ABSTRACT
The academic study of popular music took a quantum leap in the mid-1970s thanks to the influential research emanating from the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. American punk offered a minimalist aesthetic, the cult of the Street and a penchant for self-laceration. Punk is a singularly appropriate point of departure for a study of this kind because punk style contained distorted reflections of all the major post-war subcultures. While Subculture’s scholarly tone would have a profound impact on the rise of academic-based popular music studies, it also received favorable publicity and reviews in the mainstream rock music press as well. The post-war may be conducted at a level beneath the consciousness of the individual members of a spectacular subculture but with the emergence of a group, ‘war—and it is Surrealism’s war—is declared on a world of surfaces’.
