Never Mind the Norm - Punk as an Intellectual Vanguard

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.