Punk Rock: So What?

The Cultural Legacy of Punk

Roger Sabin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134699056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

It's now over twenty years since punk pogo-ed its way into our consciousness. Punk Rock So What? brings together a new generation of academics, writers and journalists to provide the first comprehensive assessment of punk and its place in popular music history, culture and myth. The contributors, who include Suzanne Moore, Lucy OBrien, Andy Medhurst, Mark Sinker and Paul Cobley, challenge standard views of punk prevalent since the 1970s. They:
* re-situate punk in its historical context, analysing the possible origins of punk in the New York art scene and Manchester clubs as well as in Malcolm McClarens brain
* question whether punk deserves its reputation as an anti-fascist, anti-sexist movement which opened up opportunities for women musicians and fans alike.
* trace punks long-lasting influence on comics, literature, art and cinema as well as music and fashion, from films such as Sid and Nancy and The Great Rock n Roll Swindle to work by contemporary artists such as Gavin Turk and Sarah Lucas.
* discuss the role played by such key figures as Johnny Rotten, Richard Hell, Malcolm McClaren, Mark E. Smith and Viv Albertine.
Punk Rock Revisited kicks over the statues of many established beliefs about the meaning of punk, concluding that, if anything, punk was more culturally significant than anybody has yet suggested, but perhaps for different reasons.

Part I
SHOCK WAVES AND RIPPLE EFFECTS

1
TOO LOW TO BE LOW
Art pop and the Sex Pistols

Robert Garnett

What is it about Never Mind the Bollocks that makes it stand out from anything else in the history of popular music? What is it about ‘Anarchy in the UK’ that makes it, to borrow the words of Greil Marcus, ‘as powerful as anything I know’ (Marcus 1989:1)? Is it that it constituted the most the most authentic, the most ‘real’ form of pop to have been made, that it represented the very essence of rock ’n’ roll? Or, did punk transcend pop and become something else, like performance art, for instance? Or, was punk an instance of that ubiquitous postmodernist trope, a ‘crossover’ phenomenon, an example of the transposition of art ideas into pop that, therefore, lent it a substance, a self-consciousness that it would otherwise have lacked? There is something to be said for all of these, but none of them really seems to add up to an explanation as to why, 20 years on, ‘Anarchy’ still possesses an edge, still disconcerts and resonates. Perhaps there is no single means of explaining the phenomenon that was punk at its best, but what does seem clear is that the Pistols were singing from somewhere else, someplace that hadn’t existed before and that only existed for a brief moment in time. It was a zone that was neither high nor low; it was a space between art and pop. It was probably closer to pop than it was to anything else, but it was at the same time something unprecedented. This is what made punk singular, in that within that space bands like the Pistols created something that couldn’t be made within art or pop, or anywhere else for that matter. Referring to punk as either art or pop diminishes it and, at the same time, diminishes the specificity of art and pop themselves. Discussing punk alongside art and pop, however, brings into relief its singularity.

It is art and pop that remain after the passing of the punk moment, along with a very different space between. The moment of punk passed not simply because it was recuperated, reified or processed by the culture industry, it passed because the space within which it operated was closed down. If punk was simply recuperated it would not still affect people in the way it does. After the space within which it existed was closed down, things like ‘Anarchy’ simply couldn’t be made anymore, and nothing like it, nothing with the same gravity, nothing so abject has been made since. Twenty years on, the pop scene is probably more conservative than it has been at any stage in its history; there is little ‘serious’ debate in the music press now, and the pop culture industry is more totally administered than ever; rigorous debate only seems to take place within the critical arm of the pop business—the Cultural Studies industry. Now, then, seems an apt moment at which to reconsider the relations between art and pop. In order to do this it will be necessary to look at the visual aspects of punk, and it is fortunate that in the work of Jamie Reid an almost perfect visual counterpart to the Pistols’ music exists. His work has frequently been exhibited in art gallery contexts but, like the Pistols’ music, Reid’s work was made in different space, a space apart from the institutionalised spaces of art and graphic design. At the time they were made, if considered as art, they would have looked like hopelessly naive, sub-Dada juvenilia; but, at the same time, he also trashed the professional protocols of graphic design and his work cannot properly be placed in that category either. Like ‘Anarchy’, they were made somewhere else and gained their gravity due to the ways in which they were connected with, and were informed by, a constellation of ideas, histories and practices, albeit for a brief moment in time. When this space was closed down Reid turned to art; there was nowhere else for him to go if he did not want to become a pop industry professional. What Reid had made for the Pistols could not be made in the same way in art however; art was then, and is now, a distinct, specialised discourse.

Via punk’s critique of the pop culture industry, a significant constituency was able to gain some critical purchase upon, not only pop, but also culture more broadly. It would be hard, however, to make similar claims for any current movements within pop culture. The pop culture industry is too circumscribed today to enable any space to be made within it from which a critique of its operations might be mounted. If this critique is seen to be the most important aspect of punk then punk’s legacy can only be seen to exist in other areas of culture than in pop itself. One tendency that has recently been compared to punk is what is referred to as the ‘new’, or ‘young British art’, that has emerged in London over the past 10 years (see Garnett 1998). Like Punk, the new British art scene can be thought of as a kind of spatial and temporal montage. Another parallel is that a significant amount of it was created on the margins of the mainstream art world; like the best of punk, though, it had no intention of staying there. For this generation of artists punk exists as an inescapable cultural fact, part of what defines the parameters of cultural practice; it is as important as any recent movement in art. Again like punk, much of the work is deliberately low-tech, or is as suspicious of the grandiose claims made for the art of the 80s as punk was contemptuous of the 70s’ reverential attitude towards music. But, like the best of punk, this aspect of the new British art amounts to a meta-trash aesthetic, one that is self-consciously about the low, the base and the profane. More than anything else, it is in the way in which new British art has opened up a space between academic high art and the realm of popular culture that it can be said to form part of the legacy of punk. And, as is the case with punk, its singularity can only be appreciated if it is discussed alongside the categories of high and low.

Art into Pop?

Punk emerged in 1976 and it was approximately coincidental with the rise in currency of the term Postmodernism within intellectual culture. It was around punk that the reconfiguration of the interface between high art and popular music first began to be conducted. The first study to analyse popular culture from the perspective of semiotics was Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: the Meaning of Style. Hebdige (1979) went beyond a conventional sociological analysis of popular culture and theorised subcultural formations as semiotic counterpractices—practices that actively operated against the grain of hegemonic mainstream culture by appropriating its signs and objects and recoding them, turning them against the system. Hebdige was to withdraw from this position some time later, conceding that it was premised upon an over-investment in the oppositional potential of such strategies that, within the context of the popular culture industry, function as an essential research and development department for the production for profit of new and novel lifestyles (1988:155–181).

Nevertheless, Subculture was groundbreaking and demonstrated the ways in which punk had transformed for good the ways in which popular music was conceived. The conception of pop within Cultural Studies in the ‘postmodern’ 80s was to be at odds with punk, however. What took hold was not a continuation of punk’s negation of pop but an affirmative, populist theorisation of pop itself. Paradigmatic of this approach is Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s Art into Pop (1987). This study was premised upon a now fully postmodernised, relativist notion of culture as a. level field of signifying practices, within which the great divide between high art and low culture—pop music, design, fashion—was now gone for good. Frith and Home argued that art was now no more than ‘a mass-cultural myth, created and sustained by specific state and and mass-cultural forces, specific middle-brow mass-media, museums and exhibitions’ (1987:3). ‘The commercialisation of art’, they contended, ‘meant that art had lost its critical distance’, and any attempt at an avant-garde counter-strategy was now ‘doomed to failure, because it depends on maintaining that sense of artistic ‘difference’ that mass-market conditions deny’ (ibid.: 110). If art was commerce, they concluded, ‘then commerce could be art’ (ibid.: 107). Art was dead, they demotically implied—long live rock ’n’ roll!

Nevertheless, art had been, and still was, alive enough to form the main axis of the study, around which its central argument was constructed. The basis of this argument was that British pop had gained its vitality due to the ‘art school connection’—that the transposition of art ideas into pop, via the art school, had provided British pop with a more acute sense of the meanings and functions of pop style. Within their argument, the idea of an art-informed pop is ostensibly meant to function as a ‘dcconstruction’ or ‘sublation’ of the distinctions between high art and popular cultural practices. One example given is that of The Who, who on their 1967 album, The Who Sell Out, foreground in a self-conscious ‘Pop art’ style its status as commercial product by intercutting each track with parodies of radio advertising jingles. Pop art, they argued, had by the late 1960s lost its original meaning, had been recuperated and institutionalised as high art; the Who by ‘appropriating’ Pop art created a ‘Pop art pop’. What this latter neologism does, however, is less to dissolve the distinctions between art and pop, than to reproduce the high/low opposition within pop itself.

A further problem with arguments like this is that they are premised upon a very superficial grasp of the complexities of art critical and historical discourse, and the specific dynamics of art history. The terms of art and the terms of popular culture are not as easily interchangeable as this, and the relations between art and popular culture are discontinuous and non-synchronic. Art terms, when transposed into the context of popular culture, are more often than not reduced to metaphors that retain little of their original meaning. Art into Pop, like most populist Cultural Studies, attempts to argue away the specificity of art, commits a category error and, therefore, lacks any immanence with regard to its ‘critique’ of art, and it ends up as little more than a reductive, economistic and sociologistic elision of art’s semi-autonomy. This is not entirely surprising, given that its authors are, like most Cultural Studies academics, social scientists.

This lack of immanence is where the arguments of Art into Pop fall down, for as Adorno reminds us, ‘thought that fails to immerse itself in the phenomena on which it takes its stand, extracts from its objects that which is thought already’ (1973:27). And what Frith and Home’s arguments, along with a good deal of other populist postmodernist accounts of the high/low interface, reproduce is a residual form of rather un-postmodern binary thinking. The agenda of Art into Pop is not really to deconstruct the opposition between art and the ‘popular’, it is to affirm the ‘popular’ side of the equation, which is, consequently, over-privileged and thus the opposition is reinforced. When reading studies like this, it is not difficult to detect behind the ‘postmodernist’ facade a misplaced counter-chauvinistic prejudice against the aesthetic, not of the ‘New Times’ of the 80s, but of the Old Left—only this time, it is not socialist realism that is demanded, but a ‘people’s art’ of pop music and style culture. By the 1980s, fashion was no longer ‘tyranny’, as Barthes once described it, it was, according to ‘go-ahead’ academics such as Elizabeth Wilson, ‘performance art’; style magazines, such as The Face were no longer just style magazines, they were radical vehicles for transgression through chic.

While such accounts might have seemed plausible in the ‘designer decade’ of the 80s they certainly don’t square with punk. The last thing punk, at its best, was interested in was an ‘aesthetic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Shock Waves and Ripple Effects
• Part II: Experience, Memory and Historiography