Safety Pin as Signifier
25 years after punk rock exploded, scholars ponder its role in cultural history
By SCOTT McLEMEE
In the summer of 1977, Time and Newsweek informed their readers of a new subculture, called "punk," that had emerged at a few rock clubs in the United States and Britain. It was a style of exuberant ugliness. Men and women alike wore short hair that had been cut seemingly at random, and dyed unnatural colors. Flesh was pierced in sundry locations, at times with safety pins. Punk bands had names like the Dead Boys or the Clash. The music was very loud, very fast, and seldom involved more than three chords. Dancing was spasmodic. Spitting was common.
Horrified readers may have recalled the hippies' "Summer of Love," in 1967, and pondered how much the world had changed in a decade. Jimmy Carter would later use the term "malaise" to characterize the American mood in an era of energy crisis, "stagflation," and Third World insurgency.
Meanwhile, the noise coming from the punk clubs in 1977 sounded like the collapse of Western civilization itself.
After a quarter century, and a zeitgeist shift or two, the phenomenon of punk has entered the twilight zone between popular culture and social history. The subject of documentaries on MTV and VH-1 (and at least one deluxe coffee-table book), the early punk scene has also drawn the attention of scholars trying to understand its significance as "cultural practice." But don't assume that this is some new surge of nostalgia, with footnotes as camouflage. Punk and academe have a long history together.
"Punk was always the intellectuals' favorite," says Bernard Gendron, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. "Academics were interested in punk from the start, in England especially. One of the first really classic texts in cultural studies from the early 1980s was Dick Hebdige's Subculture, which stressed the semiotics of punk -- trying to read the 'live' texts of punk clothing's signifiers, for example. In the United States, it was the art world that was really taken with punk." Mr. Gendron traces the movement's ambivalent relationship with high culture (and vice versa) in his recent book, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (University of Chicago Press).
"Someone should do a sociological study of academics and punk," says Bill Martin, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University, in Chicago. His book Avant Rock: Experimental Music From the Beatles to Björk (Open Court) appeared this spring at about the same time as Mr. Gendron's study. "I think it's a matter of people coming of age," he says of the coincidence, "of reaching the point where they feel secure enough in the institution to write about this sort of thing."
Thrashing Ideas
The history of the subculture includes some distinguished ancestry. In Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1989), the rock journalist Greil Marcus traced the sometimes roundabout way French Marxist thinkers such as Guy Debord influenced early British punk. The manager of the Sex Pistols, for example, used Debord's scathing critique of consumerism in The Society of the Spectacle (1968) as an alibi for his cynical manipulation of the media.
Mr. Gendron's analysis of the New York underground also starts in Paris -- but with a much earlier phase of bohemia. In the 19th century, artists in the Latin Quarter began frequenting popular venues such as cabarets; later, jazz became the preferred music among venturesome intellectuals. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's arguments about how different social groups accrue "symbolic capital," Mr. Gendron argues that the worlds of avant-garde culture and mass entertainment have repeatedly been drawn to one another. Artists were lured by the wider audience enjoyed by popular musicians, while the latter craved the prestige conferred by associating with "legitimate" culture.
When punk emerged, it scrambled the distinctions between high and low culture even more severely than bebop jazz (whose practitioners sometimes wore "existentialist" goatees and horn-rimmed glasses) had in the late 1940s. The term "punk" had been coined in 1971 by critics who, disgusted by what they considered pretentious "art rock," were championing obscure American groups from the 1960s such as the Sonics and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators -- garage bands that made up in energy (and volume) what they lacked in instrumental finesse. As Mr. Gendron points out, the punk aesthetic attracted a following in the arts by overlapping with the rise of minimalism among experimental painters, sculptors, and composers. Punk bands such as the Patti Smith Group, Television, and the Voidoids included writers and artists who were as likely to allude to Rimbaud's poetry as to science-fiction movies.
By the time newsmagazines and record companies were discovering punk, in 1977, a second generation of experimentalists had emerged, called No Wave, in which musicians abandoned rock primitivism for even more extreme musical experiments. (The feminist group Y Pants played amplified children's instruments, while the guitarist for DNA scraped and plunked on an untuned electric 12-string.) The audience for No Wave was, as it were, self-selecting; bands tended to play at galleries and poetry readings. "There's really no difference at that point between artistic bohemia and the rock world," says Mr. Gendron. "There's a merger between the two worlds."
Feel the Noise
Mr. Gendron may be the first scholar to have dug into such rare sources as the early fanzines Who Put the Bomp? and Sniffin' Glue -- and his discussion of No Wave is among the very few accounts of that noisy scene available in print. By contrast, Mr. Martin's approach is less historical. His earlier work includes a number of studies of poststructuralist thought; his analyses of music periodically turn to the philosophical texts of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, as well as Theodor Adorno's sociological analyses of classical composers.
But raw enthusiasm outstrips theory in Mr. Martin's writing on music. His commentary has the digressive quality of a lecture by a well-informed aficionado playing CD's for a few friends, immediately after drinking a very large cup of coffee. Although he played bass in punk bands while in graduate school, during the early 1980s, Mr. Martin sounds ambivalent about the genre.
He suggests that the music was compelling for reasons owing as much to politics as aesthetics. "When world tensions were to the point where it seemed like the whole thing could just blow up," he says, "the times demanded a more direct expression [than the virtuosos of art rock provided]. The greatness and the fundamental weakness of punk was that immediacy. But the problem with radical negation is that after a while, it just becomes cynical and formulaic."
His analysis of the intersection between avant-garde ideas and popular music treats punk as one example of "the refusal of technique" -- an aesthetic strategy Mr. Martin finds in the work of experimental composers such as John Cage. But he also argues that any account of the history of music must recognize the drive for increasing complexity as an inescapable part of the creative process. "What's a young punk to do," he says, "once you've learned that one chord?"
A Little Group It's Always Been
The recent deaths of two founding members of the Ramones (whose debut album, in 1976, was a landmark in the genre's history) has left many old fans singing "Teenage Lobotomy" to themselves, and wondering where the time went. Sorting out the movement's legacy is also a problem facing scholars who write about the music. Mr. Gendron argues that punk introduced "a structural shift" in the relationship between elite and mass culture that continues to this day.
"You now have a permanent bifurcation between the mainstream and the underground [in popular music] that didn't exist before," he says.
"In the 1960s and '70s, what was underground one moment could well become mainstream the next." But in the aftermath of punk, small but durable niches have emerged for genres of rock that appeal only to the cognoscenti.
Most fans of the group Olivia Tremor Control have probably attended college. In the era of Elvis Presley, the very idea that a rock band might have snob appeal would have seemed preposterous.
For Mr. Martin, who is a Marxist, that split is troubling. It suggests an element of class snobbery in a musical form that was always firmly plebeian in its allegiances. "And yet," he writes, "there is an unavoidable fragility to this music of our time ... What's next? We don't know." If early punk led to a dead end, he suggests, the answer is clear: more experimentation.
And on that note, Mr. Martin prepares to go down to the basement, where he has assembled a small recording studio.
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