Punk Rock, Anarchy, and How They Relate to Each Other

ARTS & CULTURE

Punk Rock, Anarchy, and How They Relate to Each Other – A sub-cultural history paper

SANAD HAMDOUNA Staff Writer

A lot of people have heard the word “punk” or “punk rock” but not many are familiar with the subculture, or its origins.

Punk is a musical, politically charged, grassroots movement that emerged in the mid-1970s. According to Jon Savage, a scholar of the Punk movement, Punk mainly originated in the UK and North-East America as a partially cultural response to the happy-go-lucky attitude of mainstream and hippie culture in comparison to the political and social issues of the time. The movement was additionally said to rekindle the teenage rebellion rock and roll culture of the 50’s.

The Cambridge dictionary defines Punk in a more mainstream way: “a culture popular among young people, especially in the late 1970s, involving opposition to authority expressed through shocking behaviour, clothes, and hair, and fast loud music”.

Although punk rock was born from garage bands in New York’s trash culture and underground rock movement, the popularization of this cultural phenomenon was initiated in the UK by one of the best known punk bands, the Sex Pistols.

The Sex Pistols were loud, violent, crass, and in their own words “nasty little bastards”, something unheard of for bands in the UK at the time. Their crass and “in your face” lyrics expressed anarchist themes such as anti-consumerism and anti-establishment. In the short time they were active, they became a source of inspiration for many alternative rock musicians and had a significant influence on the development of punk aesthetics. The rock music scene was never the same after their shocking appearances.

Anarchy (in both the literal and political sense) has always been an important theme in punk music and culture. Anyone even a little bit familiar with the subculture knows that the symbol of the circled A is inescapable. But what this letter really represents can be unclear since Anarchism is ever-evolving and unfortunately often misrepresented.

A very general and to the point definition of Anarchism supplied by Dr. Andreas Wittel, a professor at Nottingham Trent University, is that it is a political ideology and school of thought that bases itself in the belief in a horizontal organization of society. This means that it opposes any long-standing and/or unjustified hierarchies. It’s an organization of society that has been ever-present during the course of human history but has become a minority belief and adapted to our modern times as a practice of resistance within the system.

It is a political ideology and school of thought that bases itself in the belief in a horizontal organization of society.

There are 8 main types of anarchism but the one that seems to be most present in punk is Insurrectionary Anarchism. According to Anarchy 101, this form of Anarchism opposes any formal organizing (such as NGOs and political parties) and instead supports small, group based, and informal organization. Insurrectionary Anarchism completely refuses to negotiate with class enemies and instead goes straight for the attack. This is the strain of anarchism that’s the most obvious within punk, even though there are many subsets of the punk subculture that align better with different strains. Two things that all anarchist schools of thought have in common are anti-establishment and anti-consumerism values.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines these concepts as the following. To hold anti-establishment values is to be opposed to the established beliefs of society when it comes to things such as social principles, politics, and economics. To hold anti-consumerist values, is to be opposed to the constant purchasing and consuming of material goods by our society.

Punk culture shows clear align- ment with all of these values. Opposition to strict social principles is expressed most strikingly through fashion and attitude while opposition to mainstream politics and economics is clear in the upholding of far left beliefs and values. Similarly, opposition to consumerism is seen through alternative supply chains and the strong DIY (do it yourself) ethic.

Punk music tends to have very explicitly political lyrics, the following well known punk songs are only two of many that portray this quite clearly.

This first song is called “1312” by an American-Mexican punk band called The Casualties. The name of the song itself is already very political and anti-establishment since “1312” stands for “ACAB”, meaning “All Cops Are Bastards”. To drill this message in harder, the song starts with a chant of ten “1312, ACAB”, immediately followed up by lines about corruption and police brutality related to racism. The chorus is more “1312, ACAB”, and the verses after that are as anarchist and insurrectionary as it gets, with a barely concealed call to violence against the police in: “We’ve had enough Let’s get together Let’s show them what’s up.” The song continues with similar messaging, including 4 Spanish verses, and ends with ten more chants of “1312, ACAB” with a loud “1312” at the very end to deeply emphasize the anti-establishment values.

This next song is called “No, your product” (or “know your product” depending on where you look), by an Australian punk band called The Saints. The song starts in quite a mellow way, with the first few verses being the singer telling a story about listening to an advertisement for cigarettes on the radio.

The chorus comes on as a reply to the advertisement, “cheap advertising, you’re lying”, a direct criticism of the dishonest advertising culture and a big part of consumerism in general. The chorus then continues, and the third verse of the chorus begins “I said, smooth talking, brainwashing” this verse clearly refers to the crushing hold that consumerist culture has on most people, quite explicitly calling out people who buy into that brainwashing (no pun intended). That line is also very anti-capitalist in the way it suggests that advertisement (“smooth talking”) is capitalist propaganda (“brainwashing”) meant to convince people to buy endlessly.

Punk music tends to have very explicitly political lyrics.

A common alternative to buying endlessly is the concept of DIY or “do it yourself”. It’s something that’s always been a core aspect of the punk subculture, sometimes as a form of protest against consumerism, and sometimes just out of sheer necessity.

Because of the very explicit and anarchist lyrics that punk bands used in their music, no big record labels (and very few record labels in general) were willing to sign them, which led to the need to create their own DIY record labels, and soon enough it became frowned upon to work with mainstream record labels at all. Making punk music was also very accessible in itself, and by lack of a better term, DIYable. It didn’t take much for a group of musically inclined teens to pick up a few instruments at a pawn shop and get into the music genre, almost anyone could do it as long as they had the drive. Small garage bands like that started popping up more and more, and were accepted in local scenes, some of them even broke out of the local scene and performed all over their country. Big backing just wasn’t needed –nor wanted– in punk. Even the sound itself was DIY, far from professional and far from the mainstream. It was directly anti-establishment and anti-consumerist.

The stereotypical punk look was also quite far from the mainstream, so unless someone had easy access to money and the one punk clothing shop in London (called Sex), a lot of things had to be done by hand, i.e. DIY. It didn’t help that consumerism within the subculture, even from that one shop, was extremely frowned upon.

This attitude was even kept up by the Goth subculture, Punk’s gloomier baby which was developed in the early 80s with genres such as Post-Punk, Gothic Rock, and Deathrock, all of which originally kept much of Punk’s culture and politics.

In the early 90s, gothic style started being widely appropriated and commercialized. People who consumed it and called themselves goth were shamed and rejected by the wider subculture. It was seen as a rejection of the DIY and anti-consumerism parts of the subculture, two things very important to its origins.

Subsequently, the now reclaimed term “mall goth” came into being as a pejorative term for those people, along with being called “posers” and “spooky kids”. In other words, a complete rejection of those who participated in the commercialisation of goth and mainstream consumerist culture by those who upheld the core principles of punk within their own younger and ever-developing subculture.

In conclusion, anarchism has a huge influence on punk as a whole. From explicitly political song lyrics to general culture and fashion, anti-establishment and anti-consumerism are constants, even remaining in other subcultures that eventually grew out of punk. These anarchist values gave birth to the very thing that let punk become as big and accessible as it did; DIY culture and the principle that anyone can do it themselves, outside the system.

PHoto VIA DAVID CHADWICK

Sources:

Robb, John, and Oliver Craske. Punk Rock: An Oral History. Oakland, CA : Independent Publishers Group, 2012, pp. 1-100. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost)

Martin, Eryk. “The Blurred Boundaries of Anarchism and Punk in Vancouver.” Labour/Le Travail, vol. 75, Spring 2015, pp. 9-41. Academic Search Premier

Dale, Pete. “It was easy, it was cheap, so what?: Reconsidering the DIY principle of punk and indie music.” Popular Music History, vol. 3, no. 2, Aug. 2008, pp. 171-93. Academic Search Premier

Matrix, Dot, editor. Anarchy 101. Ardent Press, 2012, pp. 1-158. Anarchist bookstore of Montreal

Savage, Jon. England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. Illustrated Edition ed. Faber & Faber, 1991.

Wittel, Andreas. “What is anarchism all about?” The Conversation, 10 Nov. 2015. p