Rebellion Into Pop Culture

Alone on a corner under a street lamp a small, dingy building, with a large white sign on the front lies cloaked in what seems to be a glaze of silence. However, the doors jolt open to a dimly-lit room screaming with noise. Suddenly, being out of place seems illogical as leering faces peer from the darkness. Women with powdered-white faces and eye make-up covering half of their face; men with giant, beautifully colored Mohawks, in green, and blue, and red and wearing just as much blackening eyeliner and rose-colored blush as the women. A teenager leaps out from the crowd with fangs stenciled on his face and a set of liberty spikes so tall, you’re afraid he might bore one deep into the depths of your petrified soul; as beer bottles and spit fly towards the band, his doc marten boots hit the floor with resounding noise as he jumps around, turning a once peaceful space into a violent slamming pit. One boy, trying to lift a speaker and throw it across the room with one of his friends wears an armband that glaringly displays the Nazi symbol on a ripped patch, safety-pinned to his jacket. People slam into each other and scream, standing around the stage in plastic bag dresses and vinyl or rubber pants and skirts, as the lights dim even further and a spotlight announces the leader of this unlikely group of misfits: Richard Lloyd “Hell”. In all his glory, mutilated shirt and pants, torn apart and stapled back together again, a razorblade hanging around the necklace dangling from his scrawny body, Richard Hell ransacks the small stage at CBGB + OMFUG along with Tom Verlaine, and so sparks, with their band Television, the beginning of the punk movement and the popularity of a subculture invested in obscene ideas.

The concert at CBGB’s, at the time a small, relatively unknown club in New York, was to be the decisive beginning to a movement that had been growing for years, but only recently received any sort of status. It was a movement of rebellion that spread like wild-fire throughout New York and the United States; a movement that fit like a puzzle piece with the history of revolution against former generations that had been prevalent throughout history. As far as concerts went, “sex, drugs, and rock n’roll were not the revolution; they were the fun the revolution promised.”

The punk movement began in the mid 1970s. Those kids that were involved in the punk movement had been babies when Bob Dylan was singing about war and peace and had been preteens during the Vietnam War, but they had memories and they hated the “corporate rock” that had been created since then. The music behind the movement, the part that most of its followers see as the part that had the largest influence on the movement because it got the message across so clearly, was a reaction against so many things in itself. There was something entirely different about punk rock music. “Bands still used guitars, drums, and a singer, but not in any ‘conventional’ way. They played louder, faster, and harder than any rock music that came before it. Punk music used the basic elements of what was known as rock n’roll and tore it apart and created them into something new.” With a pounding eighth note beat on the guitar or bass and shouted vocals, the message came across loud and clear. This was a movement against the superficial disco music, the grandiose heavy metal, the progressive rock and “arena rock”, and of course the hippie counterculture that had been labeled as a hypocritical failure in their eyes. These bands were showing people that anything could be done; that so long as you had a message, you could do it too. “They made a point to teenagers alienated by inflated prog bands of the era that style, not musicianship, was important.”

There is no decisive place where punk seems to have started, but it all came together in the United States some time in the mid 1980s as a huge new wave genre of music. Some argue that punk was an offshoot of the beats movement, which had openly confronted issues that other people refused to look at, while others saw its birth in the Dadaist movement in Zurich, Switzerland, which had argued that there was no value in a civilization that was capable of great devastations like war. Whatever the starting motivation might have been, the movement grew to the point of mayhem in the 1980s with bands like The Sex Pistols in London and The New York Dolls and The Ramones in the heart of New York. For the most part it was youth rebellion against a certain society that had oppressed them for so long and while it seemed like a regional movement, where the punks in London could not relate to the punks in the United States because they were rebelling for utterly different reasons, somehow they were all united under a generalized group of ideals that lay underneath the surface. Of course, like any other movement, punk branched off to form many different styles and forms, but its true identity, the one from which it came, remained the same as it always had. In the early 1980s, punk began to become somewhat commercialized as major labels began to finally recognize the off-tempo music and rebellious lyrics of the music involved in the movement.

They were not the only ones who began to partake of the group. Artists like Andy Warhol, who created album covers for the Velvet Underground and even had them tour with him for his exhibit, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, used the movement in their artwork and thus a new style, surrealism was born. Artists of the time made punk famous and album covers did as well. With the usual messiness of punk culture, there were two typographic scripts for album covers: the graffiti or spay can script and the ransom note script, which was made famous by The Sex Pistols cover for their album Never Mind the Bullocks. It was later said that, “It was precisely because punk never claimed to be art that it became one of the more important artistic statements of its time”. It was precisely because punk never claimed to be anything specific, that its followers never wanted to be labeled, that its leaders hated to be categorized, that it became so huge.

Punk culture called upon each and every person to be their own person and not follow the masses as one stereotyped style. Punk was a hard term to define, even at the time, because of its necessity for originality in everything. It first appeared in Fusion Magazine in an essay written by Nick Tosches in 1970 called “The Punk Muse: The True Story of Protopathic Spiff Including the Lowdown on the Trouble-Making Five Percent of America’s Youth”, but did not become a popularized label for the movement until Dave Marsh used it in Creem Magazine. There were critics to the movement who defined the punk movement as Mary Harron did, saying it was “the spectacle of middle-class children dressing up in a fantasy of proletarian aggression and lying desperately about their backgrounds”. But there really was no one definition of the movement, simply because of its message: choose your own style. Billie Joe Armstrong of the band Green Day showed this ambiguity through a story:

A guy walks up to me and asks, “What’s punk?” So I kick over a garbage can and say, “That’s punk!” So he kicks over a garbage can and asks, “That’s punk?” and I say, “No that’s a trend!”

The definition was hazy at best, but once the movement became popular and stereotypes, as they often do, became an engrained part of the movement, it was not hard to tell what a punk looked like or what he believed. While music was definitely a major part of the cultural aspect of the punk movement, it did not define the movement. There were many more factors that drew the attention of the youth that held up the movement. There was more to the appeal of the punk lifestyle than just delinquency and rebellion as well; the popularity of the movement in the 1980s and 1990s was in large part due to brilliant marketing skills and a complex set of ideas about society and the world in which one functioned.

At a time when society was questioning the government and the new generation was one of lost souls, it seemed, the punk lifestyle became a definitive voice. It reminded teenagers everywhere that the music that had once been used by the former generation to rebel against war and violence and submission had become a part of popular culture and was losing its meaning. Greil Marcus writes in his book Lipstick Traces, “Youth revolt was a key to social revolt, and thus the first target of social revolt could be rock n’roll. Rock music was the place teenagers could turn to, because it had been the place their parents had turned to and revolution was a major part of rock history already. Punk became a way for people to express their frustration with society and it seemed logical. After all, “for the young everything flowed from rock n’roll (fashion, slang, sexual styles, drug habits, poses) or was organized by it, or was validated by it.” America had been a progressive nation for decades and the punk movement was seen as a progressive movement in itself, although it held up ideals that were seen as farther left than any party at the time.

Anarchy became an engrained political message in the culture of punk. Its supporters and leaders expounded serious anarchist and pacifist ideas and supported issues like animal rights, feminism, anti-war movements, pacifistic claims except for class war, and direct action. The definition of anarchism, according to Emma Goldman was, “The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence and are therefore wrong and harmful as well as unnecessary.” This definition is optimistic of finding a world where every person is free to think and do as they like without the oppressive tendencies of human beings. After all, many punks during the time were even vegans because they felt the brutal way in which humans treated animals was psychologically connected to the way humans oppressed each other.

While there were offshoots of the anarchist movement that were not part of punk ideals, such as Green Anarchists, who rejected all industrial technology, the main idea of anarchy, even with the realm of punk culture was a “liberation of the total human being and the imagination.” Emma Goldman talks about consciousness of one’s self in her essay on anarchy and mentions that the only time when we can get away from oppressive features is when we finally are conscious of ourselves. Greil Marcus agreed with her in his book, saying that “Boredom is counterrevolutionary…all you lack is the consciousness of what you know.” Anarchy said that humans were corrupted by authority figures, who in turn abused power, which included religion, property, and government among other things. Emma Goldman, a popular anarchist defined these three things as, “Religion, the dominion of the human world, property, the dominion of human needs, and government, the dominion of human conduct, representing the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horror it entails.”

Anarchy was not a new claim or idea by any means, but it seemed that punk culture took anarchy and made it attractive to the masses, through theatrical display and absurdity. The underlying point that this school of thought was out to prove was that man was something and the powers, the authority figures, were not everything. It was a call for a revolution in thinking, because “no real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.”

The military force was seen as the most extreme form of state power, although not many saw the contradiction in the fact that most of punk culture was violent. Anarchy was based, for the most part, on authority and its enslavement of the individual. It was a philosophy that maintained that “God, the state, and society [were] nonexistent and their promises null and void since they could only be fulfilled through man’s subordination.” Punks saw the subordination of human beings as one of the major failures of life: they were independent thinkers, who took much of their thought from philosophers like those of the existentialist school of thought.

While anarchy did not deny the existence of society nor the necessity for a society, they saw recent years as a struggle between society and the individual, in which one had to come out above the other and neither realized that in order to survive, both were necessary.

Anarcho-punks, who saw the subordination of human beings and the government as oppressive parts of culture, pointed at the United States involvement in Asian and South American politics and the United States support for an oppressive regime in South Africa. In order to mock this in the music, punks chose satirical pseudonyms that had meaning behind them. For instance, Jello Biafra, the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys named himself for the news that the United States had sent shipments of Jell-O to Biafra, Africa calling it foreign aid. The band Fugazi took their name from a word meaning “crisis situation” as well. Not only were the names meant to be political, bands formed for the express purpose of calling out the wrong-doings of the government and aligned themselves with various political groups. The band MC5 (Motor City Five) formed in Detroit in 1965 and by 1967 had connected themselves with a radical political group called the White Panthers. In 1968 they also played a concert for the people who rioted at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Other bands acted out their disgust for society in other ways; Iggy Pop would hit himself with the microphone while in concert, cut his skin with pieces of glass, and smear his wounds with peanut butter, while the New York Dolls went so far as to cross-dress for every one of their shows with heavy lipstick and eye-liner and stacked heels. Bands wrote songs that satirized the occurrences within the country and without. The lyrics and beliefs within the music were the most important part, but the idea of the music and the type of music that it was was important as well: messy, sloppy, overdone. They were all features of the punk movement. They were the epitome of the punk movement. As Greil Marcus said in his book, “Music seeks to change life; life goes on; the music is left behind; that is what is left to talk about.” In their very own country, one could see the police brutality and racism that had been around for decades and finally, teenagers wanted to do something about it, because they were tired of being trampled upon and ignored.

The violence behind punk culture led to something known as “hactivism”, because anarchy called for direct action under all circumstances and if violence was necessary, then it was the lesser of the two evils. Bombing gas stations, destroying animal research labs, altering billboards to include political messages, and destroying private property were all acceptable forms of violence, especially the destruction of private property, because they rejected materialism.

Some might have questioned why the anarchist school of thought was so appealing to so many youth and teenagers at the time. In a society and time where the boredom of middle-class life and the hypocrisy of a former generation had completely engulfed them, the ideals that anarchy stood for seemed logically the only reasoning that had not yet been tried and nobody would deny something that offered freedom to every individual and a consciousness of one’s self. When there were millions of people dying because of wars and so that the economy of the country could thrive through factories and working, staying alive was appealing. In 1966 alone, 50,000 were killed and 100,000 were wounded, and every year the numbers increased. Punks were rebelling against all the factors in society that were bringing down the human race. They saw theirs as the losing end of a bargain. As Emma Goldman says in her essay on anarchism, “Poor America, to what avail is all her wealth if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy; gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey.” When a school of thought stood for “a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that would guarantee to every human being free access to the Earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to the individual desires, tastes, and inclinations”, how much more liberation could one ask for?

Because of the ideals expressed in the anarcho-punk world, punks worked to be independent in every way possible and so they expounded a culture of DIY ethics or Do-It-Yourself Culture. Behind this was the motto “Don’t hate the media, become the media”. This culture was spread throughout everything. Fashion was all about creating something new, forcing people to question what acceptable appearance was and to stop and listen. It was about the simplicity of the movement and fashion saw that through. “Dispensing with costly infrastructure or inventory (namely formal training or expensive gear), DIY culture spread through bold gestures like punk’s spiked hair or beats, for a community defined by the ideas behind the gestures.”

DIY culture was a way to keep punk as a subculture and not a pop culture. By creating their own record companies and print media and organizing their own concerts, they were able to avoid being pigeon-holed into a category and forgotten about. It was more than a genre of music, but a way of life as well, and that was the appeal behind it. The band Crass was a big supporter of the DIY ethic and of not being labeled. Their motto was “DIY not EMI” (EMI being a major mainstream record company, the likes of which punk hoped to never give in to. Penny Rimbaud hated the label “punk” and even created his own record label called Crass Records and Resistance Productions, which lived from 1980 to 1994 and helped to popularize many punk bands that were struggling under mainstream resistance.

The point behind DIY culture was to mock mainstream and to become accessible on a different level from mainstream culture. John Leland relates this to the artwork of the time, saying, “Like Warhol, DIY manipulated the folk imagery of mass culture, removing it from its normal context and holding it up for inspection or ridicule.” Conceptual art was becoming a popular notion during the time and it was often compared to the punk movement, because in many ways they were the same. Jim Curtis explains that conceptual art and punk music had in common their disdain for technique and the idea that everybody could create art. That was the defining part of the DIY ethic; “if you believed everybody could be a star, and did your creating behind a microphone, you were into punk.” Conceptual art was all about non-sensical ideas and being able to do whatever you liked as opposed to staying in some rigid definition of what you were meant to be and punk was very similar in that aspect. In conceptual art, the idea was the only thing that mattered—“the art did not have to exist at all. In conceptual art there were no objects or performances—just mind games.” And punk was all about a mind set; they complimented each other a great deal.

The most unacceptable idea was that one would sell-out of the punk culture of inspection and ridicule. The term sell-out defined one who compromised their own ethical parameters in exchange for something material such as wealth or status or power, and because of the danger of becoming a labeled stereotype, punks created their own small world that could function independently of the rest of mainstream society. This was the formation of independent labels, venues, distributors, and a whole subculture that existed without the help of society’s wealth.

Because of the DIY culture and the ideals behind anarchy, creating a separate isolated society, but also being able to use mainstream for what it was worth was an ideal situation and that is just what they tried to do. “Though the rhetoric was often rebellious, most of the work did not so much oppose mass culture as commandeer its resources—brand logos, celebrity faces, publicity, and mass media—to build networks. This was a way to turn away from mass culture without becoming irrelevant or invisible,” says John Leland. It was a simple matter of destroying mainstream from the inside out. Although many followers were unhappy at the integration into mainstream society, such as the point when The Clash’s re-release of their hit “Should I stay or Should I go” was used in a Levi’s jean commercial, the justification of the commercialization aspect was that working through the major label system was a necessary evil to allow for the widest dissemination of an artistic message like punk.

The formation of independent labels, such as the one Penny Rimbaud formed became popular during this time, in order to keep the music in their own culture and in order to not give in to big businesses that anarchy was supposed to oppose. Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion also created his own record label called Epitaph Records, along with many others. Generally it was members of bands that created their own independent labels, in order to support other bands and to publicize their own band. However, many other independent labels were created including Factory Records, Fast Product, Graduate Records, I.R.S, Virgin, and Stiff. Rough Trade Records, which began to press discs in 1976 became famous for “offering an alternative to the music establishment so a record could be available that otherwise wouldn’t.” Among others, they recorded the Ulster band, Stiff Little Fingers.

Independent labels often had their own clubs or were affiliated with certain clubs as well. Clubs were also formed independently specifically for the purpose of spreading punk music, but often times clubs that were small became huge venues for punk bands for various reasons. One of the oldest punk clubs is CBGB + OMFUG’s, which originally stood for Country, Blue Grass Blues and Other Music For Urban Gourmets. However, CBGB’s became famous for punk rock because of Television, a band formed from Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. They had been searching for a venue to play at and when they were offered the chance to play at CBGB’s under the provision that they were a rock and blue grass band, they agreed. However, once on stage, there was little to be done and the crowd loved them. CBGB’s became one of the most respectable punk rock clubs, with famous bands including The Buzzcocks, The Sex Pistols, and The Ramones. The Electric Circus, and 924 Gilman Street were two other famously punk clubs, with the former being a New York nightclub, renowned for its basement called The Dom, where “all the painters, all the poets, everybody in the world showed up”, and the latter being in Berkeley, California and being celebrated for more recent punk bands of the 1990s such as Operation Ivy, Rancid, and Green Day. The allure of punk concerts was that they were cheap and easily accessible. Fugazi was well-known for keeping their concert prices at five dollars a ticket and without an age limit, for never selling merchandise at their shows, and for never requesting backstage catering, limousines, or other special treatment. In this way, the bands were seen as down-to-earth average teenagers, and were able to easily relate to the plights of the youth they performed for.

Written publicity was in huge demand as well. While bands drew a good amount of publicity from major newspapers and magazines, like The Ramones, who brought out The New York Times, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, The Aquarian, SoHo Weekly News, NME, and Melody Maker to see one of their concerts at CBGB’s club in New York, magazines were wanted that did not blow the music out of proportion and paid attention to the message as well as the beats or how popular the band had the potential to become. Because of this, fanzines or what are sometimes known as ‘zines were created. Popular ones included Greg Shaw’s Who Put the Bomp?, Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue, Punk Search and Destroy, Maximum Rock n’Roll, Profane Existence, Flipside, and the popular Factsheet Five which listed most punk fanzines at the time. Many of the fanzines were politically driven and most were satirical and humorous as well as serious. They often contained demos, interviews, comics, Xerox art, poetry, fiction, news, investigative reporting, political agendas, and schedules for clubs showing punk bands.

Although later, many major businesses tried to recreate the image of the ‘zine on their own magazines, the quality would never be quite the same. Joseph Fox Communications, Inc. was a company that tried to become a big business that took over the underground subculture of punk by emulating the style of fanzines through their magazine entitled New Route: The New Route to New Music; however, it failed. Douglas Joseph, their editor-in-chief, even said in an editorial that “the music industry is big business”, but no matter how many tried to exploit the inner workings of the punk subculture, few were able to pull it off; all it did was publicize further the name of punk and the culture behind it.

With all the publicity the philosophy was receiving and the number of people that were drawn to it, many punk bands were able to hit the charts and were made famous because of this. Once they were heard, it was difficult to take the message away from a society that was craving the rebellion that punk philosophy offered. The Ramones’ highest position on the charts was 111, The Clash had two hits, “Train in Vain” in 1980 and “Rock the Casbah” in 1982, and Fugazi made the top 200 charts in 1983 with their record “In on the Kill Taker”. It was easy to see that punk culture was gaining a foothold in the merciless arena of mainstream society and it was even in the beginning of the movement when in October of 1976, EMI Records offered The Sex Pistols £40,000 for a recording contract with them. The second Sex Pistols album, Never Mind the Bullocks sold 150,000 copies in five days and had three top hits, including “Anarchy in the UK”, which hit number two, “Pretty Vacant” which hit number six, and “Holiday in the Sun” which hit number eight. While many bands turned down offers because of the thought of being known as sell-outs within the genre that they so heavily influenced, many accepted simply in order to spread their message, whether political, satirical, or just plain funny to as many people as possible.

Everywhere around, punk was becoming a highly priced item on the market. People were catching on to the trend. By June 1977, you could by gold safety pins from Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller; you could buy gowns with stylized rips and glitter-studded safety pins from Zandra Rhodes, a famous British designer; and Mademoiselle magazine had a four page spread on the question “Punk or preppy?” in its June 1980 issue. On August 1, 1981, a new concept that “fused DIY culture and corporate branding” was added to publicity factors that brought up punk culture. A new cable television network was introduced called MTV. With the widespread audience that MTV attracted, the majority being teenagers and youth, the wave of punk that occurred in the mid 1980s could very well have been foreseen by numerous people. The channel sold punk for everything it was worth and used everything in their power to turn rebellion into money. They turned punk rock music into something of a commodity, but it was not only the music; it was the ideas as well. “The essence of punk or hip-hop was not the products, but the ideals and aesthetic sensibilities as with brand advertising,” said Lance Jensen, and that was what punk became. A product for the masses and its popularity burst onto the scene.

It is hard to pinpoint just exactly which of these factors made the most influence, as they were all interspersed and connected to each other. Without one variable, all of the pieces might have fallen apart. The punk culture looked critically at the issues of the time including youth unemployment and oppression of the lower classes. It was a movement of rebellion against certain styles, politics, and music during a time when the previous countercultural movement had failed to follow through with their message of peace and love. The violence behind the punk movement was a reaction against that peace and love that had failed so miserably. Although many had a hard time picturing American punks as anything but spoiled middle-class kids who had no idea what they were talking about, what those critics did not see was the huge, looming message behind the music and complaints of these kids. They had enthusiasm for their cause and their energy sparked a movement so influential in history that even today many teenagers try to emulate the music of that time. Marketing and the ideas behind the music were important to the influence and appearance that punk gave and the attractive quality it perpetuated. Even without corporate co-optation, however, rebellion struck hard for a generation that was almost lost, but somehow found a way to express themselves. The point of the punk generation was defined by what Richard Hell said at one of his concerts, “If you just amass the courage that is necessary, you can completely invent yourself. You can be your own hero, then everybody is gonna be able to communicate with each other on a real basis rather than a hand-me-down set of societal standards.”

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