community of alternative youths. These interactions denied official claims that punk was the result of capitalist decadence while undermining the East German government's efforts at cultivating a distinctive socialist identity. Nor were border crossings unidirectional, as Eastern punks made daring attempts to connect with their Western cousins. Writing for West German fanzines, appearing in the Western press and even managing to release Eastern recordings smuggled westwards, Eastern punks crossed the Iron Curtain and in so doing, worked to present an alternative vision of Eastern youth to the world and join the global punk scene.

Recountings of the Washington, DC punk rock scene’s history often start with the founding of Dischord Records in 1980 and focus on the subsequent ascent of Dischord co-owner Ian MacKaye’s bands like Minor Threat and Fugazi. As seminal as Dischord remains in the narrative of DC punk ‐ a community still thriving today ‐ the years just prior to the label’s founding generated the scene’s true incunabula. Beginning with the self-released debut EP from the Slickee Boys in 1976, this first wave of DC bands ‐ also including Razz, Nurses, White Boy and others ‐ combined elements of art rock, surf, proto-punk, pub rock and power pop together to craft a protean version of punk that embraced eccentricity and humour, serving as the city’s own defiant rebuke of the staid state of 1970s rock music. No record label was more central to the nascent punk scene in DC than Limp Records. Operated by Skip Groff, Limp provided the punk community with its first proper record label. Rather than a label that centred around the efforts of a single band ‐ as most other new DC punk labels did ‐ Limp issued singles for several groups, collaborating with the fledgling Dacoit and O’Rourke labels to co-release defining singles for the Slickee Boys and Razz. DC punk would not have taken shape the way it did without Groff’s efforts, particularly considering his connections with bands like Bad Brains and the Slickee Boys and his musical and entrepreneurial influence on local teenage punks like MacKaye, Jeff Nelson and Henry Rollins. This article is a history of DC punk record labels from 1976 to 1980 and seeks to establish this overshadowed era of the scene as one of the most critical in the community’s 43-year existence. Considering the outsize influence the DC scene ultimately had on punk culture ‐ whether through the eponymous clean living philosophy inspired by the Minor Threat song ‘Straight Edge’, the unwaveringly independent business model of Dischord or the pacesetting music reliably turned out each decade by participants in the scene ‐ the impact of Groff and his first wave DC punk peers must be acknowledged.

Punk's widely accepted status as a watershed in British music-making has produced some fine academic and journalistic studies. Greil Marcus has devoted much of the last twenty years to an assessment of the legacy of punk rock (Marcus 1989, 1993). Dave Laing's One Chord Wonders provides a multi-layered approach which might serve as a model for any analysis of a particular musical–cultural moment (Laing 1985). The most detailed and thorough account is Jon Savage's England's Dreaming (1991), a paean to the mischievous self-consciousness of punk and a sly put-down of its earnest political wing. Yet there are some important gaps in this literature. Only Laing (1985, pp. 14–21) has addressed the institutional and economic effects of punk in any detail, but his account ends, like that of Savage, with the incorporation of punk imagery and sounds into the mainstream of British cultural life at the end of the 1970s. The symbolic death of punk is marked by the election of Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister in May 1979. Marcus traces the underground simmering of punk in 1980s America, and his vision of post-punk as a lasting source of vitality and rebellion in an increasingly conformist culture is a compelling one. But he is drawn primarily to the situationist and dadaist elements of punk politics. As in Savage (1991), lasting institutional repercussions are sidelined in favour of an exploration of punk's cultural impact. What follows, then, is an assessment of punk's significance as a long-term intervention in the British music industry. This means tracing the development and mutation of punk initiatives into the 1980s–long after its supposed incorporation.

The diffusion of rock and popular music from the US and British mass entertainment industries since the 1950s has had a profound impact on the music traditions world-wide. Several generations of youth have been socialised to the musical accompaniment of rock and roll music of the 1950s, the ‘beat music’ of the 1960s, the so-called ‘psychedelic’ or ‘underground’ rock music of the 1970s, disco, punk and new wave music in the 1970s and 1980s. It has resulted in the transplantation of these ‘foreign’ styles into music cultures with small groups of fan communities for rock and roll, country and western, blues, punk, reggae and others which were previously unheard of there before their introduction. In addition, domestic traditions have been profoundly affected by the diffusion of these new music styles and have integrated some of their musical, technical and other components into their own repertoires. The Schlager music in the German-speaking countries has been one of the most prominent in this respect, adapting syncopated rhythm but modifying its harmonic attributes in order to maintain its own prominence and cultural legitimacy in the music culture. Even the volkstümliche or folk-like music, a commercialised genre of traditional folk music, has undergone changes as a result of the diffusion of the newer forms of popular music. A third type of impact upon music tradition is that of ‘transnational’ or ‘transcultural’ styles. When imported musical and cultural innovations are mixed with domestic styles and traditions, these new styles and conventions are ultimately created. These, in turn, form a primary thrust in the cultivation and development of innovations in musical traditions, which eventually evolve into changes in the cultural identity of the particular country.