This was originally written for drownedinsound.com.
“After all, the single biggest achievement of punk is that it was the first musical movement to try to place men and women on an even footing, which few movements before and since have done; look at the players in the UK between ’76 and ’81, or NYC’s No Wave (corresponding to UK post-punk). If, as this book argues, punk’s attitude, poses, and costumes (highlighting socio-economic bondage) are things that can be taken off by white people, but not by black, then we have to doubt the sincerity of the former, but the whole point of a DIY and/or youth movement is that it doesn’t ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’ but offers a vision, and a design for living, while it can.”
Stephen Duncombe
White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race
by Alexander Tudor
The central problem of punk is this: music that’s simple (to play, to record, to distribute, to imitate) lends itself to the expression of radical politics – challenging racism, sexism, ageism, capitalism, and so on – just as much as it lends itself to less deserving causes (say: embodying all of the above). Like ‘the black CNN’ (as Chuck D later called hip-hop) punk reported from the ground before anyone else… but sometimes you couldn’t tell the Rock Against Racism crowd from the skinheads. It’s a problem worth disentangling, and anyone acquainted with punk history knows that Britain’s own punk explosion coincided with the arrival of cultural studies, or its blossoming into something lucid, readable, and (as much as it ever could be) productive; as in, likely to feed into the more sophisticated manifestoes, and recognize actual political engagement.
