Conceptual Musings: Liberalism vs Anarchy

More often than not, I have found my resources for this project in anti-capitalist or extreme-leftist anthologies or bookstores. This being said, a primary focus of my historicization of specific aspects of punk has alluded to a confrontational anti-consumer/corporate impetus for action that denote instances of the political (i.e. fliering or postering, as Penelope Houston recalls in Fucked Up + Photocopied, part of the thrill was the fact that it was illegal).

It was pointed out to me that a contention in discussing the trajectory of DIY through Emerson and into 1950s domestic magazines is that the latter instance of the DIY ethos is more of a liberal capitalist instantiation of this ethos very much embedded in the self-made-man-American-dream version of the do-it-yourself-spirit. There then arises a need to separate the DIY ethos of punk from this all-American entrepreneur version, placing punk further left on the political spectrum.

This would not seem to be a problem for my research, per se, as the leftist leanings of punk clearly outline much of my attraction to the culture and the trajectory of its existence in the late ’70s into the ’90s. However, in discussing the practices of zine-making and music-playing, the anyone-can-do-it spirit and peer-promotion strategies of punk slowly begin to align, in my narrative, with contemporary open source software and peer-to-peer formations concomitatnt with the rise of internet technologies. What begins to surface as the problem is making a clear delineation of the radical and liberal. More specifically, this is problematized by my new thoughts around the word “democratic” in relation to the production, promotion and reproduction of punk culture by its constituents, as I have a hard time separating the term “democratic” from capitalist America. To further elucidate this musing, I refer to something I recently read, and consequently the reason for this problematization on peer-to-peer theorist Dale Carrico’s blog amor mundi:

“But I believe no less that a radical democratic politics of global technological development will likely emancipate humanity at last. Radical democracy needs to take up its revolutionary stance again, to gain and remake the world for us all before the world is utterly lost to us all.”

Now, I would not consider my thesis to enunciate technology as the emancipating of humanity, but I would edge toward the idea that I am discussing the emancipation of culture in some sense of the concept (particularly open content initiatives). Something I think punk was laboring toward (intentionally or not) by taking matters into their own hands and confronting corporate and mainstream models of music production and promotion. Further, the term “radical democracy” is one that I am not yet comfortable ascribing to my outlining of peer to peer activity (then and now), but am interested in thinking around the term in my grand and broad quest to discuss punks radical activity as outside of the liberal model while simultaneously recognizing the participatory nature of this activity inside the context of an American political climate. Even further, aside from thinking about punk from this contemporary standpoint, I have made little assertion as to any futurological meaning of these shifts in cultural production and consumption.

Results forthcoming…

Notes from a Conversation with Scott…

In doing some research into the intersection of social networking and punk rock, I came across the dead kennedys “official” myspace page. Interested in the idea of an official page, amidst hundreds of fan pages, I wanted to know what the relationship of the DK was to this page in an effort to mine my thoughts on the existence of Myspace music as a publishing, promotion and distribution outlet.

The myspace page states that the page is run by Hard Cole Design (myspace page), so I sent Scott at HCD a message and he graciously spoke with me over the phone.

Scott grew up in Lake Arrowhead, CA and is an active member of the SoCal punk scene. Excerpts (and rough transcriptions) from our conversation  follow…

Relationship to DK?

Scott is friend of DK and usually responds to messages  – or calls up Ray or passes it on to him to respond.
Designs Filtered through the band, also does  their webpage. They choose but you do the upkeep.
Also does all their merchandise.
Broken up for good now. But keep it going with news and band members and stuff.
They wanted their website to be controlled by someone else due to controversy of getting back together without jello

didnt create but updates this site as well: deadkennedysnews.com

Myspace vs. Website?
Theyre very approachable people. After the show they hang out and interact with fans. [myspace offers] Ways to interact fans on a daily basis and they look forward to that.
Also have individual myspace pages. Just throw it on myspace page. No cds etc.

Relationship of Web to Punk?
 Orange county punk scene, was playing in band when he was a kid. it was hard to get your music out there. either at shows or get signed. it helped alot. can put out album however you want and you dont have to go through the middleman. dont have to go through labels or producers who change the music

More about publication Scott created in 200o.
Dead on the web.com – in the middle of revamping it – up by summer. he is a graphic designer had access to own server at one of his jobs. SCRAPPED magazine – used to do reviews for that magazine – take pictures and can post them when Scrapped didnt want to publish them because (started in 2000, no one was doing it to this extent back then)  the band wasnt buying ad space. also included audio. did it all with video, but internet was too slow and video too big. will make into dvd.

never did it to make any money off of it. just to meet favorite bands, get their name out there, and to keep foot in door in the music scene. scene turned to emo and then started to rip on bands and didnt do it for that.

Did you ever do any zines of the paper sort?
did paper zine when he was in high school, bunch of skater punkers. started school magazine Sludge Skull didnt tell anyone about it. made a mini zine and every month would get to school early and drop them off in the bathroom. then got busted.

Jello once mentioned that the SF scene was more political than the LA scene – thoughts?
does think its true that SF punk more political than LA.
SoCal was more of a society thing. Growing up in the suburbs and talking about shit thats happened to them when they were growing up. And got a lot of funny type shit.
Wasn’t a whole lot of political.

An quick interview with Jack Boulware…

Jack Boulware doesnt have much time these days, as he is finishing up his book a la oral history about Punk in the Bay Area (circa 1976-1998) - scheduled for an October release (check it out here). He kindly took some time to respond to a couple questions that I am constantly thinking about re:my thesis project. His responses prove very helpful to framing my research…read on

(ks)With the decrease of venue space in SF during the 1990s, what alternatives did Punk rock seek out?

(jb) we talked a lot about this while we put together the book. the east
bay still has punk shows, but what happened to punk in SF? it turns
out, at least from our perspective, that in the city, punk attached
itself to other forms of entertainment. it got more organized. the
bands were not always in the forefront, but definitely the music was
still there, and the attitude was retained. things appeared like
incredibly strange wrestling, a punk-rock show of luche libre
wrestling, comedy, and punk bands. circus redickulus, a punk-rock
sideshow circus. cyclecide — the festival/rodeo for bicyclists and
punk bands.

you could even argue that the extra action marching band, suicide
girls, the hot rod-burlesque-tattoo-swing renaissance that occurred,
those people were largely punk rockers who were a bit older, and still
wanted to have fun but in a calmer atmosphere than punk. there’s still
a costume to put on, and a crowd of similarly-dressed people you can
socialize with. the bands that were still playing punk-style music
seemed to be absorbed by rock clubs. for instance, the dwarves will
still play in SF, at the bottom of the hill, and the next night, the
club will have a metal band, or alt-country, or whatever.

over in the east bay, a bunch of disillusioned gilman kids went and
formed their own punk festival, the geekfest, hosting a weekend of
punk bands in the middle of nowhere, all camping out, listening to
music. that went on for several years. the east bay rats, the gang of
motorcycle guys who build their own rat bikes from parts, regularly
host parties and initiations, and punk bands play those shows. and of
course, the east bay still has regular shows at gilman, warehouse
spaces, house parties — all that still goes on today.

we covered some of this stuff in our book, and ended up cutting it for
space, it was a bit off-topic. but it was fascinating to see what
happened, at least in the bay area.

(ks)Aside from unneccesary appropriation (ie the Hot Topic variety), where do you see punk motives and actions occuring in our current cultural and urban landscape?

(jb)silke my co-author will have more to say on this. for myself, i think
punk has now transcended what it used to mean. punk rock is now a
flavor, an adjective that everyone can agree on its meaning. fast,
loud, fun, fuck shit up, etc. we see NOFX in their own reality TV
show, we see young bands emulating a retro 80s-hardcore aesthetic. we
see bands like pennywise, offspring, bad religion, circle jerks,
rancid, green day, all still on tour and releasing records. and yet at
the same time, “punk rock” is not a category on iTunes. as a music
genre it doesn’t appear to have lasted. as a flavor, style, mentality
– it will always exist. kids will be wearing ramones t-shirts for
decades to come.

DIY culture doesn’t mean much anymore in america. software engineers
have allowed all of us to design and build our own websites, blogs,
facebook pages, audio and video playlists. the retail world allows us
to design our own clothing, cars, books, even our cup of coffee can be
personalized. everyone is customizing their own life, every day. if
you want to break it down further, the people responsible for the
computer revolution — 60s acidhead math nerds — actually paved the
path for future generations, by creating a mentality of how humans
might use computers. early-adopter DIY types picked up the technology
ahead of most, and pushed that culture even further. so now, young
people are growing up in this world where the tools are all around
them, to customize their own life. program your phone, mix your music,
bookmark your sites, twitter your friends, create your own avatar
icon. i it’s very easy to think you are an enlightened autonomous soul
if you have the software. and that must be frustrating, i think, for
young people who want something more.

where you see this come into play for real — is outside the U.S. if
you’re a blogger in cuba, or malaysia, or china, you’re using this
technology to disseminate information that people genuinely need to
hear. these people actually risk going to jail, by using the internet
to spread the truth about government oppression and human rights
violations. that to me is a radical, relevant, and dangerous use of
technology. here in the fat and lazy US, we use it to email each other
video clips of kittens and puppies.

one of the newer trends that i see, having some ideological roots in
punk rock, is the handmade scene, the maker faire, make magazine,
readymade magazine world of creativity. The excitement around building
homemade things, showing them off to others. there’s an element of
smart culture-jamming and upending the status quo, that smells new and
unique to me.

(ks)With the rise of Internet culture, do you see any punk (or radical) activity occuring on the web that is comprable to the practices of punk activity, of say, the late 1970s?

(jb)well, hacking is the obvious one, but that’s been going on for so long
it’s not really considered punk. the concept of organizing flash mobs
has some punk community anarchy about it. i’m sure there are pockets
of punk activity occurring online, if one were to seek it out. but
that excitement and fear combination that punk rock injected into the
mainstream culture in the late 70s — i was in high school at the time
– i haven’t seen that since. we see excitement — girls screaming
over bland musicians like the jonas brothers. we see fear — alarmist
news about terrorists and the economy. but we don’t see that
combination of the two so much anymore. also, anything that appears
online is instantly considered dated and therefore must be ignored.
look at any website from the 1990s, we would rather laugh at its
remedial HTML design than understand, or remember, why it was put up
in the first place. people will still dig out their own punk records
because it reminds them of actual shows they saw, fights they
witnessed, physical visceral experiences. it’s a very different
feeling to revisit something online that might have once yanked your
chain, if there’s not a memory attached to it that occurred in the
real physical world.

some of the people in our book talked about what was going to be the
next big thing? even in the 80s, people were dissecting this — what
is going to come after hip hop and punk? what new style of music is
going to push the culture to the next level? their conclusion was, it
hasn’t really happened yet.

of course, there’s several definitions of punk rock. for some people,
it’s political activism. for others, it’s getting fucked up and
breaking things. or fast and loud with cookie monster vocals. or
having charged hair and the proper clothes.

 

Approximating Zine production numbers…

While the early years of the 1970s saw a steady rise in the number of publications, the figures rise dramatically from 1975 onwards. This expansion can be seen as the direct result of the consolidation of the network through the role played by the publications from this early period, coupled with the growing number of assembling magazines and the steady rise in the number of mail art exhibitions. All these artists’ publications were in varying degrees connected to the network and published work acquired from this source, or listed projects and publications emanating from the network.

http://www.zinebook.com/resource/perkins/perkins8.html

SF Punk Rock circa ’80s…

By Jeff Goldthorpe

http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=PUNK_ROCK

Greil Marcus located punk as son of Dada, the negationist art movement that took off from the rubble of World War I Europe (1982). But I wondered, as a bedraggled but still determined radical in the early eighties, what all this raging cynicism had to do with creating the new day of humankind. David James summarized the dilemma of punk’s negation like this:

…punk’s self-definition…made its attempt to produce itself outside of the entertainment business internally logical and indeed allowed its utopian aspiration, one form of which was the innovation of alternative modes of cultural production…Thus the increased audience participation in concerts with open passage through the stage and the flourishing of recording and record distribution outside corporate channels, as well as the constant formation and dissolution of bands and the do-it-yourself philosophy that allowed the typical producer/consumer proportions to be inverted–all were antithetical to capitalist social relations.

[But]…Having by definition no positive terms, and in the absence of any social movement that could supply them, punk was thus condemned not only to manifest itself purely as style, but condemned to manifest itself as a style that would always be in the process of pushing itself over into self-parody, to the point at which it would find itself only able to mimic its former gestures (1988, p. 168-9).

This captures two sides of punk and its ultimate dead end quite well. Yet it ignores the hopeful political currents which I was seeing punk unloose in the early eighties, even in the United States, “in the absence of any social movement” (the latter term to be redefined later)

Goldthorpe approaches the two components of the punk subcultural activity that interests me the most: the political and social, though rather lacking a full discussion.  More aligned with my research interests is his methodological approach to the essay, outlined here:

Social and political aspects of punk subculture are at the center of this study, although the punk scene was obviously musically centered. Music is discussed here as an articulation of feeling which the audience translates into behavior. Bands are emphasized for ways they typified an element of punk style, rather than how they shaped up in terms of some standard of musical excellence. Slight attention is paid to the production of music by bands in conjunction with club owners, record companies and radio stations; rather it is the consumption of music by audiences and subcultures which is emphasized.

Goldthorpe goes on to evoke the importance of the Mab and Vale’s Search & Destroy in facilitating the ‘77 punk scene in San Francisco. As he emphasizes, the scene was small, which was a sort of utopic aspect of the early that Vale pointed out in our interview.

More DIY or DIE…

Michael W Dean, director. Introduction to the DIY or DIE documentary:

“The three dozen interviewees are uniquely American artists who operate outside of any studio system, are beholden to none and produce influential, quality art regardless of a continuous paycheck. Most of them are able to make a somewhat comfortable wage with their art…many have been major influences on modern culture. However, they all have a common denominator: their need to make art is the biggest reason to get up each morning. The DIY movement has its roots in the punk rock culture of the mid-’70s. Unable to garnish corporate support many began working around the culture industry to create new channels of creative dissemination. They put on their own concerts, made thier own films, started tiny but influential record labels out of their basements and used their bedrooms to do paste-ups for hand-xeroxed fanzines to review and promote each other. The DIY-I-think-I-can ethic exists today driving everything from garage bands to the largest software companies in the world.”

(my transcription)

Taking on the System…

“Arctic Monkeys: … [When we went number one in England] we were on the news and radio about how MySpace has helped us. But that’s the perfect example of someone who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. We actually had no idea what [MySpace] was.

” Not only did the fans bypass the record label executives, they bypassed the band as well. Rather than depend on their favorite band to promote themselves, the fans did it for them. And while these fans didn’t run fancy music publications or have the money to advertise the band in traditional venues, they did have access to media tools – peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, social networks like MySpace, and other such online tools. The traditional gatekeepers can only watch as their iron grip on the business crumbles around them.” (pp 28 -29)

Zuniga, Markos Moulitsas. Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era. [London: Penguin, 2008]

Talking with Robin (2/12)…

Consider reorganizing paper by conceptual or thematic concerns – opposed to case study, or linear timeline.

Have not really focused on the music. Which is really what the scene was about, the zines etc were chronicling and responding

Circulation is also not foregrounded. SF was not an isolated place or scene. Cassettes and records circulated frequently – influence, and the comparison to circulation or publication on the internet.

Also, DIY was not something like it was in the ’50s (pre fabricated houses) there were no instruction manuals. (though now there are! I think I am tracing more as investigating the political and social circumstances that led to this and of course, the immense popularity and use of the term today)

Should check out book: Cassette Culture

and book by Lipsitz

counterpulse podcast

Band: Conflict

Notes: Constituents of a Theory of the Media (Enzensberger, 1970)

“For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves.”  Productive processes that involve communicating as well as reciprocal communication. (262)

“The new media are oriented toward action, not conteplation; towards the present, not tradition. Their attittude to time is completely opposed to that of bourgeois culture, which aspires to possession, that is to extension in time, best of all, to eternity. The media produces no objects that can be hoarded an auctioned. They do away completely with ‘intellectual property’ and liquidate the ‘heritage,’ …

“That does not mean to say that they have no history or that they contribute to the loss of historical consciousness. On the contrary, they make it possible for the first time to record historical material so that it can be reproduced at will. By  making this material available for present-day purposes, they make it obvious to anyone using it that the writing of history is alway manipulation. But the memory they hold in readiness is not hte preserve of a scholarly caste. It is social. The banked information is accessible to anyone, and this accesibility is as instantaneous as its recording.” (265)

“The direct mobilizing potentialities of the media become still more clear when they are consciously used for subversive ends.”  (269)

“Written literature has, historically speaking, played a dominant role for only a few centuries…Now it is being succeeded by the age of the electronic media, which tend once more to make the people speak. At its period of fullest development, the book to some extent usurped the place of the more primitive but generally more accessible methods of production of the past; on the other hand, it was a stand-in for future methods which make it possible for everyone to become a producer.” (272)

“Spelling mistakes, which are completely immaterial in terms of communication, are punished by the social disqualification of the writer. The rules that govern this technique have a normative power attributed to them for which there is no rational basis…While people learn to speak very early, and mostly in psychologically favorable conditions, learning to write  forms an important part of authoritarian socialization by the school…” (273)

“Structurally, the printed book is a medium that operates as a monologue, isolating producer and reader…The control circuit in the case of literary criticism is extremely cumbersome and elitist.” (273)

“It is extremely improbable, however, that writing as a special technique will disappear in the foreseeable future.” (273)

“Strictly speaking, it has shrunk to its legal dimensions. A document is something the ‘forging’ – i.e. the reproduction 0 of which is punishable by imprisonment….The productions of the electronic media, by their nature, evade such distinctions…” (275)

“When carried to extremes, such attempts to produce interaction, even when it goes against the structure of the medium employed, are nothing more than invitations to freewheel.” (275)

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “Constituents of a Theory of the Media.” The New Media Reader. Noah Wardrip-Fuin and Nick Montfort, eds. [Cambridge:  MIT Press, 2003] 259-275.