On October 12th, 1978, Sid Vicious – the former bass player for the Sex Pistols – allegedly murdered his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, at the Chelsea Hotel in New York (Wakeman, 2017). The murder confirmed for many the intentions of punk during the 1970s to cause offence to the establishment. According to Hebidge in his 1979 analysis Subculture: The Meaning of Style, punk was so successful in its ability to combine profane imagery and language with ritualistically destructive and selfdestructive behaviour that it should be used as a method to ‘test the ‘reading’ signs evolved in the centuries-old debate on the sanctity of culture’ (p. 19). In the following year, the highly controversial punk band Crass declared ‘punk is dead’ in their song, aptly entitled Punk is Dead (Crass, 1979). Ironically, the genre refused to die (perhaps testament to its tenacity, perhaps symptomatic of its innate contrarianism). Punk has continued to produce artists and local scenes, influencing the emergence of several new subcultures and genres – from thrash metal to grunge, and from emo music to Britpop and indie – all the way to the present day.
Punk’s refusal to die and its expansive influence across Western culture leaves it a prime candidate for scholarly examination. Specifically, academic discussion frequently explores the politics of punk music as well as its infamous issues with authenticity – seemingly because of its vehement opposition to hegemonic culture. With emphasis on being authentically anti-establishment as opposed to doing so in a performative manner (2009, p. 290), approaching music politically for punks would seem a path to true non-conformative action. Many punk bands took this to mean anti-fascism and opposing the neoliberalism which dominated the Western political landscape of the 1980s and 1990s, with hardcore ensembles such as Propagandhi and the Dead Kennedys writing songs such as The Only Good Fascist is a Very Dead Fascist (Propagandhi, 1996) and Nazi Punks Fuck Off (Dead Kennedys, 1981) respectively.
However, this is not always the case. In 2020, Roughton Reynolds of the modern alternative band Enter Shikari retweeted a Twitter image of John Lydon, formerly the singer and songwriter of the Sex Pistols, wearing a red ‘Make America Great Again’ shirt (which clearly can be seen as a potential endorsement of the populist, right-wing 45th President of the United States). Reynolds states that he has ‘spent [his] life sticking up for punk. But maybe I misunderstood it, and it WAS (sic) just performative contrarianism all along?’ (2020). There is obviously cognitive dissonance amongst punks about what it even means to be punk. Can an individual truly be anti-establishment and endorse the (at the time) sitting United States President, even if that individual was the frontman for a punk act that was so important to the genre that some scholars examine the extent that they reframed the entirety of English culture (Adams, 2008, p. 469)?
Given Lydon and the Sex Pistols’ relevance to punk as a genre and subculture, these questions ultimately inspire the aspirations of this paper. This dissertation seeks to answer the question: to what extent can punk ideology and mentality can be considered political (if at all)? For music to be political, it is important to explore the contexts into which it is produced, performed, and listened (Weij et al., 2019, p. 289). It is therefore appropriate to investigate these factors alongside defining what it is to be punk, the subculture’s core ideologies, and to which political philosophies they may most closely resemble. It is also important to examine the impact of ideologies from punk subcultures such as the racist skinheads and how these may diverge from a broader, more conventional concept of punk ideology. Additionally, an investigation into how closely punk and Trump voters may exist ideologically. Finally, it may be interesting to draw comparison between punk with other independent and ‘do-it-yourself’ musical subcultures such as hip-hop.
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