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- Volume 6, Issue 3, 2017
Punk & Post-Punk - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2017
Volume 6, Issue 3, 2017
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Musical protagonism: Beyond participation in punk and post-punk
More LessAbstractThis article applies the notion of participation in artworks to the phenomenon of punk and post-punk. Participation has been championed as a means of describing the activity of art moving on from a static sense of art/audience reception. The punk DIY call seems to be an expression of that move, that is, from passive audiences to active audience members turning into band members. Carol Bishop is a key theorist in the analysis of participation. However, Bishop moved from a positive position of promoting the value of participation to a much more negative reading of attempts at artistic engagement. It is significant that both positive and negative readings of these activities occurred a considerable amount of time after similar debates were worked through in practice in the arenas of punk and post-punk. The article uses personal testimony in terms of the motives and drives for people in 1977 and those looking back to that time. This testimony points to something qualitatively different from participation, in fact the activity of newly empowered musical protagonists using simple means of production to develop new contexts outside of the norm. The ‘bridge’ of the article draws on Wire’s ‘It’s So Obvious’ and the Au Pairs’ ‘It’s Obvious’ to argue that it is the expectation of creative/personal expression that marks punk and post-punk out from other musical forms – what can be termed musical protagonism. This article draws on the author’s Ph.D. research and the author’s contemporaneous experience as a member of a post-punk band. It is argued that subsequent academic/creative practices of the author, and many others, stem back to experiences of punk and post-punk. The article concludes with the suggestion of applying the concept of musical protagonists to the present day.
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Post-punk and alternative cabaret: Avant-garde, counterculture and revolution
By Ray CampbellAbstractAsk anyone to define the term ‘post-punk’ and they are likely to tell you it was a music genre that followed punk. Others will talk of its political voice, its rejection of commercial practices, its use of bricolage and its seriousness. Few will mention other post-punk forms, like alternative cabaret (alt-cab), which had similar cultural objectives that were inspired by the first wave of punk. Punk poetry, for example, straddled post-punk and alt-cab, and was more popular than stand-up comedy during the early years of the circuit. Like their counterparts in the post-punk music scene, many early alternative comedians and cabarettists were bricoleurs who rejected and/or deconstructed traditional entertainment styles, and experimented with form and content. This article discusses the structural similarities between the post-punk fields of music and entertainment, and how alt-comedians and cabarettists fused art, alternative theatre and politics to create new styles and comedy-aesthetic discourses. This article draws from a Bourdieusian paradigm, which is augmented by Wollen’s ‘The two avant-gardes’ and De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. To illustrate my argument, I will use case study and autoethnography.
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‘Tout Faux’: Parisian landscape and hardcore punk, 1983–87
More LessAbstractThough punk scholars, fans and critics have increasingly embraced France’s role in punk history, the Parisian hardcore era remains largely ignored. When hardcore arrived in Paris in the 1980s with the groups Kromozom 4 and Heimat-Los, a scene struggled to coalesce both because of suppressing factors and despite some ostensibly supportive ones. The city’s constricted urban geography prevented the growth and development of loud, noisy or otherwise outsider music scenes. Concurrently, escalating blight and street violence kept the hardcore scene from retaining membership and performance spaces. As this article argues, oral histories and collectivized accounts of the Parisian hardcore scene of the 1980s offer a powerful counternarrative to commonly accepted imaginaries of the city. It also posits Paris’ landscape as a potent actor in the hardcore scene’s landmark successes and failures.
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A honeycomb of opinion: An interview with Jeanette Leech
More LessAbstractJeanette Leech is a writer, researcher, DJ and music historian who contributes regularly to magazines including fRoots and Shindig!. She also writes extensively in the health and social care fields. Her first book about music, Seasons they Change (2010), a history of acid folk, was widely praised as ‘an engaging celebration of music from the fringes’. Her new book, Fearless (2017), is subtitled ‘the making of post-rock’. She lives in Canterbury, England.
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Post-punk poet: An interview with Dick Witts of The Passage
More LessAbstractRichard ‘Dick’ Witts is a professional musicologist, music historian and ex-leader of 1980s’ band The Passage. He was born in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, and studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music and briefly at Manchester University. During this time he was a member of the Hallé Orchestra as a percussionist. During the mid-1970s he wrote for the contemporary classical music magazine Contact and was also involved in the Manchester Musicians Collective. This led to contact with the growing punk scene and he formed The Passage, producing their recordings and singing on many of their releases. He presented the BBC television programme Oxford Road Show in the early 1980s and was also a reporter for BBC Radio 3. During the late 1980s he became involved in arts administration roles. He subsequently wrote a critical history of the Arts Council of Great Britain (1998), as well as books on Nico (1993) and The Velvet Underground (2006). Dick now lives in Liverpool and is reader in music and sound, and programme leader for the Music, Sound, Enterprise programme. The Passage: Post-Punk Poets (Witts 2017), a collection of lyrics and visual material, was recently published by Eyewear Publishing.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Kirsty Lohman, Pete Dale, Jim Donaghey and Jim DonagheyAbstractGlobal Punk: Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday Life, Kevin Dunn (2016) New York: Bloomsbury, 272 pp., ISBN: 9781628926040, p/bk, £23.00
References, Steve Ignorant and Matthew Worley (2017) Norfolk: Dimlo Productions, 160 pp., ISBN: 0992810313, p/bk, £14.99
Punk Rock Entrepreneur: Running a Business Without Losing Your Values, Caroline Moore (2016) Portland, OR: Microcosm, 128 pp., ISBN: 9781621069515, p/bk, £7.00
The Autonomous Life? Paradoxes of Hierarchy and Authority in the Squatters Movement in Amsterdam, Nazima Kadir (2016) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 232 pp., ISBN: 9781784994112, pbk, £19.99
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Gig Reviews
Authors: Michael Mary Murphy and Russ BestleyAbstractRebellion Festival, Blackpool Winter Gardens, Blackpool, 3–6 August 2017
Mekonville Festival, Pettaugh, Suffolk, 28–30 July 2017
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