ABSTRACT
It is an extraordinary coincidence that punk, arguably one of the most chaotic, yet ordered sub-cultures to emerge within popular music, should coincide with the debates surrounding language in mediating socio-political relations. As Terry Eagleton wrote in 1983:
Meaning was not ‘natural’, a question of just looking or seeing, or something eternally settled: the way you interpreted your world was a function of the languages you had at your disposal, and there was evidently nothing immutable about these. Meaning was not something which all men and women everywhere intuitively shared, and then articulated in their various tongues and scripts; what meaning you were able to articulate depended on what script of speech you shared in the first place. 1
