Never Mind the Norm - PUNK as an Intellectual Vanguard
Musician, Patti Smith, and photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe Sid Vicious of the "Sex Pistols"
Freedom began in the smoke-filled
pubs of London and burgeoned in the sordid bathrooms of the Bowery. It was
here that lovers of resistance joined to cry their sound of victory and restore
artistic sincerity. As the
commercialization of everyday life intensified during the 1970’s, meaning
became a lost art. The punk subculture
was an acknowledgement of this crisis, and essentially an aesthetic realization
of post modernity. Deconstructive fashion
signified the nihilism felt by many young adults, as well as the prevailing
sense of purposelessness. Intrinsically, the punk subculture was an
intellectual vanguard, a rejection of corruptible normality.
The word “punk” was originally a
descriptive term American music critics used to illustrate obscure garage bands
of the 1960’s. However, the term quickly
became associated with the musical and aesthetic landscape of Great
Britain. In October of 1971, art
students Malcolm McLaren and Patrick Casey opened a boutique called Paradise Garage in London’s Chelsea
district. The boutique originally sold
vintage records, magazines and memorabilia of the 1950’s. McLaren’s girlfriend, Vivienne Westwood, was enlisted
to assist with the design of clothing.
Her ingenious designs would later be attributed to establishing new wave
fashion as a conventional vogue. The store
was renamed SEX and began to
challenge social and sexual taboos.
Traditional designs included T-shirts depicting the image of Peter Cook,
a notorious British rapist.
Additionally, a piece of clothing referred to as the Anarchy shirt featured silk embellishments
adorned with the face of communist figure, Karl Marx. British media theorist, Richard Hebdige,
noted that “despite its proletarian accents, punk’s rhetoric was steeped in
irony.” Intentionally torn clothing
symbolized the imminent disintegration of British society. Furthermore, the
aesthetic movement was a dismissal of western consumption. By recycling societal imagery for satirical
purposes, the movement disassembled the prevailing interpretations of cultural
icons. Punk musicians fulfilled this
revelation when they became scapegoats for the deposition of civilized
order. Essentially, they strategically
maneuvered institutions of mass consumption against themselves in order to
expose the ill-fated nature of society.
As the youth of
Britain relished in the disaffection of Westwood’s fashion, a musical
revolution had concurrently begun. The
Sex Pistols formed in London in 1975 and disassembled the traditional notions
of what constituted “rock n roll.” Johnny
Rotten’s vocals were characterized by their working- class nodes, whilst the
other members publicly displayed their instrumental incompetence. In 1977, the band released their iconic
single, “God Save The Queen”, which coincided with the celebration of Queen
Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee. The song
compared Queen Elizabeth’s political sentiments to that of a “fascist regime”
and essentially was an assault on the British monarchical system. Vocalist Johnny Rotten noted that, “You don’t
write ‘God Save The Queen’ because you hate the English race. You write a song like that because you love
them, and you’re fed up with them being mistreated.” Malcolm McLaren referred
to the Sex Pistols as “Dickensian” figures, for they humorously personified a
sense of disenfranchisement akin to the characters of Dickens’ novels. McLaren even managed the Sex Pistols, and in
doing so, generated exposure to his and Westwood’s store, SEX. Whilst the punk
movement denounced mercenary capitalism, McLaren and Westwood commercially
prospered. Additionally, the rise of the Sex Pistols indicated
a postmodern transformation in the emergence of subcultures, as the “reality”
of youthful dissent and the media’s portrayal of “morality” became
indistinguishable. Prior to the
formation of a punk subculture, the British media had already begun
sensationalizing the dissolution of purity.
This led to the satirical image of depravity found in the musical
construct of the Sex Pistols.
In New York City, punk took center
stage at a dingy Bowery bar called CBGB’s.
Whilst the CBGB originally intended to feature country, bluegrass and
blues artists, it quickly became a forum for American punk acts, such as
Television, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Blondie and the Ramones. The punk scene of New York City’s Lower East
Side drew influence from an assortment of ideological principles and literary
figures, most notably the Beat generation.
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and
William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch provided
the impetus for many punk musicians to reject cultural normality, of which they
found artistically inhibiting. Essentially,
as Allen Ginsberg noted in the poem Howl,
“They saw the best minds of their generation destroyed by madness”, and
wished to restore authenticity. Furthermore,
transcendentalist literature, such as Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience greatly influenced
the cerebral composition of New York City’s punk landscape. As Thoreau stated, “Disobedience is the true
foundation of liberty. The obedient must
be slaves.” This sentiment echoed
through the movement’s political construct.
The Velvet Underground’s experimental yet melodic musical structure of
the 1960’s was also attributed to the formation of the New York punk
movement. Pop artist and manager of the
Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol illustrated the relation between artistic
sincerity and celebratory culture in his artwork, which was a chief element of the
subculture. As a result, the Bowery became
the cornerstone of punk history.
As an intellectual vanguard, punk
transformed the social scenery of both Britain and the United States. In their search for meaningful expression,
punk musicians engaged spectators as contributing participants, rather than
simply consumers of mass media. The
sub cultural movement was in essence a postmodern reply to the political
disintegration of society, the cry of the disenchanted souls.
