Punk Rock Subculture Gets Eaten Up By the Mainstream
by Francesca Olsen
Imagine a counterculture revolution that has been strong enough to last for thirty years, span five generations of young people, and continue to disgust and attack mainstream values while acclimating itself at the same time. Imagine its chief output is music, second fashion, third the model of participation of active members. This counterculture upholds values that might also be seen at Harvard: lifestyles which include no drugs, alcohol or promiscuous sex and pride and value put upon independence and humble success in one's field. Members are encouraged to start their own projects, even their own businesses, and they are fiercely competitive about it.
This counterculture also can embrace drugs, sex and violence, destruction of public and personal property, even acceptance into mainstream culture. It honors anarchistic ideas and peppers them with plenty of nihilism. Members of this subculture take pride in their disrespect for mainstream culture and its mainstream members.
Welcome to punk rock, the genre-expanding, almost all-encompassing underground journey from 1976 to here, and maybe even before and almost certainly after. Adolescents and young adults have seemed to pick up this subculture and drag it from year to year, passing it on to the younger, and then again. It's lived in a million different forms, and has been ever-present in underground society -- and has been primary in the social subcultural learning of teenagers for years, and years, and years. It's even been made the occasional phenomena in mainstream society. Punk is the jewel of underground culture, and since it's been around so long, bits of it come out everywhere if you look hard enough.
Punk is a relevant subculture to study because of two things: it was the first revolution in rock music that was actually against rock music, and because it has been the model for the underground music “scene” ever since; every small musical movement that followed punk was essentially made in its image. Punk was brought to global eye by small groups of passionate individuals in two cities with independent publications and venues that were previously not utilized, and by attracting a group of youth who were desperate to make something their own in a culture quickly being taken over by corporate mechanisms.
From the late 1970's to today, television and advertising have practically become all the culture we have. The nature of youth is to make one's own culture, which becomes harder and harder as our popular culture becomes all-encompassing. This can result in subcultures which go violently against norms but burn out quickly for the very same reason.
Rock stars on MTV with spiky hair are, whether they know it or not, emulating early punk rockers such as Johnny Rotten and Richard Hell. Anyone who goes to CBGB's to see anyone play a show is honoring the very beginning of punk -- Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine and Johnny Thunders, not to mention the Ramones, helped make the venue famous. It could go on and on, for pages and pages.
By now, a lot of the ideas and practices of traditional punk have been bastardized for popular consumption, but a lot of different related musical and social movements have come out of this. Punk may have never truly been erased from contemporary culture because it's never done anything; there have been no civil rights advances or government overthrows from young, punk America, ever. But the social hierarchy! The posturing! The creativity and the simplicity! The idea that anyone can form their own scene, make their own record or magazine or anything else, and be heralded by the youthful underground is tantalizing, especially to teens who crave an in-group, and punk is where much of that attitude started. In punk, it's called DIY (do it yourself). The term represents the idea of an independent set of norms and values, and an independence from mainstream advertising, companies, and culture.
In any subculture there are snobs. There are separatists, and there are retreatists, and there is breaking down again and again. The separatism and elitism of punk is responsible for its umpteen sub genres. Punk spawned hardcore punk, and its mainstream counterpart, New Wave, which had a lot of pull in 80's mainstream culture. Hardcore punk spawned second generation hardcore, and grindcore was spawned from that. In-between, emo, riot grrl, grunge, no-wave and more came from between other musical lines directly related to punk and its spirit and values and music. This is the story of how elitism and separatism in underground music has helped carry a very antiestablishment musical idea to mainstream culture.
The general agreement is that punk started in New York City, in the Bowery, in 1976, and then was brought to London in 1977 by engenue Malcolm McLaren. In the beginning it was garage rock; bands like the Dead Boys and the New York Dolls were essentially low-fi rock bands which played shorter songs. Since by 1977 the progressive rock music that filled radio airwaves was complicated, long and showy, a shorter song was less of an artistic decision than backlash to the high horse of era rock n' roll.
