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.
