Burmese punks gather to celebrate on the eve of Thingyan, a four-day water festival ushering in Myanmar’s New Year, April 2012
In all these years, why has no movement superseded punk for pure outrage? Decades after the Sex Pistols appalled and thrilled, we continue to crave punk’s feisty, DIY spirit. As curators everywhere scrabble for tatty flyers and ’zines that most punks’ mums chucked years ago, a new book comes stomping like Godzilla into the busy new world of punk studies. It’s a big one, complete with its own exhibition, the Hayward Gallery’s current overview of punk graphic design, “Someday all the adults will die!”, and coincides with other offerings like Toby Mott’s limited edition book, 100 Fanzines/10 Years of British Punk, 1976-1985, published last year.
PUNK: An Aesthetic is a new book co-edited by punk lifer, Jon Savage and archivist and curator Johann Kugelberg. The book contains essays by William Gibson, the science fiction maven and cyber-punk populariser and artists Gee Vaucher, of Crass, and Linder Sterling. Anyone alert to music at the time will remember Sterling’s cover design for the Buzzcocks single “Orgasm Addict” a collage of an iron superimposed onto the head of a nude female torso, red lips in place of nipples. It’s largely through such visual material that the book sets out the story of punk. Drawing on the collections of 36 punk aficionados, it presents an exhaustive and intimate survey.
Such a heavyweight, glossy book might seem at odds with the images of the flimsy DIY fanzines and flyers found within it. But that is the point. Impudent young punk has grown venerable. Once rough, the pages it reproduces are now gloriously smooth and shiny. Mocked at the time, the punk aesthetic is everywhere today.
Not only ex-punks will want this monster tome. To youth like my students, who’ve grown up knowing music as something they pull from the air in digital downloads, the making of indie punk seven-inch records is as alien an exercise as shoeing a horse. How they will wonder at the handy guide to “Making Your Own Record” from a 1980 issue of Zigzag magazine. The indie mag shares its new business savvy with innocent excitement. Angry, funnyor cynical, the art and ephemera presented here in this book share an exuberant immediacy that’s oh so punk.
But where did punk come from? Savage and Kugelberg have dug up some juicy roots. They begin with the transgressive gender-bending of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the rock musical stageplay famously made into a film starring Tim Curry in 1975. Hippy cartoons from the underground press mix with confrontational pre-punk ranters, tawdry pulp paperbacks and scandal sheets. There’s an American anti-Beatles leaflet, and preciously, a 1964 Situationist fanzine by Guy Debord. This is the cultural soup from which punk emerged.
Curiosities from the movement’s heyday include flyers advertising gigs, like one promoting a night at CBGB, the legendary New York club: the group Television are pictured alongside the logo of the Stilettos (the band in which Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein met). It conjures up a New York City nightlife scene long since gentrified.
Disclosure time. I know Mott. I also used to edit Savage’s work at Sounds, the punk-rock weekly. But then the First Wave scene was so small that punky pundits have always been within gobbing range. However, this book’s lack of any straightforward historical context to clarify all the visuals gives an unhelpful feeling of insularity. Its cool, loose neutrality undermines the volume’s attempts at tracing what John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten, lead singer of the Sex Pistols) called “The meaning behind the moaning.” Thus, external factors that shaped punk—like the miners’ strike or Reaganomics—and epochal breakthroughs like the arrival of the first generation of self-determined women musicians do not register verbally or visually. Kugelberg stresses, “The history of the punk aesthetic cannot be told, only shown.” Oh dear, better not tell that to my Punk Aesthetics class!
The present wave of punk nostalgia is not simply a generation applauding its survival while it still can. It tells us something vital about the future, our own present—and punk’s past. In the closing essay, Savage notes, “Everybody thinks about punk in terms of social realism of the present day, as if it’s all about dole queues and so forth. But it was super futuristic.” This is true. Punk’s gritty survivalism that has such relevance now, always had an eye on tomorrow. No wonder that as the Exploited sang, “Punk’s not dead.”
