Punk is Dead: Notes Toward the Apocalyptic Tone Adopted by Punk Rock

Philosophy, which once seemed passé, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed.

Theodor Adorno Negative Dialeics

I wonder which came first in 1979: Dick Hebdige's foundational analysis of the rise of punk rock, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, or the pronouncement by Crass, "Yes that's right, punk is dead," in their song "Punk is Dead"? The two events stand as memorials erected to mark the demise of punk even as they create some of the conditions that would prove essential for the survival of punk beyond its death. What does the pronouncement of death mean for punk culture and how might it be thought as a productive force that organizes the subculture in certain ways? What kinds of meaning and effects does it generate, and what ways of thinking and acting does it make more or less conceivable? Such questions become all the more pressing when one considers that punk has never quite ended, even if the death of punk has been proclaimed anew repeatedly since that time. Punk is powerfully attached to this rhetoric and its conceptual promise to do much more than simply pronounce its own demise. To what ends do punks speak about the death of punk? What desires does this tone represent? What does this apocalyptic rhetoric accomplish?

It might appear that to speak of the death of punk is an act of bad faith on my part or, worse, a failure to appreciate all of the ways it continues to inspire vibrant and strange expressions of music, community, and ethics. Punk remains alive and well globally in all sorts of local manifestations, and its effects continue to include the creation of identifiably punk music, even if what that sounds like changes for different times and places. It remains dangerous to be punk for some more than others, as the experiences of Pussy Riot in Russia show. Punk remains much more than music. It is an incubator, "a mechanism and a set of guiding principles" (Biel 3), that is as lively today as it ever was, with the audacity of Do It Yourself culture emboldening individuals to create the culture they want in creative and thoughtful ways that aspire to avoid exploitation and profit, appreciate community and strangeness, celebrate rebellion and newfound rituals, risk screwing up, and following one's ideals. Punk has perhaps never looked less like a dead end. Punks like Shawna Potter support others to confront harassment and intimidation and create positive environments with her book Making Spaces Safer as well as her activities fronting the band War on Women; David Norman releases hand-dipped diy cassette tapes and continues the tradition of truly independent non-commercial music distribution with Zegema Beach Records; and Reid Chancellor is expanding what it means to say "punk rock saved our lives" with his graphic novel Hardcore Anxiety: A Graphic Guide to Punk Rock and Mental Health. So, the question is not where did it go? How did it die? Punk never left, and it still provides a home for so many who might not find one elsewhere. Why, then, does punk so urgently and continually assert its demise?

From the beginning, there has been nothing but the end of punk. Crass is correct: punk was dead by 1979. In the uk, it had become mainstream with its dissident visual economy sublimated into fashion while its anti-commercial protest music became profit-generating discord for major record labels. Yet punk died too young and was never quite finished by this death. What continued in Europe, Canada, and the United States, and eventually all over the globe during the next forty years, distinguished itself from the birth and death of punk in the uk. When punk emigrated—if a spatial metaphor can be allowed for a transformation that involved much more than simple relocation and certainly none of the permanence this term might suggest—it was no longer rooted in the confrontational mode Dick Hebdige documented as a "resistance in which experienced contradictions and objections to ruling ideology are obliquely represented in [End Page...