An overview of the genre

The term ‘punk’ can be used adjectively in order to qualify a range of activities. Recent academic analyses of punk phenomena point towards the possibility of there being punk politics, punk journalism (such as the work of Lester Bangs), punk clothing and fashion (including both the haute couture work of Vivienne Westwood and Zandra Rhodes and the no less spectacular clothing of punk bands and everyday punks), punk poetry (as performed by the Mancunian wordsmith John Cooper Clarke), punk cartoons (such as the commercially successful comic Love & Rockets), punk art (the work of‘young British artist’ Gavin Turk or the Sex Pistols’ art director Jamie Reid), punk fanzines (such as Sniffin Glue), punk fiction (Gideon Sams or Stewart Home), punk cinema (Derek Jarman's Jubilee) and even punk etiquette (which often involved spitting). What these cultural forms have in common is debateable, with the majority of the leading commentators disagreeing as to what connects these disparate cultural forms. For Roger Sabin, punk involved ‘an emphasis on negation (rather than nihilism); a consciousness of class-based politics (with a stress on “working class credibility”); and a belief in spontaneity and “doing in yourself” ‘ (Sabin 1999b: 3). For Jon Savage, British punk was a form of ‘dole queue rock’ that was directly related to the economic and social upheavals that the country was going through at the time (Savage 1994a). For Greil Marcus, punk was a combination of situationist and anarchist politics (Marcus 1989). For Stewart Home, there is no ‘core’ to punk rock at all - it is a fluid category with its boundaries subject to ‘ongoing renegotiation’ (Home 1995: 7-9).

While discussions of the non-musical elements of the British and American punk explosions of the 1970s are of interest, this chapter will concentrate primarily on punk rock as a music genre. In generic terms, there are essentially two contrasting styles, and these contrasting two styles are seen on both sides of the Atlantic. The first of these styles is a plebeian or social-realist style. Plebeian punk rock places a lyrical emphasis on providing an exposition of working-class dissatisfaction with ‘normal’ society, and frequently focuses upon concerns that are particular to young people.