ABSTRACT
Punk was an approach to pop music and a youth sub-culture that emphatically came to public attention, at least in the UK, in the summer of 1976 (not least when the interviewer Bill Grundy encouraged the punk bank the Sex Pistols to utter extremely rude words during a live, teatime, regional news programme). As music, punk represented a return to basics, in reaction to the pretensions, and predominantly middle-class appeal, of such ‘pomp rock’ bands as Pink Floyd and Yes. In the heady days of 1976, musicianship was not at a premium. Guitars were bought from Woolworth’s, and a working knowledge of three chords was generally considered to be sufficient. Legends of singers being three songs ahead of the rest of the band proliferated. As a subculture, punk responded to growing youth unemployment throughout the 1970s. Culturally, it drew on diverse influences, including the dress associated with 1960s mods, Rastafarianism, New York rock, and even glam rock. Hebdige analyses this style as tying together disparate fragments of culture, without any attempt to generate a new and coherent meaning out of those elements (1979). Its meaning, paradoxically, lay in the refusal and subversion of meaning. The safety-pin became emblematic of this style, and its attitude may usefully be summed up in the Sex Pistols’ line: ‘I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it’. (A darker side is expressed in the anthem, ‘Looking through Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’. Gary Gilmore was a prisoner on death row, who requested execution.) Sadly, punk was rapidly codified and incorporated into mainstream culture. By the end of 1976, the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes was appropriating elements of punk dress, and declaring that it was ‘chic to shock’. However, its influence on popular and high culture was still extensive (found, to take a single and arbitrary example, in Derek Jarman’s film making). [AE] Further reading: Hebdige 1979; Laing 1985.
