Young Punks

Rat Race is a semi-autobiographical novel set in the 1980s in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. It focuses on Paul, who has just graduated and wants to be a writer. He faces overwhelming pressure from everyone around him, however, to ‘get on’ and join the Rat Race, against his will and in sharp contrast to the alternative lifestyle he wants to live. Pretty soon he finds himself on the scrapheap and having to compromise his beliefs in order to make something of himself. Rat Race is one year in his life, charting his fluctuating fortunes, set against a background of the music and fashion of the alternative scene at the time. It is also a love story, as he meets and falls in love with the girl of his dreams, and all the trials and tribulations that brings with it. Rat Race is an alternative view of growing up in the 1980s, the flipside, a savage indictment of the Thatcher regime, punctuated with some of the writer’s own poems written at the time, which provide a juxtaposition to the sometimes hard- hitting and brutal prose. Rat Race is a novel about many things, but most of all the pressures on the young to achieve at any cost in the get- rich-quick society in which they find themselves.

This book is the first in-depth, ethnographic study of the Dutch punk scene. It questions the artificial boundaries of subcultural research, calling for a critical analysis of the distinctions drawn between subcultural and everyday lives, and between localised and globalised subcultures. The everyday experiences of punk are framed within the mobile and connected global subculture of which they are a part. It traces its emergence in the 1970s and its development through to 2010, with chapters that map Dutch punk historically and spatially. Further chapters explore the meanings and practices attached to punk by its participants before focusing in particular on the political affiliations of punks. This book argues for an approach to social research that recognises the ‘messiness’ and the ‘connectedness’ of punk and of the social world.

This history of the punk movement in the United States shows how punk music, fashion, art, and attitude clashed with and ultimately influenced mainstream culture. Unlike other volumes on the punk era that focus on just the music—and primarily on British punk bands—Punks: A Guide to an American Subculture spans the full expanse of punk as it happened in the United States, from the late-1960s blast from Iggy Pop and the Stooges to the full explosion of punk in the mid 1970s to its next-generation resurgences and continuing aftershocks. Punks covers it all—not just music, but the punk influence on film, fashion, media, and language. Readers will see how punk spread virally, through fan-created magazines, record labels, clubs, and radio stations, as well as how mainstream America reacted, then absorbed aspects of punk culture. The book includes interviews with key members of the punk subculture, including new conversations with people who participated in the punk scene in the 1970s and 1980s.

David O'Dell was one of the earliest supporters of the Chinese punk rock scene that started taking shape in 1995 in Beijing. The book is a rich and uniquely personal collection of stories, over one hundred previously unreleased photos and translated song lyrics from the earliest Chinese punk bands and the dizzying development of the scene - it is unlike anything you have ever read, or ever will read, about China.

Punk culture is currently having a revival worldwide and is poised to extend and mutate even more as youth unemployment and youth alienation increase in many countries of the world. In Russia, its power to have an impact and to shock is well illustrated by the state response to activist collective and punk band Pussy Riot. This book, based on extensive original research, examines the nature of punk culture in contemporary Russia. Drawing on interviews and observation, it explores the vibrant punk music scenes and the social relations underpinning them in three contrasting Russian cities. It relates punk to wider contemporary culture and uses the Russian example to discuss more generally what constitutes 'punk' today.

Much has been written about the glamorous and short-lived New York City punk rock scene of the late 1970s. Less has been written about the second-wave punk scene that followed in the 1980s. Unlike the earlier scene, the ‘80s punk scene took place largely outside of the established downtown clubs, in the streets and squats of the Lower East Side. Punk in NYC’s Lower East Side, 1981-1991, the first installment in the Scene History Series offers a glimpse into this important cultural moment, which has had such a lasting impact on American subcultures, from Hardcore, to Skinhead, to, most crucially, Anarcho-Punk.Drawing on both archival documents and original interviews, this zine explores the music of the era’s bands, including Bad Brains, Cro-Mags, Agnostic Front, False Prophets, Urgent Fury, No Thanks, and Reagan Youth. At the same time, the scene is situated within the broader social context, from the election of Ronald Reagan to the Tompkins Square Riots. Woven throughout is the tragic story of New York City’s most legendary anarcho-punk, Reagan Youth’s Dave Insurgent. Insurgent came from a Jewish family of holocaust survivors whose history is rarely discussed.

Punk Rock Warlord explores the relevance of Joe Strummer within the continuing legacies of both punk rock and progressive politics. It is aimed at scholars and general readers interested in The Clash, punk culture, and the intersections between pop music and politics, on both sides of the Atlantic. Contributors to the collection represent a wide range of disciplines, including history, sociology, musicology, and literature; their work examines all phases of Strummer’s career, from his early days as ’Woody’ the busker to the whirlwind years as front man for The Clash, to the ’wilderness years’ and Strummer’s final days with the Mescaleros. Punk Rock Warlord offers an engaging survey of its subject, while at the same time challenging some of the historical narratives that have been constructed around Strummer the Punk Icon. The essays in Punk Rock Warlord address issues including John Graham Mellor’s self-fashioning as ’Joe Strummer, rock revolutionary’; critical and media constructions of punk; and the singer’s complicated and changing relationship to feminism and anti-racist politics. These diverse essays nevertheless cohere around the claim that Strummer’s look, style, and musical repertoire are so rooted in both English and American cultures that he cannot finally be extricated from either.

This book explores the role of young people in shaping a democratic Spain, focusing on their urban performances of dissent, their consumption of censored literature, political-literary magazines and comic books and their involvement in a newly developed punk scene. After forty years of dictatorship, Madrid became the centre of both a young democracy and a vibrant artistic scene by the early 1980s. Louie Dean Valencia-García skillfully examines how young Spaniards occupied public plazas, subverted Spanish cultural norms and undermined the authoritarian state by participating in a postmodern punk subculture that eventually grew into the 'Movida Madrileña'. In doing so, he exposes how this antiauthoritarian youth culture reflected a mixture of sexual liberation, a rejection of the ideological indoctrination of the dictatorship, a reinvention of native Iberian pluralistic traditions and a burgeoning global youth culture that connected the USA, Britain, France and Spain. By analyzing young people's everyday acts of resistance, Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain offers a fascinating account of Madrid's youth and their role in the transition to the modern Spanish democracy.