Global Punk

Forty years after its inception, punk has gone global. The founding scenes in the United Kingdom and United States now have counterparts all around the world. Most, if not all, cities on the planet now have some variation of punk existing in their respective undergrounds, and long-standing scenes can be found in China, Japan, India, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Each scene, rather than adopting traditional interpretations of the punk filter, reflects national, regional and local identities. The first offering in Intellect's new Global Punk series, The Punk Reader: Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global is the first edited volume to explore and critically interrogate punk culture in relation to contemporary, radicalized globalization. Documenting disparate international punk scenes, including Mexico, China, Malaysia and Iran, The Punk Reader is a long-overdue addition to punk studies and a valuable resource for readers seeking to know more about the global influence of punk beyond the 1970s.

The punk movement of the 1970s to early 1980s is examined as an art movement through archive research, interviews, and art historical analysis. It is about pop, pain, poetry, presence, and about a 'no future' generation refusing to be the next artworld avant-garde, instead choosing to be the 'rear-guard'. Skov draws on personal interviews with punk art protagonists from London, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Berlin, among others the members Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris), members of Værkstedet Værst (The Workshop Called Worst), Nina Sten-Knudsen, Marc Miller, Diana Ozon, Hugo Kaagman, as well as email correspondence with Jon Savage, Anna Banana, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. A large portion of the discussed materials stem from the protagonists' private archives, while some very public-scandalous and spectacular-events are discussed, too, such as the Prostitution exhibition at the ICA in London in 1976 and Die Große Untergangsshow (The Grand Downfall Show) in West-Berlin in 1981. The examined materials cover almost all media: paintings, drawings, bricolages, collages, booklets, posters, zines, installations, sculptures, Super 8 films, documentation of performances and happenings, body art, street art. What emerges is how crucial the concept of history was in punk at that point in time. The punk movement's rejection of the tale of progress and prosperity, as it was being propagated on both sides of the iron curtain, evidently manifested itself in punk visual art too. Central to the book is the thesis that punks placed themselves as the rear-guards, not the avant-gardes, a statement which was in made by Danish punks in 1981, when they called themselves "bagtropperne". Behind the rear-guard watchword was the rejection of the inherent notion of progress that the avant-garde name brings with it; how could a "no future" movement want to lead the way? Although aimed at students and scholars of art, design, music and performance history, the subject as well as the author's accessible, occasionally playful style will no doubt draw readers with an interest in punk, music, and urban histories.

Art school Britain in the 1960s and 1970s — a hotbed of experimental DIY creativity blurring the lines between art and music. In “Blank Canvas”, multi-genre musician turned university lecturer Simon Strange paints a picture of the diverse range of people who broke down the barriers between art, life and the creative self. Tracing lines from the Bauhaus 'blank slate' through the white heat of the Velvet Underground and the cutting edge of the Slits, “Blank Canvas” draws on interviews with giants of the genre across music, gender and race spectrums, from Brian Eno to Pauline Black, Cabaret Voltaire to Gaye Advert. Illustrated is a picture of two decades erupting in a devastatingly diverse flow of outspoken originality as an eclectic range of musical styles and cultures fused. Does modern day music education suffocate the soul and inhibit the impact of the bohemian artist? This book asks questions of today's artists, musicians, and educators, looking for the essence of creativity and suggests how lessons learnt in and around art school education show a path for the cultural evolution of both musicians and artists hoping to create the future. Audience will include university students at all levels in popular music, popular culture and creative arts education. Academics, educators and researchers working in popular culture and creativity. May also appeal to a more general reader interested in popular culture and creativity. With a “Blank Canvas”, anything is possible...

This new collection is the second in the Global Punk series. Following the publication of the first volume the series editors invited proposals for a second volume, and selected contributions from a range of interdisciplinary areas, including cultural studies, musicology, ethnography, art and design, history and the social sciences. This collection extends the theme into new territories, with a particular emphasis on contemporary global punk scenes, post-2000, reflecting upon the notion of origin, music(s), identity, careers, membership and circulation. This area of subcultural studies is far less documented than more 'historical' work related to earlier punk scenes and subcultures of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This new volume covers countries and regions including New Zealand, Indonesia, Cuba, Ireland, South Africa, Siberia and the Philippines, alongside thematic discussions relating to trans-global scenes, the evolution of subcultural styles, punk demographics and the notion of punk identity across cultural and geographic boundaries. The book series adopts an essentially analytical perspective, raising questions over the dissemination of punk scenes and their form, structure and contemporary cultural significance in the daily lives of an increasing number of people around the world. This book has a genuine crossover market, being designed in such a way that it can be adopted as an undergraduate student textbook while at the same time having important currency as a key resource for established academics, postdoctoral researchers and PhD students. In terms of the undergraduate market for the book, it is likely that it will be adopted by convenors of courses on popular music, youth culture and in discipline areas such as sociology, popular music studies, urban/cultural geography, political history, heritage studies, media and cultural studies.

This book situates the British band Throbbing Gristle as both a lens and critical tool for England during the punk years and the Winter of Discontent. Using detailed archival research and testimony from key performances, it plots the impact and affective reach of the band. 20 b/w illus.

Punk Identities, Punk Utopias: Global Punk and Media seeks to unpack and illuminate punk as a trajectory of 'timelesness...as a set of diverse but confluent values and appropriations' that have both reflected and informed an increasingly complex, indefinable social, political and economic setting. Whereas the first two volumes in the series were broadly focused on local punk 'scenes' in a disparate range of countries and regions around the world, Punk Identities, Punk Utopias extends that critical enquiry to reflect broader social, political and technological concerns impacting punk scenes around the world, from digital technology and new media to gender, ethnicity, identity and representation. This new volume therefore draws upon the interdisciplinary areas of cultural studies, musicology and social sciences to present an edited text on the notion of identities, ideologies and cultural discourse surrounding contemporary global punk scenes. It is hoped that the books in the Global Punk series will add to the academic discussion of contemporary popular culture, particularly in relation to punk and the critical understanding of transnational and cross-cultural dialogue. Punk is a global phenomenon and the Global Punk series aims to reflect contemporary scenes around the world since the millennium. Punk and its subsequent variants, from hardcore to post-punk, have always crossed borders and become assimilated within countercultural practices with local, national and regional variations. Produced in collaboration between the Punk Scholars Network and Intellect Books, the Global Punk book series focuses on the development of contemporary global punk (c. 2000 onwards), reflecting upon its origins, aesthetics, identity, legacy, membership and circulation. Critical approaches draw upon the interdisciplinary areas of (among others) cultural studies, art and design, sociology, musicology and social sciences in order to develop a broad and inclusive picture of punk and punk-inspired subcultural developments around the globe. The series adopts an essentially analytical perspective, raising questions about the dissemination of punk scenes and subcultures and their form, structure and contemporary cultural significance in the daily lives of an increasing number of people around the world. This book has a genuine crossover appealed. It will be a key resource for established academics, postdoctoral researchers and Ph.D. students, as well as being suitable for adoption as an undergraduate student textbook. Suitable courses will include those in the fields of popular music, youth culture, sociology, urban/cultural geography, political history, heritage studies, media and cultural studies.

The book traces the story of how a song recorded in 1981 by a young punk rock band from a cultural backwater on the English-Welsh border, and released on a tiny independent record label, became famous in a Yugoslavia formed in the image of Marshall Tito? Why was it 30 years before the members of the band found out? How did this 'socialist' country have one of the most vibrant punk scenes in the world? Gloucester, England, 1981; multi-racial, teenage street-punk band, Demob, recorded and released what would become their best known and most enduring song, No Room For You. A rasping vocal told the story of the 1979 closure of a short-lived, punk rock venue at a disused motel on the edge of the provincial city. Depending on your mind-set, the lyrics were either a howl of rage at the injustice, a wail at the loss, or a love-song to an era. More than three decades later, the author—and Demob's bass player in 1981—set out to follow the song across a country that no longer exists. On the road he heard the life stories of the heroes of Yugoslavian punk and the punks themselves; from the Tito era, through the disintegration and wars, forced displacements and permanent exiles, to today's turbulent 'reconstruction. Who were 'Tito's punks' and who are they now? An unvarnished but also affectionate portrait of Yugoslavia in the years before its demise through to the present, seen through the unlikely lens of punk and punk rockers. Part travelogue, part history the book is both, and neither, of those things. Rather, it is a mural and soundtrack of a journey through a time and place which no longer exists. The latest addition to the Global Punk series from Intellect.