Punk's Not Dead

Stacy Thompson Punk's Not Dead (on Roger Sabin et al., Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk [London: Routledge, 1999]) What is punk? This question recurs throughout the "punk project," understood as both punk itselfand the continuing attempts, both theoretical and non-, to explicate or elaborate upon it as a mass culture phenomenon. In his introduction to Punk Rock: So What? Roger Sabin offers this provisional definition: ... at a very basic level, we can say that punk was/is a subculture best characterised as being part youth rebellion, part artistic statement. It had its high point from 1976 to 1979, and was most visible in Britain and America. It had its primary manifestation in music—and specifically in the disaffected rock and roll of bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Philosophically, it had no "set agenda" like the hippy movement that preceded it, but nevertheless stood for identifiable attitudes, among them: an emphasis on negationism (rather than nihilism); a consciousness of class-based politics (with a stress on "working-class credibility"); and a belief in spontaneity and "doing it yourself." (3) With this definition as its backbone—and its privileging of music in particular—this collection of essays attempts to sketch the multiple forms of media of which punk is composed, providing a pair of axes to understand punk: as either a mode of economic resistance ("classbased politics") or a mode of aesthetic resistance ("negationism"). But what is being economically or aesthetically resisted? In the book's first half, "Shock Waves and Ripple Effects," most of the articles argue for expanding the possible constructions of punk beyond currently popular definitions advanced by cultural studies. They broaden the field of punk to encompass not only music and clothing styles but also the realms of art, fiction, novels, cyberpunk, film, and comics. Unfortunately, the majority do not develop beyond this initial move, serving primarily to demonstrate that several elements of "punk aesthetics," which the authors have difficulty describing or defining, have influenced non-musical forms of media. (Guy Lawley's article, "I Like Hate and I Hate Everything Else," exemplifies this tendency, tracking punk's influence into the non-musical domain of comics.) Because the authors assume— rightly, I believe—that punk endeavors to set itself over against some- 300 the minnesota review thing, that it enacts a form of aesthetic resistance, their inability to name the structure that it opposes forces their chapters to assume the shape of punk rhetorics, tracing punk tropes through various texrualities. Reversing the first section's overall method, Robert Garnett points out "art's" influence upon punk. Reacting specifically to Simon Frith and Howard Home's Art into Pop, Garnett's essay, "Too Low to be Low: Art Pop and the Sex Pistols," locates punk between "art" and "pop," claiming that the Sex Pistols were "punk at its best" (22) and employed the Situationist International's "art" technique of détournement against "pop culture." He argues: "Far more than simply exploiting the transgressive potential of pop style, the Pistols went further and exploited the space they occupied to refuse the illusory pleasures and fraudulent myths of the pop culture industry itself. It was the extent of this refusal that made it a détournement of pop" (22). Where Garnett finds Frith and Home privileging the popular, he privileges détournement as an effective technique of negation drawn from avant-garde art. Garnett claims thatpunk rock (or at least the Pistols) produced a form of aesthetic resistance to the "culture industry" as Adorno and Horkheimer describe it. Here, Garnett broaches one of the fundamental problems that constitutes the punk project: does aesthetic negation, and the Sex Pistols as an expression of it, serve as a viable strategy for opposing what Fredric Jameson labels "the massive Being of capital" (48), which no longer allows for an "outside" from which it can be "assaulted"? Garnett's invocation of this question for punk—into which I have inserted the term "capital"—is more important than his answer to it (an unequivocal "yes"), because punk's power lies not in a successful aesthetic negation of capitalism but in its failure to enact either an aesthetic or...