Gabriel Chemin

21201260

Cultural Studies

'British Punk and the subculture problematics'

Second term question :

1> Starting from a cultural form/practice/industry/institution of your

choice, discuss the way in which the Cultural Studies and their application
in different disciplines may enable us to foster, promote, or advance a
critical analysis.

To Giulia Battaglia.
Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle

I have chosen for this essay question to start from Punk cultural form in
order to discuss about what are the virtue of a Cultural Study approach in the way
to construct a critical analysis.
First, I will start from an explanation of this subject, the reasons of my
choice and the main notions linked to it. The punk movement, I only decided to
talk about the british one, is characteristic on some points to discuss the notion of
subcultures through their history, symbols, beliefs and value system. Cultural
studies approach help us with key notions in a way to critique and consider social
transformations through analysis.
If we deconstruct a cultural or social practice, we can borrow several axes. For
this subject we can easily adopt and discuss notions as: postmodernity critic,
dominant/dominated relations, mainstream/underground, media, in term of
hierarchy, or youth identity construction through a particular context (economical
and social context for instance). All these intellectual materials are sourced to
authors but are precious tools for us. There is always a large choice of scale to
define the purpose of our analysis and what we exactly want to underline`.
In the mid 1970's England was stroke by a economical crisis. Jon Savage,
a British musical journalist (he wrote a lot about Rock and Punk culture) said in
England's Dreaming Englands crisis had become what Stuart Hall calls the
articulation of a fully fledged capitalist recession, with extremely high rates of
inflation, a toppling currency, a savaging of living standards, and a sacrificing of
the working class to capital. Due to this recession came striking shocks in the
lives of the British people. The young were particularly stressful because they saw
their working class parents losing their jobs.
People were frightened and felt trapped, they did not have the financial freedom to
fight back. People felt hopeless, the youth living in Britain was inevitably touched
by this event. Many youths were angry against the government of Thatcher and
society to show inability to help its own citizens and protect them.

There is some arguments about punk : it was a short movement of angry,

critic youths which died quickly. because it could not survive to spread its
nihilism ideas. But in a way, this kind of argument against the durability of this
movement confirm its importance in term of subculture.
The subculture approach is deconstructed into the work of Mike Brake : The
Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures. He gave some key points to
define the common aspects of subcultures. Subculture is defined by the fact that
people share something in common, have different beliefs or behavior than the
dominant culture, often subordinate to it, often organized in informal structures
and react to class struggles. Punks represented a good example to these
characteristics and tried to show their discontent against the bourgeois culture, the
lack of opportunities for their class during the crisis context.
Dick Hebidge, a British media theorist and sociologist, wrote a book about the
subculture topic, in 1979, Subculture: The Meaning of Style . It treated about
Britain's postwar working-class youth subcultures defying dominant ideology,
hegemony and social normalization thanks to symbolic acts to resist. The author
tries to understand the British youth, through the study of the clothing style there,
used by some as way of subversion of the daily objects allowing to dissociate
itself from the mass culture. David Hebidge perceives the society as a complex set
of interactions dominated by a consensus. The subcultures develop another vision
of the society and the clothing style is one of ways of expression of this
conflicting dimension. His personal approach of each subcultures (Teddy boys,
rockers, punks, mods, skinheads) shows a complexity of that kind of study
because he tried to understand its through social, economical, historical and media
context. He combined these disciplines to express similarities and differences. It
allows a balanced point of view on these subcultures and their interactions
between them, like the famous duality opposing rockers and Teddy boys. Behind
dualities, there are socioeconomic reasons, class or ideology confrontations,
interactions to analyze into a particular context.
The Punk movement start in reactions of the fear and lived chaos. They believed
that the economy failed because it was based on a obsolete model. They
developed hatred against the government and thought that the only way to live
was to make their own rules. The local and personal scale seemed to be the best

option, they showed disinterest toward the whole rest of society. With
contradictions and opposing point of views, the punks found their own path. But
the Punks were not racists, nationalists and grow out a bit thanks of their disgust
to the skinheads ideology. But, a lot of other political and social parameters that
led the development of the punk culture to an identity and cultural bases to
organize and manage their community.
The book Culture et Matrialisme wrote by Raymond Williams give us precious
informations. Through seven essays, the English academic is engaged in an
analysis of the cultural fact, trying to explain its various mechanism. He defined
different sorts of counterculture, he thought that human activity and culture is not
fixed. He argues that culture growth by a multitude of relations of power and not
only economical. He explored the notion of mass culture and remain us to avoid a
Manichean vision between mass culture and counterculture (when it is not an
emerging counterculture). The interesting definition of subculture, concerning
our subject, is particularly this one. An emerging counterculture is defined by the
creation of new meanings and/or values into a community. The punk youth
identity construction was well established against the dominance and defined
around an active interaction between their community like Do It Yourself
fanzines, dressing and hair styles, music style. They preferred create their own
content rather than occupy themselves with entertainment (built to occupy the free
time after the work and the week end). Punks developed and explored the margins
of

local way to express themselves in opposition to the cultural industry as

independent record labels and media that they produced by their own. It's a
constitution of a productive underground existence.
We can read this movement on a more social level as Richard Hoggard did in The
Uses of Literacy. He refuses to represent lower classes in condescending way,
they had their reactions and were not completely alienated to the mass media
culture. Punk can be seen as a revolt and a refusal of passivity and the pessimism
about the lower class too : they represented themselves like brilliant eccentrics,
impressing outsiders, imposing a strong visibility and a pride to develop a
symbolic model radically opposed to the dominant, traditions, politics and
religious.

Starting to this point, all their actions were coherent in a messy but well
organized, violent but represented and symbolic, local and underground but
diffused : not at all the only nihilistic or anarchist perception that normal or
normed people who followed the dominant mass culture.
In the study of the mass culture, Theodor Adorno and Mark Horkheimer are
great names. Intellectuals from the Frankfurt school, German intellectual
movement of Marxist influence born in the 1920s, they are the first ones to speak
about industrial culture. In their book The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception, published in 1947, they defend the thesis about mass culture as a
tool of submission to the capital. Destabilization of the traditional institutions
would be the origin of a real organization of the culture and finally of certain
homogenization of it. The art could be seen as a market and the culture as a
cultural industry subjected by the capital.
The concept of mass culture is associated with an industrial organization defined
by the mass production and with a system of communication.
Historically, the idea of mass culture takes root in the appearance of new
economic thoughts, in the development of the media and in the
internationalization and in the technological inventions. So, the appearance of the
Taylorism and the Fordism made bloom the need for consumption, satisfied by a
system based on the mass chain production applied at any level. In reaction to this
dominant culture countercultures or alternative cultures develop their own world.
We saw in this precedent part of the essay that we could read the punk movement
through a subculture definition. I had to replace some key historical points to
qualify their culture too.
Thanks to the Cultural Studies we can deconstruct whose deconstructed symbols,
social norms at their time. There is a striking fact in punk history that need to be
noticed : the ambivalent construction of a worldly famous band like Sex Pistols.
The Sex Pistols started in the head of Malcolm McLaren, one of the many
entrepreneurs who conceived the band and became their A&R and manager.
McLaren came from the countercultural movements of the last decade and was
influenced by the Situationists (a great inspiration for the student revolts in Paris
during May 1968). He had in mind that the mass media was the main tool to

enlighten new symbolic struggle in front of a big audience. Savage related his
words : The media was our helper and our lover and that in effect was the Sex
Pistols success . . . as today to control our media is to have the power of
government, God or both. McLaren, firstly read the critical publicity and
mockeries as a huge misfortune but he realized what the consequences were and
how he could used it, he understood the rules of the dominant media class. With
the aim to deconstruct the state of institutions and society, he used the same arms
than the dominants, promotion, marketing in a very sarcastic way.
McLaren through the Sex Pistols did not achieve to set up a musical movement
and scene like they wanted, but they succeeded thanks to opportunities for
scandals to promote their audience. Savage explains that: Everything that
Malcolm planned fell flat on its face . . . and everything he didnt plan made
headlines. He really worked as a product designer and wanted to build a really
dynamic a punk scene (he was a business man too), the antithesis of the punk
model, like trying to bomb the musical industry. Accomplishing, in one time, to
gather a desperate and angry youth around his shop (with all the punk dresses and
accessories), he helped this subculture, in a second time, to die.
Although, he embody perfectly what against the punk movement fought for : the
rock scene established and the industry, preferring to explode the norms, all this
attributes of a dominant discourse and accepted art form. Short and accelerated
beats, nonsense, symbolic violence into lyrics, irony and cynicism, noisy and
amateur musicians. Raymond Williams (in his already cited book), importantly
worked on a fundamental axes about the culture. He defend a vision of the culture
like a practice and not only a situation : people are not only consumers and
participate actively, it is a construction and not a state. In our case, all could be
done and had to be done, encouraged by the community, by people who
participate to this movement : writing fanzines (lifestyle, tips for learning the
three main chords to play a song on a guitar), playing in a band even if you did
not know how to play an instrument. They had based and built their own spirit,
proudly defended, using the lower class language variations, kind of contents and
network.
The distant and provocative relationship to hierarchies against the branded and
mainstream culture is the expression of a research of authenticity like an

empowering possibility (such as the deconstructive one). This ethic not only
maintain a certain autonomy from the culture industry but served to facilitate the
critique and, also, actions. They cultivate marginality to enforce them rather than
trying to do subversive gestures inside of the dominant part of the culture.
Their principal arms were a reflexive deconstruction of meanings, expression of
the society including the dominant text which saturate social space. An autoreflexive capacity, tainted by irony, the punks have recycled cultural symbols,
artifacts and fragments for drawing parodies and shocking. In a way, it could be
read like an answer of young people born and educated inside a mass culture,
consumerism environment who played with signs and turned spectacles against
them because they are the product of what they denounce. Their way to engage
war against society and all its attributes.
They used chains, nazi svastika, Christian cross, royalty signs and Queen pictures,
to scared, impress on the public places, their favorite playground. The Sex Pistols
did a strong action to released their most famous song God Save the Queen with
a cynical and mocking campaign of promotion in order to scandalize traditional
sensibilities before the royal ceremony of Queen Elizabeth IIs Silver Jubilee.
Radio stations did not diffuse it. The controversy fed and probably helped God
Save the Queen to sell two hundred thousand copies in one week. Many of punk
rock bands have embodied and played the role of the bored and aimlessness of
suburban youth which did not want to be only passive consumers. The punk
deconstruction is restricted and could be efficient and realized thanks to the
economic and social transformations which has deeply accelerated the flow of
images, symbols, and common consumed products. Young people were
particularly affected by these changes, concretely because they were more and
more targeted and solicited by and through the entertainment industry and media
industry.
They responded to the nonsense of what they perceived of postmodernity
conditions by their form of nonsense, which appropriated signs, symbols, and
style for shocking. They wanted to define their pursuit of authenticity and
development of isolated subculture transforming the mediocrity and the
superficiality of postmodern culture into punk meaning.

An other question about this topic on subcultures problematics is based on the

assimilation into the dominant landscape, accepted and lost it essence.
Dick Hebidge argues this point : when a subculture reach a level of recognition by
the dominant society, the revolt essence begin to run dry. The popularization of
certain practices can empty them of the substance. The possibility, for example, to
inquire very easily about the punk movement led to its everyday acceptance. It
signed the death of the movement which was based on a developed reject of the
society and the effects of their cultural artifacts. Indeed, Punks are in collective
imagination reduced immediately, defined by their dress code, rangers, piercings,
studded bracelets or Punk necklace in dark leather.
As in this advertising for the Eurostar in 2007, presenting a punk tagging
"Future" on a wall, accompanied by the text "London is Changing". A subtle
reference to the London's Burning of The Clash. This example is striking,
because it marks the recycling of a formerly subversive symbol in a commercial
purpose, and by changing even radically the nature of its message. The
development of certain forms of cultural expression can so end in their
denaturation.

REFERENCES

Bibliography

Savage Jon, England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock - Faber and

Faber, 1991.

Brake Mike, The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures

Routledge, 1980.

Hebidge Dick, Subculture: The Meaning of Style Routledge, 1979.

Adorno Theodor ; Horkheimer Mark, The Culture Industry:

Enlightenment as Mass Deception ; Kulturindustrie - Allia (wrote in 1947).

Hoggart Richard, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life -

Chatto and Windus, 1957.

Sabin Roger, Punk Rock, So What ? The Cultural Legacy Routledge,

1999.
Webography

Tucker, L. Brian, Punk and the Political: The Role of Practices in

Subcultural Lives - A thesis presented to the faculty ofthe College of Arts and
Sciences of Ohio University (PDF), 2008.
- Cogan Bryan, What Do I Get? Punk Rock, Authenticity and Cultural Capital
counterblast.org / https://www.nyu.edu/pubs/counterblast/punk.htm