No Future. Punk Is Dead. That is what they sang and said. Yet as we approach fifty years of punk rock, it still endures, and even thrives. From “White Riot” to Pussy Riot, Never Mind the Bollocks to Nevermind, DIY (Do It Yourself) to never gonna die(t), punk rock has marked or stained—it marks or stains—our musical and cultural history and practice.
A project I have been working on for some years has now come to fruition. The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock, edited with the wonderful Gina Arnold in California, contains 32 chapters by authors from round the world, and around the disciplines. (Chapter-by-chapter authors and content listed here.) It’s now available as a hardback book. From the editors’ foreword….
Steve Severin, bassist with Siouxsie and the Banshees, observed in 1994 that “the farther [punk] recedes into the distance, the more important in seems” (quoted in Lydon 1994, 188)…. It seems that, in spite of the Sex Pistols’ bold declaration, “No future” (which also kind of meant “No past”), the musics and scenes of punk have had a future after all. In aspic throb punk confounds, even if its constancy may be its primary enduring gift of surprise.
Like other incendiary and innovative rock and roll moments, punk had no pretensions to longevity, yet it (has) endured. Unlike other rock and roll bursts, punk wrapped itself in an attitude of rejection of the past and future alike, the former gestural and ahistorical, the latter gestural and potentially self-defeating. The gesture is the link, not empty but resonant and energizing, even if one might think it incorrect twice over.
While for aging fans and subcultural adherents across many genres and scenes “music is about not only where they have been but also where they are going” (Bennett 2013, 32), it is a result of the culture of early punk’s eschatological halo that such questions of futurity and longevity as are being discussed here are especially pertinent.
Since it now has its own past—a lengthy (for popular music) history—and a future—evidenced by its ongoing capacity to attract new adherents—punk needs and warrants its studies more than ever.
This should not, though, be a hauntology: if punk had an originary impulse of rejection, whether generational or musical, what has become abundantly clear is that that impulse was not a one-off moment. It has spoken and appealed to subsequent generations as well (so: not one-off) and seemed somehow to keep speaking to early elements (not simply a moment).
Intriguingly, as it accrued a past, this has not seemed to weigh it down. Its reflexivity and humor might have contributed here: if you are in a punk club pogoing to a song like “I Am a Cliché,” perhaps when you become a cliché it’s not quite so bad? (Singer Poly Styrene’s solo spoken intro to the 1 min. 54 sec. song seeks to confirm its observation: “I am a cliché”—even though, of course, we may know that she of all punks was not: X-Ray Spex 1978.)…
As for its longevity, there is strength in the suggestion that “if punk can never quite give up the ghost, perhaps that’s because we are still trawling through the political and economic wreckage that prompted its emergence in the first place” (Brown et al. 2013, 1).
Also, punk was never simply a new rock and roll burst, could never be restricted to mere music: its broader cultural innovation, impact, and influence—from fashion to graphic design, enterprise to its (cloaked) entrepreneurship, its sometimes radical politics to its perhaps less tangible features such as ways of walking and talking, or attitudinality—contribute to and help explain its enduring significance.